Where can one start with the visit of Pope Benedict to Sydney on July 17, 2008?
Aside from the Catholic/Italian Premier of New South
Wales funding the whole circus with revenue which otherwise would have been
frittered away on luxuries (such as schools, hospitals, roads, public
transport, welfare programmes), on the sophistic premise that the outlay would
be balanced by all the foreign Catholics who would come to Sydney to see a
vertically challenged ex-Hitler Youth wearing a KKK suit, we were subjected to
a spectacle of religious superstition and hocus pocus which would have made a
New Guinea Cargo Cultist blush.
To mark the historic occasion, Herr Pope beatified an Australian saint - a dead
nun whose induction to the rapidly enlarging congregation of saints was justified by
not one, but two miracles.
The first was the occasion of a surgeon being
overheard to say "it's a bloody miracle" (probably in relation to the
previous weekend's unexpected football result) when leaving the operating
theatre following a procedure on a patient whose relative was praying to the
dead nun.
The second was the "cure" of a patient with a diagnosis of
cancer, also after prayers to the said dead nun. (On such dodgy misdiagnoses rests
the entire alternative medicine industry).
We did, however, see lots of press coverage of Herr
Ratzinger in Britain, including some wonderful television footage of our
favourite ex-Hitler Youth in his armoured vehicle driving along Princes Street
on a beautiful Edinburgh autumn day.
I have since been imagining the Pederast-in-Chief's return to his Palazzo in the Vatican, descending the ancient stone stairway accompanied by the ghastly wraith-like figures of his Cardinals to a dark, dank cellar lit only by the flames of burning torches on the walls, whereupon they drop to the floor and scuttle away sideways like crabs into the darkness.
Voltaire was an implacable enemy of all institutionalized Christianity, but why stop there? All religion, like alternative medicine, would be hilarious if it were not inherently baleful.
The superstitions and bizarre ceremonial rituals of indigenous peoples have long been a source of patronizing amusement for we clever folk, cleverness apparently being a virtue which does not include insight.
I have since been imagining the Pederast-in-Chief's return to his Palazzo in the Vatican, descending the ancient stone stairway accompanied by the ghastly wraith-like figures of his Cardinals to a dark, dank cellar lit only by the flames of burning torches on the walls, whereupon they drop to the floor and scuttle away sideways like crabs into the darkness.
Voltaire was an implacable enemy of all institutionalized Christianity, but why stop there? All religion, like alternative medicine, would be hilarious if it were not inherently baleful.
The superstitions and bizarre ceremonial rituals of indigenous peoples have long been a source of patronizing amusement for we clever folk, cleverness apparently being a virtue which does not include insight.
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