It's All About the Delusionality, Part 1: The Vatican, Iraq:
We know how this shit actually went down. A bunch of cardinals, bishops, the Pope, other hangers-on in man-dresses gathered in Rome and said, with their various cute accents, "Damn, we gotta do something to make people think we're not a bunch of hatemongering bullshit artists who only wanna fuck little boys and engorge our golden coffers with the money of the poor." So, now, there's only a little bit of wriggle room in Catholic teachings to do something that won't completely fuck with people and cause a schism, a la those heathen Episcopalians. What do you do, motherfuckers? What do you do?

You say the babies ain't floatin' in limbo no more. Yep, that'll take care of the bad PR. For centuries, Catholics have believed that dead babies (and fetuses) wouldn't be allowed into God's creepily wide open arms because no one in a man-dress had poured on the babies' heads a goodly dose of holy water, which, as near as the Rude Pundit can tell, means water that the Pope has dipped his balls in. (Followed, of course, by the dude in the man-dress smearing lubricant on the baby's head. Followed, of course, by the baby crying because some dude in a man-dress just tossed water in her eyes and then made her ready for cooking.)

Apparently, this was done after a great deal of "study." Says the document the Vatican put out, "The conclusion of this study is that there are theological and liturgical reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness even if there is not an explicit teaching on this question found in revelation." How does the babies gets them some salvation? Well, suffering is always a good way, by "saving conformity to Christ in his own death." So crucified babies are in, as are other victims of "violence." And then there's the chance that God'll just give 'em a pass.

It's really part of the ongoing upgrading in the status of the dead babies since St. Augustine, that repressed fuck, declared that the babies is headin' to hell to burn because babies make Satan's fires glow more brightly. That was in the fifth century. In the 1200s, they upgraded the babies to limbo, but they held the bar awfully low. Now it's all the way to heaven for them babies. Although the Catholics are hedging their bets in an amazingly honest statement: "It must be clearly acknowledged that the church does not have sure knowledge about the salvation of unbaptized infants who die."

Seriously, how is this any different than slicing open a goat and reading its entrails to see what's what?

Meanwhile, over in Mosul, Iraq, gunmen, probably Sunni, separated people by religion, letting the Christians go, and keeping a bunch of Kurds who belong to the Yazidi faith (not an Islamic sect) on the bus they were riding in. Then they, you know, drove 'em somewhere, lined 'em up, and killed 23 of them. The reason had something to do with revenge for a Yazidi woman who converted to Islam for a Sunni lover and then was stoned to death by the Yazidis for it. And there's some shit about Yazidis believing in some angel who some Christians and Muslims believe is the devil and...ah, fuck it.

You wanna know why the war is lost? Because it could never, never be won. We're asking people who live in a state of religious delusion to calm the fuck down and not respond to their delusions. Delusional reality. Delusionality, if you will. We in the West just think our delusionality is so much more civilized than theirs.

But if the great and wondrous West is still trying to figure out if some invisible sky wizard lets the ghosts of dead babies into his invisible sky cloud city, if this is something that grown-ups have to have a "study" about, whether for reasons of public relations or theology, then we are not so far down that historical road from stoning for conversions.

We're not gonna win this war because we're in the middle of the Better Butter Battle. Hell, the Zooks and the Yooks even built a goddamn wall.