Are you the Vati-Can?

Or are you the Vati-Can’t?

I guess we can count our blessings that the Big Hat Church no longer thinks it can get away with actually burning witches, just ‘cause it says so in the Bible.

And that it can’t stone people to death for a whole catalog of peccadilloes, misdemeanors and accidentally grabbing the wrong stuff in the buffet line, just because their Operating Manual says its cool.

Or that they can’t also order up mass murder for trivia as easily as take-out pizza – repeatedly – as in this little gem from Deuteronomy:

“ Suppose you hear in one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you that some worthless rabble among you have led their fellow citizens astray by encouraging them to worship foreign gods. In such cases, you must examine the facts carefully. If you find it is true and can prove that such a detestable act has occurred among you, you must attack that town and completely destroy all its inhabitants, as well as all the livestock. Then you must pile all the plunder in the middle of the street and burn it. Put the entire town to the torch as a burnt offering to the LORD your God. That town must remain a ruin forever; it may never be rebuilt. Keep none of the plunder that has been set apart for destruction. Then the LORD will turn from his fierce anger and be merciful to you. He will have compassion on you and make you a great nation, just as he solemnly promised your ancestors. "The LORD your God will be merciful only if you obey him and keep all the commands I am giving you today, doing what is pleasing to him."

Just fucking delightful.

And in case you were wondering why we free-thinkers think the Modern GOP needs to be driven into the electoral sea, it is because this kind of charnel-house vision of Righteousness is part and parcel of the Glorious Future that Christopaths have all planned out for me and you.

That being said, here’s this from the Times Online:

Harry Potter and the Vatican enforcer

BY JACK MALVERN

Pope condemned ‘subtle seduction’ of tales of wizardry
HARRY POTTER has come under attack from soul-sucking dementors and basilisks, but he faces his most formidable adversary yet in the form of the Pope.
A letter written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before he was elected Pope in April, condemns the boy wizard as a potentially corrupting influence on children.

The Cardinal, then the late Pope John Paul II’s “enforcer” as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, revealed his views in a letter to the author of Harry Potter — Good or Evil?, a book published in Germany. The Cardinal appeared to sympathise with Gabriele Kuby’s thesis that Harry Potter corrupts the young, distorting their understanding of the battle between good and evil. “It is good that you enlighten people about Harry Potter because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul before it can grow properly,” he wrote.
…

As opposed to those more overt things that can distort the worldview of a young Christian such as, say, his parish priest raping him and them telling him God approved it and he’ll burn in Hell forever is he tells anyone?

OK, here’s the deal.

How about the Church that brought you Father Fondler McBusyhands, Cardinal Coverup and Archbishop Fuggeddaboudit lays off opining on the subject of what will or will not corrupt children for, oh, about the next century or two?

And how about the Church that spent itself into the poorhouse – including the plundering of the poorbox – bribing and intimidating witnesses as gleefully as any Cosa Nostra arm-bender…the Church that spirited the child-molesting scum of the Earth away to the 13th Century security of Vatican where they frolic safe and free and shielded from criminal charges…

…how about that Church swears off using anything that sounds as grotesquely creepy coming out of the Pope’s transubstantiation hole as the phrase, “subtle seductions” forever.