Bible guarantees! Wow, it must be true then.

Unclear on whether that’s Greenwich mean time or whether it’ll be a rolling event as the day tracks around the globe. So as an Australian I won’t get a chance to repent but those in later time zones will presumably get a bit of lead time, perhaps to arrange for their pets to be looked after by some left behind atheists.

So let’s look on the bright side of the rapture
Let’s assume that all the religious believers are taken up for processing with just the dirty non-believers left behind. Unlike each of those religions, I’ll assume they’re all going to be treated the same: you believe in god/gods then hey – you won the irrational thinking bonus of a lifetime.

Chaplains out of schools
It will get NSCP Chaplains out of our supposed-to-be secular public education system in Australia (so we’d save $222m from the budget recently announced) and stop me from having to complain about the dodgy NSCP mobs (e.g. Scripture Union, Access Ministries) that run this tax funded religious racket.

School time would be more ethical and less bronze age
The only option in SRE time in NSW would be the Primary Ethics course or “non scripture” (I dubbed the trial The first useful scripture lesson in NSW history). So ethics teachers still need to turn up to teach the kiddies next week as they’d be left behind having shunned the nuns. It’s possible other ethics teachers would need to be covered by the Atheists as it is a secular course after all and makes no religious claims.

Public education would no longer be playing second fiddle to private religious schools and would have billions of dollars to spend on much needed facilities, materials, staff and land acquisitions in cramped schools.

Special treatment at all levels. (Image from SMH)

The calls for creationism to be taught in science class would stop.

No more door to door
There’ll be no one knocking on doors in cheap white short sleeve shirts and black ties while you’re trying to get a sleep in. The plus side is that there’ll be little piles of exactly that sort of clothing left around the streets in the post rapture world. Might want to discard their magic Mormon underwear.

Style repellent too.

Peace and quiet
No church bells on Sunday.
No more ridiculously early morning call to prayer in Muslim countries.
No more wailing at the wailing wall.
No more batshitcrazy types picketing funerals.
No more rioting mobs any time a holy book is destroyed.

London's finest out in force.

Discrimination laws will have less exemptions
No religious run businesses/schools left with ridiculous exemptions from the discrimination laws (e.g. allowing the expelling gays or single mothers from schools).

Less nonsense in healthcare
All hospitals left running would offer IVF, abortion services, post rape medical treatment, contraception advice etc. Chemists/pharmacists would all give out medication based on medical need and wouldn’t veto for their own personal reasons.

No nut-cases like this lady picketing female health clinics.

Crazy old bat that pickets a clinic in Surry Hills

No people thinking that scraps of Mary Mackillop miracle placebo items are miraculous. HIV/AIDS treatment and vaccinations could move forward instead of having ridiculous religious leaders impeding the flow of medical aid and advice.

Business and property
The tax system would have a massive amount of money to spend on things as it would stop handouts to the tune of billions to religious organisations.

Sanitarium would have to start paying taxes on its weetbix profits, meaning the tax free status it uses to compete with other cereal companies would evaporate. A slew of other for profit religious owned businesses would no longer be rorting an unfair tax advantage to put normal businesses out of the market.

There’d be lots of prime real estate that could be turned into useful spaces rather than just sitting empty except for an hour a week when a few people get up on a Sunday to do work. The new users of those buildings would pay council rates like everyone else.

Politics and equality would improve a bit
We’d have no more Fred Nile in parliament so someone else would get a chance at the dumbest minister award (plenty of candidates, but Abbott will be gone so the position is open).

Top priorities for Fred.

Gays could get married and have equal rights… you know, like they should have always had.

Child safety
The world’s largest paedophile cover-up group would cease to exist meaning thousands of children would not be exposed to predatory Catholic priests and crimes not covered up then simply shuffled on to new areas. Previous victims could be given free right to loot some of the gold that the Catholic church loves to hoard.

Women’s rights
We’d no longer have clerichead bearded Islamic morons telling us how to beat wives or rape them in a Sharia compliant way and brave Muslim women having to stand up and tell them they’re dickheads.

There's nothing real funny about this, but it makes a point.

Environment and Science
A whole bunch of trees cut down to produce uninspiring religious texts would be saved or used to make more interesting or enlightened books. There’d be slightly more storage room in bedside tables in hotels without the Gideon minions doing their work.

We’d (sadly) lose the learned Cardinal Pell and his climate science denial ways (because as a person who reads the bible he knows better than scientists).

Atheists/Agnostics and secularists can get back to adult matters
And finally Atheists, although they’d have been wrong if the rapture happens would finally get that evidence after thousands of years of waiting.
Secularists will get their separation of church and state they’ve been asking for..

Any others?

Where is the real miracle here? How about showing us one amputee who has been healed? Surely not too big an ask for any god worth his/her salt? Prayer is a placebo, nothing more. Mary MacKillop herself was proof of the idea that two working hands achieve more than a million hands praying. So let’s not belittle the good she did by ridiculous superstition and the Catholic Church trying to boost falling numbers. If prayer worked there would be no need for people like MacKillop to try to fix things.

Nathan Lee Coogee

Prayer has been shown to be beneficial to the individual praying in the same sense that any other placebo can be useful: positive thinking. That’s not the same as a miracle. You can (and many people do) get the same result without the need for supernatural appeals.

How to think you're helping at the expense of actually helping!

The point I made was that Mary Mackillop (for all her sky god beliefs) did good by going out there and doing stuff. She didn’t sit around and pray to try and fix the world. I’ve absolutely no beef with anyone who is out there trying to help people. Whether wasting time trying to convert them or push an irrational belief system on vulnerable people is morally “good” is another matter (or indeed you’re pushing that ideology and don’t buy it yourself e.g. like that fraud Mother Teresa..).

Our bodies have a remarkable capacity for repair and capacity to function: that’s not a miracle either. It’s amazing biology and shows how fantastically sophisticated our bodies have become after millions of years of evolutionary fine tuning in a harsh environment.

Mary wrote on occasion too, only fair I should write about her.

Here’s how the miracle of Mary Mackillop “cured” cancer:

Kathleen Evans, 66, whose anonymity has been zealously guarded until now, spoke at the Mary MacKillop chapel in North Sydney this afternoon about her incredible survival.

Surrounded by her husband Barry, family members and sisters from the Josephite Order, the mother of five, grandmother of 20 and great-grandmother of two, told how she had smoked since the age of 16 but had given up in 1990, three years before she got the devastating news that at 49 she had cancer.

The tumour, in her right lung, was particularly aggressive and quickly spread to her glands. Within a few months a secondary cancer was found on her brain.

She was told it was inoperable and that chemotherapy and X-ray treatment were considered pointless.

“Besides,” she said, “the odds were just not worth it.

“‘I was only given a couple of months at the most to live so I said thanks but no thanks.

“All I had left was prayer.”

A friend in the Hunter Valley gave her a picture of Mary MacKillop and a piece of her clothing, so Ms Evans, her family and her parish all began praying.

Yep, that’s the “miracle” there. This half baked explanation of how worshipping a piece of cloth (that Mary Mackillop may or may not have wiped her nose with or worn at some stage which she is so attached to that she pays attention) cures cancer.

Just how many other people at some stage have been told their situation was dire and they had better get their affairs in order? How many have subsequently recovered? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

The data so far..

The world is full of people who were told they would die by a certain age and found a way to beat the odds to keep alive and kicking.

What’s the real story?

What we have here is a lady who smoked from the age of 16, gave it up, they found (a gift from God?) cancer and her body was (fortunately) able to clear it up once it recovered from the years of smoking abuse.

Just like someone who’s diagnosed with heart problems or high blood pressure who gives up the burgers, starts going for regular walks/swims and eats healthily has a pretty good chance their body will get back to a good state.

Had we had two identical twins who had identical smoking habits, who were diagnosed with the identical cancers in the same spots in the body at the same stage and one prayed to the grubby bit of Mackillop cloth and the other didn’t THEN maybe we’d start to have something interesting to investigate. Even then though, all it would really be testing would be the power of positive thinking/placebo affect. That’s why I asked for an amputee cure as proof of a miracle (it won’t be long and science/medicine will fix that too.. and then I’ll bet praise goes skyward for that too).

If doctors were surprised, it was because based on probability she had a good chance of being dead in a matter of months (and who could blame them looking at her medical history). That’s assuming of course we can believe that her description of the medical opinion is correct and that she wasn’t receiving any other treatment (the old chemotherapy/intensive care/skilled doctors/multiple operations and therapies that God gets the credit for and doctors get screwed).

Time for some investigative journalism!

Now to tell the Sydney Morning Herald what I they need to do next time to fix their fluff religious “miracle” piece wrapped up as “news”:

• find the doctors involved and talk to them
• find out if there are many similar recoveries recorded
• perhaps include some more grounded, less superstitious reasons for the recovery or talk to someone with a medical/science background about how the body repairs itself

Anyhow, rant over.. Til next time dear readers..

Before I talk about the contents, which are in part to do with the need for ethics in global financial terms, let’s just look at some pictures of the pope. First up signing this papal sheet:

The pope demonstrating modest attire

Let’s count the less than humble items:

• gold pen
• gold ring
• gold glasses
• gold crucifix (two if you count his minder there)

I mean if I had a higher resolution pic of the ring I’d bet it’s this one:

Close up of the ring? Would not surprise me!

Maybe the previous pope was less gold obsessed:

Previous Pope's example: a throne of gold

Nope.. Thar be a lot o’ gold on a chair for someone humbled in the presence of God.

Now tell me, for a man talking about charity and social ethics and preaching about the charitable nature of Jesus: why all the bling? Even if (and I highly doubt it given the vast vast amounts of cash the Catholic church has) the gold is fake or just painted on – does it really set a good example to surround yourself by gold when preaching against greed?

Is it ethical for a religious leader, living off the charity of followers, preaching about social responsibility to be signing a call to arms for charity with a mont blanc pen (let’s say it is an entry level one that only costs 3-400 bucks eh?) that if sold could immunise a whole villiage and provide education for little kiddies.

How much is that gold cross worth?

I mean come on pope: practice at least a little of what you preach eh?

As for the content of his little essay: all I can say is an awful lot of talk about truth and charity for an organisation based completely around lies and wasting people’s charitable donations on gold ornaments, red carpets and palaces.