Catholic Bishops: all the moral authority of a tapeworm

I'm a sociologist, and one focus of my study is how people understand their lifeworlds and their well being. So I ought to be good at understanding major social institutions and the basis of their attraction, like for example the Catholic Church. But I just don't get why this atavistic, intellectually ludicrous and morally depraved enterprise doesn't wither and blow away.

Here's the Bishop of Springfield, Illinois organizing an exorcism to drive Satan from the body politic, "in reparation for the sin of same-sex marriage." For all of the new Pope's conciliatory words, when he was still Jorge Bergoglio he said that gay marriage in Argentina was "a 'move' of the father of lies who wishes to confuse and deceive the children of God." So Bishop Paprocki will perform an exorcism as the governor signs the same sex marriage bill.

Here's the idea, as I understand it. God is beneficent, all knowing, and all powerful. God created the universe and people (the latter "in his own image"). He put the people in a garden in which he also placed two trees, from which he instructed them not to eat. Despite his being all powerful and all knowing, another being, in the form of a talking snake, succeeded in getting the people to eat an apple, which he didn't know about at the time because he was apparently distracted elsewhere. So God cursed the people for their sin of doing what he presumably knew they were going to do and which they did because they were of the nature which he made them.

Some time later (it used to be about 4,000 years later, but since the Bishops now say they accept scientific accounts of human antiquity it's impossible to say when all this shit supposedly happened nor is it in any way coherent) God impregnated a woman with his son, who was also himself, who he then deliberately had tortured to death to pay for the sin of eating the apple, but he wasn't really dead he just rose up into the sky. That means God will no longer have to torture everybody in hell forever, just the people who don't believe this crap.

Nowadays some of the people who God made in his own image are marrying people of the same sex, which God does not want them to do, but it's happening because some other dude -- maybe the same entity as the snake, it's not clear -- is making it possible. God can't do anything about that himself, but if a bunch of old men in fancy silk dresses chant and wave incense around and ring bells and snuff out candles, maybe the snake thing will slither away after all.

The old men will do this during their breaks from raping children, of course.

The 12th Century is so over. Get used to it.