I used to always give my spare change to the Salvation Army at this time of year — there they were, ringing their bell outside the grocery store, so sure, I’d give a little. That changed when I learned about their anti-gay policies, though…and now there’s another reason to spurn the Salvation Army.

The Salvation Army says it refuses to distribute Harry Potter and Twilight toys collected for needy children because they’re incompatible with the charity’s Christian beliefs.

The policy has alarmed a Calgarian who volunteered to sift through a southeast warehouse full of unused, donated items and was alarmed when he was told by Salvation Army officials that the two kinds of toys are “disposed of” and not given to other charities.

“I asked if these toys went to another charitable organizations but was told no, that by passing these toys on to another agency for distribution would be supporting these toys,” said the man, who wouldn’t give his name due to his occupation.

So donors may have handed over popular toys for distribution, not knowing that the destination was going to be the landfill. And it’s not because the Salvation Army is concerned about the quality or educational value of the toys…

“I was told to withhold a six-inch Harry Potter figure, but when I picked up a plastic M-16, I was told, ‘That’s for the 10-year-olds,'” he said.

I feel so dumb for having ever given that organization anything. I should have been clued in by the frickin’ name that it was run by a gang of puffed-up sanctimonious looneys.

Bad news out of Germany: they’ve been investigating cases of priestly child abuse, and found lots (159 priests, 15 deacons, 96 religion teachers and six pastoral employees implicated so far), but they also found evidence of a systematic cover-up by the Catholic church.

Germany’s Catholic Church systematically covered up cases of sexual abuse within its own ranks for several decades, according to an expert study commissioned by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising.

The lawyer heading up the investigation, Marion Westpfahl, said at a press conference on Friday that the available records pointed to huge gaps in the documentation between 1945 and 2009. She added this hinted strongly at a “systematic system of cover-up,” in which few abuse cases were criminally prosecuted.

“Only 26 priests were convicted for sexual offences,” Westpfahl explained to reporters, saying she found 365 files containing evidence that “acts of abuse had taken place in an almost commonplace manner.”

“We have to assume that there is a large unknown number [of abuse cases],” she said. “We are dealing with the extensive destruction of files.”

Note also:

Westpfahl also said that the period of 1977 to 1982, when Pope Benedikt XVI – then Archbishop Josef Ratzinger – headed up the archdiocese, was particularly poorly documented.

So now we know what he’s good at — burying the bodies.

The study was commissioned by Archbishop Reinhard Marx, who made this little comment that somehow reminded me of someone else.

For me, these were surely the worst months of my life. I felt shame, grief and dismay. As a church, we ask forgiveness for those things done by our church employees.

No one gives a damn about your worst moment, Marx. Think about how awful it was for the people under your care, instead.

I am beginning to understand why Christians makes such a big deal about forgiveness. It’s because they need it so much.

Stevie Johnson, a player for the Buffalo Bills football team, dropped the ball in a catch that would have won his team a game. I have to commend him for some consistency, though — most players just credit their good catches to the Man Upstairs, but not Stevie: he got on Twitter and cussed out his god.

I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…

I’ve learned from this, at least. Stevie Johnson really likes exclamation points, and you can chew out god using Twitter. Who knew?

Meanwhile, over in Scotland, a football referee joked about the Pope on email. He apparently passed along this image:

I guess the Catholics are darned sure that their god doesn’t have a sense of humor, or at least doesn’t like jokes about priests, so one little pipsqueak in the church complained…and the referee was fired. No, not tied to a stick and set on fire, just sacked…no, not tied up in a sack and beaten, just pink-slipped…no, not…well, I’m pretty sure there must have been some old Catholic torture called pink-slipping, they’ve been so thorough in that department. Anyway, he has been released…aaargh, now everything is looking like a euphemism for hallowed Catholic death-dealing techniques.

He lost his job, OK?

So now Dawkins is calling on a letter campaign: inundate the Scottish Catholic office with pope jokes. You can just copy and paste the picture above, if you want, and send it to:

mail@scmo.org

info@scottishfa.co.uk

This could be fun. That office clearly needs some instruction in humor.

What is wrong with people? It’s just a frackin’ book!

A 15-year-old girl has been arrested on suspicion of inciting religious hatred after allegedly burning an English-language version of the Qur’an — and then posting video footage of the act on Facebook.

No. It is obscene to start jailing people for destroying their own books, simply because some oversensitive wackos think it is magical. Apparently, this girl burned it on school property, though — call her on creating a fire hazard. But not for contradicting someone’s delusions.

And the kooks defending the arrest aren’t helping their own cause.

Catherine Heseltine, chief executive officer of the Muslim public affairs committee, said burning the Qur’an was one of the most offensive acts to Muslims she could imagine.

Oh, really? Ms Heseltine’s imagination is not very impressive.

How about digging up their grandfather’s body, sawing off the top of the skull, and using it for a dog food bowl? Or how about walking up to their mother and pissing on their burqua?

Or hey, how about cruising over a Muslim country with a Predator drone and opening up on suspicious-looking crowds with Hellfire missiles? Would it be more offensive if the missiles had Bible verses painted on them?

It really diminishes the quality of their outrage when they have tantrums over such trivial and harmless offenses. Man, if I hadn’t already buried my only copy of the Qur’an, I’d be taking it out back right now and setting it on fire.

There’s a campaign of sorts that’s beginning in the UK, in which Christians are urged to stand up and announce that they are not ashamed to believe in a zombie redeemer who will protect them from his flaming torture pit deep beneath the earth. In a way, I’m sure it’s very nice for them personally to sustain that kind of self esteem, but really…they should be embarrassed to believe in such absurd nonsense.

At least they’re mostly doing no harm. The action they’re calling for is for everyone to pray harder.

Please pray for the Not Ashamed campaign and especially that the official launch next week will increase the profile of the initiative and give rise to good opportunities to speak to leading figures in public life about Jesus Christ, the only true hope for our nation. Perhaps you could include such prayers at church this Sunday? For prayer suggestions, please click here.

John Fiala is a bad man, and he’s also a Catholic priest. I’ve got a flood of email telling me I ought to highlight the case because he’s a priest who forced a boy to have sex with him at gunpoint, and later tried to hire a hit man to kill him. What he has done has been awful and evil, but, you know, it’s not an indictment of religious belief.

Fiala is simply nuts.

If his religious order did cover up his crimes (and that is one of the charges here), then it is evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the Catholic church, but that’s still an open question — from the accounts I’ve seen, he was removed from the active ministry when his predilections were discovered, and transferred to administration. I don’t know how openly crazy he was; if it was known that he favored sodomy at gunpoint, then yes, that the church only tried to hide him in the attic for a few years is bad news for religion. But psychopaths can mask their nastiness fairly well.

But otherwise, I have to ask, if this guy had been an atheist, would I consider it a sign of problems in the atheist philosophy? And I have to say no. Emotionally disturbed individuals and psychopaths and just plain bad people can crop up as individuals anywhere, and the issue is whether the institutions towards which they gravitate ought to be held accountable for sheltering or promoting or enabling their behavior. This is a case where the wretchedness of John Fiala is obvious now, but is religion responsible? I don’t see a case for that.

Of course, you can make the case that being in the presence of the Lord and being nestled in a holy sanctuary every single day didn’t seem to miraculously cure Fiala’s sickness, but we don’t believe in magic miracle cures anyway.

Scientists are often accused of cruelty towards animals, and there are some experiments that do cause pain…but at the same time, what we can do is very tightly regulated and scrutinized, with every experiment requiring rather thorough justification, and in every case that I know of, the investigators themselves are greatly concerned about minimizing suffering, even without the watchdogs of animal care and use committees hovering over them. And need I mention that scientists actually accomplish something useful in their animal work?

If animal rightists want to focus right now on a widespread practice that causes intense pain, they ought to look to the rules for halal/kosher meat. As Johann Hari explains, there are religious rules that demand that animals needlessly suffer when they are slaughtered, and when criticized, of course the barbarous butchers hide behind the claim that their religion demands this agony.

Atheists who criticise religion are constantly being told we have missed the point and religion is really about compassion and kindness. It is only a handful of extremists and fundamentalists who “misunderstand” faith and use it for cruel ends, we are told with a wagging finger. But here’s an example where most members of a religion choose to do something pointlessly cruel, and even the moderates demand “respect” for their “views”. Their faith makes them prioritise pleasing an invisible supernatural being over the screaming of actual living creatures. Doesn’t this suggest that faith itself – the choice to believe something in the total absence of evidence – is a danger that can lead you up needlessly nasty paths?

It says something about faith that it can be used to justify torture, simply because they’ve always done it that way.

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Oh, and for a beautiful example of misplaced priorities, contrast the insensitivity of the public to slitting the throats of conscious farm animals to this bizarre story of pulling plastic pigs from children’s toy sets, because of the possibility that kosher/halal gobbling religionists might be perturbed by the existence of itty-bitty models of smiling swine.