Cults, Big and Small

Two items on the news tonight--the Papal visit and the polygamous sect that has been raided by Texas authorities--have a certain link, I think. But I'm a person who believes that religious institutions do the human race far more harm than they do good. You can call me a dreamer, but I subscribe to the lyrics of John Lennon's "Imagine."

I'm sure an overwhelming majority of Americans view the FLDS, a splinter group of the Church of Latter Day Saints, as kooks. What they are really, is a well-orchestrated front for men who like to fuck young girls. There's a certain evil genius to Warren Jeffs and his henchmen, who have brainwashed so many women into believing that offering their under-age flesh to middle-aged men is somehow spiritually correct that they pass this belief on to their own daughters, pimping them out. The state of Texas has rightly taken away their children, and they are in despair, wearing their Little House on the Prairie dresses and staring vacantly into the camera, clearly without a shred of their individuality left. They are pod people.

But what is any religion but a cult that has bamboozled the worshippers? The Catholic church is a prime example, a cult that managed to catch on in a huge way. Here we have millions of people following the will of a group of elderly celibate (supposedly) men who wear medieval costumes and have traditions that are as hopelessly arcane as alchemy. Their main language is Latin, a dead language, for goodness' sake, and it took an eon for them to even ease up on the insistence that mass be done in this language that few could understand.

The Pope, as with all of the college of cardinals, is a politician, with an agenda and a facility for achieving power. He is the head of a church that has a long history of divisiveness (ironic, considering the dictionary definition of the word catholic) and inhumanity. They may not put people to the rack anymore, but at least in the U.S. they have done their best to cover-up systematic abuse of children. The Pope made news this week by acknowledging this. Excuse me, but that's years too late.

I think the greatest misery the Catholic church has perpetrated on mankind is the ban on birth control, which has led to overpopulation, which if unchecked will lead to a rapid depletion of the Earth's resources. I heard a writer once suggest that to arrest this depletion, couples everywhere should have only one child, so world populations will return to a sane level. The Catholic church, I imagine would frown upon this, all because somebody once took quill to parchment to write down "Be fruitful and multiply."

Though I'm baffled by the idolatry that this reactionary octogenarian receives when he lands on our shores, I certainly can't speak against Catholics as individuals. Two of my very best friends are Catholics, and like many American Catholics, they pick and choose the dogma that they want to follow. Therefore, the Pope isn't quite the superstar here that he is in countries that are institutionally Catholic. But he still draws a far bigger crowd than I think he deserves.