Sam Harris, Ph.D. (born 1967)
Neuroscientist, Author, and Outspoken Atheist
The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception, preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy — or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution — one of the wealthiest on earth — that preferentially attracts pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority, and grants them privileged access to children. Finally, consider that vast numbers of children will be born out of wedlock, and their unwed mothers vilified, wherever Church teaching holds sway — leading boys and girls by the thousands to be abandoned to Church-run orphanages only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy. Here, in this ghoulish machinery set to whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord.
It was Ariane Noelle Patterson’s 21st birthday, and she was grateful to be alive. The Gardner-Webb University student took to her Twitter account on Jan. 17 and posted the message: “Thank you God for another year of life.” Hours later, she collapsed during a religion class and was rushed to nearby hospital, where she was pronounced dead, the Associated Press reports. The senior at the North Carolina Christian college was originally from Delaware and majored in religious studies, the Shelby Star reports.
Always Question Authority 