Bill Donohue's Mad...Again...

October is a pretty busy time for me what with all the...wait, what was that? I thought I heard some rustling over there in the bushes...there it is again! Hand me the flashlight and we'll find out what it is. Probably just the wind, or some kind of animal, or...

YIKES!!!

It's Bill Donohue, hiding in the shrubs and laying in wait so he can jump out and be offended.

Okay, so that was a (bad) attempt at humor, but I'm hardly exaggerating. Bill Donohue and his friends at the Angry Pansy Patrol Catholic League are hopping mad again, this time about something they saw on The Simpsons. Check out their press release. See, one of the stories on this year's "Treehouse of Horror" episode involved Bart being the only hope for humanity after a zombie plague, but only if people ate him to gain his immunity ffrom the zombie virus. So what? Well, it also included the line "What kind of civilized people eat the body and blood of their savior?” According to Billy, pointing out the grisly absurdity of Christianity's obsession with cannibalism/vampirism is "crossing the line" because it's "mocking the heart" of his religion.

All in all the "incident" has provoked a pretty stock response from Bill. Ranting and raving, followed by the e-mail address of some guy at FOX for the faithful to harass. (Though I note that Bill's e-mail address is nowhere to be found on the Catholic League site. Hmm...)

There's one thing I've never understood though. Bill claims to have a personal relationship with the Omnipotent Ruler of the Universe, but somehow feels that this same all-powerful being needs a bunch of letter-writing ninnies to leap to its defense whenever a cartoon makes an off-color crack. Still, I suppose an angry e-mail campaign in preferable to going Old Testament on the rest of us.

Our Sunday Visitor's Backhanded Bollocks

My folks are Catholic and I'm over at their house fairly frequently. That means I get the pleasure of leafing through a new edition Our Sunday Visitor, a Catholic newspaper my dad subscribes to, pretty much every week. The current (June 14) edition had an interesting story about how the the combination of high rates of attrition low rates of conversion has begun to erode church membership, written nominally search for a reason for this trend. What really caught my attention though was the weekly editorial, entitled Tiller's Killer.

In case you've been living under a rock for the last two weeks, George Tiller was a doctor who performed late abortions in response to cases of severe fetal malformation and/or serious risk to the life of the mother. On May 31, he was assassinated by Scott Roeder, a "pro-life activist", while serving as an usher at his church.

Every political pundit and blogger out there has weighed in on the killing, so naturally OSV had something to say about it. Given the anti-abortion, anti-death penalty stance of the Catholic Church, I would have assumed that the OSV editorial would have been a harsh condemnation of Roeder's actions and a call to legislative action rather than murder as a means of fighting abortion. I would have assumed wrong. Here's what the editorial actually said:

Scott Roeder took aim at an abortionist and succeeded in putting a bullet in the pro-life movement. And it couldn't have come at a worse time...
Now his slaying has transformed him into a martyr for the cause of abortion "rights," and has smeared by extension all those dedicated to defense of unborn human life...
The timing of Tiller's killing is particularly awful. A Gallup poll in May found that for the first time a majority of Americans consider themselves "pro-life." This murder will do little to further draw hearts and minds to the pro-life cause...

I honestly don't like using that many ellipses, so I suggest you read the whole article. And, to be fair, the second-to-last sentence of the editorial does refer to the murder as "a tragic crime", but I don't think I've ever seen a more backhanded way of denouncing someone's murder. "Oh no, a doctor was assassinated by a lone wolf whacko...and with such inconvenient timing, too." Jeeze.

There's plenty of room for legitimate debate about abortion, and frankly I've never been entirely satisfied with the "right to privacy" argument so often articulated by the pro-choice crowd. That being said, I'm flabbergasted that an editorial from a "pro-life" source was only able to muster so pusillanimous a condemnation of murder as "the timing was bad." Add to that all the sanctimonious comments on tacked onto the online version of the article and I think we may have at least part of an explanation for why people are leaving the church.

Not Even The Catholics Like Bill...

Even some Catholics are getting sick of Bill Donohue's perpetual outrage strategy.

Donohue, that is. A group called Catholics for Choice has released an fierce 26-page article decrying Bill Donohue and his Catholic League as little more than a reactionary attention machine dedicated to stamping out Donohue's own pet peeves through a bizarre combination of bullying people and claiming persecution. They further note that the Catholic League argues "for the right of conservative Catholics to impose their values in the public sphere, while arguing against the right of others in the public sphere to offer legitimate criticism of Catholics or Catholicism." Check out the full document here. The "key findings" listed on the second page are worth a look in and of themselves.

I can already see Donohue's reaction, though. Clearly these opposition Catholics have been infected by us evil secularists and are trying to destroy the church from within...

PZ Finishes What He Started...

PZ Myers' Great Desecration is complete. It's neither elaborate nor particularly malicious, but it certainly puts both the Holy Cracker and the Quran in their place. Well done.

This whole incident brings to mind a story I was told when I was just a whelp. Because I went to a public school, my folks stuck me in Catholic religious education classes throughout all of elementary and a bit of middle school. I encountered some peculiar folks in those classes, mostly the teachers. When you combine the weird D&D mysticism of the Catholic Church with the Southern propensity for Charismatic nonsense, you end up getting some pretty laughable stuff. (One of my fellow students once claimed that all of her family's crucifixes spontaneously turned gold, and I was quickly smote down by the teacher for calling shenanigans.) In any event, one Wednesday our little study books decreed that we would learn the definition of the word "blasphemy". Rather than, say, have us look it up in the dictionary, the kooky lady in charge of the class instead told us a horror story about some kid who stole a Eucharist from church (with no apparent motivation) and took it home to flush it down the john. Naturally the instant the Holy Cracker hit the water, it turned the entire contents of the toilet in a soupy pool of blood. It was, the teacher said in nicer words than I'm going to use, Yahweh's way of telling the kid to settle down and tow the line unless he wanted his ass handed to him on a cosmic scale. I, along with every other kid in the class except maybe the golden crucifix girl, was freaked right the hell out. I mean, this lady was a teacher (nominally); She wouldn't tell scary lies to a bunch of little kids, would she?

Talking to other former Catholics on the internet has made me realize that almost all of us have, at some point, heard some derivation of the so-called "Bleeding Host Story", and that really cheeses me off. It's pretty freakin' cowardly to isolate little kids (I think I was 6 or 7 at the time) and tell them crazy horror movie stories about your fearsome god in order to scare them out of questioning the obvious bullshit you're feeding them. If I used that kind of emotionally abusive coercive crap at work to get my mentally disabled clients to do what I wanted them to I'd be (quite deservedly) fired on the spot. Between this and my Baptist schoolmates being tormented by their parents with threats of Hell from the time they were old enough to repeat the word, all I can say is that I've seen my fair share of religion being used to abuse children. I suppose the only way to get people to devote their lives to a hodgepodge of vapid, self-contradictory fables is to terrify them into submission as early as possible.

Bill Donohue - Still A Raving Ass...

The Catholic League is basically a vehicle through which Bill Donohue bitches about things that he considers to be anti-Catholic. Since Bill Donohue appears to have an enormous persecution complex, he does an awful lot of bitching. His latest ravings about "hate crimes against Catholics" is in regards to P.Z. Myers and his recent bemusement over the row about a Florida student who, horror of horrors, left a Catholic mass with a Eucharist in his pocket to protest fees that University of Central Florida.

The Catholic League has claimed that this is "beyond a hate crime" and has called for the expulsion of the student in question. Myer's responded to the debacle with this blog post, which, of course, pissed off the Catholic League even more. Donohue is now calling for Myers' head on a pike, and his minions have begun to deluge both the University of Minnesota and Dr. Myers with hate mail.

Naturally the web's skeptics have been quick to defend Myers, and I'm sure that some of them have sent some unfriendly correspondence to Donohue and his lackeys, and this of course plays right in to Donohue's martyr fantasies. He has summoned up the gall to accuse Myers of promoting hysterics (Remember that it was Donohue who called for the destruction of a student's academic future over the theft of a minor religious token that was, in any event, destined to be consumed, processed, and ultimately flushed down the toilet anyway.) and is now calling on his website for additional security for Catholics during the Republican National Convention (which will take place in Minnesota this September) for fear that the atheists will rise up and smite them.

The Catholic League claims that it exists to "safeguard both the religious freedom rights and the free speech rights of Catholics whenever and wherever they are threatened", and as you can see, it works towards this end by trampling the rights of everyone else.

Fuck off, Bill. It's a goddamned cracker.

Two Different Kinds of Terrifying...

A movie came out in 1973 that scared the ever-loving crap out of people: The Exorcist. Based on William Peter Blatty's novel, this film about demonic possession was a cultural phenomenon that captured worldwide attention and ultimately spawned four sequels. (Yes, I can count: Exorcist II, Exorcist III, and two vastly different versions of the fourth film, Dominion and Exorcist: The Beginning.) If you somehow have never seen The Exorcist, I can vouch for its scariness. Hell, I'm an atheist and that movie gives me the heebie-jeebies. It's a well-made movie about a subject that, if true, would be the most nightmarish thing imaginable.

The Exorcist is supposedly based on a true story. Well, kind of. It's based on a book of the same name by William Peter Blatty that's supposedly based on a true story. Now, while the book is pretty good (There was a copy in the vacation house where I stayed in North Carolina last summer), there's no compelling evidence to suspect that the event it's based on had any sort of supernatural component. Indeed, there are pretty good reasons to suspect that it didn't. That's fine, though - knowing that the all crazy supernatural stuff in the movie didn't actually take place doesn't make the film any less enjoyable.

That being said, there's one film on a similar subject that is decidedly less enjoyable precisely because it is based on something that happened. Film-savvy readers may have already guessed, but I'm talking about The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Aside from just not being very good in the first place, The Exorcism of Emily Rose glorifies and supernaturalizes as very real, very tragic event that happened in Germany in the mid 1970s. The film version tells the story a 19 year-old woman (played by the sister from that show Dexter) whose apparent fits of epilepsy turn out to be an actual demonic possession. She eventually dies after a drawn-out exorcism and the priest involved is charged with negligent homicide. I won't spoil the ending, but eventually the supernatural elements are confirmed for the audience and everyone is meant to go home thinking that even though the girl is dead, her soul is in a better place.

Bullshit. The truth of the matter is far from the faith-affirming Hollywood bollocks presented in the film.

In 1976, a 23 year-old German girl named Anneliese Michel died an agonizing death as the result of a months-long exorcism performed by a pair of Catholic priests at the behest of her parents. Anneliese was a very devout Catholic whose life took a turn for the worse after she began having "demonic visions" while praying. This appears to have occurred sometime around 1970. Shortly thereafter, she began having seizures and she and her family became increasingly convinced that she was possessed, especially after the anti-epilepsy drug Tegretol failed to halt her seizures. (I have an epileptic client at work who takes the drugs Tegretol, Diazepam, and Kepra multiple times a day and still has seizures regularly. One of my other epileptic clients routinely hears voices before and after having seizures.) There were several attempts made to get the Catholic Church to order an exorcism, but these requests were rebuffed until 1975, when a local bishop granted the family's request and dispatched a pair of priests to perform the ritual. It is probably worth noting that The Exorcist was released theatrically in Germany in 1974 and caused an enormous upsurge in claims of occult phenomena there.

Anneliese during happy times.

The exorcism went on for eleven months, during which time Anneliese stopped taking all of her medications (in addition to anticonvulsants, she was being treated with at least one medication used to control schizophrenia). During the exorcism itself Anneliese made a point of stringently fasting (apparently dropping to a mere 68 pounds) and performing repeated genuflections (dropping to one's knees). Normally genuflections aren't meant to be any sort of self-flagellation or anything like that, but reports indicate that Anneliese performed the action so many times in the final months of her life that she severely damaged her knees. On the final day of her life she was so exhausted that her parents had to raise and lower her from the floor because she no longer had the strength perform the motion on her own.

Dehydrated, suffering from pneumonia, fever, and severe malnutrition , Anneliese Michel died on July 1st, 1976. (32 years ago yesterday.) Both of her parents and the two exorcists were ultimately charged with negligent homicide in her horrible death, though they were found guilty only of manslaughter and inexplicably were never sent to prison.

Anneliese during the exorcism that ultimately led to her death.

Take a good, long look at the picture above this paragraph. There's nothing inspirational, beautiful, or life-affirming about that. I wish that just a picture from a horror movie, but it's not. It's a picture of a young woman who's close to death because she's being put through an anachronistic religious ceremony rather than receiving treatment for her mental illness. It's an obscenity. Some web commentators have noted that Anneliese wanted to undergo the exorcism, to which I answer that she was an untreated schizophrenic! Her mental state left her incapable of distinguishing her hallucinations from reality or realizing that she was having seizures rather than being attacked by demons. It is to be expected that she would behave in an irrational, potentially self-destructive manner. The fault doesn't belong with Anneliese, but with those around her: Her parents failed to look out for her because of their own religious delusions and ultimately the Church (Which obviously knew better at some point because it turned down several prior exorcism requests) sanctioned a ritual that only strengthened the family's collective fantasy and finally killed Anneliese.

Even though The Exorcist is a pretty frightening movie, what scares me far more is the idea that even in modern, first-world countries people still get so caught up in Dark Ages supernatural fantasies that they're willing to put their lives on the line to see them played out.

Notes - Vaguely woo-woo anthropologist Felicitas Goodman wrote a book about Anneliese Michel that is the principle source for details about the case. For a disturbing taste of just how people today are completely missing the point of the entire episode, try reading the some of the Amazon reader reviews. Goodman herself was thoroughly convinced that the possession was real. Also available are videos on Youtube that feature photo montages of Anneliese set to recordings of her speaking in "demonic voices" during the exorcism. One reviewer noted that "it's hard to debunk the idea of possession while" viewing the video, but no, it's not. The physical deterioration is purely explicable in terms of her fasting and the exertions of the ceremony, and anyone who's spent any time working with the mentally ill can tell you that scary, shrieky voices happen daily with those kinds of patients. Anneliese was a schizophrenic young woman who went off her medication. There's no need to look for a supernatural explanation for her having a screaming fit under those circumstances.

Is a Space Pope next...?

Word from the Vatican is that it's cool to believe in aliens. Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, who's the director of the Vatican Observatory, recently noted that believe in his wacky sky deity is does not preclude the existence of life on other planets and that Catholics can believe in aliens without the threat of everlasting torment in hell. He said that aliens would all be "God's creatures" too. Funes said that ruling out the existence of aliens would be equivalent to "putting limits" on God.

And on the eight day, God created Spacemen.

Now, it's fair enough to say that their might be aliens out there. Heck, I'm no UFO True Believer™, but as far as some form of life existing somewhere in the universe, the statistics seem to favor it. That being said, it's just hilarious to me watching the Church flail around reaching for some sort of modern context for itself. I'm waiting for a papal pronouncement about Sasquatch next.

Have You Tortured Yourself for Jesus Today...?

Ah, self-flagellation, that most glorious of pastimes. What could be better than sitting around cutting yourself, beating the bejeezus out of yourself with a whip, or intentionally wearing tortuously uncomfortable clothes? While modern society has largely relegated self-flagellation and mutilation to the trash heap of history, it still has its holdouts. Most of them are goth teenagers. The rest are religious folks.

Believing that they should suffer like Christ suffered (Well, believing that they should often be somewhat uncomfortable.), a surprising number of religious loons practice self-flagellation today. It is especially popular among the Roman Catholic Church and the Catholic lay order Opus Dei. This self-punishment often comes in one of three forms. The first is wearing a "hairshirt", which, as you might expect, is a coarse, over-warm shirt often made of goat hair. I imagine it feels somewhat like being a Wookie. The second is beating oneself with a "discipline", which is actually a a small scourge made of rope. The third, and most fashionable, is to wear a cilice, which is a band of chain with small spikes protruding from it. They are a typically worn across the thigh, and are by all reports quite unpleasant. (They won't actually rip you to shreds like the one depicted in the film The DaVinci Code - They're meant to poke and be uncomfortable, not to break the skin.)

A Cilice -If Only it said "WWJD".

Well, if all this crazy crap sounds good to you, I can refer you to a reputable website that sells these instruments of self-torture. It even has a creepy slogan: "How luminous is darkness." Reminds me a bit of Hellraiser. Just don't go overboard - this stuff is super expensive. I guess the hairshirts and cilices are a limited market and take some skill to make but there's no excuse for the "disciplines" costing so much, they're just rope. If you think of Jesus as an S&M fan and would like some implements of discipline at a more reasonable rate, I might suggest a simple trip to your nearest adult store to satisfy your kink.