Another Reason to Consider Belief in the Antichrist

The ejaculatory white emission from the chimney over the Sistine Chapel has signaled that we now have a new Pope. Not much tension there before the climax, which indicates that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger plays pretty good inside baseball in the Vatican.

I'm not sure why I personally should care that the new pope is Ratzinger, now self-named Pope Benedict XVI. I'm not a Catholic, nor a Christian for that matter, and the Vatican has always seemed to me to be more of a tourist curiosity than anything else. Granted, Pope John Paul II had a lot of clout, but not because he wielded actual power through economic or military means; rather, his power came from those millions around the world who willingly ceded it to him, acknowledging his "holiness" and using it to validate things like screwing without a condom because, in Monty Pythonese, "Every sperm is sacred." So if tens of millions of Africans become infected with HIV/AIDS as a result, well, gee isn't it interesting that the ascendancy of African Catholics in the last decades has been so rapid? Could there be some link between one thing and the other? A defensive maneuver by the white Vatican? Yeah, I know--I sound like a conspiracy nut.

I doubt that Pope Benedict XVI will soften any of the hard stances established by John Paul II; in fact, based on what I've read, if anything he will tighten the screws on Catholics worldwide, possibly bringing about a modern schism, which I think would be healthy. My American Catholic friends, who practice birth control, have sex for fun, are gay, don't go to confession, and so on, have always baffled me, because for me a church is like a club, and if you don't like the rules, then you start a new club, like Martin Luther did. Well, now it's going to be a challenge to this relaxed form of Catholicism as practiced in this country (Rick Man-on-Dog Santorum excluded, of course) when Ratzinger reaffirms his take-no-prisoners stance on homosexuality, premarital sex, birth control, abortion, and all the rest of the doctrine.

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's own ego and one's own desires," [Ratzinger] declared at a pre-conclave Mass in St. Peter's Basilica.

"A dictatorship of relativism" is a nifty coinage. Funny how that would be more frightening than a dictatorship derived from an imagined god. Unless, of course, you have asserted the sole power to know the mind of that invisible great white father.