Catholics crack me up!

Unlike some people in the New Atheist movement, I don't think that religious belief is inherently dangerous. It can lead to fundamentalism and extremism but so can any philosophical position if you push it far enough. There are those people who depend on religion as a guide or at least a crutch to explain their lives and the world around them. That's just fine, people are entitled to believe whatever they want, including supporting Man Utd. Personally, I think the world would be worse off without religion because then the rest of us would have nothing to laugh at.

In particular, the recent mid-term elections in the US were a great source of comedy. In Nevada, you had Sharron Angle running for the Senate who believes that the US should pull out of the United Nations because of their liberal agenda and for being "the umpire on fraudulent science such as global warming". Thankfully she lost. In Delaware there was Christine O'Donnell who objects to cloning, stem cell research, evolution, abortion, social security and anything else that can't be explained to her in single syllable words. On the issue of stem cell research she said:

American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains

There's not really much else to say other than wow. Thankfully, she also lost.

None of these nutjobs really compare to this morning's nugget of brilliance from Bill Donahue, President of the American Catholic League. For those out there who are unfamiliar, the Catholic League is a group which professes to defend the rights of catholics in America. Their tagline is "for religious and civil rights". Already they're not off to the best of starts. I don't think that they understand civil rights to mean the same thing that the rest of us do. Particularly when they think that the only right gays should have is to occupy a jail cell. Bill Donahue as president pretends to speak for Catholics. Unfortunately for Bill's career aspirations, catholics already have someone to speak for them. He lives in Rome, wears a lot of funny hats and likes children ... a lot.

This morning he published his reaction to the election results in an article entitled:

Catholics decide the election

Apart from the obvious air of smugness about giving the Democrats a big black eye, there is a fair amount of rhetoric about the persecution of catholics and the unity of their social behaviour. There's nothing new in this. Most catholic writers employ this air of adversity and hardship in their articles which would give an uninformed reader the sense that Catholics are this persecuted minority, hiding their beliefs and meeting in secret. They seem thrilled that they have had such a large influence on the election results. 

As with a lot of religious people, the real problem with this view is reality. There are at the moment approximately 310 million people in the USA. Of these 22% are Roman Catholic. That equates to almost 69 million catholics. In terms of an identifiable social group (i.e. a group united by a single identifying characteristic) they are one of the largest equal to the total number of African-Americans and Hispanic Americans combined. As a religious domination they are the largest, equal in size to the next ten biggest religions combined. In no common sense of the word could you possibly describe catholics as a minority.

Look, Bill, if you're reading this, you probably won't be reading this because you're too busy getting ready to overthrow Ratzi but if you've been doing some egosurfing and stumbled across my little plot of the web by mistake, can you please give the whole persecution complex angle a rest. We're really not buying any of it. People like me who are atheist or other people who really do have to be careful about expressing their beliefs can see right through the act. Catholics have run the world (into the ground) for most of the last two thousand years and for most of that time minorities, particularly those with opposing views were violently suppressed. Before you decide to present yourself as a real victim, try talking to people who really are, you self-righteous wanker. Oh, and one more thing, in response to your obvious pride about the difference that catholics made in the election, here's something to hoist you with your own petard:

In his pride the wicked does not seek him; in all his thoughts there is no room for God

 Psalms 10:4