Ever seen Mallrats? Go take a look at it. It's stupid and hilarious and one of my favorite movies. I'll wait. Done? Good. Did you notice how, through the entire movie, Brodie's worthiness as a companion is slammed continuously? Rene, who breaks up with him early in the movie, spends the rest of it talking about the horrible things he did to and around her. Even Brodie knows he was a terrible boyfriend, and the rest of his friends know it, too. Nobody ever argues otherwise. But at the end of the movie, after he declares his love for her publicly amid a huge finale, Rene gives in with a smile, saying to the gape-jawed crowd, "What can I say? I love the retard."

That's pretty much how I sum up Leah Libresco's much-touted recent conversion to Catholicism. She had an atheist blog for a long time, but secretly bought into the "God of the Gaps" logical fallacy--that she believed in an objective morality, and it wasn't a huge leap from there to that objective morality being given by a single being. From there, she leaped to Catholicism as the faith that seemed to be the closest to that objective morality.

I've got to say that even if I decided to become Christian again, it sure would not be Catholicism I'd leap to. That muddy, bloated river is too blood-soaked and poisonous to consider dipping into. The faith she thought had the most to offer her spiritually was the faith that has encouraged pedophiles and the disenfranchisement of women and minorities for centuries? She actually believes that the Pope--that hoary, raccoon-eyed Emperor Palpatine lookalike with his disgust for TEH GHEY and his fear of women--is God's best representative on earth? She believes that wafers and wine literally turn into a human sacrifice's flesh and blood with a magic ritual? YIKES. She got to this ritual-laden, obscene, hypocritical collection of Old White Men and dogma from "well, I just don't have any answers"?

There's absolutely no reason to believe that there is a single deity in charge of creation or the world. There's even less reason to believe that such a being would look like Yahweh or Jesus. Morality itself does not demand such a being. It does just fine being a human construct. There's no way to get from that idea to "then Jesus must have done it." How does she know? How can she prove it? I can DISprove it easily enough through history--the Catholic Church is about the easiest thing in the world to disprove. It's too sin-laden, too anti-woman, and too obviously agenda-driven to be the creation of a perfectly good being. But proving it is a worthwhile or edifying institution is a whole other kettle. That she's a woman and buying into this misogynistic bullcrap is the most mystifying part, but there are female Republicans out there right now actively trying to roll back every advance feminists have made in the last century, so I guess a woman buying into institutionalized misogyny isn't the strangest part of this story.

I hope it's just another trick, like the Turing test she ran a short while ago. If it isn't, then I wish her all the best, and wonder privately how long it'll take her to figure out how ridiculous it is to jump from "I've got no answers about the divine" to "Catholicism is the right way!" Christianity has abused women for centuries, but what can she say? She loves the divine R-tard.

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PS: I don't condone using the R-word; it's just part of the quote. It's an injustice to truly mentally-challenged people to compare religious kooks or bad boyfriends to them. Just sayin'.