Holier than thou

I should’ve mentioned this before, but Sunday seems the appropriate day: One of my favourite bloggers, Joe.My.God., has long chronicled “This Week in Holy Crimes” in which he details the very real earthly crimes of ministers of one sort of religion or another. I highly endorse it.

There are some—on the right—who think this is an “attack on religion”, which rather proves the point that subtlety and irony are completely beyond the capacity of most rightwing religionists. The point is the hypocrisy of religious leaders daring to lecture the rest of us on “morality” when they’re not merely immoral themselves, but downright criminal.

So have a look around Joe’s posts, and ponder the central message: Religious leaders are human, prone to the same mistakes, sins, foibles and crimes as the rest of us. We should never pay them any more attention than we would anyone else around us. Holy, after all, is earned, not conferred by a mere title.