I Find the Same With Marxists

I can't stand atheists -- but it's not because they don't believe in God. It's because they're crashing bores.

Maybe atheists wouldn't be so unpopular if they stopped beating the drum until the hide splits on their second-favorite topic: How stupid people are who believe in God. This is a favorite Dawkins theme. In a recent interview with Trina Hoaks, the atheist blogger for the Examiner.com website, Dawkins described religious believers as follows: "They feel uneducated, which they are; often rather stupid, which they are; inferior, which they are; and paranoid about pointy-headed intellectuals from the East Coast looking down on them, which, with some justification, they do." Thanks, Richard!

Let me be fair, though - I also find overly pious Catholics to sometimes be intolerable gits as well.

I think you can prefer TLM over Novus Ordo Masses, I think you can prefer cassock over pants, I think you can prefer no altar girls over allowing altar girls, but I find blogs where you get folks who insist not.one.change in the Catholic Church since Vatican II is valid and, in their opinion, is harmful and demonstrative of Satan in our midst. And the rest of us are simply apostates.

Notwithstanding one popular blog run by a group of Y-chromosome carrying folks (i.e., men), I find the most insufferable are overly pious women, who clutch at their breasts at a rough epithet and insist Mother Mary is weeping inconsolably when a child wears jeans to Mass. Worshipping as I do at a poor parish, the reason for the jeans may well be that it is all the family can afford, but I digress . . . anything not up to their "womanly" standards is branded as "feminism" and we all know how Satanic that is.

So read the essay above with some pleasure but don't start patting yourself on the back because you are thinking, "Well, thank God I have my faith!" Recently, I have received a spate of unsolicited advice from well-meaning, but self-righteous Catholics about my choice of language. Thanks for your input but when I politely decline to follow it, don't keep following up with sermons as to why you are right and I am wrong, because that's when I level the shotgun and tell you to git your squirrel ass off my porch . . .