It was only a matter of time before the contrarian intellectualist backlash against Charlie Hebdo began. The body of Charlie Hebdo‘s murdered editor Stéphane Charbonnier is barely even cold, and incredibly not even buried yet(!), but none-the-less one of the original founders of the magazine, Henri Roussel, felt compelled to criticise Chabonnier’s decision to post the now infamous cartoons.

What made him feel the need to drag the team into overdoing it? He shouldn’t have done it, but Charb did it again a year later, in September 2012 … I believe that we [were] fools who took an unnecessary risk. That’s it. We think we are invulnerable. For years, decades even, it was a provocation, and then one day the provocation turns against us … I know it’s not done … [but] I really hold it against you [Charbonnier]. [link]

This is, of course, bollocks. Nobody deserves to be shot dead for printing or saying anything. Roussel, could you have not waited a respectful period before spouting this nonsense (e.g. after the funeral, perchance)?

Luckily, organised religion is always nearby to save the day when mankind is in need of sanity. The Pope said this:

If my good friend Dr Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s normal. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others … There is a limit. Every religion has its dignity … in freedom of expression there are limits. [link]

That’s right, folks: the Pope used the same justification that rapists and wife-beaters employ the world over. Well, look at how high her dress is: she was just ASKING for it! The stupid bitch MADE me do it!

Organised religion, you fail. Again. Why is organised religion never there when we need it, but always there AFTERWARDS to do the handwringing and soul-searching?

Yeah, we WERE complicit in the Holocaust, both directly through our support of the Nazi regime and indirectly through our constant stirring up of anti-Jewish feeling which exists EVEN IN OUR FOUNDATIONAL TEXT (!) [see the Gospel of John], but, ya know, we feel we’ve really grown from this experience. 

Some half-senile old crank cartoonist can criticise whoever he wants. He’s wrong, of course. But the spiritual and political leader of around a quarter of the world’s population, a man who wields both spiritual and temporal power as a head of state, a man who rannks among the most influential on the face of the earth — he should know better.

The thing is, organised religion is like all good scams. The pope and all his kind can say or do whatever they want and the mud just won’t stick. He kisses a deformed man once, and apparently he’s flawless.

Dear Francis:

You did not say that the Charlie Hebdo staff deserved to die, I grant you that. But by saying that nobody has the right to criticise religion, you (1) declare your ignorant pre-enlightenment mindset which has not quite grasped the basics of what makes a free and prosperous society possible, and (2) you offer extenuating circumstances to those terrorist, murdering scumbags — you do, in fact, offer the same justification as the rapist and the wife-beater. You are therefore both spiritually and intellectually incapable of being a leader to billions — although, ironically, perfectly suited to being head of the Roman Catholic church — and you gravely let down mankind with your unhelpful and hindersome words.

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© 2015 Bryan A. J. Parry