Mile Zero
if challenge had a taste, you'd be quite delicious
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
You may have heard by now that Mother Teresa suffered a severe crisis of faith for the fifty years prior to her death. During the entire time that she worked in her ministry she felt nothing from God, according to her own private letters, and she even held doubts as to His existence. Fellow priests have called this a trial of her faith--although where I come from, we call a fifty-year streak of skepticism "being agnostic," to say the least.
It's depressing. Not because she did good work: on the contrary, this was a woman who used her influence not to build hospitals or spread vaccinations, but to provide miserable spaces for people to die in agony, simply because she thought suffering might bring them to Christ. After all she had seen, she still insisted that the greatest evil on the planet was birth control. No, as Christopher Hitchens has said, she was no friend of the poor: she was a friend of poverty.
And it turns out she didn't even believe in her own excuses. If it weren't so sad, it might almost be funny.
19:56 x Thomas x /culture/religion/catholicism x link x 0 comments
Finishing Frank Thomas's "What's the Matter with Kansas" today at lunch, I had almost drifted gently and without obstacle through the book (which stubbornly refuses to find larger meaning to its well-written examination of a very boring and foolish state) before I hit a snag. In the last chapter, Thomas casually spends some time commenting on a Kansan formerly known as David Bawden, now elected Pope Michael I after a 32 year interregnum of the "true" Catholic Church.
Pause, if you will, and consider that for a second.
Apparently, since the Vatican II reforms (don't ask me, I only speak Secular), the Vatican and other sects have been on the wrong track. The false church's supporters can all be discounted due to various sins or false testimonies. The only remaining person eligible for the papacy, in other words, is David Bawden, and so he has donned the robes and funny hat. If you really feel up to it, you can visit the Pope's website to uncover this controversy in more detail. I'm not aware that anti-Popes John Paul II or Benedict XXAIV3 have clumsily-coded home pages hosted through generic free servers, so that may be a point in Michael I's favor.
I know that from a purely dispassionate perspective the Catholic Church is everything I loathe in a religion--dogmatic, superstitious, utterly medieval in structure and method--yet I can't help but feel some fondness for the Church. It just seems to get a better class of crazy than the openly-hostile Protestant fundamentalists.
14:29 x Thomas x /culture/religion/catholicism x link x 1 comment
