Hot news – the pope will address Congress.

Pope Francis will become the first leader of the Catholic church to address the United States Congress.

Francis will stop off in the Capitol on Sept. 24 during his week-long tour of the U.S., and speak to a joint session of Congress. House Speaker John Boehner announced the news in a Thursday morning tweet.

Why. Why will he do that. Why will the pope address Congress.

Why? Why was he invited?

Congress is the government. It’s a secular government. The pope is the head of a religious institution, and a very wicked reactionary woman-hating child-raping lawbreaking religious institution at that. Why invite him to talk to a major branch of government? … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So now that you know how to conduct yourself if you have the audacity to go out in public, let’s turn our attention to Congress and the pope. Congress has asked the pope to come along and talk to them next time he’s in town, officially.

Congressional leaders have invited Pope Francis to address a joint session of Congress during his expected visit to the United States next year.

He’s planning to come over in September for a conference on families. Because that makes sense, right? Having an officially celibate cleric participate in a conference on families? They should invite him to a conference on early childhood development, too; he could explain the benefits of being raped by the … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

We hear a lot about people going out looking for things to be offended by. Sometimes that’s not what’s going on; other times it is.

One of the latter is when an editor shouts across a noisy newsroom, responding to a delay in production, “can anyone tell what’s happening to the fucking Pope?” and a Catholic employee brings a claim in the Employment Tribunal for harassment and victimisation on the grounds of his religious belief.

The Appellant, a casual sub-editor on the Times Newspaper, was a Roman Catholic. He was working at the Times during the visit to the United Kingdom of the Pope in 2010. During March the Times was preparing a story about the Pope relating to allegations

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Kevin Smith of CFI-Canada did another “Ask the Experts” for the Ottawa Citizen – this one on the burning question, “What are your ‘spiritual’ New Year’s resolutions?”

Dam’ fool question. To be nicer to my fellow humans? To see more spooky things? To be a better dualist?

Kevin hints at a similar sort of doubt, but then gives them a reply anyway.

My motivation comes from an unlikely source: the Pope. God’s deputy has taken up  Twitter, and he’s surprisingly adept at pontificating in 140 characters or less.  Recently, he committed what I consider his first tweet-sin, when he charged  atheists with denying human dignity. He wrote, “When you deny God, you deny  human dignity. Whoever defends God is defending

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The pope has his message of peace for the new year all written and typed up and translated and posted online. The pope is way ahead of the game! The pope can kick back and watch some football.

Well it won’t have been very difficult. It doesn’t break any new ground. Somebody could have put it together by cutting and pasting from previous messages of peace for the new year.

It’s not very rich in what you might call self-awareness or self-knowledge.

In addition to the varied forms of terrorism and international crime, peace is also endangered by those forms of fundamentalism and fanaticism which distort the true nature of religion, which is called to foster fellowship and reconciliation among

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)