Atheists... Your life is pointless

If i had a brand new manure spreader, maybe i could wade through this thread . . .

Wow!! Whodathowtit? Works for what? Counting chickens? Checking your temperature? Starting your car?

How about the science of arranging people in an orderly fashion with evolutionary success in mind?

Okay. That's not science I suppose? Well--it wouldn't be would it? Can't afford that being a science can we? You wouldn't be able to keep your balls in the air if that was a science.

Which, of course, it is. You don't think the Church prohibits and approves certain activities for their own sake do you? It is the social effect of them that it is concerned with.

Yeah, because you can pray polio away.

The Church benefits from keeping its gullible masses kneeling and bowing and apologizing and...paying tithes...so that they can afford silly hats, silk robes, fine cuisine and golden crosses while the gullible masses starve. As if they really gave a **** about starving people.

The essence of what you are saying is correct, FBM. But you are giving short shrift to the many religious people who truly do try to live a decent life and who truly do try to help the poor and disadvantaged.

There are religious people who give that same kind of short shrift to non-theists. They are every bit as wrong in doing so.

The world is more complex than that.

Just sayin'.

And that includes many who are considered a large part of "the Church."

I look forward to the day when they strip all the gold inlay and gold leaf from the Vatican, melt it down and buy the poor of the world lunch. Yeah . . . like that will ever happen in any of our lifetimes.

I know. I'm doing it on purpose.

I'm not going to hold my breath. I've rubbed elbows with bishops in the US and Central America. They think alarmingly alike. They feel like they deserve all their luxuries because they're doing 'the Lord's work' by helping the starving people's souls get to heaven. By starving them, if you ask me.

What's really sad is that Latin America is the home of "liberation theology," which has been embraced even by American Protestants. So now they've got a Pope who is allegedly a friend of the poor. That's sad because it gives hope to millions who will not benefit in the least from this joker. Even if this Pope tried to reform the church and help the poor, there's two thousand years of custom and one of the largest, if not the largest, bureaucracies in the world opposing any reform.

I suspected that.

In any case, if the Church were to strip all the gold and sell all the artwork and statuary and the proceeds used to buy lunch for "the poor", as Setanta suggests, "the poor" would be full for a day...and all the trappings would be in the hands of the rich people who bought it after the stripping.

Life is not fair. I am almost always in a good mood...and even though I am part of the poor, I feel I am one of the luckiest people alive.

Some people just live in psychological squalor.

We can only hope that they derive something of value from their misery...just as we can only hope "the poor" are able to see the rainbows and silver linings in their lives.

Yeah, I got introduced to liberation theology in Honduras. It's essentially a way to enemize anyone who isn't a believer, especially if they're rich and powerful. Which...the Church leadership is...

One of the happiest human beings I've ever known was also one of the poorest. An old black man in Mississippi when I was in my early teens. He lived in a one-room shack and his most prized possession was a lawnmower that worked. He had about 10 square feet to mow. He once talked me into holding the spark plug wire on the plug while he pulled. That old fart taught me good that time. He was always laughing and cheerful. Never heard a negative word out of him. Didn't have a pot to piss in and barely a window to throw it out of. Once a month he'd get his check from the gummit, go to Canton (we lived in a dry county), buy him a little bottle of peach brandy and a piece of pussy and that was all he wanted out of life. Years later after I had moved away, it dawned on me that he must certainly have died of old age by that time. Made me cry to think that the world was without Buddy Mack. Still does, a little.

Hey, cognitive dissonance is essential to all religion. I think that at the parish priest level, liberation theology was being practiced. Of course, parish priests don't have wealth or influence, so it didn't do the poor much good.

Here is a great passage from the end of the novel Azincourt by Bernard Cornwell. The characters are newly returned from France, where Henry V has just won his stunning victory over the Franco-Burgundian army. The characters have traversed London, through the rejoicing crowds, to a small, impoverished parish church, near where Henry had hung and burned some Lollards, certainly a pack of heretics, before sailing for France. It is their intent to endow a shrine to one of the victims . . .

Hook stared at the woman [i.e., a crude painting on a wall]. Her face, what could be seen of it in the dim light and through the cracked paint, was long and sad. 'How did you know she was here?' he asked Father Christopher.

'I asked,' the priest said, smiling. 'There's always someone who knows about the oddities of London. I found that man and asked him.'

'An oddity?' the Sire de Lanferelle asked.

'I'm assured this is the only shrine to Saint Sarah in the whole city,' Father Christopher replied.

'It is,' the parish priest said. He was a ragged man, shivering in a threadbare robe. His face had been scarred by the pox.

Lanferelle gave a brief smile. 'Sarah? A French Saint?'

'Perhaps,' Father Christopher said. 'Some say she was Mary Magdalene's servant, some say she gave refuge to the Magdalene in her house in France. I don't know.'

'She was a martyr,' Hook interrupted harshly. [He is referring to the Lollard who had been murdered near by, which he had witnessed.] 'She died not far from here, murdered by an evil man. And i didn't save her life.' He nodded to Melisande who went to the altar, knelt there, and took a leather purse from beneath her cloak. She laid the purse on the altar.

'For Sarah, father,' she told the priest.

The priest took the purse and unlaced it. His eyes widened and he looked at Melisande almost in fear, as though he suspected she might have second thoughts and take back the gold.

'I took them,' she said, 'from the man who raped Sarah.'

The priest dropped to his knees and made the sign of the cros. He was called Roger and Father Christopher had spoken with him the day before and afterwards had assured Hook that Father Roger was a good man. 'A good man and a fool, of course,' Father Christopher had said.

'A fool?' Hook had asked.

'He believes the meek will inherit the earth. He believes the church's task is to comfort the sick, to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked. You know I found you wife stark naked?'

'You always were a lucky man,' Hook had said. 'So what is the church's task?'

'To comfort the rich, feed the fat and clothe the bishops in finery, of course, but Father Roger still clings to a vision of Christ the Redeemer. As I said, he is a fool,' he had spoken gently.

That's my experience with US and Honduran bishops in a nutshell.

When i was a child, i refused to go to the mass any longer. To avoid strife, we cut a deal in which i agreed to go through the confirmation ceremony, and in return, no one would attempt to force me to attend the mass. I caused a brief, minor scandal when i walked past the bishop, ignoring him, and did not kneel to kiss his ring. "Yeah, right after he kisses my ass" i was thinking.

Good for you, my man! I went through that **** much later in life. I'm a slow learner, I guess.

The United States was then (and still is, for aught that i know) considered a missionary country because the population of Catholics was below a certain level. We were served by the Brothers and Sisters of Charity--what an ugly joke that was. These were largely Irishmen and -women, and they were even harder of the children of Irish descent than they were on the other poor saps. When i was five years old, my buddy Charlie and i were goofing around in the back of the church when this nun descended on us, and demanded in a loud voice that i tell her why god had made me. Of course, young heathen that i was, i had no clue. The answer, which i would have known if i had been paying attention was "To know him and love him in heaven." Yeah, right. She then rapped me on the back of my hand with a ruler. I tried to kick her in return, but Charlie held me back. She went livid and told me to get out. I did, gladly. I was being raised Catholic by my Protestant grandmother under that cultural value of America at the time, that one should respect others' religions and their wishes for their children. So she was not only not pissed at me, she was pissed at the nun. The Brothers and Sisters of Charity never attempted to lay a hand on me again, so i suspect she had a word with Father Sheehan about that one. So, from the age of five, judging on the basis of the people he employed, i was not at all impressed with this god joker, who apparently had nothing better to do than torment small children. It took eight more years, but i gave up organized religion altogether eventually. I honor the men and women who help others out of a sense of religious duty, but i suspect that most of them are the ones who would help out anyway. As far as i'm concerned, religion never made a bad man good, nor did the lack of it ever make a good man bad.

It's amazing what a trifling personal experience can do for an intellectual appraisal of a 2,000 year old religion embraced by over a billion people, 80 million in the USA, and rising, and which has been the powerhouse of our cultural inheritance in morality, art and science.

And like I have said many times before spendius...I agree with what you are saying, but I think it goes much deeper than just sexual issues...and goes much deeper than just the church, and what it stands for itself...as that is just a building, a foundation, or an institution based upon the beliefs in this God...Since the beliefs in this God are what delegate this institution...but I am not sure if you understand what I mean because you do not embrace the spiritual aspect to this God on which this foundation is built upon...

Was a rock ballad playing at the time?