Old News: Vatican Corrupt

The world's smallest city-state is in the news once again and, once again, hopes its ridiculously inappropriate Foreign-Sovereign Immunity (which absolves it of all responsibility for child sexual abuse cases in the United States, fyi) will allow it to do whatever it wants while thumbing its nose at the peculiar secular world, where actions have consequences.

VATICAN CITY — Italian authorities seized euro23 million ($30 million) from a Vatican bank account Tuesday and said they have begun investigating top officials of the Vatican bank in connection with a money-laundering probe.

(courtesy HuffPo)

But don't worry, it's probably all a big misunderstanding--it's not like the Vatican has any history of highly-suspicious involvement with the mafia and/or catastrophic financial crimes:

The Vatican bank was famously implicated in a scandal over the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano in the 1980s in one of Italy's largest fraud cases. Roberto Calvi, the head of Banco Ambrosiano, was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982 in circumstances that still remain mysterious.

London investigators first ruled that Calvi committed suicide, but his family pressed for further investigation. Eventually murder charges were filed against five defendants, including a major Mafia figure, and they were tried in Rome and acquitted in 2007.

Banco Ambrosiano collapsed following the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans the bank had made to several dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans. While denying any wrongdoing, the Vatican bank agreed to pay $250 million to Ambrosiano's creditors.

(courtesy HuffPo)

Yikes! But soft--who runs the Vatican Bank? Its problems can most likely be blamed on greedy secular bankers operating outside the church's sphere of influence, right? The religious folk just made a few careless mistakes in who they hired to run their financial operations, right?

Wrong:

More after the jump...

The Religious Trap

If pedophilia happens, doesn't that mean that it was God's will, as people so often say when tragedy strikes, since he is omnipresent and omnipotent?

If that is the case, then isn't there nothing we can do about it, since judgment is His job and not that of a mere mortal?

Also, as long as the guilty pervert priests confess, aren't they absolved of their sins and granted entry into heaven?

It's enough to make your fucking brain explode trying to make sense of religion...


Dessert:

Evidently, I'm not the only one with some of these questions...

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Sometimes Atheists Make Me So Proud...

Two prominent British atheists--Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens--have huddled up with their lawyers and plan to make the case that The Fucking Pope should be arrested when he visits the UK.

For what? Crimes against humanity, for his part in the cover-up of Catholic Church Inc's heavenly history of sex-abuse.

Now, I am not naive enough to think this plan will actually work out the way it should, but I love the fact that we finally live in an age where somebody is trying--publicly--to shake the plebians out of their delusional slumber and slash a chunk of flesh off the arrogant church monster.

How great are these two dudes? Check this out:

Last month Dawkins wrote a scathing article for the Washington Post in which he called the pope:

A leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds; a man who believes he is infallible and acts the part; a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa; a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.

Hitchens told the Sunday Times of London: "This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalized concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment."

"A leering old villain in frock." Huzzah!

And on a related note, check this out, also courtesy of HuffPo:

A prominent Old Testament scholar has resigned from a professorial position after he was recorded on video endorsing evolution.

Until several days ago, Bruce K. Waltke was a professor at Florida's Reformed Theological Seminary. But after the school found out about his video blog (the video has since been removed at Waltke's request) on the website of the BioLogos Foundation, which promotes harmony between science and theology, he lost his job.

According to several people who saw the video, Waltke said that Christianity's continued denial of evolution will "make [them] a cult."

Circle the wagons, religion, cuz the word is out--you're a cult!

It's no big surprise, I'm sure, but I take great satisfaction in the knowledge that at some point in the future, the religions of today will be as reviled as the pagans of yore. To each era of humanity their own, I guess.

Speaking of, I wonder what the future religions will be like...robots that smile beatifically as they grab you by the throat and squeeze until you swipe a credit card through a magnetized slit in their crotch?

Why not, right?

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