The Scathing Atheist

by Noah Lugeons

First, I’ll answer the title question in short form:

No. Catholics are really weird and fucked up and if one were to devote an eternal and restless existence to nothing but picking on Catholics, one would still fall far short of picking on them too much.

So with that out of the way, let me turn to the long-form answer.  For that, we’ll have to turn to the long form question.

I received an email from listener named Sai in Brisbane that started with a bunch of flattering praise for the podcast.  As much as I enjoy flattering praise, that hardly made the email worth blogging about.  But the final line did seem like something I should address:

I noticed that in your show you spend a lot of time talking about the Catholic Church specifically and just wanted to remind you that there are plenty of other religions to keep an eye on as well.

I looked back over it and I must admit that Sai is correct.  In the first two episodes I’ve covered 19 news items and 7 of them were about those Rascally Romans.  Now, in my defense, I should point out that in the 4 weeks I’ve been working on this podcast, the Catholic Church has:

• Fired the lead investigator into their internal investigation of child sex abuse,
• Released damning evidence that even the highest officials in one archdiocese was directly involved in covering up child sex abuse,
• Exhausted every possible legal maneuver to delay releasing the aforementioned damning evidence,
• Had a former priest arrested for (allegedly) selling $9000 a month worth of Meth and then laundering it through a sex-toy emporium,
• Ramped up efforts to limit the availability of contraception in AIDS ravaged and overpopulated parts of the world,
• Had an archdiocese file for bankruptcy protection because of millions of dollars in hush money and damages paid to victims of child sexual abuse, and
• Started tweeting in Latin.

Now, if you’re writing a comedic atheist news podcast, I think it’s clear that the Catholics are comedy gold.  They are the gift that keeps on giving.  If I have two minutes to fill in the program, it’s a good bet that they did something 2 minutes worth of stupid (or evil) that I can slip in.  If I need an extra story that viscerally demonstrates the real-world horror that ensues when you allow a class of sexually-inhibited, logically-ambivalent, power-drunk perverts to speak for god, you can bet that the Catholic Church has just such an example.

That being said, I must agree with Sai that perhaps I’m guilty of going for the low hanging fruit a bit too often.  In fact, I cut a skit I’d considered using in the last episode about the pope’s new Twitter account because I was starting to feel like the show was a little too Catholic.

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think I’m going too hard on the Catholics.  I just think I’m going too easy on all the other religions when I talk about Catholics instead of them.  Two episodes in and I haven’t even mentioned Scientology, Mormonism or those Islamic Barbarians (unity with Dawkins!).

Sorry about that…