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February 13th, 2013
A resurrection in honour of Benny, originally inspired by this news story.
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Yes! This cartoon is almost certainly why Ratzi resigned. If we get an African pope, does this mean the Catholic church will lurch even further to the right? If so, can we hope that it would drive more people away? Discuss.
Gong? As in ‘Bang a..’ (Marc Bolan 1972)
Dammit! Thanks, steeve. I’ve fixed it. Now to wait a couple of days for the cache to clear before the correction appears. This drives me absolutely nuts.
Isn’t the next pope the last one? Or at least Malachy thought so 😀
I’m surprised that JC would allow an apple, from which you can get knowledge, to be anywhere near him.
Specially when someone has so obviously had a nibble on it.
After all, wasn’t he meant to have died for the original (as opposed to copied) sin?
I bet he secretly get his own back by serving Mo, the Mince with Pork in it?
Smart move, the pope resigning, it’s been one of the most dangerous jobs in the word as over the last 600 years they’ve all died whilst in office.
Good post! I’m betting the next pope is from Brazil, especially Sao Paolo… With Brazil’s rise in economics and relative neutrality regarding wars, it seems a diplomatic and potentially “rich” choice…
Gong in gone.
Happy Ash Wednesday, everyone!
@Author
“Gong” for “going” is one of those many cases when a spell-checker can’t help. But my favourites are writing ‘wether’ for ‘whether’ and ‘calender’ for ‘calendar’ when both of the obsolete words are left in the dictionary to trap the unwary.
Having said that, I see the spell-check here has picked up “wether”, but also it has picked up “favourites” which has nothing wrong with it :-))
By the way “going” is showing as “going” so only Steeve’s comment told me of the original typo.
That’s even funnier than thr original mistake 🙂
Glad Mrs. Brains is feeling a little better, HFB. I’ve left a comment for you (and one for SPAMMER) on the last thread.
I didn’t notice the first time this cartoon was aired, but I love the Catholic ‘blood of Christ’ – Pope’s vampire teeth tie-in. Nice one, Author.
@ IanB – I think you might be confusing the pope with Dr Who
Yes, AoS, I got the message, thanks. Still no soup delivery though ;-).
DH from last week – Mrs Brains says that she agrees with your “Type 1” and “Type 2”, except that she says it’s easy just to call them “Women” and “Men”.
Why is it that when the cardinals elect a new pope, it’s always a homophobic bigot with a hatred of rubber goods? Is it just that none of them are prepared to admit that their predecessors might have been less than infallible? Or is it just that that’s the job description?
Hotrats,
I think it is pretty obvious that evolution of the Papacy tracks evolution of society at large. When Galileo discovered that not all heavenly bodies revolved around earth, he was excommunicated. Now all of society accepts that fact and so does the Catholic Church. The Papacy was against unjust slavery but all for just slavery (whatever that is). Now they are totally against slavery. They were anti-evolution. Now they are for it. As more and more of society at large decides that birth control is good, the Papacy will also decide that birth control is good.
Count on it.
FKS
Mention the word “pope” and the usual suspects digress
The mouth breathing oafs each other try to impress
Their repletion is a bore
When critics open their closet door
Accusing others of what they should really confess.
hotrats, here’s the secret of the pope’s infallibility.
HforB if that’s the case, my woman has a strong male side, which, come to think about it, fits and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I really doubt the validity of any such gender generalization.
Author, the rumor could be correct but I’m more inclined to think it was all the Vatican staff humming the melody to Tim Minchin’s song while they polished the Prada. You know the one.
NBH:
The usual suspects, all present and correct:
1) No pretence of scansion;
2) A vaguely insulting theme;
3) At least one entirely misused word;
4) At least one out-of-date idiom, again misused;
5) Taken as a whole, entirely incoherent.
Give it a rest old darling, you just make yourself look bitchy, smug and out of touch.
FKS:
I think it is pretty obvious that evolution of the Papacy tracks evolution of society at large.
I don’t find it as ‘pretty obvious’ as you suggest. To say it ‘tracks’ society at large is very generous of you; ‘drags its wooden leg several generations behind the times, only revising its dogma when it faces the ridicule of its own congregation’ would be nearer the mark. ‘Count on it’? Count very very slowly to it, more likely; if their admission of error over Galileo’s teaching is anything to go by, the One True Church should be embracing contraception by – oh, about the year 2389. On the other hand, if we take Darwin as a defining example, it could be rushed through by 2153.
Now that the pope has resigned, would it be possible to prosecute him for crime against humankind like some people would like to?
I wonder if Benny is retiring to sunnier climes. What’s the betting on him buying a retirement condominium in Florida?
omg:
It would be nice to drag the old paedo-enabler and victim-silencer to the dock, finally to face his numerous accusers (“Disgraced former Pope Joe Ratzinger…”), but I suspect the pseudo-state of Vatican City will simply make him some sort of diplomat, giving him lifetime immunity from arrest, detention and prosecution.
Hotrats,
I agree with your “drags its wooden leg…” characterization, but I don’t think that is a dismissal of my statement. It is a more of a measure of how closely it tracks. As you say several generations behind.
Once you switch to math though I think your zeal to show the silliness of the Catholic Church has exceeded their actual silliness. 🙂 You calculated the time from Galileo until the church issued a formal “my bad”. The Church lifted the ban on heliocentric works in 1757. The church was probably ahead of society on this one. You pulled a similar move on Catholic acceptance of evolution. You calculated from Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”. When society accepted evolution (or even if it has) depends heavily on how you define societal acceptance. But certainly society did not widely embrace ToE the year that Darwin published. Probably not for at least 100 years.
So anyway the idea that the church is 350 years behind the times is pretty funny, but at least in my opinion, exaggerated.
We could sit here and argue in rhyme
Re the Church’s exact sense of time.
But when lives are being lost
Delay has a high cost
The Church ought to turn on a dime!
Chris Phoenix,
I like your limerick and agree that the church should turn on a dime. If it did the church could be a force for morality. Sadly the church is almost always a force for evil. The Southern Baptisit church in the USA split off from the Baptist church for the express purpose of affirming the God-Granted-Goodness of slavery. It boggles my mind that there are still Southern Baptists.
It boggles my mind that there are still religions. If a numbskull such as I can see through the smoke and mirrors* then surely anybody can. OK, the various religions effectively inserted a loophole to deal with doubt of the existance of (insert pet diety’s name here) by declaring it to be either a) a test of their faith, to be resisted with all of one’s ‘spiritual’ strength, or b) a crime punishable by lopping off the old noggin, but again if I can see through it…..
*And I still believe that computers work by either magic or microscopic people dwelling behind its electronic facade. Honest to god I do 😉
Hey guys, every once in a while my efforts to understand idiots turns up a gem of academic investigation. This deservess to go viral and make Bob Altemeyer as famous as Stephen Pinker. Check it out. Free download of the book. A rare thing, serious but entertaining. http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
Must credit my partner for this find. Brilliant woman.
BTW I hope that any women reading this thread will take my “Hey, guys” salutation as gender neutral. Not meaning to exclude anybody, not even NBH who certainly deserves to be excluded for that last fetid example of mental flatulence with chunks. Hotrats, you nailed it. 🙂
Does his retirement mean that Benny is now fallible again? My point is of course facetious, but I bet the Catholic Church doesn’t know for sure what the rules are on this as it hasn’t happened for five or six hundred years.
A happy
Hallmark Cards profiteering daySt. Valentines day to all. I trust your posties emptied their bulging sacks through your letterboxes this morning (oooerr, get back in your grave, Frankie Howerd)!Mrs. o’Sagan has requested slow-roasted leg of lamb with all the trimmings for dinner tonight. Top tip: cut a couple of garlic cloves into slivers and strip a dozen or so stalks of fresh rosemary from the plant; stab the lamb all over with a skewer and push garlic slivers, rosemary stalks, and a whole black peppercorn or two into the meat, cover with foil and roast on a really low heat for several hours. Don’t forget to retain the juices for the gravy. Delicious.
DH, an interesting looking book, please thank your partner for the link. And just for the record, whenever I use words such as ‘guys’, ‘fellas’, chaps’ etc. it is always meant to be all-inclusive, though I do tend to stick to the less ambiguous ‘folks’ (or, ‘you unruly mob’ when wanting the attention of all on this site) 😉
DH – fascinating reading! But I MUST STOP and get on with other things! Just read the “You have trudged your way through (I suspect) the most boring chapter in this book, and are entitled to some sort of reward.” So I had to stop, else the whole day would go by…..
Don’t worry, I accept ‘guys’ as gender neutral too. 🙂
AoS:
If you’re looking for a collective noun for J&M regulars, you could do worse than ‘we miscreants’. Sums it up for me.
FKS:
You’re quite right, my mental abacus is missing a bead or three, and while it might be justified for comic effect, I do hate to exaggerate and would hate to get a name for it, especially when the unvarnished fact is more than enough to make the point.
The Catholic position on evolution is not quite one of acceptance; they still insist it was all god’s doing, which misses the point entirely. In the interests of full disclosure, it must be admitted that the Vatican is actually ahead of popular opinion, at least in the USA, on young-earth creationism; though I fear that that says more about how ignorant and reactionary the Yanks* are, rather than how contemporary the church might be.
Whatever the maths – and in trying to carbon-date ‘public acceptance’ we are pulling figures out of thin air – I think we can safely say that none of us will live to see a pope endorsing condoms, not only because the church needs the breeders to keep popping out more of the faithful, but because condoms help disconnect sex from risk and guilt, which is where the church wants to keep it.
It was Catholic activists who spoke out against Papilloma virus innoculations for pre-teen girls, on the grounds that any reduction in fear of the consequences of disease would be an inducement to promiscuity – given the incidence of cervical cancer in papilloma sufferers, a truly disgustingly immoral position.
*not you personally, obviously.
FKS:
It could be interesting to note that the church use to bring in front of the inquisition people that propagate ideas that are again the church teaching. So that could have slowed the acceptance of an heliocentric solar system.
It is the same for the use of the condom in Africa. The church is so again it and people in Africa are quite catholic. So, I think, it will inevitably slow the acceptance of it by the people there. The same stan for gay mariage, and for almost everything the church don’t agree with.
So the society could be ahead of the church if the church didn’t slow the society…
omg:
An excellent point; it’s not just a reactionary papacy at ideological odds with the world at large, a really determined church can hold back social progress in their own congregations indefinitely, and while it remains in their interests to do so, they have every incentive to continue. As Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee observed, they have been demonstrably on the wrong side of every social issue since the middle ages, yet they are still going strong; you can’t expect them to abandon a winning formula.
I was chatting to somebody earlier this evening who has a teenage granddaughter currently on her third liver, and who will not see out the year if she doesn’t get a fourth, so you can imagine how much suffering she’s had in her short life so far. She wasn’t the topic of conversation, he was telling me that his best friend, a chap in his seventies, had been diagnosed with bone cancer, and had little time left because, as he said, “it’s incurable”.
I gave the glib response that death is incurable, we’ve all got to go sometime, and he replied that that was true, and out time was up when god called, so I asked if he really believed that and he said “I’m a Catholic, of course I believe it. Don’t you?”
“Put it this way” I said, “I can’t believe that your loving god and your granddaughter can exist in the same Universe. Either one negates the existance of the other” (a simplistic view I know, but he is a simplistic man).
“It doesn’t” he replied, “because she gets to be an angel when she gets to heaven. That’s worth the suffering, isn’t it?”
So I left him to chew over a simple question; “When your kids were little, did you used to whip them until they bled? or beat them to within an inch of their lives, just so they’d appreciate you more when you weren’t hurting them?” Then, with a cheery “Good night” I turned on my heels, called the dog and set off for the woods. I looked back after a couple of minutes to see him still stood exactly where I’d left him, looking to the sky with his hand cupping his chin; the signs of a person in deep thought.
I can’t wait to see him again, just to see if he’s managed to rationalise it to himself. If he has, I fully intend to give him more food for thought.
AoS, you’ve given a perfect example of one of my biggest issues with the religious. Why oh why is it that they constantly place human limit on their perfect all loving god?
My question to your acquaintance would have been different, but would make the same point (I think); “Why does your god need to put anybody through suffering in order to make them angels? Does he not have the power to give us both perfect lives AND perfect afterlives? Why would he want us to suffer at all given that he loves us AND is capable of doing anything he wants to do?”
From the article:
“”A Christian can never remain silent,” he said, after being greeted on arrival in Cameroon by President Paul Biya.”
Well *there’s* your problem!
Marky, it has something to do with the idea that one cannot fully appreciate the good without suffering the bad, and then there’s the old ‘testing the faith’ chestnut too. All nonsense, of course, and like so many other religious ideas they have several answers to the same problems. What it all boils down to is that all of the excuses for their deity of choice suggests that they know the workings of said deities’ mind – which is absolutely the reverse to what their holy books actually tell them – until they meet one of us, who dismiss their nonsense out of hand, at which point they stop pretending to know its mind and fall back on the ‘moves in mysterious ways’ (always reminds me of the Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks does that) and ‘mortal humans are unable and undeserving to know its mind’ bullshite. The incredible thing is that they can go from definitive knowledge of what their god is doing and why to denying the same without even seeming to notice their own self-contradictions.
On a side note, what about the meteor shower over Russia, eh? 500 or so injured, a couple of folks dead, loads of damage; it reminded me of the opening scenes of the wonderfully silly and heavily cliche-ridden* Armageddon, and we all know what followed that particular shower. It’s enough to make one wonder if the astronomers et al have calculated the orbital trajectory of tonight’s asteroid – due to pass between us and our geo-stationary satellites – accurately enough.
All together now; “It’s the end of the world as we know it”!
*My favourite vomit-inducing cliche being at the end as the Shuttle (Independance or Freedom, can’t recall which) crew are doing the ‘glory walk’ down the runway, the NASA pilot stands before Liv Tyler’s Gracie>/i> and says “Colonel Willy Sharp, United States Air Force, Ma’am, requesting permission to shake the hand of the daughter of the bravest man I ever met”.
And I’ve just been a bit sick in my mouth…again 😉
Come out of your bunkers, you miscreants (cheers, hotrats, a great word), the world isn’t really about to end. But, dreadful person that I am, I have managed to convince a lot of people that it is; you’d be surprised just how gullible some folk can be. A touch of pseudo-science – the heat of the Sun and gravitational pull of Jupiter and Saturn dislodged a small chunk, accellerating it ahead of the main piece; the small chunk hit Russia yesterday, the big piece kills us all in the early hours. That sort of bollocks – said with a confident air can fool a lot of people (the asteroid being of a size that, even if it did hit land, would only affect an area about the size of London notwithstanding). I think I understand religion a little better now; some people will believe owt.
Speaking of the gullible, I wonder how many preachers and modern-day prophets have been holding prayer sessions tonight asking their chosen deity to divert the asteroid that was never going to hit us anyway, and will tomorrow be using the fact that it missed as proof of the efficacy of prayer?
But just in case (;-)): goodbye friends, it’s been fun chatting, laughing, debating, and arguing with you all. As HFB commented on the last strip, this is the best local one could wish for.
DISCLAIMER
That last bit was a joke, of course (except the bit about this being the best local one could wish for: that’s true), before anybody thinks I’m going soft in the head. Even if I were the kind to be alarmed, knowing that the Russian meteor came in from the East and tonight’s asteroid comes from the South would allay any fears I may have had. Which were non-existant to begin with. Not that it stopped me scaring the shit out of just about everybody I spoke to today.
Yes, I’m a bad man. But it was fun.
Reminds me of the fun we had just afew weeks ago when the Mayan calendar ran out of paper or something. You are right of course, some people will believe anything.
Fellow miscreants, regarding the gullibility of the faithful, you MUST read that book. Explains it all.
Not objecting to ‘miscreants’ but I was thinking ‘jammers’ might be appropriate. Especially as we are Meanderthals.
DH – I will find time to read more 🙂
Oh good, you’ve all left your bunkers 🙂
DH, the book is on my to-read list; I’m currently reading Do Polar Bears Get Lonely?, a collection of Q&A’s from New Scientist magazine and the fourth book in the series that I have, the others being Do Penguins Feet freeze? Do Penguins Have Knees? and Do Ants Have Arseholes?. I’ve never been one to judge a book by its cover, and all that, so even though the preface to The Authoritarians sounds very much to me that Altermeyer has spent the last few decades researching the bleeding obvious, I certainly will be giving it a go.
WWc, yes, very much like the Mayan nonsense; does anybody have any knowledge of prayer sessions last night? Or seen anyone in the news (web, T.V. etc.) attributing the asteroid missing us to prayer?
Botanist, a nice suggestion but I do prefer hotrats’ miscreants. Without going into details, if you knew my history you’d know that miscreant is the perfect fit. I may be a respectable old geezer nowadays, but ’twas not ever thus!
AoS:
It’s not only youthful excess, one reason I suggest ‘miscreants’ is that it literally means unbelievers – the ‘-cre-‘ part is from the same root as ‘creed’, ‘credence’ ‘credibility’ etc.
Well, as all of us are bound to fit one of the definitions, then Miscreants we are.
@ Peter:
Yep, wearing a dress and that goofy high hat has to be the predecessor to those new crew members on the Enterprise wearing red jackets, poof, gone before they get to the end of the episode.
“Smart move, the pope resigning, it’s been one of the most dangerous jobs in the word as over the last 600 years they’ve all died whilst in office.”
DH – Thanks for “The Authoritarians” link. I’m onto chapter two now, and it’s taking up the time I should be spending posting rubbish here (so not all bad news). It’s fascinating stuff, although it needs to be read with a North American perspective. So far I can recommend it, but I’ll get back to the rest of you once I’ve finished it.
Yes DH and HFB, I’m half way thru now but to get so far I’ve skipped the notes at the end of each chapter. Very interesting, thanks for the link 🙂
Damn you for setting that one up, HFB, you knew I’d want to smash it over the net, didn’t you? I….MUST….RESIST….I….MUST…..RESIST….I….MUST…. 😉
In the shop where I was buying the Sunday papers up this morning were a small group of twenty-somethings stocking up on energy drinks, orange juice, and bottled water, cigarettes and king-size cigarette papers (can’t for the life of me think why they’d need both 😉 ) all very wide-eyed and fidgety and all talking constantly over one another. This gave me – ahem- divine inspiration, so to continue hotrats’ hymn game, I give you;
I danced in the morning when the World was begun
I danced with the Moon and the stars and the sun
I came down hard three days later. That’s the last time I take Ecstasy pills and L.S.D. at the same time.
AoS – I honestly don’t know what’s bothering you, but pleased to get such a good reaction from you :-). Still waiting for the smash.
I’m on to chapter 3 now, and once you read it you’ll see what I mean about N. American perspective.
As to the song, very entertaining, and a good challenge to NBH for the title of worst scansion.
Botanist – I think it’s worth reading the notes, as they are mostly not technical, and like the main text there are some laughs in there. I think I’ll find myself looking at all sorts of people in a new light, now.
I’ve just had a visit from our local friendly Jehovah’s Witnesses, who left me the latest copy of “The Watchtower” and of “Awake!” I’ve promised to read them, and they in turn have promised to come back and find out what I thought of them. This could be fun, but they are a couple of wee old ladies, and I’m worried they might burst into tears. The last lot that came round were much younger, and suddenly remembered a pressing engagement just as the discussion was getting interesting.
Sorry, HFB, I didn’t mean to sound quite so explosive, it’s just that, considering the almost global opinion of N. Americans, ” it needs to be read with a North American perspective.” is a feeder just begging for a punchline. Normally I would be only too happy to supply it – on many other sites I would have done so in half a heartbeat – but I suddenly found myself metaphorically biting my tongue out of respect for the many intelligent American regulars, or, as I have found myself thinking of them, the exceptions that prove the rule, who are to be found here.
Now, don’t go too easy on the wee old ladies. Think about it, they’ve probably been doing this for donkey’s years, so just think of the amount of grief and bullshit they’ve given to innocents such as you and I over the
milleniacenturiesdecades: think of all the peaceful Sundays that have been ruined by those carrion crows: most of think of how they must privately laugh together at us because they can do what they enjoy the most, namely ruining other people’s fun, safe in the knowledge that nobody’s going to want to upset two such sweet little old ladies.Now, go get ’em, Floyd!*
*Where do I remember that line from? I seem to think it may have been from an advert. Or possibly a police drama. Definitely from the 1970’s though.
Bloody Hell! I forgot about the omniscient google>/i>.
Toffo, very chewy toffee sweets (young people, think Rolo but with no chocolate and a tooth-extractingly hard centre).
“Toffo. Because a man’s gotta chew what a man’s gotta chew. Go get ’em, Floyd.”
Ahh, they don’t write them like that anymore.
Sorry for waffling; the grandsons are stopping over again so I’m sat up waiting for the youngest to wake for his nappy change and bottle, and the eldest to be woken by the youngest, need a nappy change and a drink of warm milk. In the meantime, I’m bored. No point in getting stuck into a book whilst I’ve got one ear on the bedroom, there’s sod all on the T.V……..Bugger it, I’m off for a trawl around some blogs, I’m in a mischievous mood
AofS “Altermeyer has spent the last few decades researching the bleeding obvious” yes, now that I have finished the book, this was an accurate and perceptive statement. I enjoyed it, but perhaps it wasn’t quite as earth shaking as I lead you all to believe. I think the pendulum is swinging back now, and the alarm he is sounding need not be quite so shrill. Hard to tell.
@DH, if I read that book and recognise myself, what should I do then? I’m asking as I regard you as the established authority here.
MarkyWarky, if you read that book and recognize yourself, try to change. It is possible.
Thank you DH, I shall try to do as you say of course.
DH? EA!
Hotrats, I think I detect a degree of chain pulling or piss taking by MarkyWarky. No doubt I deserve it. 🙂
No no no. Honestly no. I was just playing clumsily with the concept that by doing what you suggest (reading the book), I’m being one of the authoritarians he describes IN the book 🙂
But I see he includes a test, so I’ll be able to tell quite quickly whether or not I am. Trouble is, the test has RULES. What to do, what to do…………….?
(as you may be able to tell, I’ve not read beyond the intro yet 🙂 Is it relevant to those of us outside the US; I guess yes?)
@ Hotrats, what’s “EA”?
MW, I’m up to chapter four now, and, it is relevant mainly in giving an insight into a type of person who is most easily recognised in the US, but exists everywhere. His theories are mostly about people who are brought up to accept authority (very crude summary), and as such are equally applicable to fundamentalists of all types, even down to your average “jobsworth” IMO.
DH – “Altermeyer has spent the last few decades researching the bleeding obvious”. I couldn’t find who said this, and while it may be true, it is interesting to see the phenomenon researched by a professor, essentially proving what many of us feel to be bleeding obvious. I should qualify that by saying that the professor clearly started out with a hypothesis which he wanted to prove, and it would be interesting to see what conclusion would be reached by another academic coming from the RWA community. Having said that, I imaging that such an academic would consider the research a waste of time.
For those of you wondering what I’m talking about, read the book – it’s free! (I have to be true to my image as a True Scotsman™ :-).
MW:
EA? in your own words – the Established Authority here, your own, your very own, Darwin Harmless. Infallible (ex cathedra), or so I hear.
hotrats – did I miss the white smoke, then?
HFB, ’twas our resident prophet, in a post about half-way up the page;
@ hotrats, oh that’s disappointing, I haven’t had a good fight for a little while now, so was hoping it was some kind of insult aimed at me!!
Actually I have just had a fight, of sorts, by email with a Christian acquaintance. Why do the buggers ALWAYS back out of an argument as soon as they realise you’re not going to just accept their assertions on faith. It’s bloody frustrating, like trying to punch a bloke who just won’t sit still long enough 🙁
A taser tends to solve that problem….or so I’m told 😉
AoS – Ah, I just didn’t go back far enough. Thanks. So now we have a pope and a prophet here. My cup runneth over. Any volunteers for an Easter headliner?
Easter headliner? How about Nassar? He’s always cross 🙂
That was fun. I’m sorry to see this thread die, but the moving finger writes and we’re all moving on. More brilliance on the next strip. See you all there.
OK – so I got my email wrong – So sorry AoS.
The offer of a drink stands, and dear Author will eventually recognise me and reinstate my ‘picture’ (pretty please).
Alll will become clear when I come out of moderation!
ps Author – is there any way I can tell you all my aliases? Cos I’ve made this mistake before lol