Thus sayeth the prophecy

I've wondered for years why people fall for conspiracy theories.

My surmise -- and admittedly, that's all it is -- is that when bad things happen, any explanation is better than there being no explanation other than the universe being a chaotic and capricious place.  Blaming the latest tornado outbreak on weather manipulation by the Bad Guys at least means there's a reason why communities were destroyed and lives were lost; otherwise it just appears that shit happens because shit happens, and nice people sometimes die and the world can be dangerous and unfair.

Which brings us to the death of Pope Francis, who died three days ago at the age of 88.

Even for many non-Catholics, Pope Francis seemed like a pretty cool guy.  He embodied tolerance, gentleness, humility, and a deep concern for our environment.  I didn't agree with his theology (obviously) but I did have a lot of respect for him as a person and a spiritual leader.

Now, it's not like his death was unexpected.  He'd been ailing and in a slow decline for months, and recently came out of a long hospital stay for double pneumonia.  Even so, the world's Catholics are in mourning -- and understandably anxious, in our current volatile world situation, about who will be chosen next to lead the world's 1.4 billion Roman Catholics.

And... also not unexpected... almost as soon as he died, the conspiracy theories started.

The first was that his death had something to do with a visit from Vice President J. D. Vance, who is nominally Catholic himself but embodies the exact opposite list of characteristics from those I listed for Pope Francis: intolerance, viciousness, arrogance, and a complete disregard for the environment.  I've seen a number of claims -- some tongue-in-cheek, others apparently quite serious -- that Vance did something to hasten the Pope's death because of Francis's condemnation of many of the Trump administration's policies.

I'm a little dubious, but I think we should deport Vance to El Salvador just in case.  He recently said he's fine with the "inevitable errors" that will come with eliminating due process, so he should have no problem with it, right?

Even more out there are the people who are now leaping about making excited little squeaking noises about the Prophecy of St. Malachi.  This curious document is a series of 112 phrases in Latin, each of which is supposed to refer to one of the Popes, in order, starting with Celestine II (who led the church from 1143 to 1144).  It was published in 1595 by Flemish Benedictine monk Arnold Wion, but Wion said it was actually from Malachi of Armagh, a twelfth-century Irish saint.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Andreas F. Borchert, Malaquías de Armagh (cropped), CC BY-SA 4.0]

Most modern scholars, however, think the whole thing was made up, if not by Wion, by someone in the late sixteenth century.  So any accurate passages that apply to the Popes from prior to 1595 or so shouldn't be looked upon as anything even close to miraculous.  It is, after all, easy to prophesy something after it's already happened.

Aficionados of the prophecy, though, have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to make the lines referring to events after 1595 fit to the Popes they allegedly are about.  #83, for example, which would correspond with Pope Alexander VII, translates to "Guardian of the Mountains," and Alexander's papal arms had a design of six hills.  Pope Clement X, whose line is "From a Great River," was allegedly born during a flood of the Tiber.  

When you get into the eighteenth century, however, things become dicier, because by that time the Prophecy of St. Malachi had become widely popular, so some of the Popes apparently did stuff to fit the prophecy rather than the other way around.  Pope Clement XI, for example, corresponds to the line "Surrounded by Flowers," and Clement had a medal created with the line "Flores circumdati," which is a pretty blatant attempt to make sure the Prophecy applies to him.

The reason the conspiracy theorists are getting all excited is that there are a total of 112 passages in the Prophecy, and -- you guessed it -- Pope Francis is the 112th Pope since Celestine II.  So, without further ado, here's the passage that's supposed to apply to Pope Francis:

Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations, and when these things are finished, the City of Seven Hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people.  The End.

It's hard even for the most devoted conspiracy theorist to see how Pope Francis could be "Peter the Roman."  He's not Roman, he's Argentine; neither his chosen papal name nor his birth name (Jorge Mario Bergoglio) contains any form of the name Peter.  The best they've been able to do is to say that his chosen name (Francis) is after St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Francis's father was named Pietro, but even for a lot of woo-woos this is stretching credulity to the breaking point.

Be that as it may, there are still a lot of people who think the Prophecy is serious business, and they are especially focusing on "the City of Seven Hills will be destroyed" part.  Because now that Pope Francis is dead, that means the rest of the prediction is imminent, so Rome is about to be hit by a massive earthquake or something.

I'm thinking it's probably not worth worrying about.  I mean, for cryin' in the sink, this is worse than Nostradamus.  Plus, it's not like we don't have enough real stuff to lose sleep over.  I'm not going to fret over a prophecy that couldn't even get the name and origin of the Pope right.

But for some reason, this kind of stuff thrills a lot of people, and I really don't see the appeal.  I guess it gives some mystical gloss to day-to-day events, rather than things happening because the world is just kind of weird and random.  In any case, to any of my Catholic readers, my condolences for the loss of your spiritual leader.  He did seem like a pretty cool guy, and I hope they can find a suitable replacement to step into his shoes.

But for those of you who live in Rome, no worries about the city burning down or anything. 

****************************************

No hell below us, above us only sky

I think my problem is that I really don't understand religion.

I understand, or at least think I do, religious people.  I have a lot of religious friends, and mostly we get along fine, even if I am a fairly outspoken godless heathen.  I've been in many a discussion with my religious friends, and from what they've told me they believe for a variety of reasons -- it's their culture/the way they were raised to believe, it makes sense of the world around them, it's comforting, and (for some of them) they have had experiences that they interpret as being in contact with the divine.

So far, no problem.  I may not share this framework for interpreting the universe, but as long as they don't try to force it on me and I don't try to force my atheism on them, it's not a problem for either of us.

But what I don't understand is some of the pronouncements from religious leaders, who take their own convictions about the nature of the deity and feel obliged to make sure that everyone else believes the same way.  Especially given that (1) each of said religious leaders is telling us something different, and (2) even the same religious leader can seriously change his tune from one moment to the next, as if suddenly the entire cosmos shifted and only he was aware of it.

It's this latter one that I want to address today, given Pope Francis's recent pronouncement that hell doesn't exist.  Now, let me say up front that my impression is that the Pope is a pretty cool guy.  We (obviously) don't agree on much in a doctrinal sense, but he seems like a genuinely kind and moral person.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But sometimes he does say things that leave me scratching my head.  In an interview in La Repubblica conducted by Eugenio Scalfari, the Pope said the following:

They [people who die without confessing mortal sin] are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear.  There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.

Which is a little cheerier than the prospect of the Fiery Furnace.  However, there's the problem that it runs counter to The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which you think would be fairly authoritative:

The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity.  Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, 'eternal fire.'  The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.

So that's awkward.  The Vatican scrambled to do damage control, and a day after the interview went public, issued the following statement:

The Holy Father Francis recently received the founder of the newspaper La Repubblica in a private meeting on the occasion of Easter, without however giving him any interviews.  What is reported by the author in today’s article [in La Repubblica] is the result of his reconstruction, in which the textual words pronounced by the Pope are not quoted.  No quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.

So, basically, "you weren't there and you can't prove that's what he said."

Apparently, however, it was too late, as only a few hours after the article was published, some big chunks of the ceiling of St. Peter's Basilica broke off and fell hundreds of feet to the cathedral floor.  No one was injured, but the faithful said it was a message from God that you better just forget the whole "hell doesn't exist" episode ever happened.

What I wonder about is if Pope Francis is right and hell doesn't exist, how does the Vatican justify exorcism?  Because if hell doesn't exist, then how can Satan and demons and all?  I would think that they would be first on the list of "did not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven," and would have vanished along with the rest of the sinners.  But that hasn't stopped the powers-that-be in the Catholic Church from launching a new program to train exorcists, spurred, they say, by a sudden uptick in demonic possession.  The number of possessed people in Italy alone, they say, has risen to 500,000 a year.

Which is a shitload of demons.  So from April 16 to April 21, the church is sponsoring an exorcism training course at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome.  One of the course instructors, Father Cesare Truqui, said:

The fight against the evil one started at the origin of the world, and is destined to last until the end of the world.  But today we are at a stage crucial in history: many Christians no longer believe in [the devil’s] existence, few exorcists are appointed and there are no more young priests willing to learn the doctrine and practice of liberation of souls.

Pope Francis has said he agrees:

If a priest becomes aware of genuine spiritual disturbances that may be in large part psychic, and therefore must be confirmed by means of healthy collaboration with the human sciences, he must not hesitate to refer the issue to those who, in the diocese, are charged with this delicate and necessary ministry, namely, exorcists.

 Now just hang on a moment.

I'll admit that I might not be the right one to try to figure this all out, given my aforementioned godless-heathen status.  But how can all of this fit together?  That is, if Eugenio Scalfari reported what the Pope said accurately, which (I note) the Pope himself hasn't denied.  Hell doesn't exist, and souls that disobeyed God simply vanish, but there are demons loose in the world who disobeyed God and didn't vanish, and they can take over humans, and if they're not exorcised by a priest said human/demon hybrids will die in sin, and vanish again, presumably for good this time.

Is there something I'm missing here?  I'm willing to admit I may just be confused.

Anyhow, that's today's missive from the world of religion.  Allow me to reiterate that I'm not trying to offend any of my religious readers; if I come off as sounding snarky it's because I'm genuinely perplexed at how someone could reconcile all of the above.  So I'm gonna just throw this out there, and go back to thinking about something that's easier to make sense of, like quantum physics.

UIPDATE:  Apparently there's a significant possibility that the interviewer might not be very reliable -- Snopes is calling his claim "unproven" and says that it's not the first time he's claimed the Pope has said something like this, without any facts to back him up.  So we'll file this one in the "well, maybe" folder for now.

Thus sayeth Lord Steven

I'm not in the habit of using Skeptophilia as a forum to give publicity to weirdos, but sometimes I find a member of the Wingnut Coalition that is so delightfully out there that I just have to tell you about it.

In this case we have a guy who calls himself "Lord Steven Christ."  As if "Christ" was Jesus's last name or something.  (Although musician and stand-up comic Stephen Lynch did riff on this idea in his song "Craig," which is about Jesus's bad-boy brother, Craig Christ.  Note: the song is hilarious, but at the same time runs pretty close to the edge of sacrilege more than once, and is highly NSFW.  You have been warned.)

Anyhow, Lord Steven's website is a sight to behold.  First off, he's very fond of having photographs of himself all over the place, usually shirtless and in mid-flex.  It also has links to three dozen or so videos, the general gist of which is that the Earth is concave and the sky is made of glass.

I'm not making this up.  So now we've gone one step past the Flat Earth lunacy; the Earth is actually shaped like a bowl.  The reason we can't see this -- why, for example, someone with a telescope can't see Japan over there on the other edge of the bowl -- is because "light bends to the center so you can't see the other side."  Whatever that means.  But anyone who doesn't believe this, Lord Steven says, is delusional.  He says that NASA and the other pesky people who investigate the universe and have come up with different answers are "lie-n-tists."

But the most interesting part of his spiel is his take on religion, because in his opinion there should be only one religion, and that is the religion of Lord Steven.  In fact, he wrote a letter to Pope Francis demanding that he turn over the keys to the Vatican forthwith, which I include in toto below because it's just that wonderful:

Dear Jorge Bergoglio: 

As your fellow Jesuit colleagues should know very well, I am the Returned Christ.  I am awaiting exaltation to world authority over all mankind.  I am ready to establish my Kingdom. 

According to the Malachy papal prophecies, you know that you, by taking on the name Francis di Pietro, have fulfilled the office of the last pope dubbed as Peter Romanus. According to the prophecy you are called to feed the people.  You are to feed them with the truth of the reality of the Kingdom of God, in which I am on the verge of establishing.  You are also commanded to tell the people that I, Christ am back, returned in a new body with a new name "Steven", the Crowned One.  You are commanded to help educate the people of my return and the hoped for liberty and righteousness to all the people that fear my name. 

You also should know that I am the "Dreadful Judge" that is mentioned in the Malachy prophecy, which also states that Rome will be destroyed.  I am here to execute judgment upon the entire Earth, and to educate the masses about taking cover prior to the hail descending from the sky, and the sun burning up the Earth. 

I am here to implement my universal mark upon humanity.  This will separate the sheep from the goats.  All who submit and wear my Seal of the Living God will be protected and blessed, those who refuse will be left to perish outside of safety. 

I command you to conceal not my identity and my message to the masses.  For the time is short and judgment is at hand.  You are to point them to me as the returned Christ. 

I expect a quick response from you confirming your obedience to me. 

The Lord Steven Christ

So that's pretty unequivocal.  I haven't heard what, if anything, Pope Francis responded, but I'm guessing that Lord Steven's demands were ignored given that I haven't heard anything about Francis resigning.  As far as the rest of his message, I have to say it's pretty nice of him to Educate the Masses before the hail descends and Earth gets burned up by the Sun, but I'm a little less enthusiastic about Perishing Outside of Safety.

I guess you can't have everything.

He also has other stuff about how he's in favor of the New World Order as long as he gets to be in charge, and that his followers need to get this complicated star-pattern design tattooed on the back of their right hands so he'll know who not to smite.  "Please also be wise and reverent in relating to me," Lord Steven writes, "because there are many proud and bashing people online that do not understand who they are relating to."

Here's Lord Steven's seal, in case you are interested in a hand tattoo.

Then there's his diatribe against Alex Jones, because apparently Lord Steven is of the opinion that like the Highlander, amongst the wingnuts There Can Only Be One.  He says that Alex Jones is a "child," and that it'd help us to see that if Alex would dress up in a bib and a frilly bonnet and hold a rattle.

Which is a mental image that will forever haunt my nightmares.

So anyhow, the whole thing is highly entertaining, in a weird, performance-art sort of way.  I strongly recommend watching some of the videos.  I watched one of them, after fortifying myself with a glass of scotch, and only twice had to pause it and put my head down on my desk to recover.  After a second glass of scotch, though, some of it actually started to make sense, so I decided I'd better either stop watching or stop drinking.

Which was a rather easy choice to make, honestly.

But I felt obliged to pass along the website to my readers, in the hopes that you'll find it as engaging as I did.  Unless, of course, you're a "proud and bashing person," in which case you'll probably just roll your eyes and stop watching.

Thicker than water

People on the left side of the political aisle are currently engaging in a good bit of gloom-and-doom prognostication.  I try not to make predictions -- I've found that almost always, such attempts to look ahead don't work.  The universe always seems to have surprises in store for us -- some of them far better than we'd hoped, others far worse than we'd feared.  In any case, foretelling the future is generally a losing game.

This time, though.  I dunno, folks.  2017 is looking pretty dire.  I say that not as some kind of political pundit, which heaven knows I'm not.  I'm saying this because...

... the blood of St. Januarius didn't liquefy a couple of days ago.

St. Januarius is an interesting figure, largely because there's a huge and complex story about him even though modern historians are uncertain whether he ever existed.  The short version is that he was a third-century holy man who helped out Christians during the reign of the virulently anti-Christian Roman Emperor Diocletian, and for his trouble got shoved into a fiery furnace (that didn't work), thrown into a pit filled with wild bears (that didn't work either), and finally beheaded (that worked).  The earliest historical sources that mention him date to the sixth century, so right there it casts a little doubt on his life history, even if you don't count the miracles.

The Martyrdom of Saint Januarius (1631), by Artemisia Gentileschi [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Fast forward to 1389, when a relic of St. Januarius showed up in Naples, Italy (where he is known as St. Gennaro).  It was a vial of the saint's blood, obtained when he was beheaded in 305 C. E. or thereabouts.  Where it had been for a thousand-odd years is anyone's guess, but it was immediately revered as a holy relic, especially when it was found that the blood spontaneously liquefied three times a year.

Skeptics have speculated for some time about how the whole liquefaction thing happens.  Robert Todd Carroll, in The Skeptic's Dictionary, said that the "miracle" can be duplicated using a mixture of chalk, hydrated iron chloride, and salt water, and was due to a property of certain liquids called thixotropy -- they become less viscous the more they're shaken, stirred, or agitated.  (A common example is ketchup.)  So predictably, my thought is that it's a non-miracle that relies on purely natural physical properties of whatever it is that's in the vial.

But of course, the true believers don't like that idea.  Especially now that (gasp) the blood didn't liquefy on schedule.  They say that this only happens when a disaster is about to strike -- such as in 1631 (before an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius), 1939 (right before World War II), 1943 (when Italy was occupied by the Nazis) and 1980 (right before an earthquake struck).  Of course, those are hardly the only bad things that have ever happened, so one has to wonder how many times the blood liquefied and something awful followed, or didn't liquefy and there was a disaster.

This hasn't stopped people in Naples from panicking, of course.  The Catholic powers-that-be have tried to calm everyone, to little effect. Monsignor Vincenzo De Gregorio, Abbot of the Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro, said, "We must not think of disasters and calamities.  We are men of faith and we must pray."

Or, possibly, stop believing in medieval superstitions and look for rational explanations for stuff.  That could work, too.

Of course, apparently the saint has been giving us hints of disaster all year.  When Pope Francis visited the Chapel earlier this year and said the Lord's Prayer over the vial, the blood only "half liquefied."  Whatever that means.  Archbishop Crescenzio Sepe said of the event, "The blood has half liquefied, which shows that Saint Januarius loves our pope and Naples."

The pope wasn't quite so sanguine.  "The bishop just announced that the blood half liquefied.  We can see the saint only half loves us.  We must all spread the Word, so that he loves us more."

Righty-o.  And now the blood didn't liquefy at all, which means St. Januarius doesn't love us at all, or (according to the legend) that something really dreadful is about to happen.

I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, however.  Given the world's current state, something really dreadful is pretty likely to happen anyhow, regardless whether some obscure saint decided to warn us ahead of time.  And besides, since the saints are supposed to be pretty powerful and able to work miracles and all, don't you think that there'd be a more direct way of warning us than having his blood liquefy?  How about the saint putting big letters in the sky spelling out "WATCH OUT THERE'S GOING TO BE AN EARTHQUAKE?"  Or having celestial trumpets blare, and the saint's deep, booming voice shout out, "There's going to be a volcanic eruption in the middle of downtown Omaha, you probably should evacuate?"  Or simply having the saint tell Donald Trump to tweet about it?

In any case, I'm willing to wait and see what 2017 has in store.  My guess is it'll be a mixed bag as always, although considering the fact that the incoming Cabinet appointments have all been selected from the Daddy Warbucks Fan Club, it could be a rough ride.  So we'll have to wait until the next scheduled liquefaction, which is in May, if the Earth isn't hit with a giant asteroid or something before then.

Meddling with science

Something I find really peculiar is the selectiveness with which people apply the tenets of their own religion.

Take, for example, staunch Catholic and Republican presidential contender Rick Santorum, who last month opined that Pope Francis was out of his depth to speak on climate change:

He’s someone who is as committed to the nuclear family as I am.  I’m a huge fan of his and his focus on making sure that we have a healthier society. 

I understand and I sympathize and I support completely the pope’s call for us to do more to create opportunities for people to be able to rise in society, and to care for the poor.  [But] the church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists. 

I think when we get involved with controversial political and scientific theories, then I think the church is probably not as forceful and credible.  And I’ve said this to the bishops many times when they get involved in agriculture policy or things like that, that are really outside of the scope of what the church’s main message is.

Some people have responded with comments like, "Don't you people think the pope is infallible?"  Now, even an atheist like myself knows that the official church policy is that the pope only invokes papal infallibility when he is "speaking ex cathedra;" in the words of Catholic Encyclopedia author P. J. Toner, "When, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church."  But shouldn't his word still carry weight, even when he's not claiming to be infallible?

I mean, he is the pope, right?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And as far as Santorum claiming that we should "leave science to the scientists" -- well, it's not like the politicians are scientists, either.  Hell, they don't even listen to the scientists.  So what it seems like is that the policy is "people speaking with authority should be believed as long as it's politically expedient and I already agreed with their position."

Even more striking are the comments this week from Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who said that Catholics don't have to follow the pope's call to environmental stewardship because God has no specific opinions thereof:

The pope has the authority to speak on matters of faith and morals. Once you get beyond that, can you speak to other issues?  Of course you can speak to other issue, but I don’t care whether it’s Pope Francis or his predecessors or his successors some day, once you get outside the domain of faith and morals, be careful.  Be careful and be careful particularly when you get into the weeds and get very specific. 

For example, are we God’s stewards?  Are we supposed to take care of the Earth?  Of course, that’s out of the Old Testament, it’s out of the New Testament, it’s totally unobjectionable... 

The problem is, the more specific you get [on issues like climate change], Catholics will scratch their heads and say he's a very nice man. 

His encyclical on climate change will come out later this month, and he's going to speak to the UN, so we'll see more at that time.  And Catholics will offer him respect, but in terms of accepting what he has to say as guiding their thoughts, no, it’s not going to happen.  We know, for example, that even on issues as the death penalty, for example, or on gun control or on helping the poor, there’s a lot of different issues where Catholics can disagree on.  When it comes to things that are non-negotiable -- I'll give you two quick ones, abortion and euthanasia -- it's not my opinion, it's in the catechism, it says that these are intrinsically evil.  No one has ever said that air pollution is intrinsically evil.  So, people need to get up to speed on this.

So, basically, god is vehemently against the killing of one person at a time, but has no problem with the killing of lots of people at the same time -- such as in Beijing, where the estimates are that over 400,000 people die yearly from the effects of air pollution?

Of course, that's not the only place where the "word of god" kind of misses the boat.  Interesting how there are all sorts of commandments about worshiping god, and honoring your mother and father, and all that sort of thing, but never once does the bible say, "Slavery is bad.  It's immoral to claim that you own another human being."  No prohibitions against rape, either.  No, we're just given rules regarding how badly we can beat our slaves (Exodus 21:20-21) and rules requiring a rapist to marry his victim "and never divorce her as long as he lives" (Deuteronomy 22:28-29).

What Donohue and his ilk are doing is the usual; cherry-picking what they like from the bible and the catechism and the pope's declarations, and ignoring the rest.  So once again, what it sounds like is that we have someone who's making god in his own image.  Abortion and euthanasia -- which, allow me to point out, weren't mentioned in the bible, either -- are "non-negotiable," but the pope's commentary on climate change is nothing more than the musings of "a very nice man."  So take your own opinions and political biases and put those in the mouth of god, and dismiss anything else.

The whole thing reminds me of a joke my dad used to tell.  A fire-and-brimstone preacher was intoning to his congregation a litany of the evils they needed to avoid in order to escape being sent to hell.  Old Mrs. Jones, sitting in the front pew, was listening with rapt attention and great appreciation.

"And who can argue," the preacher thundered, "about the evils of strong drink?  Liquor is the devil's own brew!  Every sip scorching its way down your throat should remind you of the hellfire waiting for you!"  And Mrs. Jones took a pinch of snuff, and said, "Aaaaaaamen, Brother!"

"And immorality of the flesh!" the preacher continued.  "Fornicating and thinking lustful thoughts may make you burn inside, but that is nothing to the burning your body will experience in the fiery furnace!"  And Mrs. Jones took a pinch of snuff, and again said, "Aaaaaaamen!"

"And evil rock music, all that hootin' and hollerin' and chantin' of unholy words!  You must close your ears, brothers and sisters!"  Another pinch of snuff for Mrs. Jones, and a rolling, "Aaaaaamen!"

Then the preacher said, "And the horrors of the use of that evil weed, straight from the pits of hell... the evil scourge of tobacco..."

And Mrs. Jones said, "Wouldn't you know it?  He's stopped preachin' and started meddlin.'"

On a mission

There's something inherently odd about missionaries.

Now, I've met some nice ones.  There were a couple of Mormons who dropped by last fall to chat with me about religion, and when I told them (amiably) that I was an atheist and really didn't think they'd convince me otherwise, they offered to help me stack firewood.  I told them no, but I was kind of touched that they thought that since they couldn't help me in one way, they'd give a shot at helping with another.

Then, there were the Jehovah's Witnesses, both female, who rang my doorbell on a blisteringly hot day a couple of summers ago.  I was in the front yard weeding the garden, and heard them talking -- and I came out from around the corner of the house, shirtless, dripping with sweat, and disgustingly grimy.  They looked a little shocked, but it was too late to retreat gracefully.  That was one conversion attempt that I think they were perfectly glad to terminate unsuccessfully.

So it takes a good degree of bravery to go on a mission, even in the relatively safe territory of the rural United States.  You never know what you're going to run into -- and it could, of course, be much worse than half-naked gardeners.  Add to that the additional risk of missionary work in other countries, where you could be putting your safety or even your life at risk, and you have to have some grudging admiration for these folks.

But even so, there's something a little... condescending about the concept of missionaries.  "Hey, you're probably wrong about everything you believe," they seem to be saying.  "And since I'm right, let me tell you all about it!"  Where they've been successful, missionaries have done a pretty fine job of eradicating not only preexisting religions, but local culture, artifacts, traditions, and sometimes language as well.

Which is why the proposal by Pope Francis I to canonize Father Junipero Serra, the founder of 21 missions in 18th century California, has met with some pretty stiff opposition.

Serra has been hailed by Catholic leaders as the man who brought Catholicism to California, and who was responsible for educating the Native Americans who lived there -- the latter claim being pretty patronizing in and of itself, given that people who had lived successfully in a place for millennia can hardly be regarded as "uneducated" just because they couldn't read and write Spanish.  As far as Serra's treatment of the Natives -- while he and his followers didn't rush in and kill them all, like their countrymen the Conquistadors did in Central and South America, he certainly didn't treat them like equals.  Serra wrote:

The view that spiritual fathers should punish their sons, the Indians, with blows appears to be as old as the conquest of the Americas; so general in fact that the saints do not seem to be any exception to the rule.

Whatever you think of his intentions and his methods, the outcome is certain; the Natives were forced to abandon their languages, customs, and kinship ties in favor of Serra's imposed Spanish culture and religion.  Miranda Ramirez, whose Native ancestry can be traced back to people who were part of the Carmel Mission, said, "We lost everything (because of Serra)...  We were not allowed to be with our people. We lost contact with cousins, we lost the family ties.  Our language was gone."

Steven Hackel, who has written a biography of Serra, was equally critical.  "One can point to certain moments in the historical record when Serra does protect Indians," Hackel said in an interview with Al Jazeera America.  "But the larger story I think is one in which his policies and his plans led to tremendous pain and suffering, most of it unintended on his part, among Native peoples.  If one looks at the legacy of Serra's missions and what he was trying to do in California, there's no question that his goal was to radically alter Native culture, to have Indians not speak their Native languages, to practice Spanish culture, to transform Native belief patterns in ways that would make them much less Native.  He really did want to eliminate many aspects of Native culture."

Not only did Serra's actions eradicate the cultures that were already there, his insistence that the Natives abandon their villages and land has led to a further injustice -- the United States government only recognizes Native American tribes who have had uninterrupted cultural identity as meriting legally recognized membership.  Since the tribes that Serra converted back in the 18th century lost everything, even their languages, today they can't get federal recognition of their status as Natives.  Writes Karen Klein, in her piece for the Los Angeles Times entitled "What California Indians Lost Under Junipero Serra":

Because the missions mixed different Native American groups together and forced all of them to give up much of their cultural identity, many of these groups cannot meet the requirements of continuous cultural and geographical identity required to be federally recognized tribes, with the many benefits such recognition bestows. It’s one of the most painful ironies in California history — robbed of their culture by white missions the first time, and then, because of that first theft, robbed by the U.S. government a second time. 

The pope cited Serra’s role as the “evangelizer of the West” in announcing his canonization. But many see his role more as one of forced conversion rather than persuasive evangelism. I’m sure the pope realizes this; the church has recognized in the past, at least, that there were some serious problems with California’s early mission history. Perhaps that seems like a regrettable but small part of the story from the viewpoint of the Vatican, but here in California, the irreparable harm done to Native Americans is not easily minimized.

I know the argument in Serra's favor -- that he was a man of his time, that he honestly thought he was helping the Natives because he believed that without his intervention, they'd burn in hell for all eternity.  Nonetheless, there's the troubling fact that his efforts pretty much singlehandedly destroyed an entire culture.

So what do you do with someone who is acting out of what, for them, are pure motives, but who nonetheless (1) uses questionable means to attain those ends, and (2) is probably wrong in any case?  The Muslim leaders in the Middle East who advocate publicly flogging and/or decapitating heretics are, after all, operating from much the same worldview.  Better to punish one person severely for errors of faith rather than have everyone face the wrath of Allah.

My own view, of course, is pretty unequivocal; the whole shebang is really just a bunch of antiquated superstition, and no one has a right to push anyone else into belief.  Or disbelief, for that matter.  We all are capable of using our brains, and if given the freedom, to evaluate the evidence we have and decide how we think the universe works.

No missionaries necessary.

And to put it bluntly, that the Roman Catholic religion produced people like Serra should be more a cause for shame than celebration.

The right to criticize lunacy

At what point are you allowed to say, "That may be your religion, but it's completely insane," without being accused of crossing the lines of propriety?

I ask the question because of a comment made by Pope Francis that many are interpreting as implying that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists brought their deaths upon themselves. "You cannot provoke," the Pope said.  "You cannot insult the faith of others.  You cannot make fun of the faith of others."

Okay, I admit that it's not nice to do something deliberately that upsets people, but other than that, why should we place religious faith outside of the reach of criticism?  What if the "faith of others" is completely absurd?

For example, consider a story that appeared a couple of days ago in The Times of Israel, which describes a reporter who traveled in Algeria, asking people who they thought were responsible for the Charlie Hebdo massacre.  And apparently the response she got was:

The attacks were done by shape-shifting Jews.

Illustration from Goethe's Werke (1882) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

"Many Muslims in north Africa," Dana Kennedy said, "are of the opinion that Jews staged the series of terror incidents to make Muslims look bad... (and) that they weren’t just regular Jews that were doing this, but in fact but a race of magical shape-shifting Jews that were master manipulators that could be everywhere at the same time."

Oh, those wily, wily Jews.  Creating such convincing personae as Cherif and Said Kouachi (the gunmen responsible for the Charlie Hebdo attack, who shouted "Muhammad is avenged" after killing the twelve staff members) and Amedy Coulibaly (the self-proclaimed member of Islamic Jihad who killed a policewoman and four civilians in separate attacks, and who deliberately targeted Jews).  

And their response to all of this is that the attacks were by Jews impersonating Muslim terrorists?  What, are the Jews also the ones who are beheading people in Syria right now?  Is it Jews who are responsible for flogging, hanging, or beheading people in public because they've been found guilty by a criminal justice system that would have seemed unfair to Tomás de Torquemada?

I dunno.  It seems to me as if the Muslims are making themselves look bad enough without any outside assistance, from the Jews or anyone else.

And to Pope Francis I would say: if you are not allowed to criticize ideas freely, then how are you supposed to combat ideas that are batshit insane?  Is anyone allowed to claim anything, free of repercussions, because it's under the aegis of faith?  How can he not see that treating "It's my religion" as a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card is tantamount to giving license to lunacy of all kinds?

So while Pope Francis has certainly met with my approval over some of his statements, that encourage dialogue and ecumenism rather than rancor and recrimination, I think this one is ridiculous.  We have to be able to point out the absurdity of beliefs.  Without that freedom, there is no filter for telling fact from fiction, reasonable claims from insanity.

Shape-shifting Jews, my ass.

I know I've said it before, but it's important enough that I'll reiterate: I'm all for treating people with compassion.  We all come to understanding by different roads and at different speeds, and most of us are striving to figure things out in whatever way we can.  But there is no such requirement that we treat beliefs as if they could have their feelings hurt by criticism.  Beliefs stand and fall by the same criteria as any other sort of claim; by their agreement with facts and evidence.  Without that standard for acceptance, you are adrift in a sea of wild conjecture, without a touchstone for reality.

Alien round-up

Yesterday's post, which involved fact-free speculation about UFOs being a "macro-scale quantum effect," made me realize that it's been a while since we looked at what was happening in the world of UFOlogists and alien aficionados.  So I did some research, and I'm glad that I did, because there are three stories that certainly merit a closer look.

First, we have an article over at the wonderfully loony website Phantoms and Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal called "Chatting With the Axthadans," in which we learn about an extraterrestrial species that I, at least, had never heard of.

The Axthadans are sometimes confused with the "Greys," we read, although there are some significant differences.  The "Greys" are much shorter, the author tells us, and come from a planet only thirty light years distant.  The Axthadans, on the other hand, are benevolent aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy.

Upon reading this, I immediately thought, "How can you be from a whole galaxy?"  I mean, it's bad enough that some woo-woos think that there are life forms that come from a constellation, given that this is just a loose assemblage of a few stars that are all at varying distances from the Earth, and only seem to be near each other when viewed from our vantage point.  But an entire galaxy?  Made up, according to recent studies, of one trillion stars?

How could that possibly work?

Also, there's the little problem that the distance from the Earth to the center of the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years.  In other words, so distant that even at the speed of light, it would take 2.5 million years to get there.  I seem to remember that even the writers of the original Star Trek recognized that the Andromeda Galaxy was kind of far away -- in one episode, evil aliens try to hijack the Enterprise and take it there, for some reason that escapes my memory at the moment, and they convert almost the entire crew into little geometrical solids for the duration of the voyage, which saved not only on upkeep but also on salary for hiring actors to portray Red Shirts who were just gonna die anyhow.  But fortunately, the un-converted members of the crew save the day, and prevent the ship from being taken on a voyage Boldly Going Where No One In His Right Mind Would Ever Attempt To Go.

So, however unlikely it is that we've been visited by beings from another star system, it's orders of magnitude less likely that we've been visited by beings from another galaxy.  The distances are simply prohibitive, even presupposing some kind of super-advanced technology.


(Much) closer to home, we have a woman in Wales who thinks that the aliens are abducting Welsh people because of their superior DNA.

Hilary Porter, "UFOlogist and public speaker," says she herself has been abducted so many times that she's lost count.  The first time was when she and her husband were on their way to visit a friend in Llanelli, and had a time-slip after which they found themselves near Cardiff with no memory of what had happened for some hours previous.

"It was damned frightening," Porter said.  "We just blacked out and had no idea how we got there.  I didn’t feel well at all.  My husband thought we must have gone to sleep, but that didn’t explain how we got there...  When we got home I got changed and found triangular suction marks on my stomach, blood suction marks. I thought 'flipping hell, look at that.'"

Which is a fair enough response, I suppose.  As far as why they abducted her, and why that area of road is an "abduction hotspot," Porter speculates that it's because the aliens want DNA from "the Celtic tribes" because their "DNA is of more interest" and is "compatible for creating human/alien hybrids."

I suppose I should be concerned, given that I'm a quarter Scottish by ancestry.  I'm not sure if the other 3/4 (which is mainly French) outweighs the Celtic-ness, though.  I can understand it if the aliens aren't interested in French DNA, given that a human-alien hybrid that was only interested in sitting around in the intergalactic café drinking red wine and looking smug probably wouldn't be much use.  But if a quarter Scottish is sufficient, I want to invite the aliens to abduct me.  I would love to see the interior of a spacecraft.  Also, meeting an extraterrestrial intelligence is high on the list of things I want to do.  I'd be happy to roll up my sleeve and give them a vial of blood, if that's what they're after, although I'd appreciate it if they'd give me a pass on the whole body-cavity probe thing.

Last, we have word from none other than Pope Francis himself that if aliens exist, he'd not only welcome them, he'd baptize them.

I'm not making this up.  The Vatican has taken a great interest in astronomy in recent years, probably out of guilt feelings over what they did to Galileo and Giordano Bruno.  And the pope himself is deeply intrigued by the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

In his weekly homily, given on Monday, Pope Francis said, "If – for example - tomorrow an expedition of Martians came, and some of them came to us, here... Martians, right?  Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them...  And one says, 'But I want to be baptized!' What would happen?...  When the Lord shows us the way, who are we to say, 'No, Lord, it is not prudent!  No, let's do it this way'... Who are we to close doors?  In the early Church, even today, there is the ministry of the ostiary [usher].  And what did the ostiary do?  He opened the door, received the people, allowed them to pass.  But it was never the ministry of the closed door, never."

So that sounds pretty open-minded, although I do have to wonder why exactly the aliens would want to be baptized.  I mean, if the pope is right about god and salvation and the whole shebang, presumably the aliens already know about it.  There's no particular reason why they'd have to go to the trouble of coming all the way to Rome (Italy, Earth, Solar System) to get access.

And then, there'd be the inconvenience of the aliens having to fly their spaceships to Mass every Sunday, and sending their kids to catechism classes and all.  Nah, I'm pretty sure they'd just prefer to stay home and keep whatever religious beliefs (or lack thereof) they already had.

But that's the whole problem, isn't it?  According to the UFOlogists, we have all of these aliens, coming here all the time.  To listen to people like Hilary Porter, Earth is a regular Stellar Grand Central Station.  And the people who believe in the Axthadans think that they came all the way to this tiny, insignificant little speck of rock, 2.5 million light years away, to "guide our development" and "prepare humans for possible integration into the universal culture."  And they've been coming for a while, too; apparently the biblical book of Ezekiel, which reads like almost as much of a Bronze-Age bad acid trip as the book of Revelation, was a chronicle of a visit from the Axthadans.

It all seems pretty unlikely to me -- given the distances involved, and the how generally unremarkable our planet and Solar System seem to be.  So sad to say, but I think we probably haven't been visited.  Meaning my DNA and yours (if you have Celtic ancestry) is reasonably certain to be safe from extraction.

Tweet your way to heaven

Today I learned that the Catholic church still engages in a practice that I thought it had abandoned years ago.

I refer to the granting of "indulgences" -- the guarantee of less time in purgatory for sins you've committed (and confessed to, and done penance for, and been granted absolution) because you have done some special action in addition to all that.

Time off for good behavior, is how I see it.

I remember running into this idea when I was in high school world history class, a time when I was still a practicing (albeit rather dubious) Roman Catholic.  Our teacher, Ms. Syrie, described in some detail the abuses of the granting of indulgences during the Middle Ages -- people being granted indulgences for monetary contributions to the church (the bigger the donation, the more time off you got); noblemen getting them for visiting abbeys and monasteries, where they were feasted like kings; and some folks even gaming the system by purchasing indulgences ahead of time for sins they hadn't committed yet, but intended to.  ("Yes, Father, I would like some indulgences, because I'm planning on cheating my business partner next week, I'm going to lie on my tax return, and I'd like to commit fornication at least eight or nine times this month.  How much do I owe you?"  "That will be $8,000, my son, taking into account the coupons you brought in from Catholic Digest.")

To be fair, there was some effort to rein in the practice, especially after Martin Luther had the guts to point out how far the abuses had gone.  I kind of thought that the whole thing had faded away, but it turns out that as recently as Pope Paul VI there was reconsideration of this doctrine.  Apparently now, there are only a few things that can get you paroled from purgatory early:

1. Raising the mind to God with humble trust while performing one's duties and bearing life's difficulties, and adding, at least mentally, some pious invocation.
2. Devoting oneself or one's goods compassionately in a spirit of faith to the service of one's brothers and sisters in need.
3. Freely abstaining in a spirit of penance from something licit and pleasant.
4. Freely giving open witness to one's faith before others in particular circumstances of everyday life.
5. Piously reading or listening to Sacred Scripture for at least half an hour.
6. Adoration of Jesus in the Eucharist for at least half an hour.
7. The pious exercise of the Stations of the Cross.
8. Recitation of the Rosary or in a church or oratory, or in a family, a religious community, an association of the faithful and, in general, when several people come together for an honorable purpose.

There is apparently still some argument, though.  Lots of people still believe, for example, that if you walk up the Sacred Steps in Rome, praying the whole way, you get nine years off of your sentence for each step.  It has always struck me as weird how the people in charge seem to know how much time off you get for particular actions, when (1) as far as I know, no one has ever reported back from purgatory, and (2) god hasn't publicly said anything about it himself.  I know, as an atheist, that I couldn't reasonably be expected to have any other reaction, but it still strikes me as, even by religious standards, making shit up because it sounds good.

Anyhow, the point of all this is that it's still going on today.  Just a couple of days ago, Pope Francis announced that he's offering time off from purgatory if you follow him on Twitter.  No, I'm not joking -- I'm not nearly creative enough to come up with something this strange.

The pope is going to be in Brazil next Monday as part of Catholic Youth Day, and the Vatican has announced that the powers-that-be are mindful that not everyone can afford to hop on a plane and go see him.  So anyone who follows the "rites and pious exercises" that are being conducted there by reading the pope's tweets will be granted an indulgence.  "But you must be following the events live," a Vatican spokesperson said.  "It is not as if you can get an indulgence by chatting on the internet."

You also have to be "truly penitent and contrite" for whatever sin it is you're trying to get out of paying for.

"You can't obtain indulgences like getting a coffee from a vending machine," Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, head of the pontifical council for social communication, told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.   "What really counts is that the tweets the Pope sends from Brazil or the photos of the Catholic World Youth Day that go up on Pinterest produce authentic spiritual fruit in the hearts of everyone."

So anyway, that's our weird news from the world of religion.  I have to wonder how long it'll be before they start giving time off from purgatory for clicking on those "like if you <heart> Jesus" things you see all the time on Facebook, or offering forgiveness of sins via infomercial.  "Call now!  Hell lasts forever but THIS DEAL WON'T!  Operators are standing by!" 

Some thoughts about demons

C. S. Lewis' famous book The Screwtape Letters chronicles the tempting of a young British man (known only as "The Patient") by a junior demon, Wormwood, who is under the guidance of a senior devil named Screwtape.  The Patient experiences pulls and pushes from various sides, some (in Lewis' worldview) positive, i.e. toward god; others negative, toward hell and damnation.  A particularly interesting passage comes in Letter #10, where Lewis throws a barb at us skeptics and atheists (if you haven't read this book, recall that it's from the devil's point of view, and therefore "The Enemy" is the Christian God):

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

I was delighted to hear from Triptweeze that your patient has made some very desirable new acquaintances and that you seem to have used this event in a really promising manner. I gather that the middle-aged married couple who called at his office are just the sort of people we want him to know - rich, smart, superficially intellectual, and brightly sceptical about everything in the world. I gather they are even vaguely pacifist, not on moral grounds but from an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men and from a dash of purely fashionable and literary communism. This is excellent. And you seem to have made good use of all his social, sexual, and intellectual vanity. Tell me more. Did he commit himself deeply? I don't mean in words. There is a subtle play of looks and tones and laughs by which a Mortal can imply that he is of the same party is those to whom he is speaking. That is the kind of betrayal you should specially encourage, because the man does not fully realise it himself; and by the time he does you will have made withdrawal difficult.

No doubt he must very soon realise that his own faith is in direct opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new friends is based. I don't think that matters much provided that you can persuade him to postpone any open acknowledgment of the fact, and this, with the aid of shame, pride, modesty and vanity, will be easy to do. As long as the postponement lasts he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent. He will assume, at first only by his manner, but presently by his words, all sorts of cynical and sceptical attitudes which are not really his. But if you play him well, they may become his. All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary. The real question is how to prepare for the Enemy's counter attack.

It is clear that Lewis, although he meant The Screwtape Letters as a fictional allegory, believed in the reality of demons and their capacity for tempting humans into sin.  In the preface to Screwtape he writes,

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.

What I find interesting about all of this is two things; first is why, if demons actually exist, they don't tend to bother atheists like myself -- wouldn't we be easy targets for possession?  (Lewis, I suspect, would respond to this objection that I am so far gone in my disbelief that the demons have already added me to their Ledger Book -- there's no further need to tempt me, as I'm already damned.)  Be that as it may, it's interesting that the only people who seem to be troubled by demons are Christians who already thought they were real beforehand.

The second interesting thing is how generally embarrassed Christians seem to be by the idea of demons, although it is clearly scriptural in origin (recall the passage in Matthew 8 where Jesus casts some demons out of a couple of guys, and the demons possess a bunch of pigs, who proceed to drown themselves in a lake).  Despite this, and with the exception of the fundamentalist sects of Christianity, a lot of Christians kind of turn red and change the subject when you bring up demons and possession.

As evidence of the latter, look at the dithering that came from the Vatican last week after Pope Francis did an impromptu exorcism on a guy in St. Peter's Square.  A television station showed a video clip that had captured the incident, and the announcer stated that it was "certainly an exorcism" given that the man had opened his mouth wide, convulsed, and then slumped to one side when the pope put his hands on his head.  Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi responded with some apparent unease that of course the pope hadn't performed an exorcism; "rather," Lombardi said, "as he frequently does with the sick or suffering who come his way, he simply intended to pray for a suffering person."

Not everyone shared Lombardi's trepidation on the topic.  After the incident in St. Peter's Square, and the media flurry that followed, Father Gabriele Amorth of Rome stated that despite Lombari's claim, the pope had clearly performed an exorcism.  How does Amorth know?  Because he is the head of the International Association of Exorcists, and over his career has expelled 160,000 demons.

That, my friend, is a crapload of demons.

Amorth himself is completely convinced that it works, and went on record in 2010 as saying that "bishops who don't appoint exorcists are committing a mortal sin."

So it's clear that there's some disagreement here, which only got weirder yesterday when the man Pope Francis either did or did not exorcise told the press that it hadn't worked, he was still possessed.  "I still have the demons inside me, they have not gone away," the man, who was identified as a father of two from Michoacán, Mexico named Angel V.  Angel V. has been possessed, he says, since 1999, and has had thirty unsuccessful exorcisms, including one...

... by the head of the International Association of Exorcists, Father Gabriele Amorth.

I couldn't make all this up if I wanted to.  The Mexican priest who accompanied Angel V. to Rome said, in all apparent seriousness, "the demons that live in him do not want to leave."

Or, maybe, it could be that Angel V. has a mental illness that could be treated by modern medicine.  There's always that.

In any case, that's our odd story of the day.  I still have to say that I wonder why the demons aren't after me.  I've been a non-believer for close on twenty years, and I've had nary a single demon come up and shake my hand in congratulations.  (It must be said that I never saw one before that, either, not even during my church-going days.)  So my general conclusion, given the complete lack of evidence, is that demons don't exist.

But I'm sure that Father Amorth would disagree.  "The principle responsibility of the exorcist is to free man from the fear of the devil," he told reporters.  Well, I guess that's a second reason I don't need him.  I'm not afraid of the devil at all.  There's no reason to be afraid of something that doesn't actually exist.

The coolness of Pope Francis

The Roman Catholic world is buzzing because of an announcement made at morning mass last Wednesday by Pope Francis.

"The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone,” the pope said.  "'Father, the atheists?' Even the atheists. Everyone!  We must meet one another doing good. 'But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!'  But do good: we will meet one another there."  [Source]

This isn't the first time that the new pope -- just installed as the church's leader -- has weighed in on us nonbelievers.  Shortly after his election, he told a crowd,

[W]e also sense our closeness to all those men and women who, although not identifying themselves as followers of any religious tradition, are nonetheless searching for truth, goodness and beauty, the truth, goodness and beauty of God.  They are our valued allies in the commitment to defending human dignity, in building a peaceful coexistence between peoples and in safeguarding and caring for creation.

As an atheist, I think that all of this is nice to hear, and I have to say that Pope Francis seems like a pretty cool guy.  And this kind of statement is a refreshing change from what we secularists usually hear.  After all, being told over and over that you're going to burn in horrible agony for all eternity is a little off-putting, even if you don't technically believe that hell exists.  Especially given how happy the folks who say those things seem to be about it.  You can take schadenfreude too far, in my opinion.

But of course, it was only a matter of time before the rest of the Catholic world questioned Francis' statement.  The powers-that-be need to remind the world that they're still an exclusive club, however welcoming the pope was trying to be.  Reverend Thomas Rosica, a Vatican spokesperson, clarified Pope Francis' statement by saying that "every man or woman, whatever their situation, can be saved.  Even non-Christians can respond to this saving action of the Spirit.  No person is excluded from salvation simply because of so-called original sin."  On the other hand, Rosica said that people who are aware of the Catholic church "cannot be saved" if they "refuse to enter her or remain in her."

So, anyhow, I'm of two minds about all of this.  On the one hand, I think that being treated with more respect by the religious is pretty awesome, and I'm impressed with the fact that Pope Francis has reached out his hand to us atheists.  In no way do I want to be seen as scorning what was, honestly, an unprecedented and kind gesture.

But on the other hand, the implication is still, "... even though you're wrong about the most important question in the universe."  Now, to be fair, we all kind of start out from that stance -- that we have the answers, and anyone who disagrees is very likely to be mistaken.  Obviously, I wouldn't consider myself an atheist if I thought the pope et al. were right.  But isn't his approach kind of curious, when you think about it?  The pope seems to be saying, "Hey, atheists, we recognize that you can be nice people and do good stuff.  So why don't you just accept that god exists and start coming to church?"  You have to wonder why he thinks that's an appealing offer, given that by definition, we atheists see no particular reason to tie up our Sunday mornings worshiping a god that we are pretty sure isn't there, and asking for forgiveness for a bunch of things that mostly are just basic human nature.

In any case, it's all a step in the right direction.  I'm all for dialogue, mutual understanding, and treating each other nicely.  We don't all have to agree, after all, but it's just so much nicer if we just get along and tolerate one another.  It'd be wonderful if some of the other religions on Earth would follow Pope Francis' lead, and move toward acceptance of people of other beliefs -- or no belief at all.

Yeah, I'm looking at you, Muslims.

The trials and tribulations of Pope Francis

I have it on good authority that the new pope, Francis I, is either a spy in league with extraterrestrials, or else is an emissary of the Antichrist who will oversee the destruction of Rome.  Or possibly both at the same time.  It's hard to tell, frankly, because my source for this, an article called "Pope Francis: His Jesuitical, Extraterrestrial, 'False Prophet,' and Political Identities," doesn't seem all that certain itself.

And I have to admit that "good authority" may be a bit of an exaggeration, here.  This article was authored by none other than Alfred Lambremont Webre, who has previously claimed that President Obama has visited Mars, that the Earth would be bombarded by "fourth dimensional energy" on November 11, 2011 resulting in all of us being able to engage in "fourth dimensional sex," and that there is a brown dwarf star on the way that will reach its closest approach this year in July and which will trigger "massive electrical discharges" that will result in a catastrophic flood.  (None of us can see the approach of the star except for Alfred, apparently, because the government is hiding its approach from us with chemtrails.  He himself saw it using a "chronovisor," which is a machine that allows him to see the future.)

So, as you can see, he's not exactly the most credible witness right from the get-go.  Be that as it may, let's give him a chance, and hear what he has to say in his rambling diatribe.  Um, article.

Well, first, we have the obvious relevance of the date Pope Francis was elected:

March 13, 2013, the date of Pope Francis I nomination, was the 16th anniversary of the Phoenix Light, a massive space craft that overflew Phoenix, AZ. on March 13, 1997. March 13, 1997 is a significant event in the Exopolitical community that follows the Extraterrestrial presence on Earth.

Don't expect me to believe that's a coincidence.  Alfred either.  You just know that the College of Cardinals was sitting there, on the first day of the conclave, and one of them said, "Hang on... let's wait till tomorrow to decide.  Because then we'll be voting him in on the sixteenth anniversary of a random UFO sighting.  That will send a message, won't it?"  And all of the other cardinals said, "Amen, Your Holy Eminence, that sounds like a dandy idea."

Then, we have a bit about the "Prophecies of St. Malachy," about which I've previously written.  The last pope in the prophecies was one "Petrus Romanus" (Peter the Roman), who was supposed to be the Antichrist's right-hand man, and was going to be in charge of the church during the Tribulation.  So, there's lots of speculation as to whether Pope Francis is actually Petrus Romanus, even though he's not really Peter from Rome, he's Jorge from Argentina.  But hey, close enough, right?  After all, Alfred doesn't even touch on a much greater likelihood, which is that Pope Francis is actually George Bluth from Arrested Development:

Then we have a long, confusing bit about how Pope Francis, in his previous life as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, was a Jesuit.  First of all, the Jesuits are somehow connected with research into extraterrestrials, so that's significant.  Don't ask me how.  Secondly, we all know how the Jesuits are an evil secret organization bent on world domination.  Alfred then tells us all about the "Jesuit Oath," which includes the following lovely passage:

[I] declare and swear that His Holiness, the Pope, is Christ's Vice-Regent and is the true and only head of the Catholic or Universal Church throughout the earth; and that by the virtue of the keys of binding and loosing given to His Holiness by my Saviour, Jesus Christ, he hath power to depose heretical Kings, Princes, States, Commonwealths, and Governments, and they may be safely destroyed. Therefore to the utmost of my power I will defend this doctrine and His Holiness's right and custom against all usurpers of the heretical or Protestant authority whatever, especially the Lutheran Church of Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and the now pretended authority and Churches of England and Scotland, and the branches of same now established in Ireland and on the continent of America and elsewhere and all adherents in regard that they may be usurped and heretical, opposing the sacred Mother Church of Rome. I do now denounce and disown any allegiance as due to any heretical king, prince or State, named Protestant or Liberal, or obedience to any of their laws, magistrates or officers. I do further declare the doctrine of the Churches of England and Scotland of the Calvinists, Huguenots, and others of the name of Protestants or Masons to be damnable, and they themselves to be damned who will not forsake the same.

The problem is, the "Jesuit Oath" is a hoax.  It was a bit of anti-Catholic vitriol passed around by Protestant fear-mongers in the early 20th century (the same era that produced the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion).  So, really, these two pieces of nasty nonsense constitute two of the first-ever-recorded conspiracy theories.  The evil Catholics are trying to destroy the world!  No, wait, it's the Jews!  No, wait, its both!

In any case, the whole thing is wrapped up with aliens, somehow.  In a passage that should be enshrined forever in the Annals of WTF, Alfred writes:

One hermeneutical interpretation would have "the dragon" of the Book of Revelations identified as "Extraterrestrial civilizations that the False Prophet (putatively Pope Francis I) promotes to humanity. This role of a Jesuit Pope, promoting "Official ET Disclosure" along with other major institutions such as the United Nations and the major space-faring and extraterrestrial knowledgeable nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China, would certainly fulfill one dystopian view of extraterrestrial "Disclosure", that of a false flag extraterrestrial invasion such as was predicted by Dr. Wernher von Btraun [sic] on his death bed and related to Disclosure Project witness Dr. Carol Rosin.

Oh.  Okay.  What?

So.  Anyway.  I know that regular readers of this blog know me well enough to realize that I'm very far from a Catholic apologist.  I think a lot of the Vatican's policies are repressive, backwards, and medieval, and there's no indication that Pope Francis is anything but a party liner in this regard.  And there are, apparently, some questions to be asked about the new pope's past, especially his alleged complicity with abuses by the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983.  But other than that -- for cryin' in the sink, leave the poor guy alone.  He's barely had a chance to do anything yet, good or bad.  It seems a little premature to conclude that he's going to sell us out to the extraterrestrials.  Or the Antichrist.  Or the evil Jesuits.  Or whoever.  My guess is that he'll just continue the same policies of the last pope, pretty much, and things will go on in the church as they always have.

So, anyway, I'm willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt for the time being.  And given that I'm an atheist, I think that's pretty generous, don't you?