(no subject)

[webofevil]

A new dawn! A new Pope! If you can honestly call a 78 year-old man “new”. Seventy-eight? I wouldn’t even bother vacating St Peter’s Square. Just set up a tent and wait. Maybe that’s the idea—after the excitement provoked by the death of the last pontiff, they’re keen to repeat the show as soon as possible. After all, attendance at Catholic churches in this country has shot up the past few weeks. All that flying, all that travelling... turns out all the old boy had to do was buy the farm.

“I’m so happy,” said member of the crowd after member of the crowd. Why? Was there some doubt? Did they think the Cardinals might abandon their deliberations, turn up on the balcony and say “We’ve decided. It’s all off. Go home”?

Anyway, to commemorate the elevation of Benedict XVI to what the Romans affectionately call “Il Duce”, where he can say whatever crazy and terrible things he likes and no-one will even think of apologising for them until four hundred years after his death, I present a short passage. And also the following lines of text.

The Ayatollah Khomeini has written an authoritative guide to Natural Law according to Allah, with whom he is allegedly on intimate terms. In this tome, Khomeini says that a woman may not get a divorce just because her husband is in the habit of sodomizing camels: Allah does not permit divorce for such trivialities and, in fact, frowns on divorce in almost all cases. However, later on Khomeini allows that a woman may get a divorce if her husband is in the habit of sodomizing her brother.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Pontiff in the Vatican declares that divorce is against “Natural Law” in all cases. It appears quite clear that when the Vatican say “all cases” they mean “all cases”. We had a referendum about that in Ireland, and the Pope’s spokesentities made abundantly clear that a man could come home drunk every night, seduce and sexually abuse their children, give his wife syphilis, and commit any abomination in the pages of de Sade and the Catholic God was still against giving the poor woman a divorce. The Ayatollah begins to seem a relative liberal compared with the Pope.

Robert Anton Wilson, Natural Law, 1987 (edited to within an inch of its life)