A procession of devils, ghosts and zombies through the historic Spanish city of Toledo has been branded blasphemous by the Catholic Church.

Actors from the Morboria theatre company performed a representation inspired by the medieval Dance of Death in Toledo’s streets provoking an angry reaction from the cathedral pulpit.

“We ask forgiveness for those who insulted the body of Christ,” said Archbishop Antonio Canizares, quoted in newspaper El Pais.

He told worshippers the procession, which also included a Virgin Mary and a Saint Peter, made a mockery of the Catholic celebration of Corpus Christi…

Toledo retains a reputation as one of the most conservative towns in Spain. It was once home to a permanent office of the Spanish Inquisition, which had more painful methods of dealing with blasphemy than those available to Canizares.

Who do you trust with your freedom? Mel Brooks or the Archbishop?




  1. bobbo says:

    #59–Mustard says “All 10 challenging questions to christians at post #47 are strawman arguments.”

    Anyone who says prove any one of them to be wrong is trolling.

    Well said Mister Mustard. “I Believe” you have revealed the sum and substance of your personal experience.

  2. OhForTheLoveOf says:

    #46 – I have never been religious so I wonder how it happens. “God revealed himself to me” is very common.

    What’s to know..? Conversion symptoms are typically similar, whether it is a reaction to addiction or a profound traumatic emotional experience, whatever it is that figuratively kicks the God myth into someone’s head.

    Fear drives most of it. Mortality is hard to swallow to that makes religion easier to swallow.

    Who knows? Who cares?

    As soon as the religious community gets out of my business, they’ll be welcome to worship as they like. Until they stop attacking our children, our schools, our culture, our secular way of life… they must be marginalized.

    Are there reasonable Christians who wish only to live in peace and not impose their values on the society as a whole? Maybe. But their peculiar silence when faced with the atrocious behavior of their more zealous cousins does not inspire confidence, so until they grow the balls to stand up and disown fundamentalism, then will be treated as if they were the same.

  3. Mister Mustard says:

    >>You have elevated being wrong to an art form.

    Aw, OFTLO. And we were getting along so well.

    >>We learned that from religious people.

    Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. Maybe you learned it from some of the Atheist Eminences, like Mao, Pol Pot, or Stalin.

    >>Perfect and succinct!! You really nailed
    >>it on that one.

    I thought it was kind of stupid. Even a Junior Logician like Bobbolina should be able to come up with something better than that.

  4. OhForTheLoveOf says:

    #59 – I don’t believe there is no god. I know it. Because I have common sense and can deduce that god is a man made construct. About that, you are right.

    Is it my religion? No. I don’t have one.
    Is that what atheism means? No, it is not.

    Why?

    Because neither you nor I get to invent the definitions of words on the fly. I don’t care what you believe. I care that you state what you believe accurately. And in all the time I’ve known you, you have never once shown any respect for the one common language that binds us and that is why we have to have the stupid, redundant, fuckwit debate every two weeks.

    Give me your address. I will buy and mail you a dictionary at my own expense if that would mean we could just move on.

  5. bobbo says:

    #63—Mustard===heh, heh, heh.

    Are you sure that isn’t spelled “stoopid?”

    So==still not gonna pick one straw man and set him on fire?

    I’ll check this thread weekly for when you take the challenge.

  6. Mister Mustard says:

    >>But their peculiar silence when faced with the >>atrocious behavior of their more zealous
    >>cousins does not inspire confidence, so until
    >>they grow the balls to stand up and disown
    >>fundamentalism, then will be treated as if
    >>they were the same.

    Aw, STFU, OFTLO. Have I ever failed to disown fundamentalism?

    What “silence” are you talking about? If you’ve never met any reasonable Christians (or believers in any other faith), you need to spend less time on whydoesntgodcureamputees.com and get out a little more.

  7. #59 – Mister Mustard,

    Bobbo, STFU. You’re beginning to annoy me. Stop trolling.

    My $0.02, I see his point perfectly. I see no evidence of trolling.

    >>Agnostics believe god or gods may exist. This
    >>is more of a belief than atheists have.

    No, Scottie, it’s not. I can only infer that you are jerking my chain. To suggest that saying “gee, I don’t know” is more of a belief than “no fucking way does God exist, never happened, never will, and anybody who says otherwise is a delusional psychopath who should probably be in a strait jacket” is silliness of the first water.

    No. I’m really not jerking your chain. I really am making a legitimate statement. You may not see it as such. But, I’m not just jerking your chain.

    There is no invisible massless perfectly silent elephant stomping around in my apartment. There is no reason to think that there is. There is not even any reason to give the slightest hint of credence to the hypothesis. If I at least show you a footprint or you catch a whiff of zoo doo or something, maybe you’d have reason to doubt. I assure you that there is no reason for doubt about the elephant in my apartment. There simply isn’t one.

    This is exactly the case with god.

    Give it up, Mister M (heheheheh, you’ve got the same name as I do!), you BELIEVE, with all your heart, that there’s no God. Not a lack of belief, but an affirmative statement “I BELIEVE THERE IS NO GOD”.

    ??!!? Forget to take your meds?

    Gosh darn it, why won’t you admit that you’re a believer??? And a hard-core one at that.

    Bingo. Perfect. Thank you for making my point so effectively. You simply will not leave me alone. You are pushing your views on me.

    I say I do not believe.

    Why do you refuse to be open-minded enough to allow the concept of non-belief?

    This is where I find you highly disrespectful of atheists. You will not even give us the courtesy of being able to state our own views. You must stick your faulty logic into our mouths as if we said it. Take that shit and go home. Give us the respect of assuming we can state our views for ourself. That’s all most of us have been asking of you.

    Do you also have trouble with the number zero? Perhaps you can visualize my feelings about god as if god were simply a null pointer in my mind. When I attempt to access it, I get a SIGSEGV or a NullPointerException or, for people who still remember the days of VAXEN, %SYSTEM-F-ACCVIO, access violation, reason mask=00, virtual address=00000000, PC=00000000, PS=00000000.

    In short, there’s just nothing there, no belief, nothing.

    I do have many beliefs about religion. I have no beliefs about god. How can I have beliefs about a non-entity? I believe religion is evil. I believe fundamentalism leads to violence. I believe religious moderates lend credence to the beliefs of religious fundamentalists.

    However, I have no direct beliefs about god.

  8. Jägermeister says:

    #63 – M&M – Even a Junior Logician like Bobbolina should be able to come up with something better than that.

    If your logic is so much more advanced than everyone else, then please give logical answers to the ten questions in my earlier post.

  9. #60 – OhForTheLoveOf,

    WELCOME TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT!!!! Good to have you on board Scott. I was worried you might not make it.

    Thanks.

  10. Mister Mustard says:

    >>I’ll check this thread weekly for when
    >>you take the challenge.

    What challenge is that, Bobster? To convert you to Christianity? As I’ve been saying since I’ve been reading dvorak.org/blog, I have no interest in doing that.

    My only interest is in stanching the relentless persecution of people of faith.

    Let my people go! Jesus. You and Scottie look like you’re headed toward the “Burn all the Christians” camp of Atheism.

  11. #70 – Sister Custard,

    My only interest is in stanching the relentless persecution of people of faith.

    Bullshit in the extreme. You are trying to make atheists look no more reasonable than religious wack jobs. Reason leads to atheism. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. However, absence of evidence is good cause not to give any credence to a hypothesis.

    Let my people go! Jesus. You and Scottie look like you’re headed toward the “Burn all the Christians” camp of Atheism.

    Where the fuck do you come off saying that about either of us?!

    Neither of us has ever made any such statement at all, nor given any hint of such thoughts. If you wish to avoid the moniker of fundamentalist wacko, you would do well not to deal out the moniker to others with exactly equal amounts of fundamentalism to you, i.e. none.

  12. Mister Mustard says:

    >>I say I do not believe.

    No, Scottie. I “don’t believe” that it’s raining today in Accra (Ghana), because I don’t know.

    You believe, you Believe, PRAISE GOD ALMIGHTY YOU BELIEVE that God does not exist.

    >>However, I have no direct beliefs about god.

    Pants on fire, Scottie. You’ve said over and over and over again that you believe that he does not exist. If you didn’t believe that, you’d either be an agnostic or a person of faith.

    Why is that so hard to admit? You believe something that has no objective proof one way or the other, so you’re no different than the Pope or the Dalai Lama or Bishop Desmod Tutu.

    I realize that being an agnostic isn’t as hip and happening as being an Atheist, but wtf. You just have to play the hand you’re dealt.

    this thread| dev/null

  13. bobbo says:

    Well, as a junior logistician, I will look once again at the 10 Questions and find the weakest one to challenge.

    I enjoy the workout even if Mustard pretends its not there. I invite others to join the exercise. Defeating an argument in your favor only makes your understanding stronger.

    I will report back if not struck by lightning.

  14. this thread | /dev/null

    On that we agree … and on many other things … but not on this thread or the 934,513,765 just like it that we’ve already had.

  15. Jägermeister says:

    Mister Mustard – When you’re in a hole, stop digging…

  16. bobbo says:

    #73–myself==Gosh, what I thought was hard to do is actually quite simple.

    The 10 questions ((for those who didn’t even look at them and wrote them off as strawman)):

    1..Why won’t God Heal Amputees? (ie, Why doesn’t God answer prayers?)
    2..Why are there so many starving people in our World?
    3..Why does god demand the death of so many people in the Bible?
    4..What does the bible contain so much anti-scientific non-sense.
    5..Why is god such a huge proponent of slavery in the bible and why do all intellitent people abhor slavery and make it illegal?
    6..Why do bad things happen to good people?
    7..Why didn’t any of Jesus miracles in the bible leave behind any evidence?
    8..How do we esplaint the fact that Jesus has never appeared to you?
    9.. Why would Jesus want you to eat his body and drink his blood?
    10..Why do Christians get divorced at the same rate as non-Christians?

    Lets suppose on personal experience, or revelation, or whatever, god does exist. He exists in our universe. Then certainly these questions simply only highlight that we don’t understand him. The bible is no source of truth either. That all is a given. But “an unknowable God” cannot be refuted by facts.

    So–just for instance–#1 and all other “challenges” to the human race are just that. Can we love god even though he does not answer our prayers? I know I still love that little girl in the 4th grade even though she wouldn’t drop her knickers for a quarter. Deep abiding faith survives disappointment. And so on with all the rest.

    God remains supreme–over experience, logic, observation, testing. Only our explanations fail.

    Easy really.

  17. OhForTheLoveOf says:

    #66 – Aw, STFU, OFTLO. Have I ever failed to disown fundamentalism?

    If I typed an express exception for you with every post I’d have carpel tunnel and arthritis and 5 other repetitive stress injuries…

    Can’t we just once and for all agree that you got my pass?

    you need to spend less time on whydoesntgodcureamputees.com and get out a little more.

    Please say that isn’t a real site.

    I’m in Indianapolis, Indiana… Do you really think I get through any of my days without being uncomfortably close to at least three dozen glaze eyed thumpers?

  18. OhForTheLoveOf says:

    #76 –

    1 – 9 – Because is God is a myth.

    10..Why do Christians get divorced at the same rate as non-Christians?

    They don’t. They get divorced at a higher rate than atheists.


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