Wednesday, September 17, 2008

You are all going to hell in a handbasket!

In my journey from hard core Roman Catholicism to rationality, one of my discoveries along the way was that rather than being united by their love of Jesus Christ, the various Christian sects hate each other.

I used to do clinic defense at a women's health center in South Jersey in the 1980s (I have tons of videotape to prove it) which meant I dealt with both fundamentalist Protestants and right-wing Catholics. It was always fun to ask the fundamentalists, within earshot of the Catholics, about Jesus's mom Mary and her perpetual virginity. The fundies and the Pope-lovers do NOT agree about exactly how big a virgin Mary was. The Catholics believe that Mary was a virgin her entire life, in spite of being married to St. Joseph. The fundies believe that she was only a virgin until after she gave birth to Jesus, after which she was allowed to have "normal" marital relations with St. J. And don't dare tell them otherwise. Oh the fights that used to cause - sometimes they forgot to scream at women entering the clinic, so obsessed were they with convincing the other side about the state of Mary's hymen.

Long after I became an atheist it occurred to me that the whole Mary thing represents such total hostility on the part of Christianity - especially Catholicism - to female sexuality. Mary is honored for being the mother of God. But a mother who got pregnant without having sex! And the whole pedophile priest scandal was such a clear demonstration of the low regard the completely male-dominated Church hierarchy has for women: their response to the declining numbers of men entering the priesthood was not to ordain women - it was to help pedophiles remain priests.

Well, the infamous Jack Chick and his pamphlet industry think that Catholics are all going to hell anyway - because they believe that Catholics are not actually Christians!

Wouldn't that be a kick in the head for Catholics to end up in Hell for eternity with us atheists, gays, Jews, Muslims, Masons and Halloween lovers.