Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

​The State of Louisiana, apparently being too full of whiskey and gumbo to notice how poorly other states fared fucking with the First Amendment, has made it a law that all publicly-funded classrooms in the state have to post a copy of the Ten Commandments on their walls.
 
Jeff Landry, the Governor of the state, explained that the law was necessary because “Moses was the original lawgiver.”
 
This is not true, of course. The original lawgiver’s name is lost in prehistory, but you can bet he was a big guy with big muscles, big friends and a big stick. When he gave a law, your cave ass obeyed it.
 
But we’re not here to talk history. We’re here to talk competition, and the first competition is what’s going to go up on the wall next to the Ten when the suing gets done. You might think that Muslims and Jews will be happy with the Ten Commandments being required reading in Louisiana for tykes and teenagers alike, since Moses was a Jew and Islam happily stole his Commandments just like the Christians did, but anyone with even a modicum of acquaintance with religious history knows that Christians, Muslims and Jews being happy at the same time about the same thing has never, ever happened.
 
The Muslims are going to want the Five Pillars of Islam up there, too. Also, probably Sharia Law. Landry and most other Louisianans would rather shit out a live possum than see this happen, but they opened this can of crawdads.
 
The Jews, having had thousands of years longer than either Christians or Muslims to fine tune their Commandment game, actually have 613 Commandments. This is because Jews want their religion to be more miserable and demanding than any other, which, oddly enough, makes them happy with it. Going to take some fine print, though, to get 613 Commandments on a ten by fourteen piece of parchment, which is the minimum size the Louisiana Commandments can be, by law.
 
The Church of Satan is going to want in on this action, for sure. Oklahoma already found this out the hard way, and After-School Satan Clubs are a thing everywhere school districts have tried to institute after school Christianity. Satan has Eleven Rules of the Earth, according to this web site. Number 11 is, and I am not making this up, although someone obviously did, is When walking in open territory, bother no one. If someone bothers you, ask him to stop. If he does not stop, destroy him.
 
If we all become Satanists, the college football bowl season is going to get way more interesting.
 
Other, faiths, less numerous perhaps, but no less sincere, are going to want a piece of the Louisiana schoolroom wall pie. Dudeists will want, “This aggression will not stand, man,” on their poster, and due to its terse nature, they’ll get it in big print. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s Commandments are lightly worded as well, although there are a few, my favorite of which is "Thou shalt have no other Monsters before Me (Afterwards is OK; just use protection)."

Atheists are out of luck, as usual. You can't put "This is all bullshit" on a third grade classroom wall, so they'll have to settle for a blank piece of paper, I guess, or else a simple, declarative, "There is no God."

Hopefully, some cynical schoolchild will graffiti "There is no Santa Claus, either," on top of it.

It’s June, and that means that social media is filling up with memes that depict Satan as gay, or at least in rainbow colors. The Evil One is not amused. He popped up on my computer screen again.
 
“You know I hate Teams,” I told him.
 
“And you know we’re an all-Microsoft workplace now. Makes the afterlife a little more Hellish, and it will really motivate my imps to go to town on Bill Gates when he finally shows up here. I’m here to say that I DID NOT start Pride Month.
 
Never even dreamed you did.
 
“Well, plenty of people think so. Come on! What’s my motivation for that? It’s caused me no end of trouble.”
 
“How’s that?
 
“Well, you always hear the Other Guy bragging about how perfect He is, and I’m letting you know He can be perfectly sneaky. You should have heard Him chortling, “Ha, ha ha. Did you hear about Pride Month yet? It’s a thing now, and Pride is one of the seven deadly sins, so now they’re all yours. You’ll like it. Some of them are pretty funny.’ Then he shoved all the gay souls over to the Gates of Hell. My front porch.”
 
“Oh no, you don’t,” I said, but I was left with a bunch of lost gay souls, standing out front because I don’t do group passes. I had to ask for arbitration….”
 
Who does arbitration in the afterlife?
 
“Solomon, natch. He just split them, 50-50. He’s kind of a one-trick pony that way. I had to accept his decision.”
 
But why don’t you want gays in Hell?
 
“I don’t want anybody in Hell! It’s Hell trying to keep Hell hot enough now. You should see my gas bill. I see one more condemned soul, I’m going to scream! The Other Side feels the same way. ‘In My Father’s House, there are many mansions’ isn’t the current real estate situation there. First floor, one bedroom condo is all you get if you get past the Pearlies now, is what I hear, and you can park your chariot on the street."
 
But Jesus said that thing about mansions.
 
“Don’t bring that Guy’s name up around here. This is all His fault, for refusing to put the Second Coming on His calendar. He’s got a bucket of excuses, mostly about production values for the Apocalypse. ‘The sky full of thunderbolts didn’t crackle loud enough in rehearsal.’ ‘That’s not a blood moon, it’s more of an umber moon.’ “Can’t anyone count the heads on a dragon anymore? It supposed to be seven.’ Then He bolts off for another three-day weekend with his side chick, Joan of Arc.”
 
Wow, that’s some inside stuff. How do you know so much about what goes on in Heaven?
 
“I back-channel with the Holy Ghost. Dude is sick of being the low Divine Being on the totem pool, so He keeps me up to date.”
 
But you’re still locked in eternal conflict with the Almighty, right?  I mean, your whole business model is built on bad feelings.
 
“I guess. The whole Eden thing seems so long ago, although I still do turn into a snake once in a while, just so I can bite Rush Limbaugh on the ass. Neither He nor me brings up the Garden anymore. Now we mostly fight about who is going to have to take the latest batch of souls for all eternity. Got to go. I see a bunch of war criminals headed my way.”
 
And you’ve got to take them, right?
 
“Only if they’re not gay. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”

The Pope got himself in hot water instead of holy water over the weekend when he used a derogatory term for gay men at a meeting of bishops.
 
Francis apologized later. “The Communion wine was flowing. It was just locker-room talk,” he said. Of course, he said it in Latin. *
 
A lot of people were surprised that the kindly old Pope, who had previously welcomed gays and atheists into Heaven, harbored this streak of homophobia in his soul. No one was more surprised than the anonymous gay bishop who ratted him out to the press, is the guess here.
 
The Pope was complaining about the rising number of gay men in Italy’s seminaries, training for future work as God’s anointed. The word he used was the Italian frociaggine, which translates into the English insult “way too faggoty.”
 
The Pope, apparently prefers muscular young studs with nary a gay thought in their heads for future Mass-sayers and Communion-givers. Manly men who don’t mind washing the feet of other men and who can swing a censer like they were throwing a fastball. Men who keep a copy of Field and Stream next to their breviaries. Men who would make gay men weak with lust.
 
These are the kind of dudes the Pope gets off on. Which makes you wonder. But, let me make it clear, I’m not saying the Pope is gay. Although the one before him certainly was.
 
The Pope, at 87, has been around the block. Surely, he knows that the Church has a long history of putting gay men in vestments. In the Irish-American Catholic tradition I was compressed into as a youth, it was considered a necessity. If you had eleven kids, as many families at the time did, with a preponderance of males, you were almost obligated to give one up to the priesthood, and, usually, it was obvious which one.
 
This worked out perfectly for centuries, especially before pedophilia was invented. Catholic wives were left unmolested by the representatives of Christ on Earth, while Catholic husbands could snicker at them behind their backs when they played golf together.
 
But this Pope’s mission has been to scrape the barnacles off the Church of the past two millennia and get it turned around so that people will jump on the Catholic vessel instead of jumping off of it. He has abandoned the traditional Catholic theology of the afterlife, which was that all non-Catholics went to Hell, along with 90%, at least, of all Catholics. This Pope has virtually cancelled Hell. He has said nice things about almost all other religions, even the Jewish one, which the Church used to burn you at the stake for following.
 
So, it was a surprise when the Pope blurted out his preference for brawling heterosexual men to take vows of celibacy and cram themselves into seminaries to minister to Catholic flocks. He may regret this wish if it is granted. Camouflage cassocks may become the rage, so that the new priests can go directly from hunting blinds to preside over morning Mass, and many parishes will install big-screen TVs tuned to ESPN amid the baptismal founts and statues of the saints.
 
With the volume turned down, of course. But at least the faithful will be able to follow the scores.
 
*“Vinum communio fluit. Sicut erat in CAPSA Disputatio. "**
 
**This is the best Google translate could do. I’m not sure the ancient Romans even had locker rooms.

​The Boy Scouts of America have changed their name to Scouting America, to reflect on their new mission of inclusiveness to not only male juveniles, but towards LGBTQ people and the subset of young girls who like to wander through the woods, slashing at trees with tiny axes like boys do, and also because they were getting their asses sued off because of all the boy molesters they signed on as troop leaders.
 
This, naturally, revolted some people, and caused the formation of Trail Life, USA, which describes itself as “Christ-Centered,” and whose motto is “Let boys be boys.”

Why? I can't believe, "Let the little dickheads run around in the woods," was taken.
 
I suppose they couldn’t use “Yo! Boy molesters! Over here!”
 
The organization promises to promote “Biblical masculinity,” whatever that is. There’s a lot of different takes on masculinity in the Bible. There are women in the Bible, too, from Ruth, Esther and Mary to Delilah and Salome, who are my personal favorites, but let’s face it--the Book is primarily a sausage fest. Guys who killed whole tribes of people and had a lot of concubines often get  a couple of verses or even a whole chapter in the Word of God.
 
If you want to read something solemn, self-important, and humorless about Biblical masculinity, have at it here. If you want it summarized, I’ll be happy to. You, as a Biblical dude, need to be the boss of your house and keep your wife and kids safe from the influences of gays and Democrats by any means necessary, whether that involves merely using the parental controls on your cable box, or guns and machetes.
 
Oh, and be someone your religion can count on when it needs a few bucks.
 
Either current version of Scouting bears no resemblance to the Scout days of my youth. Let me reminisce for you:
 

I was once a Boy Scout, in the worst boy scout troop ever assembled—Troop 555, the Triple Nickel, out of Lenni, PA. There were no Eagle Scouts in Troop 555—anyone who aspired to be one would have immediately been pummeled by the rest of the troop. There was one First Class Scout, who was routinely bullied. I had the good sense not to rise beyond the rank of Second Class. The alpha Scout of the troop was a gigantic Tenderfoot, a kid who was taller by a foot and heavier by a hundred pounds than any of the rest of us. He had no merit badges and an instinctive hatred of anyone who did.
 
In winter, we went to our Catholic school gym for Scout meetings and played basketball and buck-buck and otherwise tried to injure each other. In spring and fall, we would go camping in the freezing Pennsylvania woods, accompanied by our Scout leader, a devoted beer-drinker, who was helped by his assistant Scout Leaders, who were the men he liked to drink beer with. Sometimes they would make us sing songs around the campfire—it’s where I learned the lyrics to “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,” but mostly they just drank beer and let all of us run around the woods with knives and hand-axes, looking for stuff to kill.
 
In the summer, they would take us to Boy Scout summer camp, where we camped with other troops. Our leaders would abandon us, sneaking into town to drink in a bar. Those were truly 555’s glory days—we specialized in waiting for other troops to fall asleep, then raiding their camps, piling on top of their tents until they collapsed, and then holding the canvas down with our weight in the hopes of suffocating the occupants. Then, when we were tired, we’d retreat to our own encampment, where one of our number, virgin as the rest of us, would entertain us by extemporizing songs about all the vagina he hoped to eventually get.
 
Good times.

It is true that God, up until now, has not required any assistance from technology. Whether by burning bush, walls of Middle Eastern cities coming tumbling down, or simply showy tricks like walking on water, God made his anger, goodness and superiority plain without assistance from T-Mobile.
 
But it is the Age of Apps, and right now, right this very second, you can download the Hallow app and plead with the Almighty directly, depending on your signal and battery strength. Despite the convenience of being able to have a chin-wag with Jesus without using the traditional method of mental telepathy focused on the skies above, I hesitated to download this app.
 
For one thing, I already have a shit-ton of useless apps on my phone, like everybody else. Having recently returned from vacation, I have the Delta Airlines app, which, anytime I want, will tell me I don’t have enough Delta miles for anything more than an extra bag of weird crackers on my next flight. I have the Norwegian app, which is pretty well good for nothing unless you are on a Norwegian cruise ship and need a pleasant Filipino steward to bring a beer to your cabin.
 
I have WhatsApp, for people who are too technologically snobby to send a regular text message to me.
 
But the Hallows app has many tempting features. It’s for Christians only, so you’re not going to get accidentally connected to Allah and wind up on a pilgrimage or a jihad you didn’t intend to go on. It builds a prayer habit, so you consistently remind God about your existence. This may strike God as a trifle annoying—He may have other stuff to do—but it may come in handy if you find yourself being swallowed alive by a giant anaconda and need immediate intercession from the All Powerful before you end up partially digested in Heaven.
 
Of course, if you find yourself in the situation of being a snake snack, and need to use the app, you have to log in first, and this is no time to need to use the Forgot Password button. You also have to hope there’s enough signal in the swamp to patch through to the Pearly Gates.
 
And, inevitably, when at some point when you really want to get close to God right now, you’ll get a message that the app is updating.
 
But you can pray the rosary with Mark Wahlberg! The hunky actor is featured on the app, and if you can’t picture yourself mumbling through yet another dreary ritual of bead-counting by yourself, Mark Wahlberg will help you do it! You can imagine yourself running your fingers across his ripped abdominals and shaved pectorals, and resting your head against his chest, slightly sweaty from his daily workout, as you chant your Hail Marys.
 
And if you start to suspect that thinking about covering Mark Wahlberg’s hardened muscles with light kisses while you’re supposed to be praying the Lord’s Prayer might be an occasion of sin, as the nuns of my youth used to describe such things to me, you do not have to worry about that offense.
 
Forgiveness is just an app away.

It seems like it’s been ages since there was a good, old-fashioned Rapture scare around here, but it is finally happening. Nowadays, the thinking among Christian sorts is that they are going to get Hoovered out of their sneakers by the thrumming turbine of God’s love and be upwelled into the company of angels on April 8th, the date of the next solar eclipse.
 
Sadly, if you have ordered golden Trump footwear and were looking forward to being foofed into Heaven out of them, they will not be arriving in time for the scheduled Apocalypse.
 
Not all Armageddon fans are thinking this solar eclipse is going to precipitate the Final Shakeout. After all, there have been a couple million* of them since the Earth and Moon took their present orbital positions. Most of them took place long before humans existed to crap in their loincloths over them. The first amphibious creatures ever might have been crawling onto the land during a solar eclipse. They just shrugged their shoulders, if they had any, at it, and kept on evolving. There’s even going to be another solar eclipse this year as well, but it’s only going to visible over the Pacific and Patagonia, so only penguins are likely to get Raptured over it.
 
The world-ending Planet Niburu is sitting this one out, too. It’s definitely not going to emerge from the outer reaches of the solar system and smush us by April 8th. People whose future plans include getting squashed out of existence by a dark sphere from outer space are just going about their business. "If it ain't Niburu, it ain't shit," is their take on the eclipse.
 
The April 8th Rapture does have its proponents, though. Many have noted that the path of totality passes through the hamlet of Rapture, Indiana, which town is eagerly encouraging visitors to go there to view the Eclipse, knowing that there’s a subset of them that are longing to get Raptured from Rapture. They’ll be in a spending mood, knowing that they’re only one eclipse away from ceasing to participate in the American economy forever, and the townspeople are looking forward to an influx of evangelical cash.
 
There’s a nice YouTube video from a pastor named Troy Brewer, who spends 33 minutes detailing the prophetic significance of the eclipse. He finds it important that the phenomenon enters the US at Eagle Pass, Texas, where Trump recently visited to make a strong stand against the ungodly immigrant hordes, goes through someplace called Omega, which means The End, and ends up in Salem, Massachusetts, where witches were burned in better and merrier times gone by. Jesus speaks directly to Troy, which confirms Our Savior’s taste for white men with pricey haircuts, expensive suits and fat asses. Troy touches on Moses, Jonah and Jim Jordan during the course of the video, which leads Democrats to start thinking, “If there’s anybody I’d like to see Raptured, it’s Jim Jordan."

Congressman Jordan is from Ohio, too, where the darkness will be thickest. Another coincidence? Rapture theorists think not.
 
Brewer also goes on about the prophetic importance of the number 24, which is mentioned serially in the Bible, which is the number this year ends in, and the number 4:8, which corresponds to April 8th, in a calendar that was adopted long after those prophets were dead. So, there’s room for a little skepticism there.
 
But I’ll make a prediction based on numerology myself. The Rapture will occur when exactly 24,000 Americans have only 24 dollars left in their checking accounts.
 
So if you're nervous about the Rapture and your place in it, and want to put it off for a while longer, send that money to me. Bless you for that.
 
*Just a guess. Loads, though. Ask your local astronomer for a more exact number.

So, you want to find Jesus? Great! Jesus wants to be found. By you. Ideally, before you meet Him as the Long-Haired White Guy meting out your eternal fate from a throne in the clouds while the Apocalypse crackles around you like a great big bag of Orville Redenbacher’s in a world-sized microwave, because by then, His opinion of you is baked in.
 
But, enough of the food metaphors, although, ironically, toast is one of His favorite mediums in which to appear. We’ll start by finding ways to meet Jesus.
 
You don’t find Jesus by having a nice, fat 401(k) and being on a glide path to an easy retirement on a coral sand beach in the Caribbean, with a compliant wife twenty years younger than you, so that she still looks pretty hot in the bikini that is all she mostly wears every day. If you find yourself in this situation, you are as close to Hell as you can get and still have a cocktail in your hand. What you want to do is lose that IRA in an obvious pyramid scam, the wife to a cabana boy, and your drink to a rogue wave. Destitute and sober, you have to relocate to someplace like Buffalo, where, amid the snows of winter and the mosquito-clouds of summer, Jesus will come to you. You will realize that having your life turned to shit was part of His divine Plan, and join a particularly annoying church, the kind full of white people who can’t sing but do so constantly anyway. You are on the way to eternal glory. Isn’t that a relief?
 
You won’t find Jesus by being a young hunk with a perfect head of hair, great clothes sense and a lucrative job with a vague title like “Investment Banker.” You are a magnet for attractive young girls who just want to have sex with you. Jesus is avoiding you like the plague, brother. What you need to do is develop a crack habit that ruins your skin and melts away all those muscles you spent years at the gym acquiring. You lose your condo and your ability to sustain an erection. Bottoming out by being arrested in homeless sweep at the park, you get clean at taxpayer’s expense and spend the rest of your days boring the crap out of people at Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Those people, at least, will be happy when you get Raptured.
 
Ladies, you won’t find Jesus by being a sexy young Instagram influencer, or wriggling in lingerie or less on My Fans. Flashing your uniquely attractive booty on the Internet, and basking in the waves of approval it draws from men all over the world, may be fun—strike that, it is fun—but you’re looking for Jesus in all the wrong places. Fall in love with a jealous guy who makes you suspend all your accounts, then breaks his back in an accident so that you have to support him by working at a Rite-Aid while he tries to get approved for disability. Have a child. Discover your toddler is on the spectrum. At this point, Jesus will come to you, although it is likely that the married manager at the Rite Aid will come to you as well, not necessarily wearing his pants. Pray.
 
There are countless other ways to find your Savior. A book could be written, but I haven’t had breakfast yet, so I’m not writing it now. The important thing to remember is you don’t have to endure tragedy or deadly disease to get closer to God. Just reflect, when things are going fine and your life seems to be working out as well as it possibly can on Earth, Jesus is waiting.
 
For you to make some poor decisions. They’re the highway to Him.

​We’re midway through October, so it’s time for the Christian right to get hysterical about Halloween. We’re not them, so we don’t bother with it much. A couple years ago, I dressed as Mr. Clean, having the hairstyle for it, and went to a pub with my Chihuahua. The dog was sporting a few strands of yarn crocheted together by my girl, and made a pretty convincing mop. We had a fine time. The dog behaved himself well. Fortunately. No one wants to hear the phrase, “Hey, your mop just pooped on the floor.”
 
We haven’t done much since, though. Our immediate neighborhood is pretty devoid of children. If we could count on at least a few tykes showing up dressed as goblins or celebrities, we would carve a pumpkin and give out some candy. Our neighbors, for the most part, are busy bankrupting the government collecting extra Social Security by living to ages even more advanced than my own. Even their great-grandchildren are old enough to drink.
 
No kids are going to be showing up at our door, but to be on the safe side, we leave the porch light off. If a misguided Halloweener knocks on it anyway, I’m sure we could find something to give the child. A slice of baloney, or a shot glass full of beer, maybe.
 
Accidentally, we behave as some Christian families are instructed to behave, which is to shun all trick-or-treating as a form of idolatry. They kneel on the rug and pray All Hallows Eve away, praying louder if some beggar after a sugar rush knocks on their door. Pastor John Ramirez, in particular, is violently against Halloween.
 
The Pastor claims to be an ex-Satanist, who died and went to Hell, met Satan there, but also met Jesus, who was apparently slumming in Hades that day, and returned to life a full-blown Christian, which means, like all of his kind, he is a full-blown party pooper. Christians who participate in Halloween are having a one-night stand with the Prince of Darkness, according to Brother John.
 
You heard him--that five-year-old girl dressed as a Star Wars princess, knocking on your door looking for a mini-Three Musketeers bar, is snacking with Satan. No matter how cute her curls or innocent her face, she is embracing Baphomet.
 
Ramirez is not unique in having talked to the Evil One. I have myself, both in person, but mostly on Skype. I haven’t chatted with Beelzebub, recently, though, because he strictly uses Microsoft Teams now. I see his point—going all Microsoft makes your world a more hellish place, as anyone who is forced to use Word or Outlook knows—but I don’t endorse it.
 
My impression of Satan is that he is like any middle-aged (although I’m aware eternal beings can’t actually be middle-aged) person, who, though successful in their field, has gnawing doubts about their career choice and is plagued by “what ifs.” His attention to his job wanders, and his imps have unionized. He couldn’t care less about Halloween, or most things, and is constantly trying to shunt souls away from Hell, which is dangerously overcrowded, mostly on account of free porn and Republicans.
 
He'd just as soon leave the holiday to candy manufacturers and John Ramirez. They’re the ones making money off of it, after all.

People have been talking to Jesus for 20 centuries and counting, but now, thanks to the miracle of artificial intelligence, Jesus will now answer you back. Several AI programs will now let you ask questions of the Lord, and He will answer your prayers.
 
AI Jesus is no more likely to solve any real problems for you than church Jesus. The program will not be able to give you winning lottery numbers or assist your baseball team in scoring runs in the bottom of the ninth, anymore than praying to Our Savior currently does. It will not raise the dead, cure deadly diseases or turn water into wine coolers. You can buy a loaf of bread and a fish and they will not get multiplied for you, although AI Jesus will give you some paltry excuse as to why he’s gone out of the feeding the multitudes trade.
 
As you eat your fish sandwich, you may be thinking of other Biblical characters you’d like to text with, and, lo and behold, you can. You can communicate with Moses, if you’re in a burning bush, Ten-Commandmentsy, idol-melting kind of mood. You can ask him why he wandered for forty years in the desert without consulting his digital buddy, GPS Moses.
 
You can ask Mary what it felt like to be impregnated by Almighty God, although it may be a sin to listen to the answer. You can ask Noah if he ever learned to tread water. You can ask Joshua what it felt like when the walls of Jerico came tumbling down, and did he think God was really doing his bidding when it happened, or did he suspect that the Jericoans just didn’t know how to pour a foundation?
 
You can talk to Satan, too, although I suspect that AI Satan may not have all the knowledge you really need about Hell, which you are going to now for sure, just for talking to Chatbot Baphomet. AI Satan is not likely to give you any useful info on the place of eternal damnation, like which of your friends are already there, and do they take turns lighting Rush Limbaugh’s hair on fire?
 
I look at the development of AI Jesus with some regrets, because He is obviously forcing my own personal Jesus, Dollar Store Camouflage Jesus, to eat His dust. Dollar Store Camouflage Jesus just stands in his nine-inch, plastic glory on my bookshelf, not answering any prayers or questions, just inviting worship, like any old school Jesus, soon to be as outmoded as a floppy disc.
 
In the near future, we will no doubt have entire digital churches, which the faithful can flock to on Sunday, to see a holographic Savior, whose ethnicity and theology may be adjusted by the pastor, on a scale from Humble Jesus the Holy Brown Person to Blonde Jesus with Anger Management Issues, according to the whims of his congregation.

As it is now, to be honest about it. Just with a slightly higher electric bill.

The Pope is pissed off at many American cardinals and assorted other Holinesses of the US church, for being backwards purveyors of big hate. If he really wanted to communicate with Americans he could have used the term "back-asswards," but, hey, the guy is from Argentina.
 
Aping the attitudes of American evangelicals, the American Church concerns itself far too much with politics, including abortion politics and gay marriage politics, for the current Pope’s taste.
 
This Pope has always wanted Catholics to be nicer, which is not the historical position of the Church, which has usually favored banning, excommunicating, torturing, and occasionally burning its perceived enemies at the stake. Not this Pope, though. This is the Pope that let atheists into Heaven, much to our surprise, so we rationalists have a soft spot for him, or at least, we nice ones do.
 
The Pope let gays into Heaven, too, although he still doesn’t let them get married in the Church. He’s in favor of civil unions for gays. So, if you’re a gay Catholic, you can get civilly unionized, do gay stuff with your gay partner until you die, and, as long as you confess it all before your number is up, you skip right up to St. Peter.
 
This is a complicated route to the Pearlies. The suggestion here is that you peeps just become atheists. It’s a much more direct path to our section of Heaven, which is a huge nightclub where we party all eternity and laugh at the schmucks who have to hosanna 24-7.
 
Conservatives on the American Catholic scene are especially browned off at the Pope for letting divorced Catholics back in the Church. You, a Catholic, get divorced, thinking you are escaping hell, but Catholic doctrine used to be you were automatically being consigned to Hell. You have to stay married for life, according to the Church, even to someone you bitterly hate, even if you never have sex again, or at least, sex with your spouse. The hatred and cheating that inevitably follows results in a build-up in the sin industry, which corresponds to an increase in the confessional index, which is what traditional Catholics want. They want you to hate yourself as much as they hate you. The whole point of the Church, and most other faiths, is to loathe yourself into Heaven.
 
For those of you who think this is just silly, I’ll have you know dated a woman for several years that was a divorced Catholic and had been excommunicated from her parish. Still, her religious impulses lingered. At one point she asked if we should start going to Episcopal church together. “No!” I exclaimed, spitting out bits of breakfast egg. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
 
Now, my woman is Jewish. One of the many reasons I love her is she never asks questions like that.
 
While this Pope preaches niceness and tolerance, American bishops gnash their teeth in the darkness, believing that the Church is straying from its mission, which is to find excuses to despise the rest of humanity, including atheists, agnostics, Protestants, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Bahai’s, unaffiliated people who claim to be spiritual, and, most importantly, the vast majority of other Catholics as well.
 
What a waste of effort. You don’t have to believe in anything to despise other people. Trust me on that.