Narcissist Haunted by Conscience

In one of the sillier moments of self-dramatizing atheism, some ex-Catholic writes a piece called “Let my Person Go!” and recounts, with unwitting comedy, his bafflement over how to get himself excommunicated from the Church.

It seems that some highly advanced mammals splashed water on him as a kid and mumbled some words over him, followed by several years of ingesting some organic materials and listening to readings from translations of writings by various ancient hominids who held certain beliefs about a non-existent deity. That, at any rate, is what the author maintains.

Yet, inexplicably, instead of just living by his purported convictions and, you know, not going into architectural structures where these behaviors are performed by hominids and instead going and doing something else, our Hero feels a peculiar need to rub off the long evaporated splash of water, to vomit up the organic materials, to remove from his ears the sound of the words he heard. Some of us would call that “irrational” not “rationalism”.

Some of us would also note that this particular *kind* of irrationality especially seems to afflict ex-Catholics, who have the oddest habit, whether they become atheist fundamentalists or religious fundamentalists, of lingering around the Church they say means nothing to them, jawing on at length about how they have totally put the Catholic faith behind them and found freedom. Yessirree, they are free! They aren’t obsessed with find some way to hit the Church again. They *tons* of reasons (and they’d love to share them with you) why the Catholic Church means nothing to them any more and they have totally left it all behind.