Another Catholic replies, this time to Infinite Thought's exoriation of the Oirish ethnofascist wing of the child abuse blood cult.
He signs himself 'Agnostic Humanist'. Let's face it, is there any worse position than that - you might as well call yourself 'Last Man - Man without a Chest', pathologically uncommitted late capitalist consumer-sucker.
In any case, the Agnostic Humanist is clearly anything but. The weirdness of lapsed Catholics - or cultural Catholics as I prefer to call them - is that they always make this odd rhetorical move: 'I am not a Catholic any more, but I am now going to argue exactly as if I was one.... Because that is rational and objective, and anyone who attacks Catholicism must be a deranged bigot.'
When of course Catholicism just is deranged bigotry. Insofar as it is Catholic of course. Astonishingly, Catholicism does retain some traces of Christianity. But these are the vestigial, not fully concealed, ethical calls of Christ, not the superstitious pagan doctrine and certainly not the history of the Catholic church.
Given that the 'agnostic' Catholics would surely disavow
the Spanish Inquisition
witchburnings
the conquistadors
the burning of most of Mayan culture in an afternoon by Bishop Landa
the propagation of idiotic images of women
the expropriation of wealth from the poor
institutionalized child abuse
in other words, the entire history of the Catholic church, what is left to give 'dignified respect' to? Only a stubborn tribal mind virus that insists that is good to belong to a certain ethnic group.
Fascism in other words.
So anti-Catholicism is no different to anti-fascism. And let me repeat, the Nazis only managed a decade, the Catholic church has managed 2 millennia of Satanic anti-Christian dissimulation and atrocity propagation.
One of the interesting thing about Zizek's essay on the The Passion of the Christ is that it reveals that even the Pope is not a Catholic any more. Even the Pope feels it is politically unpropitious to avow any commitment to the RCC's official belief system.
What remains is not enlightened tolerance so much as postmodern fascism, the Wittgensteinian authoritarian mystagoguery of incommensurable language games and 'forms of life' whose rational underpinning - or lack of it - cannot be interrogated. 'Respect' for these mumbo jumbled idiot ethnicities amounts to a confederacy of fascism - you be a fascist, we'll be fascists, and let's not bother each other, OK?
But obviously they know not what they do, and we must have compassion for the carrier-victims of this dangerous abuse virus.