Epic Battle of Dangerously Deluded Patriarchs

Sometimes the tsunami of rightwingnutter religious zealotry and insanity gets overwhelming, even for those dedicated to observing its surges.

Fortunately, we can always count upon our splendid blogging colleagues to rise to the challenge.

Marion Pat Robertson and Pope Maledict made headlines this week for the usual reasons. As expected, they cranked up the religious rightwingnutz quotient.

From Nunc Scio:

Yesterday, on his daily television show, Robertson suggested that Haiti is “cursed” because it made a pact with the devil to secure its freedom from France in 1804. You can watch the video here, because I don’t want such vile material on my blog. You’ll recall that Rev. Robertson, a prominent religious conservative, also thinks that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for America’s sinful ways. [...]

This is an excellent example of what I like to call the “Onion of Insanity”. [...] In this case, the Onion of Insanity has three layers:

1) Incredible indifference to human suffering. Thousands upon thousands of people were killed in Haitian earthquake, and many million more are struggling through the aftermath. To suggest that this cataclysm is somehow the fault of the Haitian people is monstrous. It is especially disgusting to suggest that this punishment is the result of an alleged event that can only be described as superstitious nonsense.

Read the whole thing. You'll learn a new evaluative tool for discerning the levels of batshit-crazy whenever you encounter the religiously deranged.

From Slap Upside the Head: Pope Maledict ...

speaking to several diplomats in Vatican City last week, called gay men and women—and the laws that protect their human rights—a threat to no less than all of humankind.

“Creatures differ from one another,” he began, “and can be protected or endangered in different ways, as we know from daily experience. One such attack comes from laws or proposals which, in the name of fighting discrimination, strike at the biological basis of the difference between sexes. I am thinking,” he continued, “of certain countries in Europe or North and South America.” [...]

OK, the pope’s argument isn’t well veiled. It’s also a tired one. It basically says that since gay couples can’t biologically reproduce with each other, enough gay people will spell the death of all humankind. Except that, you know, it wouldn’t.

In response to this - "Yet freedom cannot be absolute, since man is not himself God, but the image of God, God’s creation. For man, the path to be taken cannot be determined by caprice or willfulness, but must rather correspond to the structure willed by the Creator", may I remind our readers that Mother Nature and/or God terminates thousands of pregnancies in the first trimester, and thus for women to make such choices with the assistance of medical care would seem to "correspond to the structure willed by the Creator".

Marion and Maledict - two peas in a gynophobic pod.