I went to mass for the last time as any kind of believer when I was about nine months into my tour in Vietnam, and in a very dark place. Not sure what I was looking for but certainly wasn't the 'Kill a Commie for Christ' pep talk we got. My faith was dangling by a thread, and that idiot priest took a blow torch to it. I walked away, never looked back, and never regretted it for a moment. The problem isn't this priest so much. It's his enablers in the pews who make him possible.
My dad (who survived Vietnam - the man standing next to him was shot and killed while on river patrol) told me, "Every system works perfectly on paper. The moment you introduce man into the mix, it goes all to hell." Religion is no exception.
As social creatures, we have a need to belong. Religion helps with this. It could be such a good thing, but man fucks it up.
I'm at a point of seeing religion as a step. It's like being set free in Plato's Cave. You can turn around and see that the shadows for what they really are. But, that's about it. That's not the end of the journey. It's like being in Kindergarten, it's safe and comfortable, and you're learning things. But it's not the end, there's more out there. I get that it helps fight back our angst at the uncertainty of the world that is "uncaring." Hell, that's what fairy tales were for originally, to pass on knowledge. Religion explained the world, and helped "defeat" death. Yes, it replaced ignorance with bullshit to create an illusion of certainty.
But man is part of the mix and there are those that use it to prevent people from leaving the cave, or even looking at anything except the shadows. Man turned religion into a form of control.
The simplicity of the analogy of Plato's Cave breaks down because people are complex. The people in the cave also see themselves as the ones who escaped the cave. This is powerful in keeping butts in pews. I try to keep this in mind when I think about the followers and not blame them. Yes, in the information age, ignorance is a choice. But this is also the disinformation age, where opinion and bullshit are treated as equal to fact because people have a right to be wrong.
Our society is built around keeping people too busy to question things. Education is designed to create producer-consumers; compliance, follow instructions. It's a creation of the industrial age. It squashes imagination, creativity and curiosity, the very things that are required for progress. Progress is littered with uselessness, but capitalism teaches us to avoid them. Without discovering the useless, we cannot find the useful. Microbiology wouldn't be a thing without curiosity, neither would WiFi. Capitalism simultaneously creates the illusion of certainty, through education, while also never alleviating the angst, and teaches us that money is the solution and measure of all things.
Religion feeds into this while also benefiting from it.
I suppose the most charitable thing I can extend to the butts in pews is they're trapped. I was. It takes a lot to break the chains that hold us in the cave. Maybe because we don't realize how surprisingly easy it is.
I am a humanist, but even humanism with all of its high ideals isn't immune to the problems of religion. In a Venn Diagram, man is the overlap, which brings it back to what my dad told me.
To quote Douglas Adams, "To summarize the summary of the summary, people are a problem."
Reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche's famous phrase, "God is dead, and we have killed him”
Yes, we both created and destroyed.
It isn’t the end, but a new beginning. It's also a call to re-evaluate existing values and create new ones in the absence of traditional religious foundations.
My dad also served in Vietnam. His number was low and he would have been drafted, so he joined the navy instead at age 19.
Australian National Service during the AMERICAN WAR IN VIETNAM … I did two years and very much appreciated my fellow Natios and my M113A1s. M113A1s … great machines.
During my time I did see a little theism in the Australian military, which felt a bit odd to me, as a lifelong normal human, with never a theist corpuscle in my beautiful body.
I am sorry Oraxx that must have been indescribably dark. We so appreciate your wisdom in your posts.
One of the nicest people, I ever met was a veteran who was a "tunnel-rat" during the conflict. He was one of the guys that was tasked with going into VC tunnels to "clear them out." My mind would "reel" when thinking about what he went through.
I also have met a guy who had played a role in Air America during the conflict. He remembered the days when small planes would come in to offload packs of opium from Hmong farmers to support the off-the-book CIA war effort. I completely get why servicemen would turn to narcotic addiction to deal with the emotional trauma of the conflict.
I think about what I would have done if called up in that conflict. I think about my capacity to do good in such a situation, but if I am being honest, I worry more about my capacity for evil.
If he had been caught molesting kids, he would've gotten a pass and been protected. But money, well, now, they can't have that. Like all churches, this one has its priorities in order.
Yes, that priority is power and control over individuals and society. The religious leadership (all religions) want to be above the law and to set the law/social norms for everyone else. Anything else is a distraction to prevent people from seeing the religious leadership grab for power and control!
Perhaps it is time to add an 8th deadly sin? Priesting without believing? Dante spent a lot of verbiage on bad priests. Nothing much seems to have changed in 715 years.
Apparently that’s the way the Vatican likes it, eh? Imagine their horror if the actions of the priestly class came to be included in the list of deadly sins.
Oh wait, they already are, and nobody outside the church admin gives a fuck.
I turned against Prince when he became a Christian and betrayed the very people that had looked up to him as an inspiration in their search for their identities.
The man who had sung “I’m not a woman, I’m not a man. I’m something you can’t understand” abandoned that stance and told his LGBTQ followers ”God hates you, so I have to hate you, too,”
What's sad is that he didn't have the surgery that would have helped him get rid of the pain because he wouldn't allow a transfusion per JW rules. Instead he used drugs to try to handle the pain. Stupid religious rules do in too many people.
It's funny how quickly the church moves to cooperate with law enforcement when a priest commits financial crimes vs. how much they obstruct for other crimes.
I know they’re trying to raise half a million dollars, but a corvette!?! So father sticky fingers here preaches against greed, one of the seven deadly sins, out of one side of his face and then runs a raffle for a freaking corvette out of the other side. And no one thought there might be something amiss?
We entered a 50/50 raffle when we went to a community theater show last weekend, we won $75. And here’s a fucking church, a part of a multibillion dollar sect with its own country and castle covered in gold, is tossing around corvettes in an attempt to plead poverty* to raise more money from the poor.
*I typed poverty, with some typo apparently, and autocorrect switched it to pervert. Ha ha ha, Freudian slip I guess.
Rape kids and that's covered by the confessional, fuck with the money and the cops get called. (I doubt I'm the first to say it today, but it bears repeating)
I won a Denver Broncos signed jersey while living in Colorado. We heard them read my number. Then someone came up to them and said something and they read out a different number and one of the people working the raffle “won” it.
So let me get this straight. A priest diddles some kids and confesses and the church cries "Oh noes! the sanctity of the confessional!" but a priest confesses to rigging a lottery and the priest he confesses to runs straight to the authorities?
They'll say we reject god because we just want to sin. And here they are, sinning all they want with a blanket get out of hell free card. This priest's Public Apology to the Ceiling didn't even hint at what whe was apologizing for. Audacity, arrogance, immorality, thy name is Christian.
He's also talking about taking over the DC police.
This isn't just beyond the pale. It was well past that 10 squares back. Someone (and preferably multiple someones!) need to get in his face and tell him, "NO, you DO NOT GET to overthrow this government, you pissant wannabe dictator!
They're all afraid of him. He has already purged the military of several high-ranking well-regarded women who had done absolutely zero to provoke him. They know they could kiss their jobs goodbye if they so much as whisper a protest. Until everybody, everywhere all at once stands up to him en masse, I'm afraid no one will.
He's pretty much already done that by calling in federal agencies to do the work. He's apparently claiming it's just for 'seven days' right now, but it seems there's an 'as long as needed' type caveat in there.* In my view, Trump pretty much plans on ruling in DC with the proverbial iron fist, and the mayor of the city won't be able to stop him.
The padre responsible for holding my grandfather's funeral mass took time during the service to rant about the "godless" and his church's declining attendance. If these men of the cloth have any sense of shame, I've never seen any convincing evidence of it.
Tell me about it. It's not just priests, it's clergy across the board. I once attended a funeral officiated by a hellfire-and-brimstone type, who actually turned the service into an altar call. Some flap about we never knew when death was coming, so we needed to get saved and get right with the Lord, yadda yadda yadda. Totally inappropriate and people talked about afterward. But as far as I know, not one of them said jack to the creepy minister.
Yeah, the Baptist preacher at my Mom's funeral made it all about Jesus. Hell, despite my mother having considered him "her" pastor for more than 20 years, he didn't know anything about her other than what my uncle (church music director) told him just before the ceremony. Only the fact I was sure other members of the family were finding comfort kept me from interrupting him.
I think this guy might've been annoyed that none of the (surviving) family were members of his congregation- nevermind that his church mainly served a 𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺; I suppose we all should've just driven from all over the Northeast to go to that church in particular every week, even those of us who'd never even been Catholics in the first place.
For my mother's funeral last autumn we hired The Norwegian Humanist Association. They delivered a funeral exactly as we wanted. Her ashes was later spread by us above the ruins of the house she was borned in. Nobody went to hospitals for deliverys of babies back in 1941. The house was burned down the autumn of 1944. Guess by whom.
The parish I grew up in had a bazaar every September to raise funds. Every year they would raffle off a new Cadillac. The monsignor drove a new caddy every year, the other parish priests got to use the older one the monsignor no longer drove. Think there was any hanky-panky between my parish and the Cadillac dealer?
When I was a kid my parents sent me to a damned catholic parochial elementary school. It messed with my life in many respects, but it taught me NOT to gamble because its crooked foolishness & a way to throw away money.
Each Thanksgiving there would be a turkey raffle, tickets selling at 25 cents each. Supposedly voluntary, it was really mandatory. Students were each issued a booklet of tickets worth $5. And you'd better bring back the full $5 to the nun or else you'd get belted by her. If you refused to participate in the "voluntary" selling of raffle tickets, the nun belted you & then you were handed the raffle ticket booklet. In other words, it was as voluntary as the goddamned chocolate bars we were "volunteered" to sell every year!
Perceptive kid that I was, I noticed the principal "won" the Thanksgiving turkey each year. I attended that school kindergarten to 5th grade, the principal "won" the turkey each year. What a miraculous miracle! In its infinite wisdom god had in boundless kindness graciously overcome the laws of probability, of averages & odds, trumped reason, to shower turkeys each Thanksgiving upon the principal! I have never gambled since then.
The closest I have come to gambling is a zero sum game at work. Either betting on the bonus ball on the UK national lottery or the winner of the Grand National. All proceeds go to the prize money. I won the lottery one first time (1 in 49) and have won the National one too (1 in 40).
But I have ADHD. I would chase losses too hard so I have never taken a bet.
Personally I think battery electric cars are a dead end. Hydrogen fuel cells seems a better option. Does not need all those rare earth metals and gives out water and a bit of heat.
We should have done a Manhattan project level development of hydrogen fueled vehicles as a war measure against the middle east back in 2001. But that was never going to happen with the scum who planned Operation OIL (OIF) in charge
No more so than the fools who will believe the scam I got this weekend. Supposedly Elon Musk had decided to give me $55 million. I *might* believe Taylor Swift giving away that kind of money (That's probably the proceeds from next weekend's concerts) but I doubt she'd give it all to one person.
Not as big as the scam of the man who said 'Lets make America Great Again' and then proceeded to take everything great and turn it into a pile of shit. While increasing his personal stash by 40% (probably a lot more).
Will be remembered as the greatest and worst President in history. By some distance.
Mark Suckerberg liked a Palo Alto, California neighborhood so much, he bought 11 houses there, radically altering Crescent Park. Several homes remain uninhabited.
Yet another new definition of the word "obscenity."
Much like the Spray-Tanned Shitgibbon who owns several hotels' worth of spare rooms in the DC area alone but would rather bulldoze the homeless off the edge of the map because he doesn't like looking at them.
I went to mass for the last time as any kind of believer when I was about nine months into my tour in Vietnam, and in a very dark place. Not sure what I was looking for but certainly wasn't the 'Kill a Commie for Christ' pep talk we got. My faith was dangling by a thread, and that idiot priest took a blow torch to it. I walked away, never looked back, and never regretted it for a moment. The problem isn't this priest so much. It's his enablers in the pews who make him possible.
My dad (who survived Vietnam - the man standing next to him was shot and killed while on river patrol) told me, "Every system works perfectly on paper. The moment you introduce man into the mix, it goes all to hell." Religion is no exception.
As social creatures, we have a need to belong. Religion helps with this. It could be such a good thing, but man fucks it up.
I'm at a point of seeing religion as a step. It's like being set free in Plato's Cave. You can turn around and see that the shadows for what they really are. But, that's about it. That's not the end of the journey. It's like being in Kindergarten, it's safe and comfortable, and you're learning things. But it's not the end, there's more out there. I get that it helps fight back our angst at the uncertainty of the world that is "uncaring." Hell, that's what fairy tales were for originally, to pass on knowledge. Religion explained the world, and helped "defeat" death. Yes, it replaced ignorance with bullshit to create an illusion of certainty.
But man is part of the mix and there are those that use it to prevent people from leaving the cave, or even looking at anything except the shadows. Man turned religion into a form of control.
The simplicity of the analogy of Plato's Cave breaks down because people are complex. The people in the cave also see themselves as the ones who escaped the cave. This is powerful in keeping butts in pews. I try to keep this in mind when I think about the followers and not blame them. Yes, in the information age, ignorance is a choice. But this is also the disinformation age, where opinion and bullshit are treated as equal to fact because people have a right to be wrong.
Our society is built around keeping people too busy to question things. Education is designed to create producer-consumers; compliance, follow instructions. It's a creation of the industrial age. It squashes imagination, creativity and curiosity, the very things that are required for progress. Progress is littered with uselessness, but capitalism teaches us to avoid them. Without discovering the useless, we cannot find the useful. Microbiology wouldn't be a thing without curiosity, neither would WiFi. Capitalism simultaneously creates the illusion of certainty, through education, while also never alleviating the angst, and teaches us that money is the solution and measure of all things.
Religion feeds into this while also benefiting from it.
I suppose the most charitable thing I can extend to the butts in pews is they're trapped. I was. It takes a lot to break the chains that hold us in the cave. Maybe because we don't realize how surprisingly easy it is.
I am a humanist, but even humanism with all of its high ideals isn't immune to the problems of religion. In a Venn Diagram, man is the overlap, which brings it back to what my dad told me.
To quote Douglas Adams, "To summarize the summary of the summary, people are a problem."
Reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche's famous phrase, "God is dead, and we have killed him”
Yes, we both created and destroyed.
It isn’t the end, but a new beginning. It's also a call to re-evaluate existing values and create new ones in the absence of traditional religious foundations.
My dad also served in Vietnam. His number was low and he would have been drafted, so he joined the navy instead at age 19.
Australian National Service during the AMERICAN WAR IN VIETNAM … I did two years and very much appreciated my fellow Natios and my M113A1s. M113A1s … great machines.
During my time I did see a little theism in the Australian military, which felt a bit odd to me, as a lifelong normal human, with never a theist corpuscle in my beautiful body.
There was no god that I noticed on our side.
We shared a billet in Saigon with an Aussie MP company. Great guys. I was only there before and after being up-country.
Thanks for your service, Oraxx. I'm glad you survived!
Sorry you had to deal with that, oraxx. You deserved better.
Coming home was worse.
Doesn't take much to understand the truth of THAT!
Doubly sorry for that.
I am sorry Oraxx that must have been indescribably dark. We so appreciate your wisdom in your posts.
One of the nicest people, I ever met was a veteran who was a "tunnel-rat" during the conflict. He was one of the guys that was tasked with going into VC tunnels to "clear them out." My mind would "reel" when thinking about what he went through.
I also have met a guy who had played a role in Air America during the conflict. He remembered the days when small planes would come in to offload packs of opium from Hmong farmers to support the off-the-book CIA war effort. I completely get why servicemen would turn to narcotic addiction to deal with the emotional trauma of the conflict.
I think about what I would have done if called up in that conflict. I think about my capacity to do good in such a situation, but if I am being honest, I worry more about my capacity for evil.
I was part of a group that hunted down Vietcong radio transmitters.
Welcome home, Brother. 🫡
Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry. What a terrible thing for him to do.
Having every old WWII tell us all about how they won their war, was worse.
If he had been caught molesting kids, he would've gotten a pass and been protected. But money, well, now, they can't have that. Like all churches, this one has its priorities in order.
♫♪ Money money money money ... MONEY!!! ♪♫
Money, it's a hit
Don't give me that do-goody-good bullshit
Yup, that, too!👍
Money makes za vorld go ‘round, za vorld go ‘round, za vorld go ‘round…
I think of that song and immediately, Joel Grey comes to mind!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JDWJzKYfdc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQMCvBa_M2I
I can relate to this one better.
This would be my go-to song about money and greed...
https://youtu.be/n7MewADYaMA?si=PIZ6If4PX-BH6qZM
Yes, that priority is power and control over individuals and society. The religious leadership (all religions) want to be above the law and to set the law/social norms for everyone else. Anything else is a distraction to prevent people from seeing the religious leadership grab for power and control!
Perhaps it is time to add an 8th deadly sin? Priesting without believing? Dante spent a lot of verbiage on bad priests. Nothing much seems to have changed in 715 years.
Apparently that’s the way the Vatican likes it, eh? Imagine their horror if the actions of the priestly class came to be included in the list of deadly sins.
Oh wait, they already are, and nobody outside the church admin gives a fuck.
They are certainly guilty of Lust and Greed already. I have to go through the plot of Se7en to remember them.
That was a very disturbing film. The only reason I went to see it was Morgan Freeman.
Pity the lead actress in it turned out to be a peddler of 'new age' crap. And that Coldplay publicity stunt.
At least she didn't turn her head into a candle to sell on her website.
I would like that better than a candle that smells like her vagina.
Truly great movie, Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman at their best.
Now I've got "Little Ped Corvette" for an earworm.
Don't you EVER disrespect Prince like that!
I turned against Prince when he became a Christian and betrayed the very people that had looked up to him as an inspiration in their search for their identities.
The man who had sung “I’m not a woman, I’m not a man. I’m something you can’t understand” abandoned that stance and told his LGBTQ followers ”God hates you, so I have to hate you, too,”
I must have missed all of that.
Kevin Smith has his own Prince story about how weird Prince's religious beliefs had made him.
The vid(s) are on YouTube.
What's sad is that he didn't have the surgery that would have helped him get rid of the pain because he wouldn't allow a transfusion per JW rules. Instead he used drugs to try to handle the pain. Stupid religious rules do in too many people.
Was it the JWs or SDAs that stole his mind?
Just seeing this. The JWs
Most mononyms know which side their bread is buttered on. Religion really fucked him up.
I love the fact that Prince's real name is Prince.
Prince Rogers Nelson.
From Minnesota, no less! Yay!
Now THAT was BAD!!! 😖
It's funny how quickly the church moves to cooperate with law enforcement when a priest commits financial crimes vs. how much they obstruct for other crimes.
That did not go unnoticed.
I know they’re trying to raise half a million dollars, but a corvette!?! So father sticky fingers here preaches against greed, one of the seven deadly sins, out of one side of his face and then runs a raffle for a freaking corvette out of the other side. And no one thought there might be something amiss?
We entered a 50/50 raffle when we went to a community theater show last weekend, we won $75. And here’s a fucking church, a part of a multibillion dollar sect with its own country and castle covered in gold, is tossing around corvettes in an attempt to plead poverty* to raise more money from the poor.
*I typed poverty, with some typo apparently, and autocorrect switched it to pervert. Ha ha ha, Freudian slip I guess.
I’m only surprised it wasn’t a cache of AR-15’s for the “raffle winner.”
Probably too afraid the winning parishioner would turn their prize on the priest when they found out where 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 he's been dipping his fingers.
Well, it IS the RCC.
Rape kids and that's covered by the confessional, fuck with the money and the cops get called. (I doubt I'm the first to say it today, but it bears repeating)
🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻.....
You weren’t. And it does!
Wow.
I won a Denver Broncos signed jersey while living in Colorado. We heard them read my number. Then someone came up to them and said something and they read out a different number and one of the people working the raffle “won” it.
It was a little disappointing.
In every raffle I ever worked with, no one connected with the raffle was allowed to buy a ticket. Ever.
Of course, those were secular raffles.
It's how it worked at the yearly festival at my first board school.
This was a public school raffle by the parent teacher organization.
Was it signed by the Broncos? Probably went down in value with every signature. They would have to pay you $200 to take it off them.
😂
Signed by Eddie McCaffrey (this was in 1999 or 2000, I think?).
He was quality. Not many players win Superbowl rings with 2 different teams.
Just need Christian to win one with the 49ers. Or Luke with the Commanders.
Still remember how unlucky the 49ers were against my Eagles in that championship game. It gives no joy beating a team without a functioning QB.
Although it gave me a lot of joy when they dismantled the Chiefs.
But, at least you didn’t have to wear a Broncos jersey during the Russell Wilson era.
The RCC?
A priest?
And it didn't involve altar boys?
Come on....who's gonna believe it.
Well, Chritians believe there's an invisible man in the sky.
If it had involved altar boys, the church would still be dragging its feet. But this involves money, so they are right on it!
Very good point! HAHAHA
So let me get this straight. A priest diddles some kids and confesses and the church cries "Oh noes! the sanctity of the confessional!" but a priest confesses to rigging a lottery and the priest he confesses to runs straight to the authorities?
Really shows your priorities there.
Money is more sacrosanct than confession.
He didn't formally "confess" in the process of a Catholic confession. He told a church employee. Loop hole!
These are the people that have the gall to lecture others on morality.
They'll say we reject god because we just want to sin. And here they are, sinning all they want with a blanket get out of hell free card. This priest's Public Apology to the Ceiling didn't even hint at what whe was apologizing for. Audacity, arrogance, immorality, thy name is Christian.
They accept God because they want to sin. And it is only fear of Hell that makes them say sorry. But only to God.
So they can go out and sign some more.
Sin?
yes. I meant sin. And the damned autocorrect tried to change it again.
Oh fuck. I meant , so they can go out and sign some more. What the hell's wrong with me today.
Your orthographic corrector hates you.
obviously. This time I definitely typed in sin. And it tried to correct me again.
Fucking a, everything is going wrong this morning. Or maybe I am just in a very shitty mood.
It is a sin of getting older.
For women in this country, it is a sin TO get older.
OT Trump calls in the National Guard to throw out a few hundred people in tents in DC.
This is getting closer to the Stasi and Schutzstaffel every day now.
Call me stupid, but I thought the USA had two Houses to vote on this kind of thing. Even if it is now a foregone conclusion.
Can somebody please ground the aircraft that are taking Putin and his puppet to Alaska and leave them outside for a couple of days and nights.
He's the special sort of asshole who looks at that famous picture of the lone protestor in Tienanmen Square...
...and wishes that he was the one driving the tank.
Nailed it.
He's also talking about taking over the DC police.
This isn't just beyond the pale. It was well past that 10 squares back. Someone (and preferably multiple someones!) need to get in his face and tell him, "NO, you DO NOT GET to overthrow this government, you pissant wannabe dictator!
I thought there were laws against using the NG against civilians. It wouldn't matter to him, but it should matter to the guardsmen (and women and nb)
They're all afraid of him. He has already purged the military of several high-ranking well-regarded women who had done absolutely zero to provoke him. They know they could kiss their jobs goodbye if they so much as whisper a protest. Until everybody, everywhere all at once stands up to him en masse, I'm afraid no one will.
Does DC have big yellow taxis?
That's something you might want to ask Joni Mitchell about!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2595abcvh2M
That was the general idea.
He's pretty much already done that by calling in federal agencies to do the work. He's apparently claiming it's just for 'seven days' right now, but it seems there's an 'as long as needed' type caveat in there.* In my view, Trump pretty much plans on ruling in DC with the proverbial iron fist, and the mayor of the city won't be able to stop him.
*https://www.npr.org/2025/08/08/g-s1-81755/trump-dc-federal-policing-washington-dc
It's twofold. It acclimates people to Dictatorshit and itself an attempt to distract from the trumpstein files.
I bet you are correct.
A senate and House of reps. Trump has already usurped their authority on numerous occasions with near zero pushback.
One House, one Senate.
Zero backbone.
Backbone? That's one of them newfangled commie ideas.
Wanna tell you a story
About the house rent blues
I come home one Friday
Had to tell the landlady I done lost my job
She said that don't confront me
Long as I get my money next Friday
Now next Friday come I didn't get the rent
And out the door I went
1x https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-a04d0/images/stencil/1280x1280/products/2951/3344/bulleit-bourbon-kentucky-straight-bourbon-whiskey__22442.1720273356.jpg
1x https://empirewine.imgix.net/item-hqid/244.jpeg
1x https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572ac08bb654f9ab18b21d55/1526407792980-C6225JDAEA0G1Z9TTFF1/Cerveza+1.jpg
Some things I experienced in my local Catholic archdiocese:
1) A priest who took Mother's Day to talk about abortion and "femi-Nazis".
2) A priest who told us he was dying of cancer who faked the whole thing.
3) A priest whose calling to the ministry in the military was actually a calling to run away from charges of improper contact with a parishioner.
4) Guest priests later accused and/or convicted of abuse.
5) A priest who was tight with the archbishop who spent tons of money on renovations to the rectory and drove fancy vehicles.
I kinda see a pattern here 🤔
The padre responsible for holding my grandfather's funeral mass took time during the service to rant about the "godless" and his church's declining attendance. If these men of the cloth have any sense of shame, I've never seen any convincing evidence of it.
Tell me about it. It's not just priests, it's clergy across the board. I once attended a funeral officiated by a hellfire-and-brimstone type, who actually turned the service into an altar call. Some flap about we never knew when death was coming, so we needed to get saved and get right with the Lord, yadda yadda yadda. Totally inappropriate and people talked about afterward. But as far as I know, not one of them said jack to the creepy minister.
Yeah, the Baptist preacher at my Mom's funeral made it all about Jesus. Hell, despite my mother having considered him "her" pastor for more than 20 years, he didn't know anything about her other than what my uncle (church music director) told him just before the ceremony. Only the fact I was sure other members of the family were finding comfort kept me from interrupting him.
I think this guy might've been annoyed that none of the (surviving) family were members of his congregation- nevermind that his church mainly served a 𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺; I suppose we all should've just driven from all over the Northeast to go to that church in particular every week, even those of us who'd never even been Catholics in the first place.
“Convincing evidence” isn’t their forte generally.
For my mother's funeral last autumn we hired The Norwegian Humanist Association. They delivered a funeral exactly as we wanted. Her ashes was later spread by us above the ruins of the house she was borned in. Nobody went to hospitals for deliverys of babies back in 1941. The house was burned down the autumn of 1944. Guess by whom.
The parish I grew up in had a bazaar every September to raise funds. Every year they would raffle off a new Cadillac. The monsignor drove a new caddy every year, the other parish priests got to use the older one the monsignor no longer drove. Think there was any hanky-panky between my parish and the Cadillac dealer?
Probably just a tax write off for the Loaner with 3k miles they had to retire.
RCC.
Priest diddling kids: “The sanctity of the confessional!!!!!!”
Priest stealing: “Lock him up!!!!”
When I was a kid my parents sent me to a damned catholic parochial elementary school. It messed with my life in many respects, but it taught me NOT to gamble because its crooked foolishness & a way to throw away money.
Each Thanksgiving there would be a turkey raffle, tickets selling at 25 cents each. Supposedly voluntary, it was really mandatory. Students were each issued a booklet of tickets worth $5. And you'd better bring back the full $5 to the nun or else you'd get belted by her. If you refused to participate in the "voluntary" selling of raffle tickets, the nun belted you & then you were handed the raffle ticket booklet. In other words, it was as voluntary as the goddamned chocolate bars we were "volunteered" to sell every year!
Perceptive kid that I was, I noticed the principal "won" the Thanksgiving turkey each year. I attended that school kindergarten to 5th grade, the principal "won" the turkey each year. What a miraculous miracle! In its infinite wisdom god had in boundless kindness graciously overcome the laws of probability, of averages & odds, trumped reason, to shower turkeys each Thanksgiving upon the principal! I have never gambled since then.
The closest I have come to gambling is a zero sum game at work. Either betting on the bonus ball on the UK national lottery or the winner of the Grand National. All proceeds go to the prize money. I won the lottery one first time (1 in 49) and have won the National one too (1 in 40).
But I have ADHD. I would chase losses too hard so I have never taken a bet.
Smart move.
"Father Ross had recently purchased a new Tesla"
That alone should be a ticket to hell.
If you go to hell just for buying 𝘢𝘯𝘺 Tesla, then where do you end up for buying a Wankpanzer?
Double secret hell.
Mar-a-Lago?
Eeeeesh, I think I'd prefer Hell.
That's the idea! 😇
Tartarus?
But they are so environmentally friendly.
Personally I think battery electric cars are a dead end. Hydrogen fuel cells seems a better option. Does not need all those rare earth metals and gives out water and a bit of heat.
We should have done a Manhattan project level development of hydrogen fueled vehicles as a war measure against the middle east back in 2001. But that was never going to happen with the scum who planned Operation OIL (OIF) in charge
And nobody was the least bit suspicious?
No more so than the fools who will believe the scam I got this weekend. Supposedly Elon Musk had decided to give me $55 million. I *might* believe Taylor Swift giving away that kind of money (That's probably the proceeds from next weekend's concerts) but I doubt she'd give it all to one person.
Not as big as the scam of the man who said 'Lets make America Great Again' and then proceeded to take everything great and turn it into a pile of shit. While increasing his personal stash by 40% (probably a lot more).
Will be remembered as the greatest and worst President in history. By some distance.
People here, that I know are MAGAts, still think he's the best thing since styrofoam coolers.
Usually folks around here avoid talking about politics for some reason. Maybe they feel it's too risky?
When did those surpass sliced bread?
Since Coors Lite
Quick OT dealing with money...
Mark Suckerberg liked a Palo Alto, California neighborhood so much, he bought 11 houses there, radically altering Crescent Park. Several homes remain uninhabited.
Yet another new definition of the word "obscenity."
Much like the Spray-Tanned Shitgibbon who owns several hotels' worth of spare rooms in the DC area alone but would rather bulldoze the homeless off the edge of the map because he doesn't like looking at them.
What would you expect from a man who stole somebody elses idea and hard work?
At least Elon Musk has the decency to buy his way in.
Oh, every billionaire needs at least a dozen houses. Says so right there in the bylaws of the Billionaire Boys Club.