Espionage Enterprises

All over the news there is a story about several Catholic women trying to become ordained as priests. Catholic canon law prohibits female ordination into the priesthood. That’s the rule. If they want to follow a different rule then they’re not playing the same game. If your personal rules for checkers call for a chainsaw and dictates that whichever player has evacuated his/her bowels most recently always wins on Tuesdays (the Tuesday checkers shit addendum) then you’re not playing checkers. You know how I can tell? I know many if not all of the rules for checkers.

Luckily for humankind, one problem that most people face today is that they’ve been exposed to rational thought and the idea that proof is valuable when it comes to a belief. But this means that more and more religious people all the time are forced to confront certain aspects of their religion that they do not agree with. They have a few choices:

1. They can ignore the conflict. (unwise)
2. They can adjust their personal belief to allow for the discrepancy (stupid)
3. Or they can conclude that perhaps this is not the religion for them.

Science is successful because it allows for mistakes. It wants to find mistakes, learn from mistakes, and rid itself of mistakes. Christianity is successful because it threatens members and non-members alike with punishment for disobedience and demands large amounts of their money for no good reason. It has absolutely no intention of doing anything with mistakes other than hiding them or denying them vehemently. Doing anything else would suggest that god is flawed.

When you find yourselves at odds with your religion you should consider refraining from asking it to change. It’s not going to want to. Instead, you should consider asking yourself to change.

The Vatican has said that, by their actions, these women are separating themselves from god. I don’t agree with the statement in its true meaning because I don’t believe in god. I do agree with the spirit of the statement because I agree that these women, by their selfishness, are isolating themselves from an institution that is presumably important to them. There aren’t female priests in Catholicism. Petty disputes like this are the reason there are almost 40,000 denominations of Christianity! That is ludicrous. No wonder it’s so popular – there are so many flavors it’s hard to not get some in your mouth.

My argument is not based on the idea that women should not be Catholic priests. It’s based on the idea that humans should not be Christians.

Side note about faith:

Occasionally you may find yourself debating religion or philosophy with another person. I know I have. When it comes to faith I tell people I have no faith. I know this because I am resourceful enough to think for myself and also research things for myself. Due to this personal quality I happen to know the actual definition of faith. A great definition is this:

The mental acceptance of and confidence in a claim as truth without proof supporting the claim.

People have told me that I do have faith. I dispute this because I don’t believe anything without some kind of evidence. I can’t help it. These people invariably say something like,

“You have faith that a chair will hold you up when you sit in it.”

What’s funny about this is that someone told them to say it. You can tell. They never actually thought about what they’re saying. I do not have faith that a chair will support me. I believe based on personal experience that a chair will support me. I also know that I could be wrong and that the chair could collapse. I’m not very stupid.