After both PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins ran with the above video calling for democracy in Western Civilization to be replaced by a Catholic Monarchy, those of us who favor evidence-based thinking over dogmatic superstition reacted quite vocally (just look at the comments sections on both blogs to get a sense). The reaction was enough to get the attention of the video’s creator, Michael Voris, who later released a follow-up video attacking atheists and calling them angry, hate-filled, vocabulary challenged, and ignorant of history (and theology, as if that’s even important).
He also outlines in more detail just why a Catholic Monarchy would be better, suggesting that we already live in a dictatorship, one he calls the “dictatorship of relativism,” presumably the same one (then) Cardinal Ratzinger railed against in 2005.
Both videos are fairly bizarre, and I would be content to simply laugh them off as another example of religious extremism with no audience (and indeed, plenty of us were hoping it was a mere joke) had Voris not done the follow-up calling out atheists in particular. But he apparently believes what he’s saying, and by channeling the Pope in his message, he undoubtedly will sway many with his half-baked arguments, of which there are several.
Before I get started on refuting some of his logic, I’ll pause to point out that the first video is a backup that was uploaded by a user of one or both of the Pharyngula or Dawkins websites after Voris took down the video he uploaded. Voris apparently can’t handle well-reasoned and logical responses directly in his YouTube postings, and he appears to take issue with the embed feature of said videos. Also, commenters on both Myers’s and Dawkins’s sites do a pretty good job of refuting most of his claims, so I am not going to spend much time on those.
His follow-up video is little more than a diatribe against atheists and their “relativism.” But Voris misses the real point of the whole debate, instead falling back on fear-laced lunatic ramblings such as “[atheists] may not believe in satan now, but they will” and “Catholics need to see the world as it really is, ruled by [satan]” before reasserting the need for his Catholic monarchy without referring to the history of the many failures of this form of government or indeed what parts of his holy book actually say about earthly kingdoms. He offers no evidence for the validity of his assertions, and that’s the root of atheists’ responses.
The argument for a Catholic monarchy assumes that such a thing could or should fall into the stated plans of his god (at least what is distilled from the bible). Why should they? If the end goal is for believers to get to heaven, and all of this earthly matter will be destroyed after the second coming of jesus anyway, why would a temporal theocracy even matter? The only plausible answer is that such a setup only bolsters earth-based power, and is a merely cynical construct to control others. That is to say, if Voris believes in the necessity of a material, temporal Catholic kingdom to rule in the interim between now and the return of his savior, then he’s rejected the tenets of his own religion in favor of the very materialism he otherwise denounces. That’s right: Michael Voris is a hypocrite and a fraud if he believes an earthly kingdom is reconcilable with christian eschatology.
His other tactic, invoking judgment and eternal damnation to elicit fear, also misses the mark. I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I don’t find his god worthy of even the tiniest respect if he is so vengeful that my failing to find evidence for his existence is cause for eternal suffering. Eternal suffering would be a small price to pay for the integrity of my own thoughts and beliefs, since I have the ability to gather evidence and draw conclusions about the world around me. If this god wants me to believe in him, he needs to do better than fill a book with contradictory and often immoral and unethical commandments. In short, his scare tactics are unlikely to work on those who have already come to the conclusion that 1) his god doesn’t exist or, if he did, and he was the same god portrayed in the bible, 2) he is in any way benevolent and thus worthy of devotion.
And look, I’ve written this without using a single expletive. Nor am I angry, hate-filled, or vocabulary challenged. And finally, I have the backbone to let anyone comment, assuming they get past Akismet’s spam filter. Happy commenting.
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