One of those humorless and unreflective New Atheist types continues to demonstrate that New Atheists suffer from a major personality disorder that leaves them irony-impaired.
It seems that a bishop gave a homily at the shrine in Knock in which he reportedly said that godless culture was attacking the Church.
The being post-Christian Ireland, all this is being treated with great seriousness and nobody is laughing. Prayers for the good bishop and his irony-impaired antagonist would be appreciated.
Thanks for this story.
Take a look in the mirror; that’s our future, too, if we continue to tolerate these unwarranted uber-State encroachments upon our liberties.
So, a secular humanist is suing a Bishop for saying that the Church is under attack from the secular world? Well, that ought to convince the Bishop that he is wrong.
Coming soon to a country near you.
I am still proud of my Irish heritage, but they are making it harder.
Here’s a link to the homily. “Brain-dead” is right. It’s too hard to read the words to the homily and think it was hate speech directed against humanists.
I’ve looked into the law in question and its history, at some length. The bishop has nothing at all to worry about. It’s a publicity stunt. I have not been able to find a single case in which that law was used to prosecute someone for speech, except where it was part of a physical altercation. All a defendant has to do is to say they didn’t mean to “stir up hatred” by what they said or published, and the whole thing is dropped. From the get-go, the law was obviously written more as a statement of tolerance than a real criminal justice tool.
The temptation to leap on a story that seems to validate the Christians-are-as-persecuted as in Nero’s Rome is irresistible, but as soon as you take the bait, you’re letting yourselves be played by a professional gadfly. He plays the fiddle and calls the tune, and you dance. This is a guy whose infamy probably wouldn’t have extended beyond his own pub or county, and now he’s got the whole Western Catholic world on pins and needles.
That reaction is his payday, and to the provocateur, that payoff is sweeter than one of Newt’s bazillion-dollar “consulting” gigs. If you give him that satisfaction, trust me, he’ll be back and have another go at you, and you’ll fall for it again, and the silly tosser will be laughing himself incontinent while a dozen copycats will be scheming to top him with some other lawsuit or criminal allegation.
Kenneth, that might reflect cultural differences: Americans tend to see the law as something to be followed to the letter (perhaps because of our Protestant background). I’ve read that in some European cultures it’s more the spirit of the law that matters, i.e., the law sets out an ideal but not an exact standard of conduct. I could be wrong, though, in this case.
You’re quite right. In the U.S., we incarcerate 743 people out of every 100,000. Taking into account people who are in some control of the criminal system, we’re probably close to 1,000 or more. That’s the highest in the world, and probably all of human history. Way above places like Cuba and Iran that we portray as prison states.
Ireland’s incarceration rate is 95 per 100,000.
Look at the scandals that are coming out now. Makes a person wonder how long the bishops and cardinals thought they could hide it. Just like the U.S no higher ups are going to jail.