Religion, police abuse and keeping one's mouth shut

What did he expect, he said people should have the right to vote. If he'd kept his mouth shut this wouldn't happen

I'm sitting in this coffee shop reading.  It's a bit of a small place, not my usual hang out.  Alongside me occupying three tables are a couple of priests, dressed in regular clothes trying to look like normal people, they're chatting with a few of their congregation.  One guy, a loudmouth I have had the misfortune to hear before when I've gotten a coffee to go, is talking to another person sitting with the priests.  I was not paying any attention to what he was saying until I hear, "That kid, you know, the one that got shot at the BART station; if he had done what the cops asked him to do, it wouldn't have happened." He was talking about Oscar Grant.  Grant , an unarmed young worker, was shot in the back as he lay pinned to the ground surrounded by cops. I'll bet this loudmouth is the type that reckons if the "old Lady" kept her mouth shut, her "old man" wouldn't beat her up.

I lift my head and stare at him with disgust. Our eyes meet and he can see that I do not approve of his remarks.  I am not going to get in to it at the moment as there will be another opportunity and I have much to do this morning.  But what galls me most is not this pig's remarks, its the priests ignoring them. They went on talking about golf. Although I couldn't really hear them, I cannot believe that they never heard what the guy said as he was standing right above them.

It's a bit nauseating to listen to these old folks grovel to these priests, an older one and a younger one.  I attended a viewing yesterday for the son of a friend of mine who was tragically killed by a car that hit him as he was hitchhiking; he was 30 years old. As a parent, I felt such sorrow for his mother who I have known for 25 years.  There were a number of practicing Catholics there, many of them women. It sort of fascinates me that people, especially women, can belong to this organization.  It has a violent and oppressive history that held back human development.  It can excommunicate women for daring to advocate that they should be priests or, even worse, practicing mass against the old misogynist's in the Vatican's wishes,  but it couldn't excommunicate Hitler.  These old misogynists at the Vatican, those who determine the polices of the business of religion, or the Catholic version of it, have announced that for anyone to even suggest that women should be ordained is a sin as great as pedophilia.

With religion, all the adherents of their particular version believe theirs has divine origins and everyone else's is man made. Organized religion defends capitalism and the misery and destruction it creates.  The Catholic church is not the only guilty party but, due to its size and influence, one of the worst.  Religion has added to, not in any way limited, the poverty, violence, hunger and war that exists.  It does this as it defends the ruling class and in our time Catholicism is a staunch defender of capitalism, severing its strong ties to its feudal past.  In the former colonial world it is the ally of  every dictator and murderer that came to power.  When in Latin America, the liberation theologists arose within its ranks, those who defended the poor and opposed the oligarchs and their dictators, the holy church of Rome cleared the way for their elimination by the right wing death squads.

People have a right to believe in whatever god they wish, free from persecution, but religion should have no part in public life or the political and economic life of society. It is a private matter. 

"Capitalism teaches the people the moral conceptions of cannibalism are the strong devouring the weak; its theory of the world of men and women is that of a glorified pig-trough where the biggest swine gets the most swill." -James Connolly 1910.