Religious bastards are not limited to the Vatican, of course.

Saudi Arabia’s most senior cleric was quoted Wednesday as saying it is permissible for 10-year-old girls to marry and those who think they’re too young are doing the girls an injustice. “It is wrong to say it’s not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger,” Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh, the country’s grand mufti, was quoted as saying. “A female who is 10 or 12 is marriageable and those who think she’s too young are wrong and are being unfair to her,” he said…”We hear a lot about the marriage of underage girls in the media, and we should know that Islamic law has not brought injustice

The Vatican is different from you and me; it has an eccentric way of ordering its priorities – a way so eccentric that it passes human understanding.

It has this secret tribunal, you see, which it has only now decided to open to the public, or rather to that portion of the public known as ‘the faithful.’ This secret tribunal ‘handles confessions of sins so grave only the pope can grant absolution.’ Ooh – the pope’s a busy guy, so they must be some truly grave sins then. (But then, ‘sin’ is a silly idea, and the Catholic church’s ideas of what sin is are also silly – but still, the pope is a busy guy, so they’re not going … Read the rest

Denialism and death threats.

A new book defending vaccines, written by a doctor infuriated at the claim that they cause autism, is galvanizing a backlash against the antivaccine movement in the United States. But there will be no book tour for the doctor, Paul A. Offit, author of “Autism’s False Prophets.” He has had too many death threats…[Offit] is also the co-inventor of a vaccine against rotavirus, a diarrheal disease that kills 60,000 children a year in poor countries.

So…Paul Offit collaborated on the invention of a vaccine that if implemented can save the lives of at least 60,000 children a year in poor countries – and yet ‘antivaccine activists’ think he’s evil and some think he should get … Read the rest

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Excuse me – I can’t help it.

The Pope has instructed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the Holy Office of the Inquisition, to draw up a new handbook to help bishops snuff out an explosion of bogus heavenly apparitions. Benedict XVI plans to update the Vatican’s current rules on investigating apparitions to help distinguish between true and false claims of visions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, messages, stigmata (the appearances of the five wounds of Christ), weeping and bleeding statues and Eucharistic miracles.

Well yes, certainly, of course; one can quite see why he would. Only…is it really, actually, genuinely possible to distinguish between true and false claims of visions and stigmata and the … Read the rest