The Decline of the Catholic Church in America.

Perhaps no other organized crime syndicate on earth is more skillful at euphemism that the Catholic Church.

The Church has a problem: It (along with many other traditional syndicates), is failing to persuade people to hand over their hard earned cash. They have failed to keep up with the momentum of modern society and their tired, worn out message just isn't having any impact on the younger generation. Those who do still adhere are having to hang onto the few scraps of the storybook catechism that can still be spun into fools gold.

Witness ye, the gigantic mental back flips that the Church performs when trying to address the problem of having to close up shop and retreat into smaller cells while trying to compete in the today's changing landscape in the game of fleecing an ever shrinking population of churchgoers. Today, it is far more popular to jettison traditional brick and mortar religion and instead call ones-self "Spiritual". If anything, it's a lot cheaper. 

All over the country, Catholic parishes have seen a decline in attendance and support from parishioners. The actual numbers are difficult to extract, since the church claims they are growing all the time. Growing in what respect may be the issue here.

The way the scam works is this:

Each Parish campus has an indoctrination hall (church building), living quarters for the perpetrators (rectory and/or convent) and a brainwashing center for children (parochial school). There is one campus established in every neighborhood in the city that operates TAX FREE so that everyone in the community is shouldering the property tax burden of these costly facilities whether they are being directly victimized by them or not.

The parish is in the business of exploiting families. It is important to encourage members to take on high amounts of responsibility and the burden of offspring so that the Church can exercise maximum influence on the family unit for profit. 


Once they have lured a fertile, married couple onto the membership rolls, they are then psychologically assaulted into attending indoctrination sessions on a weekly basis and paying 10% of their income to do so. They are also pressured into having as many offspring as possible and sending them to the brain washing center.


The "school" is expensive (see my other post about parochial schools) but if the family is an "active and contributing" member of the parish, they get a discount on brain washing for the kids. Often, the victims are members by default since they were raised in this environment and are unaware of what life would be like without a giant tick sucking at their neck.  

When there aren't enough marks available in the community to make a profit to run the parish, the operation has to be closed or share services with the one next door.

So many parishes have failed to profit in today's market,  that the Vatican has ordered severe cut backs to their operations in the US since it is no longer a "growth" market. Last year,the  local archdiocese sent a notice to all the parishes in the twin cities outlining the steps that will be taken to streamline the operation and stop the hemorrhaging of the holy coffers. 

Last fall, they issued a 31 page report complete with euphemisms, redundancy and cryptic verbage, that attempted to outline the fate of all the parishes in the Tri-county area. However, I have pared it down to one page that lists the Twin Cities area parishes and removed the confusing descriptions and misleading commentary.

Minneapolis:

Churches having to share recources: (Vatican euphemism: Cluster)

All Saints share with St. Boniface.

Holy Name share with St. Leonard Port Maurice.

St. Boniface share with All Saints.

St. Leonard of Port Maurice share with Holy Name.

Churches being closed. (Vatican eupemism: Merge)

St. Austin (consolidated with St. Bridget)

Visitation (consolidated with Annunciation)

Holy Cross, St. Clement & St. Hedwig (consolidated with St. Anthony of Padua)

 Surviving churches. (Vatican Euphemism: No Structural Change)

Ascension,  Basilica of Saint Mary,  Christ the King,  Holy Rosary, Incarnation, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Our Lady of Peace, Our Lady of Victory, St. Albert the Great, St. Anne/St. Joseph Hien,

St. Cyril and Methodius, St. Frances Cabrini, St. Helena, St. Joan of Arc, St. Lawrence, St. Olaf, St. Philip, St. Stephen,

St. Thomas the Apostle, Comunidad Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, - TBD, The Church of Gichitwaa Kateri – TBD.

Saint Paul:

Churches having to share resources.

Holy Childhood share with St. Adalbert, St. Columba, Holy Childhood and Maternity of the Blessed Virgin.

St. Casimir share with St. Patrick.

St. James share with St. Stanislaus.

St. Michael share with St. Mathew and Our Lady of Guadalupe.

St. Pascal Baylon, Saint Paul – share with Blessed Sacrament.

Churches being closed. (Vatican euphemism: Merge)

St. Andrew church and school (consolidating with Maternity of the Blessed Virgin.)

St. Francis de Sales  church and school (consolidating with St. James -renamed St. Francis de Sales/St James).

St. John church and school (consolidating with St. Pascal Baylon).

St. Thomas the Apostle church and school (consolidating with Blessed Sacrament)

St. Vincent de Paul (consolidating with Cathedral of Saint Paul.)

Surviving churches.

Assumption, Holy Spirit, Nativity of Our Lord, Sacred Heart, Lumen Christi Catholic Community

St. Agnes, St. Andrew Kim, St. Bernard, St. Cecilia, St. Katharine Drexel Catholic Community, Ramsey - TBD

St. Louis King of France, St. Mark, St. Mary, Peter Claver, St. Thomas More.

In all, 21 church operations will be closed, but this condensed list shows 8 in Minneapolis and St. Paul marked for closure.

The Archdiocese claims this is not about money or buildings, but about "investing in the future".  That's par for the course for the church - deny the obvious and replace it with something obtuse and meaningless. They are masters at distraction.

One would hope that these buildings, once no longer in use  for the purposes of superstitious ritual, will be subject to Taxation as they all should be.

Jammin to the "call to prayer"

Mobile Blocker is a suitcase device that jams cell phones.

"These extraordinary technological devices were originally created,

designed and perfected for the King of Jordon because he was upset

about the disruption and disturbances caused by mobile phones at 

mosques during prayer. The MobileBlockers are now used silently

and safely in Mosques all over the world."

I wonder if there is room in there for caesium-137 ?

The Frisbee: Military Death Toy.

The Frisbee is popular around the world as an apparent simple recreational toy for young people. However, few people are aware the the "Frisbee" was actually a highly sophisticated aerospace product developed by DARPA code named "FB2300A" with back funding in the 1960's as a high tech development on the "Boomerang" concept and were promising due to their remarkable planar stability circuitry. Millions of them were accidentally produced lacking  the "return to user" algorithms which made them useless in the combat theater. Fred Morrison of "Whammo"bought up the government surplus units for pennies on the dollar, painted them bright colors and successfully marketed them to teenagers. 

 

Today the surplus FB2300As are also used in the wheels of Segways.

Christians use smoking and porn to proselytize.

Here is what I found in my grocery bag after a some brief shopping.

I have always been loathe to see ads for this cheesy plug for christian fundamentalism and I wasn't very thrilled to get this steaming little pile of crap after visiting an upscale suburban store. But I could scarcely
 believe m eyes seeing the infamous R.J. Reynolds trademarked mascot portrayed on an ad for wholesome Fundi family entertainment.

This is the image (sans the cigarette hanging out of the butt hole) that was the basis for a highly controversial cigarette advertising campaign shamelessly targeted towards young adults throughout the 1990's. R. J. R. was sued, settled out of court and dropped Joe the Camel. There is plenty of propaganda out on the net typed up by shills for the cigarette manufacturer that play down the carefully crafted subliminal sexual features that were worked into the Joe camel image. It is very likely that the R.J.R. advertising folks spent a great deal of money and time adding just enough sensuality into the artwork so as to be culpably deniable.

Could it be that some clueless Fudie typed in "cool" and "camel" and got all excited thinking this would finally make being a Fundi cool enough to get young people to get down on their hands and knees and bark like doggies in a revival meeting?

One website loosely based on psychology sums it up well:

Portrayals by cigarette advertisements

• Joe Camel (cartoon character aimed at young people.
  Joe's face has features of a scrotum or other private parts
  and provides subliminal sex appeal 

Lets look at some details of the image - these suggestive features are not lost on any one, and are employed through a classic technique that hides the detailed messages by presenting one with a broader picture that draws the attention - not unlike the optical illusion artwork or even a credit card statement. The features in the artwork skillfully bring together the prime elements of sexual arousal for a human being.

In Joe's nose and upper lip are features that suggest a penis and scrotum as well as buttocks. Look closely and you can even see the "pubic hair" on the underside of Joe's ball sack. - er chin.

In Joe's mouth one can make out a possible belly button, an anus, clitoris and the whole feature suggests a vulva.

After being plastered everywhere in the 90's, the Joe Camel image rooted in our culture as  identifiable with smoking and the subliminal imagery is a popular inside joke. This usage of a scandalous ad image tells us a lot about the people who promote their Tiger Beat brand of whats cool. The advertisers are like like 13 year olds who first decide to turn their ball caps backward. Joe is recklessly slapped onto a handbill - they don't even bother to change his name - in a desperate attempt to make something that was just cheesy, into cheese wiz. Anyone can see it for what it is - a naive ripoff unartfully screaming for attention -but what can one really expect from folks who never learned how to think for themselves.

Here is what a real camel looks like.

Atheists Guide to Theology, Part one.

When the the early Christians assembled "The Bible" out of scraps of babble and apocryphal anecdotes, they felt the need to argue about it incessantly.

The human social framework is hierarchical in nature and when one Homo-Sapien rises to a position of influence, other potential alphas will summarily challenge him and if they are unsuccessful in their attempt at domination, they will split off to form their own hierarchical unit. However, they must create some reason to mask their true reason for doing so since plain ego is not an acceptable reason for committing hubris. Usually it will pivot upon some picayune aspect of the established credo and creating drama sufficient to evoke a schism so that the followers and their free labor and donations can transfer their zeal to align with that of the dissenter who then becomes know as the Heretic.

Such is the case with the hotly debated principle in the 5th century CE at a hootenanny grandly called "The First council of Ephesus" where the main subject of discussion centered around the mythological character of Jesus and whether he was a god, a human or both. This pointless argument generated a slew of fancy new words that people could write down as part of their dogma in establishing their respective turf in fairyland.

Under the heading of the subject "Christology" are such noble sounding doctrines such as  Nestorianism and its challenger, Monophysiticism  which breaks down further into Eutychianism and Apollinarianism.

Here we can see in the early christian hysteria and impressive beginning to an alphabet soup resulting in a profusion of conjuctive Syllabolism describing a confabulation of arbitrary and condictual Polyterminism.

Not to be outdone by the self-proclaimed divine leaders of early Christianity, the Rev. Barky conforms to the definitive doctrine of Nullachristology - or as Shakespeare averred;

Much ado about nothing.

Atheists and Charity

Atheist groups should not act like church organizations. If you are a non-believer and feel the need to give to charity, need childcare, be chronically positive, follow an ego and be politically correct, join the Unitarians.


Charity has 2 inherent problems:

It's almost impossible to know what happens to your gift unless one has first hand knowledge.

In order to be sure you are helping someone, you need to know something about that person. Often the one who has their hand out is the person least ashamed of asking for help and that is usually the con artist. They know where and how to find donors. People in need are usually busy dealing with their problems to advertise them to the populace.  

When you hand out money for charity, are you helping someone in the short term just to enabling their dependence on aid thereby hurting then in the long run? What if your $25 ends up in the hands of thieves or some pot bellied magistrate's pocket? This is a very common problem. I have never agreed with atheists engaging in charity as a group - there are plenty of ways to do that already.

Atheism is a philosophy and as long as the holy books say we are evil, the religious won't care how many bug-eyed toddlers we feed or how pleasant we behave.

Phreak out the Robocallers

In 1957 a phenomenon was started by a whistling blind child later to be known as phreaking - a portmanteau of phone and freak. Basically, this has to do with hacking telecommunication systems.

The first time I ran into this was in college where a fellow student demonstrated how he was able to make free long distance phone calls by playing back selected tones into a pay phone receiver on operator assisted calls. Each tone signaled the insertion of a coin into the phone thus tricking the system into thinking he was paying for it.

Much of the traditional techniques used by phreaks have become obsolete and nowadays and phreaking has moved to the internet, practiced by descendants that call themselves "the 2600" - the frequency that the 7 year old Joe Engressia accidentally whistled into his receiver that resulted in ending a dialed phone recording.

Today there is still a way to use tones to hack the phone system that is useful to those who have had the misfortune to be the target of debt collection automated calling - or robocalls.

Simply record this tone as your message greeting and the computer dialing your number will flag it as no longer out of service. It really works.