And the Catholic Church wonders why they are losing parishioners…

posted by Bill Arnett @ 2:13 PM Permalink

…when they are openly calling anyone who voted for Obama a sinner requiring communion to save their immortal soul.

FAIR WARNING: THIS POST EXPRESSES SOME STRONGLY HELD ANTI-RELIGIOUS VIEWPOINTS OF MINE.

It's no small wonder that I am an atheist when I read articles like this from McClatchy Washington Bureau:

Parishioners of St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Modesto have been told they should consider going to confession if they voted for Barack Obama, because of the president-elect's position condoning abortion.

"If you are one of the 54 percent of Catholics who voted for a pro-abortion candidate, you were clear on his position and you knew the gravity of the question, I urge you to go to confession before receiving communion. Don't risk losing your state of grace by receiving sacrilegiously," the Rev. Joseph Illo, pastor of St. Joseph's, wrote in a letter dated Nov. 21.

The letter was sent to more than 15,000 members of the St. Joseph's parish. It is one of 34 parishes in the Stockton Diocese, which has more than 200,000 members in Stanislaus, San Joaquin and four other counties.

Illo also delivered this message in a homily.

Obama's support of abortion rights angered many Catholics nationally during the campaign, and Illo's letter, while the first in Central California from a priest to his parishioners on the topic, is not the first nationally.

A Greenville, S.C., priest told parishioners earlier this month that those who voted for Obama risked placing themselves "outside of the full communion of Christ's church" by their vote.

That priest's action was supported by his diocese, the Diocese of Charleston, S.C., which said the priest was simply asserting church teaching.

Talk about an egocentric position to take, that the view of the church is the only one which counts, and if you don't agree you may go to hell.

This is precisely why I am an atheist. Who says, or more importantly, can PROVE that the Catholics are the only ones worshipping the real god? Why couldn't it be a Methodists, Baptists, Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, or some lone man out in the desert worshipping a large red rock be the true acolyte of god? And if that guy worshipping the red rock IS the only one genuinely worshipping a god, boy are the rest of us in trouble.

And these bigoted people (Catholics) assume they are the only ones who speak for some mythical god and that you'll go to hell for not obeying their proscriptions? Where did this god leave a note or a letter declaring that the Catholic Church has the right to control what you do in your private life? Who appointed them the arbiters of all that is right, able to determine which act will get you condemned to hell or not?

I apologize if I have or do offend anyone who is religious, but I just have serious problems with a world managed by a god that allows pestilence, plagues, mass starvation, the aggrandizement of church leaders over regular church attendees, war, AIDS, mass destruction with ever more efficient weapons causing untold suffering, etc, etc, etc.

And I refuse to buy into that garbage that, "The Lord works in mysterious ways…" when there is no mystery to anything in the previous paragraph dealing with the suffering of man, inflicted by man, carried out in the name of one god or another.

It is no church's business how a parishioner voted and it is the very height of chutzpah to indicate some type of divine retribution may be levied against anyone for not following the proscriptions of the church.

The Catholic Church didn't hesitate to be some of the earliest users of germ warfare when they killed hundreds of thousands of South Americans, entire tribes, by distributing blankets and other items used by smallpox sufferers. They didn't care how many they slaughtered in the name of god during the Inquisitions or any other time they sought the expansion of the Church by force.

But, boy, vote for Obama and you're really in trouble.

What a crock, and no wonder the churches get smaller and smaller each year and the poor suffer while the Pope sits in his fairyland castles wearing robes with gold brocade, sipping from gold and silver chalices, eating from plates of gold, and hoarding billions and billions of dollars of artwork, most of it stolen with the collusion of the Nazis in WWII.

What a fine, refined, and cultured people to tell me or anyone else how to live their lives. And don't even get me started on the religious right evangelists attempting to co-opt our precious country by influencing those in power.

There have been gods to use as an attempt to explain things not understood by man for centuries: Zeus, Apollo, Athena, and a dozen other Greek gods, and Odin, Thor, Loki, and others were worshipped by the Norsemen.

None of them have done anything but supply amusing tales for the little chirrun', including the latest fad god who had the advantage of getting his book published and distributed by the Churches in what I believe is the grandest scam of all time.

By the time Johannes Gutenberg came along, invented the printing press, and wrested knowledge from the exclusive control of the churches and extremely wealthy the Bible was already the most published and widely distributed book in history. It was a done deal and I, for one, consider the Bible to be the most widely published and read piece of fiction in history. A scam.

I wonder if he is rotting in hell?

Labels: Barack Obama, christian hypocrisy, Churches, civil liberties, civil rights, Religion