In this final installment of my response to Jeffrey T. Kuhner’s article “Why God is Great,” I want to talk about a few paragraphs within his article dealing with sexuality. In fact, I would like to even focus on Mr. Kuhner’s particular view of masturbation.
First, I would like to give credit where credit is due. Kuhner actually did have a paragraph in which he came close to articulating Christopher Hitchens’ actual position on a subject. While in the last blog article, I pointed out that Kuhner claimed Hitchens only hates the Catholic Church because of their alleged anti-communistic position, but in the previous paragraph of his article, Kuhner went on to give some of the real reasons Hitchens has such a dislike of the Catholic Church. Is Jeff’s memory so short that he couldn’t remember what he had written just one paragraph earlier? Here is what Kuhner has to say:
“The one institution Mr. Hitchens despises above all, however, is the Catholic Church. In his view, it is a primitive, medieval institution founded upon lies, anti-Semitism and sexual oppression – the means by which a clerical theocracy controls human beings by dictating their sexual behavior. He has smeared – without any concrete evidence – Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict not only for purportedly coddling pedophile priests, but for encouraging mass “child rape” and “child slavery.” Moreover, he stresses that the church is directly responsible for the deaths of millions of AIDS victims because of its stance on contraception – despite the fact that, if followed, the church’s teachings make the sexual transmission of the disease impossible.”
For the record, the Catholic Church is a primitive, medieval institution. It certainly wasn’t created yesterday. Also, since the Church has yet to prove the existence of their deity and has arguably built a business and an empire around lies, this claim seems to also be true. Does anyone remember indulgences? That was the practice in which the Catholic Church told people that they would go to Heaven if they paid the Church enough money. I have to think that the Church officials at the time knew this was not true. I can’t believe they could have honestly been that delusional. But I guess when dealing with the deeply religious anything is possible.
The claim that the Church was at one time and perhaps still is to some extent anti-Semitic is obviously true. This isn’t to say that all Catholics are anti-Semitic, but it is to say that at certain points during the Church’s history the leadership was certainly anti-Semitic. Hitler was a Roman Catholic and the Church leadership at the time did give some support to his efforts. With that said, there were of course brave clergy who did the right thing during that difficult time and hid Jews just as there are brave clergy today who do what they can to protect the victims of clerical rape. But the leadership of the Catholic Church is not so brave.
As a point of fact, there is evidence to support the claim that John Paul II knew that child rape was going on and gave the current Pope the job of dealing with it. There is also stronger evidence that Pope Benedict before becoming Pope was chiefly responsible for moving priests around the world to evade being caught. This is of course the current scandal which has gotten a lot of press all over the world.
As far as the AIDS epidemic on the African continent goes, the Pope’s view of contraception and the Catholic Church’s propagation of the idea that it is better to die from AIDS than to use condoms and live costs millions of lives a year. That is a stone cold fact.
But Kuhner also mentioned that Hitchens believes that, “clerical theocracy controls human beings by dictating their sexual behavior.” This is where I will post another brief paragraph of this article:
“Mr. Hitchens also champions anti-Catholic bigotry because the church opposes the left’s radical sexual agenda. Mr. Hitchens is a virulent supporter of abortion, homosexuality and even – I am not making this up – masturbation.”
That’s right folks; Jeffrey Kuhner is not making this up. Christopher Hitchens actually supports masturbation. Holy fucking shit. After centuries of Catholic lies to school aged children about masturbation causing hairy palms, boldness, and eternal torture in Hell, here comes crazy old Hitchens telling people the truth that masturbation is completely harmless.
As much as I find it interesting that Kuhner considers a woman’s right to an abortion and homosexuality to be a “radical sexual agenda,” the fact that he considers masturbation to be even more radical is fascinating. Yeah, we have all heard the Church’s position on abortion and homosexuality before and yeah, we have even heard the Church’s opposition to masturbation before. That isn’t anything new. But few Catholic apologists actually focus on masturbation these days. To my knowledge, no one except Kuhner considers it even more radically deviant than abortion and homosexuality. That’s kind of new to me.
If that is really Jeffrey Kuhner’s priority then there is no wonder he is so sexually frustrated. He probably has a huge hard on for Hitchens but is afraid to masturbate to him. It does seem like all these wacky Christians who are anti-gay turn out to be gay, so I wonder if Kuhner will get caught literally with his pants down any time soon.
As for me, I plan on printing out Mr. Kuhner’s article and masturbating all over it just so God will send me to Hell for it. How awesome would it be if when I got to Hell, Satan asked me why I was there and I told him that I “spilled the seed” on Jeffrey Kuhner’s crappy article. Of course there is no Satan and no Hell, so maybe I’ll just settle for going to a Catholic confessional and relating my “crime” to some sexually frustrated priest. But if he asks me to go into the back room, I am so out of there.
Filed under: Blasphemy, Catholics, Religion, conversation, sex | 2 Comments »
