The most vile act of religious intolerance perpetrated on American soil before the 11th September attacks of 2001 befell 120 travellers between Utah and California in September 1857 when a hit-squad of Mormon fanatics gave new meaning to missionary work:
It was at Mountain Meadows, a southern Utah oasis, that Mormon militiamen slaughtered the entire complement (save 17 small children younger than eight, who were regarded as ‘innocent blood’ under Mormon doctrine) of a California-bound wagon-train on 11th September 1857. The wagon-train’s considerable wealth in livestock, assets, and gold was plundered, much of it being taken by Mormon leaders as ‘tithes’ ... The surviving children were adopted by Mormon families, some of them taken into the homes of the men who murdered their parents (pleas from the child survivors’ relatives in Arkansas resulted in federal action to return them to their families). Despite the involvement of high-ranking Mormon leaders and a trail of evidence leading up to Brigham Young himself, only one man — John D Lee — was tried and executed, 20 years later, for the massacre. Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets
Religion adulterates the human brain with so powerful a drug to persuade rational men and women to babble peculiar words and songs and to enact strange rituals that in any other context would be evidence of an unsound mind and likely to land the performer in hospital for a spell of psychiatric assessment. Chanting, the flailing of arms, self-flagellation and the addressing of an imaginary friend pass unchallenged and are mild compared to the more sinister acts of religious devotion.
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. Professor Steven Weinberg
The poison of religion flows freely through the body politic and influences foreign affairs. The United States grants Israel billions in foreign aid each year for Israel in turn to spend a proportion of that money in the United States on propaganda to persuade the religious right that Israel must achieve its Zionist aims in the Middle East as a precursor to the End of the World. The suppression of the Palestinian people is relegated to a mere by-product of this process. Upright respectable Christians really do look forward to the destruction of the human race and consider such an outcome as inevitable.
But the exclusive claims to god-given authority, made by hysterical clerics on both sides and further stoked by Armageddon-minded Christians who hope to bring on the Apocalypse (preceded by the death or conversion of all Jews), have made the situation insufferable, and put the whole of humanity in the position of hostage to a quarrel that now features the threat of nuclear war. Religion poisons everything. As well as a menace to civilisation, it has become a threat to human survival. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Sam Harris warned in a 2005 lecture against the faith-fuelled Christian holocaust-loving army harping as to war: ‘If they turned on their television sets and saw a mushroom cloud had replaced New York City, they would see a silver lining in this cloud.’
The serial offenders of religion enjoy immunity of prosecution for dereliction of duty of care against their inmates. The religious syndicate grasps tax-relief status despite a structure that apes the most powerful corporations and an income that dwarfs that of many small countries. The Mormon Church [Morg] has recently laundered about five billions on a spanking new shopping mall in Salt Lake City. A recent article in Free Inquiry decries the Morg for donating a meagre 0.7% of its tithed income annually to charity (cf. 29% United Methodist Church). Estimates of the Morg’s wealth — an unpublished Howard-Hughes-esque hoarding of lands, corporations, radio stations, restaurants, farms, ranches and utilities — range upwards of one hundred billions.
‘The Catholic Church is the biggest financial power, wealth accumulator and property owner in existence,’ reports the documentary Ring of Power. ‘During World War II the Vatican was criticised for supporting Hitler and his Nazi regime. To this day the Vatican is still under investigation for plundering Nazi gold from the Swiss bank accounts of Jewish holocaust victims. Over the past five decades more than one thousand five hundred bishops have been identified in the sexual assault of tens of thousands of boys and girls in their trusting congregations and orphanages. Why is this filthy rich institution preaching spiritual values of poverty and chastity while cardinals, bishops and priests cover up their crimes of sexual abuse? Why has the Church fought and resisted the compensation claims of their sexually, emotionally and spiritually traumatised victims?’
The director Amy Berg in her documentary Deliver Us From Evil unveils the bad news: ‘Over 100,000 victims of clergy sexual abuse have come forward in the United States alone’. The BBC Panorama episode Sex Crimes and the Vatican: ‘Almost 4,500 US priests have been accused of raping or sexually abusing children’.
The Vatican Press in 1962 issued a secret decree under the rubric: Instruction on the Manner of Proceeding in Cases of Solicitation the Decree Crimen Sollicitationis, which dribbled the following depraved drivel: ‘Anyone involved in a sex-abuse investigation, the accuser and the accused, are to be restrained by a perpetual silence ... in all matters and with all persons, under the penalty of excommunication.’ In 2001, reported Panorama, the rodent-like Pope Ratzinger ‘created the successor to the Decree: in spirit it was the same — overarching secrecy with a threat of excommunication. He sent a copy to every Bishop in the world.’
Don’t expect for the victims much of a ringing apology from the evasive Grand Inquisitor Ratzinger: ‘I acknowledge the pain that the Church in America has experienced as a result of the sexual abuse of minors.’
Frank Keating, former head of the Catholic Review Board, protested in his resignation letter: ‘To resist Grand Jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, that is the model of a criminal organisation, not my church.’
The brain of the believer builds a bulwark of opiate faith against the canons of corrupt Popes, the chains of the Inquisition, the queues of escaping Nazis, the crooked cross, the silliness of saints, the reliance on relics, the persecution of scientists, the sale of Indulgences, the war against condoms, the restriction of scripture, the tears of the abused, the false-flag terrorism of P2 lodge, the protection of priests decked in their finery of purple, scarlet and gold, and drunk with the blood of martyrs.
The entrusting of God’s Church to the leaky seven hills of Rome is mountebanked with fascism. But to the eyes of the gullible lamb of the Lard this beast of the Roman empire is shrouded in the woollen clothing of a benevolent charity:
A world without the Catholic Church would be poorer, would be more hopeless, and would be a worse place in which to live. Anne Widdecombe, and John Onaiyekan v Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens, 2009
A mad cross between Illuminati and Cosa Nostra, the religious hierarchy wriggles and writhes in the shame of immunity, but the elastic brain of the believer is capable of the most brilliant mental gymnastics. Bother not to keep score of the victims and the suffering, for a broken underclass of millions is never enough.
Religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. Daniel Dennett, The Four Horsemen: Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens