[geeks] Halloween

[Phil Stracchino]

On Sun, Nov 02, 2003 at 01:18:05PM -0600, Mike Hebel wrote:
> On Sunday, November 2, 2003, at 12:45 PM, Mike Nicewonger wrote:
> >I was brought up Catholic [0], but I am better now :)

> >[0] I saw the light and ran away from the church more or less 
> >screaming.
> 
> Mine was more I knew the religion didn't feel right from the start and 
> I eventually moved to what felt right for me.  That turned out to be 
> Wicca.

I can understand that, having had a friend in the past who went to
Catholic seminary and woke up one day with an insight that orthodox
Roman Catholicism was, in his words, "based upon fear, guilt, and a
morbid obsession with death."  He left RC seminary and went to (I think)
Liberal Catholic instead.

It's my contention that a majority of the misery in the western world
during the last thousand years or so can be laid at the feet of the
Catholic church.  This can be generalized to the idea that any religion,
once organized and institutionalized, eventually becomes a force for
evil, because when any religion is organized and institutionalized,
fanatics and/or the power-hungry will always eventually rise to the top
and pervert its direction to their own desires.  Then you get jihads,
crusades, Papal bulls, televangelists, the whole schmeer.  Individual
believers may remain as pure in their beliefs and intentions as any
saint, boddhisattva, or Confucian sage.  But the $CHURCH becomes just
another political entity vying for as much power as possible over as
many people as possible, at any cost to the mere followers.  I can think
of few things more obscene than peasants starving while bishops and
cardinals dripped with gold and jewels, or entire villages of Cathars
being burned at the stake "for the sake of their immortal souls", men,
women, children and babes in arms together, because they had the
temerity to suggest that perhaps a graphic representation of the torture
and killing of one's supposed savior wasn't really a suitable object of
veneration.

Islam has a reputation as a religion of the sword, and requires its
followers to pursue a holy struggle to spread the word of Islam, but
even Islam at least has as among its principal tenets a proscription
against warring on other "peoples of the Book" and the slaughter of
innocents.  Of course, the fanatics who commit atrocities in the name of
Islam pay as little attention to those as, say, Pope Innocent II paid to
the commandment that "Thou shalt not commit murder."  It's amazing what
you can do with a totally clear conscience once you learn to rationalize
it away as your holy duty to your deity.

("We were only following orders!")

Personally, I have a tendency to view the unpunished atrocities of the
world's "great" religions as convincing proof of the non-existence of
god[s] as defined by their religions, with the possible exception of
Kali and Shiva.  They're probably having a great time watching the
carnage.


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