The other day, we noticed a new link to us on our wordpress admin page. It was, disappointingly, merely someone hotlinking to a picture we were hosting (and thus using up our bandwidth). This was especially annoying as the site in question was ‘American Papist’, which apparently has had over 1,300,000 hits. Understandably, we felt aggrieved and left a polite comment asking the webmaster, a certain Thomas Peters, to kindly refrain from his hotlinking.

Sadly, this did not seem to have the intended effect.

At this point, we decided to investigate Thomas’ website somewhat, and - I am sad to say - he let us down again. Besides linking to vendors of ‘The Pope’s Cologne’  and ‘Papist Hoodies’, Thomas also seems to enjoy attacking feminists, Democrats, liberals and others for their pro-choice (or ‘culture of death’) views, equating foetuses with ‘persons’, and even criticising other Catholics for their ‘flat-out dissent from and opposition to Church teaching’, and/or being ‘un-Catholic’.

And his attempts at news programming are fairly amusing. Did you know, for example, that MSN’s online clipart gallery contains NO images of God? That’s right, none. It’s run by atheists.

Now, before I reveal what happened next, (the punchline, if you will), let me preface it by saying that I don’t have any problems with religious belief. It’s a basic assumption of this website that such issues are matters of personal judgment, and that dogmatic atheistic beliefs are no more justified than dogmatically theistic beliefs. Clearly, many Christians are admirable and thoughtful human beings, whatever Richard Dawkins says to the contrary.

However, if you are going to dogmatically base your beliefs solely on the pontifications of one extremely powerful man, who wears a dress but says gay marriage is immoral, who is conveniently deemed by his own organisation to be entirely infallible, and whose job consists in the main of promulgating dogmas supposedly derived from divine revelations… and you then go on to criticise others for not believing the same, to the extent that you feel you have the authority to decide what other people should do with their lives and bodies, (not to mention hotlinking to our website), then you fully deserve this…

Forgive us Father…

So, remember kids, hotlinking is a sin.