The Botticelli Code

"Could the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse crisis be tied to embedded Satanic and occultic imagery in its artwork—some of it hundreds of years old?" I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess the answer is "no," but the good folks at WorldNetDaily aren't as dubious. Promoting the new documentary Rape of the Soul—"made not by anti-Catholic bigots, but by devout followers of the Church"—WND writes:

Experts are featured in the film to offer detailed accounts of the subconscious programming effects of the sex and occult images on the human brain and how it promotes sex, Satanism and the occult. Religious education materials, songbooks, children's story books, devotionals and the Sunday Missals all have been found to contain embedded imagery….

"Artists from DaVinci to Botticelli have embedded subliminal images into their art for centuries," said [Michael] Calace. "In this case we found penises on crucifixes, anarchy symbols, swastikas, demonic faces and in modern works even the word 'sex' encrypted into the images. The works in question include modern artists' work currently on the covers of missalettes and hymnals that at this very moment sit in the pews of churches throughout the U.S. and on children's religious teaching aids."

The expert witnesses include Wilson Bryan Key, who "was a professor at the University of Western Ontario," and Judith Reisman, "a world-renowned author, who specializes in child psychology and the harmful effects of pornography."

See the trailer here.

Disney gets in on the fun here and here.

Oliver Stone joins in here.

Salvador Dali's "critical paranoia" here.

Ferdinand de Saussure goes mad here.