It really can't be said enough times what a vile, abominable, hateful little gobshite Josef Twatzinger is. So here's someone else saying it very eloquently.
I have mucho respect for Johann Hari. He's one of the few people who backed the Iraq war on left-wing grounds that I genuinely believe acted in good faith. He'd actually been to that country and seen what an appalling regime Saddam Hussein's was. But, more importantly, he went back there after the war and he realised that he'd been wrong. And he said so, publicly.
Hari is an intelligent and very witty guy. In addition, he is deeply eloquent and passionate in his beliefs, but can also marshall an impressive array of evidence, as well as rhetoric, to prove his points. You'll find evidence galore on his website. So go check it out.
Oh, and as for Twatzinger- am I the only one who thinks he looks like the Emperor from Return Of The Jedi gussied up for Mardi Gras?
And does anyone else ever associate the words 'The cold dead eyes of a killer' with him?
The following categories of people should not click the link below.
-Those of a sensitive and easily offended disposition
-People who don't like bad language
-Catholics, unless you lack the moral dishonesty required to exculpate your church and its doctrine of all wrongdoing by accusing critics of religious intolerance every time they quote an inconvenient fact.
For the rest of you- enjoy this:
Just to clarify (although it's not likely to impact on Benedict XVI's apologists) I have no problem with people believing in God (or gods or goddesses, for that matter) as long as they don't hurt other people.
Nor am I blind to the fact that children have suffered abuse outside the Catholic Church, in schools and care homes and other secular organisations; and I'm also fully aware that many such organisations were more concerned with their reputations at the time than with the interests of the children. But they haven't:
-Kept on covering for the bastards responsible up into the present day; -Ordered their bishops not to report abuse cases to the police on pain of excommunication (and that's the current Pope, as in the Pontiff Formerly Known As Joseph Ratzinger, personally) -Only agreed to co-operate with the Ryan Report into child abuse in Ireland if no priests were named and no-one was prosecuted.
(If this doesn't amount to covering for paedophiles, then please tell me how.)
And I haven't even mentioned the Pope's (and the Church's) loathsome attitudes towards homosexuals ('an intrinsic moral evil', according to Joseph Fritzl- sorry, Ratzinger), AIDS in Africa (apparently condoms don't stop its spread but make it worse, which goes beyond 'beliefs I might not agree with but are basically harmless' and into the territory of 'outright lies that could/will/may already have cost the lives of thousands, if not millions of people') and women- Twatzinger has compared ordaining women as priests with sexual abuse of children, and demands the criminalisation of abortion even for the victims of rape, or women whose health will not survive pregnancy. In Brazil last year, the government allowed a rare legal abortion in the case of a 9 year old girl who was pregnant with twins after being raped by her stepfather. The Church's response was to excommunicate the doctors who'd carried out the procedure, and the girl's mother. Not the stepfather, you note. He's a naughty boy, but he can still go to church and might not go to hell if he dies, as long as he's confessed. Now if you can defend that... actually, don't bother. I don't want to know you.
And when this malignant little bigot, this loathsome little reptile, comes to Britain this year, the cost of protecting him will, I'm told, be of the order of £12 million. Can you think of better things to spend that money on? I know I can.
