Catholicism: Now with added salvation
April 21st, 2007 at 18:15
One thing that never fails to amuse me, other than watching videos of people hurt themselves on YouTube, is the overwhelming hypocrisy of organised religion.
Apparently, the Catholic church have had a committee decide to abolish ‘limbo’. As far as I can tell, this ban extends to both the dance and the half-way place between Heaven and Hell.
It turns out that despite the Bible being the divine word of God, full of infinite wisdom and being 100% correct for all of eternity, that a sub-committee of religious types can change what God has said and/or done. I don’t understand how they can do this so obviously without undermining their entire religion.
“We’re closing down limbo after extensive public consultation and a build up there of dead unbaptized babies”.
“But God said that there’s a limbo, and he’s always right, because God’s brilliant”
“Yeah, well we just re-read the Bible and it turns out that if Catholic recruiters in Africa are having a hard time selling it because of the child mortality there, then we’re allowed to tell everyone that the babies go to heaven after all”
“But if mankind can change what God has to say at will, doesn’t that mean that the Bible isn’t in fact the work of some greater being?”
“Shut Up.”
According to the linked article, St Augustine said that unbaptized babies go to hell. They changed this in the Middle Ages to Limbo… and now they’re saying they go to Heaven. This is a complete U-turn on the part of the Catholic church. This doesn’t strike me as a very… divine.
It’s slightly odd that they seem to be changing the religion for PR reasons. In Africa there’s loads of child mortality and not many baptisms, and Islam has a much more attractive system than “your dead kids are going to limbo”, so they’ve changed their product to suit the market. Why don’t they just do a New Coke and completely reinvent the product? People seem to like Islam, so why not chuck in a few new daily prayers and turn your spires into domes? History has consistently proved that (Biblical) God is little more than a fictional mascot, like Uncle Ben or the Honey Monster so they could take an, er, “nothing is sacred” approach and completely remodel the entire Catholic church?
How about a new version of the Bible for the web 2.0 era? They could write is using a Wiki. That’s a bit like how the first Bible was written anyway: by a number of authors that looks accurate on the surface, but is actually riddled with inaccuracies.
I think there are problems with the current Bible (v1.0). I don’t like its ‘holier than thou’ attitude. I just think its bizarre that religious people can re-read it and come up with completely different conclusions. And doesn’t this make religion seem farcical?
When the Catholic church put Galileo under house arrest for suggesting that the solar system is heliocentric, it later did a massive U-turn and decided that he was in fact right after having another flick through their Bible. Does that mean the Pope at the time of Galileo who had condemned him is now sitting up in Heaven? Surely God wouldn’t reward someone who falsely imprisoned a great scientist?
Similarly, all of those dead babies that originally went to Hell… are they actually in Heaven? Have they all been given a compulsory purchase order on their homes in Hell and been moved to Heaven? How does this work?
I think the answer is that it doesn’t.
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