I never cease to be astonished that some religious leaders have so immersed themselves in their batty belief that it has effectively immunised them against any basic human decency. To illustrate using example from this year, (and remember, the year is only three fracking days old), here are a couple of examples …
Example 1
Archbishop Vincent Nichols, yep the Catholic loon who is a vocal anti-gay homophobic bigot, has struck again. The BBC reports ...
Special Masses for gay Catholics at a London church are to be scrapped, the Archbishop of Westminster has said.
Archbishop Vincent Nichols said Masses at Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Warwick Street, Soho, would end.
He said the Masses were not in line with the church’s central teaching on sexuality.
Gay Catholics have been meeting at the church for the past five years, and he now decides to pull the plug! It always strikes me as odd that those who don’t have any sex at all try to tell everybody else how they can and cannot have sex. In fact, his claim that being gay is unnatural becomes truly weird when you not only made the observation that such behaviour has been observed in every species on the planet, hence is clearly natural, but is also coming from the lips of a guy whose complete lack of any sex identifies him as the one clear example of some very unnatural behaviour. When it comes to being gay, there is no ethical or moral reason that justifies his batty medieval belief-driven rhetoric.
It actually gets even odder when you think it through. The objection here is that being gay is “not in line with the church’s central teaching on sexuality”, so lets bash being gay in public and toss all the gay people out and deny them their basic rights. There are however lots of things that are not in line with “the church’s central teaching on sexuality”, for example contraception. They teach “no”, but most Catholics (quite rightly) ignore that as just daft, so are they being verbally attacked in public, or tossed out? Nope, apparently that only happens if you ignore the gay rule, breaking any of their other silly made-up rules … not a problem.
In the end, I guess it is their own little club and if they wish to manifest their homophobic bigotry by imposing daft silly rules then I guess those who are both gay and also Catholic will need to make a choice. Where this lunacy truly does cross the line is when they attempt to impose their medieval daftness upon all by attempting to interfere in the new legislation. Personally, I’m quite happy for him to speak out, he should be free to reveal to all how truly bigoted he actually is so that we can then mock and ridicule him.
Example 2
This one really takes the biscuit, a Saudi religious leader has called for gang rape of Syrian women …
A prominent Saudi cleric has issued a fatwa (a religious ordinance) that calls for the gang rape of Syrian women. Expressing frustration that the “warriors of Islam” fighting in Syria may be getting weary for the lack of sexual pleasure, the religious leader issued a decree that promotes hours-long “intercourse marriages.”
The cleric, Muhammed al-Arifi, who is a leading jihadist religious figure, made it clear that his edict called for the gang rape of Syrian women and girls. He specified that the “intercourse marriages” last only a few hours “in order to give each fighter a turn.” As to who is an eligible bride, the cleric approves any girls or women over the age of 14 who are widowed or divorced. Yes, you read that right. Any girls over the age of 14.
Yep, you read that correctly, this cleric has had his moral compass so buggered up by his insane beliefs that he is endorsing rape by simply calling it a marriage that lasts only a couple of hours … and yes, that sound you heard was my jaw hitting the floor.
So what is wrong?
When people truly embrace irrational beliefs that don’t have one single jot of credible evidence to back them up, they will sometimes end up giving that belief priority above anything and everything else, and that includes overriding feelings of empathy towards their fellow humans. It appears to be a form of belief induced psychopathy.
Criticism, satire and mockery of such things is important, because without it, real harm will result.