Sunday, August 26, 2012

Real-Life Bigotry, And My Too-Hot-For-Huffpo Response!

I don't know whether this is particularly brilliant, but it's okay, and I haven't been posting a lot lately, and frigging lame-ass Huffington Post didn't post my first attempt to reply to “I can tell you how the catholics[...]" and that was almost 24 hours ago so it looks like they're not going to post it, and below is my 2nd attempt, and who knows when or if they'll post that. (The moderation on HP Religion continues to be messed up. As you can see, in this exchange I'm not even the anti-religion party. But I think I may have ticked off some unbalanced obsessive ueber-troll who's gotten herself the position of HP Community Moderator and hangs around the Religion section and has made a project of me. Or maybe it's just messed-up business as usual.)

The Rev. James Martin, S.J., wrote the first HP piece of his which I like, a satire of the religious views of today's GOP, and a Bigoted Nimrod responded:

FIRST BN: Oh, this is rich coming from a Jesuit. They practically invented money-grubbing. Say "Father," why don't you tell us about the Jesuits and the slave trade?

ME: Why don't you tell us about a religion that never was involved in the slave trade?

SECOND BN: I can tell you how the Catholics got all up in bed with the Nazis if you wanna hear that one...

ME: I've heard that one. And you didn't answer my question: what religion was never involved in the slave trade? Even some Quakers owned slaves, although Quakers were a very strong force in the political movement which finally abolished slavery in the US. Have you heard about Maximilian Kolbe? Or Bernhard Lichtenberg? How about Kurt Gerstein? Ever read any Heinrich Böll? Joseph Roth?Franz Werfel? Alfred Döblin?How about regarding people as individuals instead of as members of a group? And while I'm at it --

"[The Jesuits] practically invented money-grubbing."

-- are you KIDDING me? Money was around for thousands of years before there were Jesuits, does FIRST BN really think the people who invented the first money didn't rig their cool new system in their own favor, the way rich people have rigged the US tax code? Does he really think something very similar to money-grubbing wasn't going on long before there was money, when trade was mostly barter? I think I'm going to disagree with just about any statement in the form of: "Everything is the ______ fault," whether you fill in the blank with "Catholics'," "Muslims'," "rich people's," "Mormons'," "Jews'," "Germans'," "Devil's," or whatever else. The world is actually more complicated that that.

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