Julia Sweeney's Discussion Forum

The HOLY Father is in the HOLY land, serially performing his act before the HOLY shrines....
Holy shit!!
What a wildly dangerous and unnecessary interference in an already overheated HOLY real estate market!!
So as usually happens when similar public relations forays make the front pages and TV news, I feel the urge to ask, "isn't it time to stop referring to them as HOLY?"
Why can't they be labeled as simply" interesting?"
(I could even go for "very interesting.")
I don't know of any instance where murder, mayhem and threats of nuclear war occur on behalf of INTERESTING.
And much as I really enjoy wandering around Israel inspecting the various sites that have taken on the patina of HOLY, most of them have, after serious inspection by bona fide archeologists turned out to be only vaguely related to the mythologies with which they have been endowed..
Sure, they are, for the most part, juxtaposed against the extraordinary landscape wonderful to behold...
However, they are responsible for some of the most impassioned slaughters in the history of the world... and other than aesthetically, they aren't really worth a human fingernail, much less the terror and misery they have encouraged; labeled "HOLY" all bets are off.

One something.. a building, a piece of real estate, an artifact is labeled as holy, some crazed obsessive is going to perform some desperate and divisive act to avenge its (usually imaginary) history..
Crusades, jihads, Tallibanic lunacy, American-made missiles are sure to follow.
..
Which brings me to my own latest war of words: join me in speaking out to ban the use of the appellation "HOLY" to anything except Swiss cheese.
And if and when the Pope is overcome by an urge for Swiss cheese, he can order in.

Norma Manna Blum

Benny the Rat-slinger sounds to me like a hybrid of (1) Peter Lorre, (2) 1930s character actor/suave heavy Henry Daniell, and (3) Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove.

I view the current pope as a walking, talking anachronism . . . He's just this guy who is doing his best to play a role, to sustain a huge, complicated, bureacratized racket with a long tradition, and to seem sincere while doing so. He's a black pot who has regular collisions with a series of equally black kettles, and he just can't bring himself to step out of the way.

I'm sitting right now in an office whose occupants are nominally about 65% Roman Catholic, with considerable variation in how seriously THEY go about maintaining the pretense of piety and fealty to Mother Church. I sometimes wonder how they view Pope Benedict XVI's effort to keep up appearances. I am pretty sure they don't share my conviction that the Pope's homilies and views carry no special weight whatsoever, except as spectacular examples of what Daniel C. Dennett calls "systematic hypocrisy."

In his custom-made $600 Italian shoes!

What I find interesting, and a bit disturbing, is how it seems even people who are not catholic go crazy over the pope as if he were some kind of rock star, and even seem to give his words some kind of authority... even as they are members of churches who broke away from the holy roman catholic church. And somehow when I hear the term "holy land" used in reference to Israel I am sure it has no connection to Jewish or Muslim "holy" sites- it's strictly Jesus-related.

An aside: where I live there are two catholic colleges who have a strong sports rivalry, which is referred to locally as the "holy war".