I have a con­fes­sion to make: I am a for­mer Catholic schoolgirl.

I’ve since been saved from the church and have been blas­phem­ing ever since. When I heard the news that The Vatican gave Avatar a poor re­view and crit­i­cized the film for “flirt­ing with mod­ern doc­trines that pro­mote the wor­ship of na­ture as a sub­sti­tute for re­li­gion,” my im­me­di­ate thought was, “Wow, someone’s get­ting defensive.”

I started think­ing about why wor­ship­ping na­ture makes for a bet­ter re­li­gion than Catholicism. Here is what I came up with:

• Nature pro­vides us with oxy­gen, sus­te­nance and life. Catholicism gives us guilt, shame and men in smocks.
• Nature will never mo­lest an al­tar boy.
• You can run naked and free through a field of grass. Try do­ing that in a cathedral.
• The smell of a for­est af­ter a rain­fall is ex­hil­a­rat­ing. The smell of burn­ing in­cense in a church is cloying.
• Nature doesn’t care what god(s) you pray to, just don’t pollute.
• Nature knows no gen­der. Catholicism hates women.
• Sex is nat­ural. Catholicism hates sex. (Unless it’s used for pro­cre­ation. But that’s it.)
• Nature is full of won­der­ful sur­prises, but it has never given us a talk­ing snake.
• Nature doesn’t care if you’re gay. In fact, it has every­thing to do with it.
• Everybody is “go­ing green”. Nobody is “go­ing Catholic”.

This pretty much en­cap­su­lates why I left the church many years ago. I’m not the tree-hugging type, but I do re­spect the en­vi­ron­ment much more than I re­spect the Pope. I’ll prob­a­bly be told I’ll be go­ing to hell for this, but as Mark Twain once said, “Go to Heaven for the cli­mate, Hell for the company.”

Amen to that.