What I wrote at the Wall Street Journal.

This is sort of on-topic because it's about Catholic rules. I'm old enough to remember when it was a mortal sin (your loving god will torture you forever) to eat meat on Fridays. Our family obeyed that rule to appease Mr. God. The problem was nobody in our family knew how to properly cook fish so we had no animals to eat at all. I lived with the problem because I was just a gullible brainwashed kid.

Then one day the Pope said "Never mind. You can eat all the farm animals you want on Friday." This was a good thing but it made me wonder why the heck did I have to endure this moronic rule when it was obviously something the Church made up and Mr. God had nothing to do with it.

Virtually every cult has rules about what people can eat and not eat. As if the magical master of the entire universe, countless trillions of solar systems, thinks what human apes eat on this tiny insignificant planet is extremely important.

What Richard Feynman said about Mr. Jesus Christ:

So …altogether I can’t believe the special stories that’ve been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be…too simple, too connected, too local, too provincial. The “earth,” He came to “the earth”, one of the aspects God came to “the earth!” mind you, and look at what’s out there…? how can we…? it isn’t in proportion…!

-- Richard Feynman http://bit.ly/1Q0fpXb

http://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-calls-for-leniency-toward-divorced-catholics-1460109702