Christopher Hitchens has a new post up on Slate entitled The Great Catholic Cover-Up: The Pope’s Entire Career Has The Stench Of Evil About It. In order to read the article and not become enraged, I was forced to do so by listening to Miles Davis’s Flamenco Sketches from the album Kind Of Blue, music so soothing that even these allegations would not be enough to ruin my day.

It’s no secret that I find the Catholic Church in most aspects to be an evil organization. That doesn’t mean Catholics are evil, but I would say misguided by a powerful force that gets at them from the earliest moments of their lives. The average Catholic goes about their worship cherry-picking the most suitable aspects of the book to fit their particular world view, and are blissfully unaware of the many evils of the body of the church. And this is entirely intentional. The church uses these secret societies and internal doctrine to ensure that John Q. Public never gets a whiff of the true nature of the organization.

At this point, the church should be thought of as a multinational corporation. They have to rake in profits, and their customers are the parishioners. Like all corporations, they spend a lot of effort ensuring that how they look to their customers does not reflect how they operate their day to day business. But in almost any corporation, if the salesman is a child rapist, getting caught means getting fired.

Still, I find it staggering that these are the people who tell us atheists that we can’t possibly have a moral compass without faith. Really? And what direction does your moral compass point when you play three card monte with child rapists, keeping them moving so nobody sees what’s really happening?

Jim