Atheism Corner

Humanity in Progress

Mother Teresa Revisited

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Far From Saint - LIke the Church that created her
Far From Saint – LIke the Church that created her

Researchers from the Canadian university of Montreal have complied a thorough study of Mother Teresa’s life and the conclusions are, well, not the nicest music the saint loving religious types like to hear. In what seems like the biggest “Bravo” ever echoed for Christopher Hitchens work on Mother Teresa these unbiased researchers found it difficult to believe that a person with such cynical cruelty towards the people she was thought to have been “saving” could be made a saint.

Nothing is new here, all is easily archived and you can reach it within 2-3 clicks of your computer mouse, Hitchens has done all the work – years ago.

So we learn again that this woman was nothing more than a radical tool for the church to use, and that a fanatical interpretation of the all might god will has led her to do things to the same people she was supposed to help, things that no one can be proud of. This is not a unique individual that somehow strayed away from the path of good deeds, rather the opposite, this is an obedient follower who was molded into the grotesque figure of the body that created her, and so the desperately ill and those who were passing their last moments of life in one of Mother Teresa’s establishments were given no chance but to fulfill the purpose of these places – to die there.

And the final word belongs to the great man himself, Hitchens –

This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction

Pope Resigns as Catholic Church Last Fig Leaf Drops

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the pope resignsThe pope is old, maybe even pretty sick, and he can not perform his duties the way he would have liked to do, and in a move that should serve as a fine example to politicians all over the world he decided to step down and retire from the papacy.

This is not the kind of idea we have of the pope, or the Catholic church, where we expect to see the pope hanging on to his role as the living version of Christ until he simply dies, much like the original Jesus did in his time. But this is no ordinary pope, and these are no ordinary times, for the Church at least it is a moment of great change.

Did Obama pave the way for an African Pope?

Obama had nothing to do with it, the regression in the Church’s ratings in Europe in the last 50 years has been so serious that the church needs to turn its attention to the places it still carries some authority in, and these are Latin America and Africa, where the bloody history of the church with the natives is so rich it could easily beat the number of words in the Bible. So there will be no surprise as the church will flatter its support base across the sea from Rome and the Vatican, in a move that will signal to those few, still loyal, Europeans that the church is not only not theirs any more, it does not even want to invest efforts in making it look like its theirs.

To us atheists this is all good news, the position of pope is humanized by becoming just another job, like any politician out there, by turning to a non European pope the old believers in the old country might start understanding that the organized religion is nothing more than a suppressive administration, built on lies and fear mongering.

In any event seeing a black toned skin pope on the balcony in Rome will be a small victory to many sides, atheists included, as freedom of religion makes another small step forward and away from the Catholic church.

Sometimes, What You Believe Can Get You Killed

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Most people will not understand what rattlesnakes have got to do with faith, or god or Christianity. It is very strange indeed that some people connect these deadly reptiles with anything that is spiritually based, but not a complete shocker that some people found a way to incorporate snakes into their belief system.

In one of his brilliant talks Sam Harris talks about the power of faith and belief and how stupid it is of us to “respect” people who believe – or rather the belief itself. Not everything anyone believes is worth respect, in some cases it is worth nothing more then ridicule, and in the case before us it deserved (past tense) a stern warning that simply was not there – probably due, in part, to the fact that people are too careful not to criticize beliefs of other people.

This is the sad and tragic story of pastor Mack Wolford, better known as the “Serpent pastor” for his belief that people should play with deadly snakes as a way to test their faith, a kind of a faith-o-meter that has got to have you on your toes at all time, because if your faith diminishes for any kind of reason you could very quickly die of a snake bite. There are many things I can doubt, but I have little doubt about the very high level of Mack Wolford’s belief, it will be safe to guess that it was as high as it can be in any person of faith.

But faith did not save Mack, and if you read carefully you will also come under the impression that he was in no great rush to save himself once bitten, because faith should not only work as a shield to protect form bites (which it failed to do) but faith would also heal the bite by itself, without needing those crazy hospital things.

Lets put things right and proper right here, there is in no way an attempt to laugh at this case, because the man had died of a snake bite. What was already a completely not normal situation in the fist place – having deadly snakes around, became an even more serious situation when the person got bitten, only to slowly get himself to a medical facility. Faith does not do that to people – Religion does.

Religion feeds this monster and keeps it alive, these non sensical interpretations of what the bible tells us to do, what god wants us to do, how we should do it – gets people all kind of ideas, and since the big man is never around to make clear what exactly he wants us to do, well, these things just grow into these type of situations.

Is it crazy that a man died because of a bite of snake that he had as a pet because he believed that god wanted him to do that? yes it is. Is it immoral for a 44 year old man to have this kind of belief without anyone in the church around him stopping him from literally killing himself on these basis – we guess not, because it seems to be more difficult to tell someone what he believes is nuts than to face and and say the truth.

Russia, Punk and the Devil

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Yes, This is 2012 and Yes - The Devil is Still here

When the punk group “pussy riot” (which you can already understand is a girl only group) surprised the audience of Moscow’s central church with a free short concert the leaders of the church (as well as the old-new Russian president Mr. Putin) was not amused, not amused at all.

“The devil work”, yes, you did not mistake the words here, for wherever god is the devil is always around, and that is not a joke at all. As long as you believe that there is a god there are also all those other biblical characters around him/her/it, as it happens the devil is one of the central figures to the story of god, so it makes perfect sense that this soft of spontaneous act was spurred by the devil himself.

Once again we can see how these small little words can lead a traditionalist to think this is just an expression, while a believer takes it literally. However the speaker did not mean it as a way of speaking, to suggest that the ill mannered behavior of these artists, not invited and not welcome in the church was a bad thing (where bad = the devil), he just meant that it was the devil who was trying to derail the usual church ceremony.

This is a small indication of what it is like to live in Russia 2012, where feminist groups sing foul songs of God and Vladimir Putin are placed behind bars and could end up in jail for 7 (seven!) years for singing an uninvited offensive song and where religion had soared to the level of importance that politics have, from being oppressed only a few decades ago. Just to show you that the men of god will take everything you give them – and they will take it fast.

7 Years in Prison for Singing?

Katharina Henot Was Not a Witch

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Burning Witches - An Old Church Tradition

This next story comes to us from Germany, where 400 years after the church led a psychopathic witch hunt into the main activity of the local peoples for a decade or so it is now moving to clear those who were burnt alive of any charges of “playing with Satan”.

All of this could sound amusing, even descent thing to do, after all most of humanity understood that there are no real witches and no one is actually making a packet with the devil since the devil does not exist, and that most of the people accused and set on fire for being the followers of the fallen angle Satan were actually loners moving through areas they did not know and had the very bad luck of getting into the wrong place at the wrong time.

So Katharina Henot who managed the post office of the city of Colon, Germany at the year 1627 was accused of having some soft of partnership with the devil and promptly set on fire to the delight of the local council and the church, now the assumption is that she was put through this because someone wanted her position in the post office, how easy it had been in those days to clear attractive jobs!, just walk up to your local priest and tell them you saw the lone woman singing while she was walking in a field and here she is sining a song for Satan, as she picks herbs to prepare yet another plague making soup.

The annoying thing here is that on the news item you can read that – ”

Hartmut Hegeler, an evangelical priest and religious education teacher who made the request for the trial to be reheard, said: ‘Katharina held her own reputation in high esteem, she would want to have it cleared.
‘As Christians, we find it challenging when innocent people are executed, even If it was centuries ago.'”

Oh really? “as Christians”? it is not surprising that the church who is suppressing its dark history would re-write it as the champion of the burned alive, well, not too fast, since some of us here still remember that driving force behind all this – the Christian Church.