ROME - A senior Vatican priest speaking at a Good Friday service compared the uproar over sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church - which have included reports about Pope Benedict XVI's oversight role in two cases - to the persecution of the Jews, sharply raising the volume in the Vatican's counterattack.

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I hope the Catholic Church collapses. Really. Not because I'm persecuting them, but because they're more of an entrenched bureaucratic institution than a vital cultural force.

Posted for mindless, meaningless amusement.

Reader's note: The 'you' in this writing is directed at the Catholic Church, not the reader. If you really like the Catholic Church you might not want to read on, for what I write below is 100% anti-Catholic Church, although not necessarily anti-Catholic person.

I was on Wikipedia, and somehow ended up reading about Catholic Apologetics and the infallibility of the Pope and inerrancy of the Bible.

Not a topic to soothe my mind with, and a bad way to mentally prepare for staying with my ultra-Catholic in-laws next week.

But seriously, Catholic Church, if you advocate things which involve violating the Law of Conservation of Mass and then claim you are infallible, and then use circular reasoning to justify the whole sorry mess, I'm going to call you out as wrong and a vicious liar.

"By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory." -- Pope Pius the 12th, 1950

The scope of observations that we've made about the universe covers the scale from individual subatomic particles to giant galactic superclusters and background radiation from the Big Bang. That's solid, dependable, re-verifiable knowledge. If you had to start over from scratch you'd find the exact same thing.

You, the Catholic Church, think that heaven and hell depend on randomly believing preposterous things with no evidence and no usefulness, and then claim you're more accurate at discerning truths then the scientific process which can divine billions of years worth of history. Essentially you are mentally ill as an organization. Science is powerful because it knows it's full of errors and corrects for them over time. 20 centuries of Popes helming your rock are jackasses because they thought they spoke for god.

Show me any piece of Catholic scholarship that is remotely as awesome and mind-blowing as this, a study on the shape and history of the Universe:

Give me anything that's 1% as convincing and I'll convert in an instant. Until then, I hope you die and rot, you miserable relic of superstition and hatred.

But you, the Catholic Church, will never produce anything remotely as truthful as that study on the topography of the Universe, qualified and incomplete though it is. Instead you'll natter on about virgin births and bodies taken up to heaven, with occasional diversions fitting the maximum number of angels onto heads of pins. Have fun with all that, just stay out of my way you corpulent bloated anachronism.

2,000 of years of navel-gazing does not infallibility make.

Catholic Church: you are hereby my mortal political, temporal, and moral enemy. Your own actions and lies have placed you in that position, until you achieve the following two things, necessary and sufficient to reclaim your place in polite society:

1) Stop claiming that you are the keepers of universal truth.

2) Stay the hell out of politics.

Since that will never happen, I'll take any chance I can get to kick you when you're down. Please feel free to excommunicate me, as my initial childhood involvement with you was against my will and not looked back upon fondly, and you're screwing up my life these days, too.

I don't even feel bad about hating you, Catholic Church, because you certainly aren't one to live and let live, and that's my minimum requirement for respect.

You have declared that dialogue with you is impossible, for how can the Catholic Church bend to any when it is the sole arbiter of truth? For that I condemn you with all my heart, every ounce of my being.

You scorn all else, and thus I scorn you, Catholic Church.

Don't bother defending yourself in kind terms based on your community and good works, Catholic Church. If something proceeds from lies and derangement, and discounts all but itself, a bit of polish and shine little makes up for the disease at the core.

SUMMARY: DOWN WITH THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ITS MANY ERRORS. YOU ARE USELESS AND ON BALANCE A FORCE FOR GREAT EVIL AND LIES. Such I pronounce. And don't forget, I am infallible on such matters, speaking ex-ex-Cathedra.

Rick Warren is going to be the minister at Obama's inauguration.

He started the whole 'Purpose Driven Life' movement.

It's like the shortest possible summary of what turns me off of religion.

Purpose #1: You Were Planned for God's Pleasure (Worship)
Purpose #2: You Were Formed for God's Family (Fellowship)
Purpose #3: You Were Created to Become Like Christ (Discipleship)
Purpose #4: You Were Shaped for Serving God (Ministry)
Purpose #5: You Were Made for a Mission (Mission)
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This kind of thing is the worst though:

This spiritual servitude only has negative connotations in a culture that is obsessed with asserting the rights of the individual. Civil rights, human rights, gay rights, minority rights-we hear about this constantly. Instead of asserting our rights-even if we have the freedom to do so-we are choosing to set them aside for a greater thing: the opportunity to serve the living God. What are you setting aside in order to serve God? --

I don't get it at all. Hearing that sort of talk is the only time that I believe in the otherwise-unbelievable claim that "religion is the opiate of the masses".

Divorcing 'God's purposes' from actual human justice seems abhorrent to me, and I don't even believe in God.

I was just on IM with someone, and they were asking me why I didn't believe in God or Christianity. This was my bare minimum list of things that I would have to take on faith to be a Christian. For future reference, am I missing anything?

- That God exists.
- That God is still involved in the universe he created.
- That God cares about us.
- That God cares what religion you are in.
- That God is the Christian God, not the Jewish, Islam, Baha'i, Mormonism, etc.
- That all other religions are in grave error. (despite those faiths having equally compelling claims and theology to lay claim to this honor)
- That God interacted directly with humanity in the past, and chose the Jews as his people above all others.
- That God guided the oral history of the Jews.
- That God wrote the Bible, indirectly.
- That God edited the Bible into its present form, indirectly.
- That God prevents textual errors from being introduced during copying, indirectly.
- That God would not allow the Bible to mislead us, but would allow other religious texts to mislead us.
- That sins are against God, instead of against other humans.
- That we have original sin that needs to be redeemed.
- That virgin births can occur.
- That Jesus was born to Mary as the Son of God.
- That Jesus is in fact, God.
- That Jesus could redeem sins through his death and resurrection.
- That Jesus' death is the only way to cause that to happen.
- That Jesus rose from the dead.
- That the story of Jesus was accurately told orally for a hundred years.
- That the hundreds of contradictory written fragments and letters from the time after that don't matter, because:
- The editing process to sort everything out was also guided by God, again, indirectly.
- That the Gospels were then transmitted down with no textual errors in copying or translation thereafter, thanks to God, indirectly.
- That the parts of the Bible and the Gospels that don't make sense don't contradict any of the above.
- That if you choose wrong, despite this inconsistent and inexplicable chain, you are damned to hell.

I really hate dislike certain aspects of religion. I am sort of a Buddhist, and on again off again go to the local Zen group for their services. The meditation is really useful, I tend to be sort of high strung or on edge and it helps balance me out. But the chanting and whatnot gets to be too much and so I tend to not go.

It just all seems made up and arbitrary, and anyone who claims that something special has been revealed to them I tend to think is misguided or confusing a psychological process for an external communication.

Zen is the closest that I would come to participating in religion as a devotee, and actually I spent a couple months in a lay-monastic situation when I was younger, which was very intense and useful. Most other religions are too externally imposive for my tastes. I just lump all that together with other things that don't make sense unless you're in a self-referential system. It's 'Sit and figure it out for yourself' vs 'THIS IS HOLY WRIT'.

Even Zen fails me on certain key points, such as claiming to be the 'Front Gate' to enlightenment. Ugh, ugh, ugh. That statement is the one that really kills it for me whenever I go. I seriously promise to attend the first Religious/Spiritual group that does not make these sorts of claims. I am totally serious, if you can show me a religion that is not self-aggrandizing, I will sign right up. Except the Unitarians, they don't count.

Just like certain political and patriotic beliefs make sense if you're in a closed system, Religion can seam like a true thing, but it doesn't admit to change without hypocrisy. Changes in revelation seems to be a fashionable accompaniment to changes in human society, not the other way around.

I get like that with politics too, and unfortunately have been pushed into being a strident Democrat the last few years via subconscious need to cling together for safety against certain geopolitical trends. But I look forward to a more even two-party rule consisting of mostly grid-lock wherein my Independent/Libertarian/Green streaks can distract me from my current party affiliation.

I've been pondering agnosticism lately, and it's something that I've never really understood. I can see how someone would believe in God by faith or whatever, or how someone can look around and fail to see the need for God as some kind of underlying explanation of the world around us, but the middle ground on this topic is pretty shaky. I just can't relate to it at all.

There was a book I read last week, the Life of Pi, which came out a few years ago and was supposedly 'A story to make you believe in God', well I of course remain disenchanted with the concept. But the protagonist's attitude towards agnostics were similar to my own, which was a bit startling. He didn't mind atheists in the least, but a life of agnosticism seemed to him to be troubling.

So - is agnosticism just a default sort of mushy thing or can agnosticism be a deeply held position, defensible in its own right? Despite my perhaps overly harsh words, I am honestly asking and have an open mind.