Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl says it’s not that the church disrespects women. Oh fuck no, said the chair of the US bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, the church thinks women are just lovely.

Noting that women hold a variety of church leadership positions in parishes and dioceses, Archbishop Wuerl said, “The church’s gratitude toward women cannot be stated strongly enough.”

“Women offer unique insight, creative abilities and unstinting generosity at the very heart of the Catholic Church,” he said.

They have that there women’s intuition, and they’re so creative with the flowers and the packed lunches and the…the flowers, and the generosity just never quits, they give us all their money and a lot of the time they let us … Read the rest

Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Project is annoyed at (wait for it) “New Atheists.” He says members of the project have been “relentlessly attacked by “New Atheists.”

The crux of these attacks seems to take two forms. In the first, clergy members are ridiculed simply for having religious faith. In the second, supposedly intelligent people pretend they are unable to distinguish these clergy members from the fundamentalists…

He doesn’t quote or name or link to any “New Atheists” doing this, so it’s hard to know if his description is accurate, but in any case…he seems to have the usual, and socially conventional, blind spot about “religious faith.” He seems, in other words, to be blind to the fact that … Read the rest

Yet another smug unthinking cliché-filled diatribe about zealous fundamentalist literalist evangelist atheism, this time from Reza Aslan. It’s as original as the other nine million.

The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling: the conviction that they are in sole possession of truth (scientific or otherwise), the troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics (Dawkins has compared creationists to Holocaust deniers), the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among most religious fundamentalists), the simplistic reductionism of the religious phenomenon, and, perhaps most bizarrely, their overwhelming sense of siege: the belief that they have been oppressed and marginalized by Western societies…

He says, in the very act of … Read the rest