Religious people can't tell right from wrong

In recent years, we saw the Roman Catholic church abandon orphans rather than allow gays to adopt. They simply closed various adoption agencies. The hell with the kids; it's more important to hate gay people. It's a moral issue, doncha know.

Well, now the Baptists are on board with this tactic. Joe Jervis tells us that a Baptist church expelled an AA group because it feared opening its doors to them would open them wide for gay weddings. As if that was even a possibility. So the hell with AA and helping alcoholics. They'd rather hate gay people.

Isn't it odd how religions that profess to be the only arbiters of morality can't tell right from wrong? Gee, I wonder why. Could it be that there's no god and these folks are just flailing in the wind and being vicious because they enjoy it? Hmmmm.

Why do religious people lack morals?

You see it all the time.

TULSA, Okla. (AP) — A 17,000-member megachurch deep in Oklahoma's Bible Belt has been rattled by allegations that five employees waited two weeks to report the rape of a 13-year-old girl in a campus stairwell, allegedly by a church worker. 

They can't tell right from wrong. They have no clue about this. None. Why does this happen? Why do religious people have no moral center?

It's simple. When you make a fairytale the centerpiece of your life, you lose contact with reality. Up becomes down; wrong becomes right. You're lost in the wilderness.

You don't have to consult a dusty book or talk to someone who isn't there, to know right from wrong. You just have to be able to see reality. Religion prevents that.

Religion is the scourge of mankind. This is not an exaggeration. 

What the American nuns say

I was trolling through HuffPo's religion section today when I came across an article about the Vatican/nuns divide. It was interesting. I was struck by something the nuns said:

Hughes [the most recent past president of the LCWR, which represents about 80 percent of the country's 57,000 Catholic sisters] said there's more to promoting the sanctity of human life than just working against abortion. She said her community's ministries against domestic violence and in support of homeless mothers and children is also pro-life work.

"That's about the sanctity of human life. It's about doing it differently. I think it's complementary. I don't think you can have one without the other," she said.

This is the crucial divide, and it's where most religious people show a severe moral deficit. There are so many "pro-life" religious people out there (and not just Catholics) who are only concerned with abortion. As soon as the child is born, they forget about it (or casually let some priest rape the child). The nuns have a much clearer view of morality. Life does not end at birth. It begins.

The Roman Catholic church, especially with this Pope's guidance, is grossly immoral. The solution is simple. The church needs women priests. Women would add what this church sorely lacks: a moral center.

Bizarre religious thinking

Pope Benedict XVI's ability to reform the troubled Legion of Christ has again been thrown into doubt following revelations that a half-dozen priests are under Vatican investigation for allegedly molesting children and that the order's leadership knew its most prominent priest had fathered a child yet did nothing to prevent him from teaching and preaching about morality.

But they let the popey guy talk about morality all the time -- and he's the man most responsible for hiding the priest pedophilia scandal. Isn't this a huge contradiction, kids?

Give up god now and get on the right team!

Can you believe this evil twit?

True evil smiles as it harms.

Oblivious to his church's immorality, newly minted red-hat cardinal Timothy Dolan spoke about sex at mass yesterday:

Dolan linked “sexual immorality” with society’s ills — violence, sex crimes, disease and broken families — and called on priests to do a better job of encouraging the sexually virtuous.

“The church has at times in the past, sadly, come across as as some naysaying, puritanical nag, always giving a big ‘No, no, no’ to one of life’s greatest joys,” he said.

Actually, Timmy, the church comes across as a wide-open field of child rapists, not puritanical nags.

When smiling Timmy Dolan speaks, he thinks there is no real world out there. He has this odd idea that he's always in the vatican, where everything is dripping with gold and there is absolutely no discussion of pedophile priests. 

But see, the rest of us live in the real world. To us, Dolan's words are cheap and meaningless. We know, Timmy. We know that many thousands of your priests can't keep their hands off children. And we know that you and the pope hide their transgressions, choosing to protect the priests rather than the children. How can you possibly speak these words when your church is being sued across the world for raping children?!

Timmy, you are a pompous, duplicitous, immoral fool. To think that you have the nerve to speak about morality in public! You! 

Ah well, at least your words teach the world that the catholic god does not exist. Because if jeebus did exist, he'd smite you and the popey guy before he did anything else. As long as we can still see folks like you -- getting promoted to red hat status, no less -- there is no god. Thank you for confirming this.

The march of the moral twits

I keep seeing these appalling stories written by Christianists. They seem to have two themes:

1. America is 90% Christian (their figure) and therefore the country should be governed by Christian morals and rules; and

2. Only Christians understand morality because the only morals humans can know are the rules set down by god on stone tablets and burnt toast and whatnot. No one else knows a thing about morality. In fact, it is literally impossible for a non-Christian to be moral. Without god's Special Rules and Decoder Ring, we would be killing, raping and stealing 24/7.

A moral man

"So Keith, who else -- other than Dr. King -- do you think is a moral person?" I'm glad you asked and a name leaps to mind.

When the US thought the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island might explode, President Jimmy Carter didn't hesitate to put his own and the First Lady's lives on the line. If the people nearby felt threatened, then they would go there to give them hope. The following is from PBS' web site, as is the accompanying photo. Here's a quote from their article.

"The national and international media had given the accident at Three Mile Island front page attention for days and venerable network newsman Walter Cronkite was speaking of a 'horror' that 'could get much worse.'

"Carter believed that the people of Pennsylvania and the nation were looking to him for leadership, so on April 1, Carter inspected the damaged plant. Middletown mayor Robert Reid later spoke of Carter's visit as providing a much-needed morale boost. 'People weren't talking to one another. They were cooped up in their homes, and when he came, it seemed like everyone came out to see the president and it was really a shot in the arm,' Reid recounted to writer Mark Stephens."

I always thought that was a brave thing for a president to do. Some presidents are the sort that run for the bunkers when a threat is three states away. Others head for the fire. It always seemed that Carter, when presented with a choice, tried to do the right thing. I'm very grateful to him for that and I see him as a powerful role-model.

Jimmy Carter was courageous then and he's never stopped his life work -- to foster peace. The man is open about who he is. When you hear him speak, you know in your heart that he simply considers himself to be a vessel for good and a tool for justice. He will let himself be used in any way that furthers these aims.

Many people see Carter as a deeply committed, religious man. But when I look at him, what I see is a moral man.

Obama and morality

President Obama spoke of morality the other day in an almost universally-praised speech about the murders and mayhem in Arizona. He gives a good speech. We already knew this. But this president seems not to have moral values. If he had some, he'd stand up for what's right. He never does that.

Today, three days before Martin Luther King Day, the Obama administration filed a brief in support of DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, which is expressly designed to oppress gay people and deny them the right to marry.

When asked directly about his position on gay marriage, Obama freely states that he hasn't decided yet if it's okay. This is not different from a white president saying he can't decide if black people should be allowed to marry. There is not one iota of difference between these two things.

But then, this is a man who continues the policy of perpetual wars, who sends drones nightly to kill innocent Afghan families, who continues to torture people in secret prisons (and American prisons!) and holds people in an endless state of solitary confinement though they are charged with no crime.

If Obama knew right from wrong, the public option would be in the health care bill -- because he would have fought long and hard for it. He would speak out against rampant taser use, the rising police state and the wearing of guns in public. If Barack Obama was a moral man, Bradley Manning wouldn't be sitting in solitary confinement, tortured by Americans. And the US would not be fighting to have Julian Assange jailed or killed for practicing journalism. But the man doesn't know right from wrong. He shows us this again and again. When it counts, he's nowhere to be found.

Morality is a land far away from the world of Barack Obama. And this is entirely of his own choosing. I have come to believe he is not a good man, and I say this as someone who cried with joy when he was elected, if only for what the moment represented. But even then, in my heart I knew the man was an illusion. He had already announced that Rick Warren, a virulently homophobic preacher, would deliver the invocation at his inauguration. I knew right then who Barack Obama was.

Barack Obama is not a good man.