whitman's mind...

Hands down, without one shred of doubt, the Catholics are my favorite religion.

As a fairly outspoken atheist, it’s strange that I even have a favorite, but I most certainly do, and even more paradoxically it’s the religion that has arguably done the most to hamstring humanity on nearly every front. Yet here we are.

The Catholics get a bad rap for a lot of very good reasons. There’s the international effort to harbor active child rapists, the propaganda campaign they are currently waging in Africa to ensure the painful and protracted deaths of anyone ignorant enough to take the words of the church at face value, and of course….Mel Gibson. All of these are bad things that humanity would be better off without…(Especially Mel Gibson.)…and none of these are what I appreciate or find remarkable about the church.

What impresses me about the Catholic Church is the fact that despite being a group of aged male virgins dressed as wizards, they somehow have managed to convince the world to take them seriously in international political concerns. It’s as if a group of people who think that Lord Of The Rings is a historical documentary were given their own country and put in charge of the fate of billions of people. It’s flabbergastingly hilarious to see these be-dazzled moo-moo wearing sorcerers who believe that the path to eternal life resides in cashing in on the murder of an unemployed Jewish conjurer, taken seriously by real countries.

It’s almost as if pirates had a seat at the UN, although that would be a little less absurd as pirates are much less superstitious.

The Vatican is essentially Hogwarts. Step thought its doors and be instantly transported several hundred years back in time, surrounded by people dressed in a wide variety or robes and ridiculous hats frantically studying a subject which science every day comes closer to proving definitively not to exist.

Strangely, the fact that Catholic upper management believe, or at least appear to believe in this sorcery is oddly not a hindrance to their political power, but the source of it. You would think in an era where science is daily extending and enriching our lives after centuries of ongoing battle against religion, that being a grown man dressed in a costume whose sole claim to fame is an intimate relationship with a sort of celestial (and rather moody) Snuffleupagus, might hinder your credibility. It’s fascinating that the opposite seems to be the case, and even more fascinating that everyone from the faithful to the Associated Press, takes this seriously.

All areas of the fantasy of fiction are susceptible to ret-con, and theology is no different. In 2007 the Catholic International Theological Commission was under pressure to move the souls of aborted fetuses from the imperfection of Limbo to the eternal bliss of Heaven. This is no small spell to cast, moving millions of dead babies from one fake dimension to another, and while very little information on what actually went down or even the names of those involved is available, I assume that the Catholic Church, with it’s flair for costumes, smoking balls on chains, and gothic cathedrals understood that this level of inter-dimensional conjuring required several highly skilled wizards pulling out all the stops. To properly complete the spell they may have needed to sacrifice a unicorn, or preform the most powerful spell in all Christendom: lynching a jew.

At any rate the spell didn’t completely work, because the best the infallible Dumbledore Pope Benedict XVI can tell us now is that dead babies don’t go to limbo and likely go to Heaven. (Oddly, the church is still against abortion, despite the fact that it now seems like the fast track program…)

The fact that the international political scene takes seriously a group of adult males, who despite an inability to so much as pull a rabbit out of a hat, claim intimate knowledge of the supernatural as their right to power is quite perplexing. What I find more amazing is that if not for the church’s incredible ability to have it’s upper management keep a straight face while dressed in ways that would get you thrown out of Mardi Gras as too flamboyant as they talk about their strong belief in symbolic cannibalism of a murder victim; and pretend drownings as a route to eternal life in heaven, they would likely be taken about as seriously on the world’s stage as your average Pentecostal snake handling faith healer.

The human mind works in mysterious ways.