Previously the selection of my personal top three items of religious weirdness have perhaps been dominated by US religious weirdness each week. So what happens if I apply a US filter this week, will I be left bereft and find nothing to choose because the US has a monopoly on religious weirdness?
In a word … no.
So with that thought in mind, I’ll simply skip over the US specific items, such as these gems via the Friendly Atheist blog …
- Anti-LGBTQ Speaker: Homosexual Men Use Gay-Straight Alliances to “Recruit” Teens
- Man Says He May Kill His 12-Year-Old Demon-Possessed Son
- Christian Activist: Roy Moore Dated Girls Because All the Older Women Were Taken
- Florida Church Warns Visitors: “We Are Heavily Armed”
- “Family Values” GOP Ex-State Senator Pleads Guilty to Child Sex Trafficking
- Rick Wiles: Liberals Are Forming a “New Nazism” To Kill Christians
- Bigots Say Starbucks Is Promoting Lesbianism, Somehow, On Its Holiday Cups
- etc….
… and will instead present you with the following non-US top three items of religious weirdness that have taken place during the past seven days.
The point is of course the observation that the US has no monopoly on religious weirdness.
Item 1 – Catholic School in New Zealand gets new pornographic statue of a saint
This falls into the “How did nobody notice this?” category. The New Zealand Herald reports …
A catholic school in Adelaide has been forced to cover up a brand new statue after the unfortunate placement of a loaf of bread caused a stir online.
Blackfriars Priory School in Prospect unveiled the statue of St Dominic last week, in which the religious icon is depicted handing a young boy a loaf of bread.
But due to a major design flaw one could be forgiven for thinking the 12th century Saint was holding something a lot less appropriate, news.com.au reported
What is mind blowing is that none of the adults actually noticed the problem until after it had been installed, and only realised that something might be wrong when the kids in the school started taking pictures.
Then again why should they have expected any kind of problem with a statue? Things like that just don’t happen with other statues …
… or stained glass church windows …
So what will they now do with the statue?
Well … since this is Catholicism, all they need do is just transfer it to another school.
Item 2 – Greek Orthodox Leader Blames Atheist Prime Minister for Deadly Floods
There have been floods in Greece that resulted in both the tragic death some people and also widespread destruction of property.
Greek Orthodox Bishop Kalavryta Ambrosios has worked out what the cause of all this is. Pappas Post reports …
He called out the “atheist prime minister and many government ministers” in his fiery post about the floods, which decimated towns in the western outskirts of Athens.
Ambrosios, who once urged his faithful to lash out at gays and to “spit on them, beat them up” because “they are not human,” ominously declared that we are at “the end of days” and living in the “century of the anti-Christ” and that the various weather disasters taking place stem from “the rage of God.”
He complained that television stations included politicians, engineers, meteorologists and other “experts” to discuss the circumstances surrounding the tragic weather events, but not a single man of the clergy was invited on a panel of experts to explain that above all, such weather phenomenon were matters of God.
Read Metropolitan Ambrosios’ blog post (in Greek) here.
Our palaeolithic ancestors would have quite naturally decided that bad weather was the wrath of a god. Today most of us now do actually understand weather and what drives it. Hint: no gods required, hence we don’t need theological “experts” to sit on panels to explain it all. Unfortunately, we do still appear to have some of our palaeolithic ancestors still living with us.
I also can’t help but wonder if this guy is related to Pat Robertson.
Item 3 – Australian Official Won’t Support Gay Marriage Because of Crocodile Attacks
There was a recent national mail-in survey in Australia that asked about gay marriage. The results are that 62% said that they did indeed support it. In response, the prime minister has promised to pass a law to enable it to happen before Christmas …
The people of Australia have spoken and I intend to make their wish the law of the land by Christmas. This is an overwhelming call for marriage equality. pic.twitter.com/PWZbH5H71r
— Malcolm Turnbull (@TurnbullMalcolm) November 14, 2017
Not everybody is a progressive.
The anti-LGBT Christian fundamentalist politician, Bob Katter, has suggested at a recent press conference that there is a far more important issue to focus on – “Crocodile Attacks” …
“But I ain’t spending any time on it because in the meantime, every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a crocodile in north Queensland.”
That clip was being broadcast to mock him, and not give him a platform. The media commentators are quite literally falling off their chairs laughing at him. That is exactly how it should be when faced with such daft nonsense.
Side note – his claim that Crocodile Attacks are a real problem is complete fiction. Since they started keeping track of crocodile attacks back in 1985 (32 years ago) there have been exactly 11 fatal attacks in total. You don’t need to do the math there to work out that this is not one fatality every three months.
It’s also not a first, this guy has a reputation for saying weird stuff.