Catholics Furious Over Anti-Christian Penn and Teller Show
Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on last night’s edition of Penn & Teller’s show. The program aired on Showtime which is owned by CBS:
The Nazis couldn’t have done better. Having been in this job for over 16 years, I have never seen a more defamatory, obscene and vicious show on TV. And I mean about any religious or demographic group—not just Catholics. The lies about the Catholic Church, to say nothing of the vile language used by Penn Jillette, were positively astounding. Moreover, it never attempted to be comedic—from the very beginning it advertised the show as payback for 2,000 years of alleged crimes. This was Julius Streicher back from the grave.
In this half-hour show, the Catholic Church was blamed for every evil in history. Jillette said the “intolerance, greed, paranoia, hypocrisy and callous disregard for human suffering” was the hallmark of the Catholic Church. Others on the show branded the Church an “amoral” and “power hungry” institution that is just worried about its “cash flow.”
Jillette lied about the Vatican’s reaction to Sabina Guzzanti, an Italian foul-mouthed comedian who staged an assault on the pope in 2008: the pope never sought to throw “her sexy ass in jail” and never once sought any punitive measure against her—it’s all a bald face lie! Jillette lied about a 1962 Vatican document—it was a statement about penalties for priests who used the confessional to solicit sex: it was not a cover-up for sexual misconduct! He lied about Pope Benedict XVI—he had absolutely nothing to do with overseeing cases of priestly sexual misconduct in the United States! And so on.
Spokesmen for Catholics for Choice, SNAP and Dignity—three anti-Catholic groups that lie about their Catholic status—twisted, distorted and ridiculed Church teachings on sexuality.
I have asked to meet with Les Moonves of CBS. On Monday, we will have a mass mailing of DVD copies of this episode to bishops and religious leaders across the nation. This cannot go unanswered.
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When Voltaire was dying and a Catholic priest admonished him to: "Renounce the Devil and all his works" he replied: "This is no time to be making new enemies."
Humor is the strongest defense against the preposterous nonsense of Roman Catholicism as well as the other repulsive Fundamentalist cults.
These parasites have no power over people who are not terrified by death or fairy tales. Life is short enough, why waste it with lies?
It is a bad headline that begins: "Catholics Furious" then focuses on Bill Donohue. Donohue does not represent most Roman Catholics or much of anything else, he is a fanatic and a Vatican ass-kisser,. who fits right in with an authoritarian pope , This Benedict may have rejected the Hitler Jugen experience of his youth but that experience, obviously, shaped the personality of the former head of "the Inquisition," which in the 20th century is a sick joke.
This faux representative of American Catholic opinion should be more careful about using Nazi accusations for that presumes ignorance of his church 's complicity in the crimes of the Third Reich.
Bill Donohue is a disgusting man, who I would only appoint as spokesman for a cause that I despised. He speaks for the power of a cult that does not much exist in the first world, but is gaining power and influence in the third because, frankly, ignorance is one of the requisites for faith in lies.
The Church can say anything about me going to hell etc, but they cannot take any criticism.
Read about the Vatican it will make your blood boil the goings on there.
If you cant take the heat dont start the fire.
Keep it up Penn and Teller .
I continue to be amazed at how priestcraft can be taken seriously in the modern world.
The belief that a cosmic jewish zombie (who is his own father) can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood, while telepathically telling him that you accept him as your master, so that he can remove an evil force from your 'soul' that is present in all humanity because a woman (made out of one rib and some dirt) was tricked into eating fruit from a magic tree by a talking snake. And millions still buy that crap!
As Sagan said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." There is absolutely none for any religious belief! Sheep is a apt term for followers of any religion .
Nothing could please a satiric comedian more than watching the object of his chain-pulling attempt to explain away the charges.
Don't know what Penn & Teller were talking about. Atheist Soviets killed 45 million people in the Gulags. Atheist Chinese Communists slaughtered over 60 million. How many did that Cambodian atheist Pol Pot kill? Oh, how many people died thanks to the atheists who rose to power during the French revolution? Gosh! I think the catholics look like amateurs in comparison. Don't you?
Maybe one person's genocide IS another's liberation. With that in mind, perhaps the crusaders were justified when they went into Jerusalem after when the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah ordered the slaughter of thousands of Christian pilgrims & the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Perhaps the muslims were justified in killing 3,000 office workers on 9/11 or slaughtering all those Armenians.
And one more thing, Hitler youth was mandatory for every German child of Ratzinger's generation so I don't think that automatically makes him a Nazi (who were pagans & occultists).
I am not a Catholic but I just can't stomach this kind of hypocrisy & bigotry coming from Penn & Teller. Clean your own house before you say something about someone else.
Certainly, those who call themselves "catholic", the people themselves, deserve respect no matter how irrational their thinking and practices. What doesn't deserve respect and never ought to lest one savage throw out the importance of accurate observation and logical reason are the abstract concepts behind catholicism or any other irrational religion . Note that I call it "irrational religion" because there are indeed religions that are entirely rational.
Respect the human being for doing the best they are currenlty able, but NEVER respect poor observation or poor thinking or the practices and institutions leading from it. To do so is to betray that which leads to genuine knowledge, genuine wisdom, genuine human progress from savage idiocy to civilized enlightenment, i.e., accurate observation and logical reasoning.
I loved Bill Donohue's comparison of P+T with the nazis! The most striking thing about the nazis was the sheer volume of people they killed because of their religion - so if we're looking for real comparisons, who else in history ever put hordes of people to death on religious grounds? Interestingly, you never hear people like Bill Donohue complaining about a "Crusade" being waged against them.
I do seem to recall Benedict, while still a cardinal, blaming the priest-pedophile scandal on the larger American society -- something about us being such corrupt hedonists that even American priests are infected into doing what they wouldn't otherwise do. This was before a similar scandal was uncovered in Ireland. I don't believe he has explained how American society so fully infected the priesthood in Ireland.
While I think the Catholic Church is over-reacting, it is also sad to see P and T using their show as a pedestal to attack what they hate.
They're both right. And I have to lean towards the Church when I say that they are more right.
But they both have the right to say what they want about each other. Even if one is just being a pompous couple of dickheads, and the other is being a whiny bitch about it.