Sigh - well Raif it certasinly would be much better if we all woke up and realized all religion, especially the monotheistic religions are simple command and control organizations.

There is no god, no jesus, no mohamed, no allah -it's all bullshit, buddies.

But good on you and I regret the amount of hate that will be coming your way from the crazed catholics - expect letters/calls etc for attacking them - like all dictatorships, they simply cannot accept criticim in any form other than that which they agree,

I don't have anything to say about the religious comments, but about Channel 10. Why is a TV channel **required** to have some religious content in order to get a licence? Insisting that any religious content is a condition to broadcast is, to my mind, ramming religion down the throats of viewers. We already have religious channels which are included in paid services, whether we want them or not, so why does a government agency force us to support an activity that is supposed to outside the purvue of government.

Without disagreeing for a moment with much that Rafe Mair wrote here, nor even taking issue with the generality of the idea that various species of religious extremism have a 'mixed' record all around the world, this construction:

is hyperbole.

Had he redacted the word 'caused' and substituted a slightly different wording, something like 'contributed to', I would have no problem with his conclusion.

The intent, gleaned from the matter that follows, is meant to refer to the modern era, post universally-available artificial contraception (and especially in Africa) and in that context the conclusion is not warranted.

I want to make it clear that I'm referring to the modern world and not the whole range of Church history. Over the longer run, Mair's designation would not be as unfair although it would still require some amendment and elaboration.

Further, despite the 'official' policy of the Magisterium, I am convinced that the Church in Africa is doing a lot more in the areas of Aids prevention and family planning than the article acknowledges.

Thought I'd save you the trouble, nightboom. Right now, I'm more concerned about the fate of another handful of Canadian soldiers that have come under both enemy and 'friendly' fire in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Thank you, Alcibiades. My thoughts exactly.

Thank you Rafe for telling it like it is! What you say millions of people know and agree with. However, rarely do we see the courage of a writer to put this in print. All of these concerns are valid and we can only hope that more people in positions of influence will speak out. Keep up the great work.

I agree with Alcibiades on the hyperbole, but generally, thanks for the article, Rafe.
For more on the curious evolution of Christianity, see "Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History" by James Carroll
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=683287

As an on-again, off-again Catholic (currently on-again; you can't change the world from outside) I don't disagree that the institution has lost its way. I too stalled at the hyperbole others mentioned but the hypocrisy inherent in the Holy See's see-no-evil-but-sex attitude in Africa is just so horrific.

Like Rafe, I think the words of Jesus are pretty important. His was a message of social justice primarily. His strongest admonishments came to those who had money and power. But the rest of us don't get off lightly. He challenged everyone to be a better person every day of their lives. As simple as that sounds, I can't say I'm a better person today than I was yesterday.

Having said all this, the religion remains pure enough. What's been sullied is the institution, not only the Catholic Church, but other denominations as well. The CC's perspective on Africa is driven not by religion but by politics, and it has been thus for many, many years.

These things come in cycles. We'll get a reformer pope again eventually who will wake up one morning with the strength and conviction to say 'this institution has lost its way.' Until then, we should be strongly criticizing the institution, shaming them into following the words that Jesus actually spoke.

Funny how people come to reject these cults in their own ways. For me it's Jesus himself who pissed me off with his continual haranguing of the crowd to follow him and abandon their families and give unto Ceasar what is Caesar's...and not being able to give a straight answer to anything but insisting on all those devious parables...you know crap like that.

Of course, it would have helped if Jesus would have known how many people would be murdered and enslaved in his name in centuries to come.

And this 2000-year wait for him to get back...that's a bit much too. I mean, talk about tardiness or what!

And, of course, it was Jesus not being able to give a hint about dinosaurs or the second law of thermodynamics which tipped me off that he was just a stupid narcissist David Koresh wannabe. (Even a tiny bit of amateur futurism would have spiked his credibility with me.)

Condoms are not relevant to Aids in Africa, so the Catholic Church has not killed hundreds of millions, nor even contributed to the deaths of hundreds of millions with their condemnation of birth control. Condoms will protect against birth and sexually transmitted diseases, but Aids is not sexually transmitted. (It's just more old diseases, precipitated by poverty and starvation which have conveniently been labelled "Aids" by Pharmacorpia.) Hiv is totally harmless, and regardless, is only minimally transmissable by sexual activity.

Hep B is nine times as transmissable as Hiv. Hiv, on average, requires 1000 sexual contacts with a hiv-positive person to be transmitted to a non-seroconverted one.

Retroviruses do not cause illness in human beings, except as claimed by Robert Gallo, HTLV (human T-Cell Lymphotropic Virus)--like hiv, also invented by him.

Jesus and Mohammed existed. God/Allah? Can't prove it either way.

Can't blame Christians for the way the world is. We can blame them for boring tv, and unnecessary preamble in our Constitution etc. But we can't blame them for child molesters, famine, 20th century wars etc.

They're just a community of people that often don't practice what they preach. So? They're not alone.

Good one Rafe! As a lapsed Catholic myself I am also disgusted with the behaviour of the church in Africa and elsewhere and how they've condemned millions to poverty and death through negligent, distorted preachings. Much of the Catholic church does have blood on its hands (however I have met some truly genuine people there who care). I won’t go back until there is a female pope and a renouncement of these crazy birth control policies. I think I'll be waiting a while...

On the topic of misinterpreting the bible here's a good article on how the devil has been portrayed and mischaracterized:

physorg.com/news75128924.html

Too general. Sounds like the Republican party to me.

Passalia's foot, thanks for the link. I guess when new learning comes merely as a confirmation of one's own wisdom, something's up regarding aging, but I can't put my finger on it yet. So anyhow...I've always thought about the devil in the same way as your linked professor; that he's more a provacateur and testor than an evil entity. So thanks a lot. (Remember how he promises Jesus a big Kingdom and all, just to go over to the dark side?)

Why would we need an evil guy for this role, anyway? The role's fairly evenly distributed in the nucleotide sequences of humanoid types, anyway.

BTW, I've always thought that the truly devilish among us are masquerading as good guys. You wouldn't believe who's on my list, so I won't bother, but there's a least one recent extreme libidinized ex US President and a UN special envoy. Oh well.

Rafe Maire is contradicting himself. First he says he can't deny that God has done the many things that all Christian churches claim he did, also that he knows an all-powerful God can do anything. Then he says "I neither believe nor disbelieve".

The fact that he acknowledges the existence of a God means he's a believer.
Everything he says after that has to be read in that context or you don't know where he's coming from.

About the bible and homos, it says, "thou shall not lie with a man as thou lies with a woman or thou has committed an abomination against the Lord" Or words to that effect, anyways, pretty clear, "shall not" and "abomination" are not open to interpretation. I don't care what people do, its thier trip, whatever. This is in the Bible, words to be obeyed if you believe that fairytale, always makes me wonder about this Anglican deal with the gay marriage and firing preachers that wouldn't do it. The pick and chose method is kind of lame to me. And yes, the word cult is meaningless, after a certain number of believers to a religion it is accepted, a numerical meaning. Really its all, as My Brain is on Fire says, bullshit.

MyBrainIsOnFire says

MyBrainIsOnFire you’re 100 % correct.

Life is full of surprises. I never thought I'd be saying this, but Rafe, you slandered the Catholic Church.

I dunno climber, Maimonides, the pre-eminent interpreter of the Jewish law also taught the following:

The punishment in Jewish law for using incorrect weights and measures in business is more severe than the punishment for sexual immorality.

He reasoned that this is on account of the fact that sexual immorality is a sin 'only' against God, but a sin such as cheating in a commercial transaction is a sin against your fellow man.

Something to think about.

Ah, yes, "The Church"... the same church that was responsible for the dark ages, the burnings of libraries stacked with all humanity knew, a threat, of course, to "The Church's authority". And when Constantine, a man who was so ruthless that he beheaded his own son and burned his own wife at the stake, decided to create the church to "rule" the lowly Christians and pagans (often confused as being one and the same) and "tax" the masses a further 10% (tithings, don't you know) the marriage of "church and state" was official.

And since that time, humanity was sent back a millenium. Gone were the teachings of Pythagreas, Demitrius, Copernicus (spelled that wrong, was he even around then?) and the like to once again, embrace the notion that the world is once again flat.

And "The Church's" leader, this "false prophet" who declares himself as "the direct descendant of Peter" (and we all know how the Church treated Peter with their self defined form of euphemasia...

And the crusades...

And the pinky and the brain mentality, "our church will simply have more babies than the rest, make babies like good Catholics". Ask any Quebecer what it was like back in their day along with the rhetorical question as to why their "swear" words are so related to "The Church".

And the preachers, dressed in white, pure as the driven snow, you know, speaking latin of which they know not the meanings of the words of the bread and wine they pour, to stay "pure" you know...

One could easily say that this "institution" that harbors a billion strong, mostly poor people, the church, the richest institution in the world has a hard time sharing with its own body... is a cult.

And does the human reaction to the blood thirst for power in any way shape or form refute the doctrinal claim that the birth of Jesus and the spirit of Christ, is in fact, a holy conception and incarnation of the Prince of truth predicted by Daniel, and others who prophesied a savior to come, one who would tell the truth of it, one who would lead by example? No, thankfully, it does not.

Do the words of old ancestors spoken make their stories true, their words etched in stone through the sands of time? No. They do not.

But our historians, (thanks to them) our keepers of old records, remind us that there was a man, a son of man born in Bethlehem, with the name Jesus Christ, and he was taken very seriously, not only by the king of the day who ordered babies to be slaughtered, but by those who later heard his words. And those words... the words of "peace" and "love" are worth believing.

Perhaps... just this one time... the messanger was and still is, the message itself.

I guess my upbringing as a R/C might have been slanted a bit. I recall my sister being told she would be excommunicated if she went to a friends wedding and participated in any way. If we ate meat on Friday, hell loomed. Birth control which I would hazard a guess as many catholics use as no catholics was a sure trip to hell. when we first got shipped to Quebec, the church ran most things. No birth control there folks. We used to hear how the Jews were still responsible for Jesus being killed. and that over 2,000 years ago. I won't mention residential schools. But somewhere along the passage of time, the word of God because the word of the local guys interpretation. I once heard a Bishops letter , a directive from John 23, being read in a church. The priest read it then gave his interpretation which was totally different. hey folks we can read and most can reasonably understand what they hear.
But everyone knows religious authorities who really do good work. In my family it was expected that at least one daughter should be a nun and one son a priest. Sorry folks didn't happen. The Pope and I, and lots of other catholics have different views on rights for women so I guess like many, we don't show up.

There are two scriptural sources for the proscription against male homosexuality (the act, not the predilection). The first is the one above, pulled from Leviticus, and the second is the "Sodom and Lot" story.

The Leviticus passage is drawn from a section dealing with the Temple Code. This was the code of behaviour that was set down for the Hebrew priesthood in order to curb certain licenses that had been taken, which risked 'soiling' the holiness of the Temple. So concerns itself with preserving the 'ritual purity' of the caste of holy men in contact with the Holy of Holies. The Temple Code forbade a wide range of behaviours and practices that were not a matter of restriction for the general population, including the wearing of fabrics containing more than one weave, etc. A lot of it doesn't make much sense today, and the rest of it probably struck the mainstream population of the day as a little innocuous. This isn't to say that male homosexual behaviour was approved of in the mainstream population (a dubious proposition), but only that the Leviticus passage is pretty shakey ground on which to base prosciptions against all homosexuals (men and women) everywhere in the modern day (especially since there's no Temple anymore!). One must wonder why they felt it necessary to include that in the Temple Code - obviously someone was up to something, so one can conclude that that the priesthood back then may have been just as attractive to sexual minorities then as they have been throughout the Christian age. Plus ça change...

The second source - the Sodom and Lot story - has been revealed by Biblical scholars and theologians to have a totally different meaning than that traditionally attached to it. The only people who still teach the erroneous interpretation that I'm aware of are some of the more conservative protestant sects (Baptists and some evangelicals...interestingly, those sects most hostile to Roman Catholicism). The actual meaning of the story was a warning against inhospitability to strangers visiting your city or town. At most, it was a warning against heterosexual rape, not homosexual activity. I'm a little rusty on my Bible study, but if memory serves the story goes something like this: Angels come and visit Lot at his house. His neighbours get suspicious as the sudden appearance of strangers. They gather outside his house and demand that he sends his visitors out so that they may "know them" (the connotation of the turn of phrase that is employed in this passage is a sexual one: the know someone = to have sexual relations with them). Lot refuses and (in order to protect the sanctity of these visitors from God) offers to send out his daughters instead. This last little tidbit has been exploited by feminists for years, claiming that the Bible condones rape. But that's not quite the meaning either.

In any case, scipture is quite shaky on this. Rafe needs to get his facts right if he's gonna critique the Roman Catholic Church properly. Their homophobia is based on something a little more subtle than scripture - it's based on Aquinas' Natural Law Theory. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-law-ethics/) Actually, the Catholic critique of modern "gay culture" is quite incisive. An inside job, obviously.

same old, same old!
same people repeating what they wrote months and maybe years ago about similar topics.
my answer is simple: if there was a god, he should be shot!
anyone with such divine powers should not let this world go to hell.
since it is definately going to hell, there is NO god!

The things Jesus said were so singular and radical that he must have said them: That it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven, or that the meek will inherit the earth (as if — when has the latter ever happened?). Nobody else ever said things like that, or consorted with criminals, and women in that time (although Paul apointed several women to lead the churches he established, which is something the RC establishment ignores to this day). Mystics and faith healers were commonplace, and Jesus was likely a very good one, and likely a highly educated one for his time.

The rest of the things he's supposed to have said are so out of step with this philosophy that they must have been interpretations by Paul, Luke, the "John" who wrote Revelations et al. How genuine their providence is, well that's debatable. Some of them were candycoated, obviously meant to make the new followers of Jesus (the Way) not appear a menace to the Imperial Romans, while others were word-for-word interpretations of the Old Testament to make it appear that Jesus was the messiah predicted by Daniel and the Jewish prophets. I don't believe Jesus thought he was the messiah, and doubt many of the other things were from his lips too. Certainly, Paul and the others who predicted the imminent second coming of Christ and the destruction of Roman conquerors were sorely disappointed.

Oh relax, religion is just another way to get control over large groups of people who have no idea what to do when left to their own thoughts. If you got rid of the evil Christians, Muslims, etc. they would probably worship Michael Jackson or some other freak.

Yes, it is the same old, same old. Not only this article, but the responses as well. I find myself writing the same textbook explanations of the Leviticus passage, but it doesn't seem to matter. That's because most people have already made up their minds on all of these issues irrespective of evidence or rational argument. Ultimately people see what they want to see. Those who are convinced the Catholic Church is 'evil incarnate' will not be convinced otherwise, and those who are convinced that flooding Africa with UN condoms will save the continent are as short-sighted as those who think all Africa needs is a strong dose of Jesus. That isn't to relativize the options - there are definitely policies that help and those that don't - but generally both the coverage of the issue and the debate surrounding it has become circular, stale, with no one departing from the black-or-white position they started out with.

Kurt - Good reasonable post.

..shall not be infringed.

I can't wait to see this added to the Bill of Rights, Charter of Rights & Freedoms, etc.

Actually I'm not sure how this is considered a right. I thought contraception was a practice or technique, which often uses man-made materials like latex or chemicals.

Rafe: As for slandering the RC church by claiming they are responsible for deaths due to anti-contraception practices. Please provide a list of other churches, synagogues or mosques that have a policy of providing contraception ?

Certainly these religious groups would not want culpability, and would therefore provide contraception ?

Good one Rafe, I wish you would have expanded to all organized religion. I call myself a spiritual
person concerned with upholding the values of Jesus Christ and not a religious person. I agree
with social justice, equality, peace, loving your neighbor etc. Organized religion has become hijacked
by hard core fanatics in most cases, only interested in abortion and gay issues, kind of like a pervert morality if you ask me. Their could be bombs dropping and destroying entire nations, millions dying in Africa and yet the church silence is defaning . But bring up gay marriage and the end of time is near. Church is where otherwise intelligent folks leave their brain at the door, right wing groups like to cherry pick their values to their own political ends. It kind of sickens me

Example . Heterosexual men who are ex murders , child molesters, rapist, death camp leaders and thieves are permitted to get married in the church . But a gay couple no way to evil.

Jwstewart - Good point. And irrespective of the dogma emanating from religious heirarchies, religious groups (and mostly Catholic ones, at that) are still the top purveyors of family planning education and contraceptives in Africa. Anyone who's been through the Catholic system during the JP2 era knows what's going on with all that. The nuns and brothers "on the ground" are some of the most progressive people you're ever likely to meet in social ministry, religious or secular.

Also, Rafe again refuses to acknowledge the doctrinal shift regarding condoms that has taken place since the Papacy turned over. Condoms are now the "lesser evil" in relations to HIV transmission (with the usual caveats regarding marriage...but what did you really expect them to say on that score - they're still a religious organization, not a social welfare appendage of the sexual revolution). So all in all, I give them a pass.

Thank you Rafe...excellent article - largely what I have been thinking for years....

jwstewart,

Ya. If you phrased it like 'A woman shall have control over her reproductive functions' you'd have a powerful statement of indubitable justice, and probably something that you'd call a "right", but it would run directly counter to Roman Catholic dogma. Sadly.

I wonder why?

dfp

Sure, you could call that a "right", but the members of the RC Church would still have a right to their dogma.

And women would have the right not to follow the RC Church, as the have now.

The real problem, not addressed by Mair, is that those who beleive in the right of contraception (like Mair) failed to enable people in Africa of such techniques, and are thus more guilty than the RC Church.

For if the RC Church is guilty of a sin of ommission by not doing what it is not supposed to, then Mair must be equally if not more quilty for not doing what he was supposed to.

More so, since he condemns the church of murder for following it's own doctrines, while he fails to follow his.

(Unless of course Mr. Mair has been shipping condoms directly or indirectly.)

Religion thrives on "poverty,misery,disease and death"Its the four pillars of their streangth so its not in their best interest to elliminate them.The only good things to come out of the "Bible" are the ten comandments most of which have been broken by the "church" itself. .The Roman Catholic Church is in my view the real evil in our world and the sooner it disappears the better along with most others.

dfp - a doctrinaire Catholic would argue that everyone already has control over their reproductive functions. No one ever died from choosing not to have sex. It's a valid (and much maligned) part of the spectrum of "sexual choices", even though it conflicts with the modern value of egocentric "self-fulfillment" and "self-realization". You and I might not see this as a viable solution, but everyone has a right to uphold their ideals and espouse them publicly (within reason and recognized norms, naturally). Condoms are a good stop-gap measure, but even Stephen Louis inserted the caveat that changing male sexual behaviours is the work of generations. So proper use of condoms every time you have stranger-sex is a good habit to teach - but creating a monumental, cult-like "Condom Culture" as if this were an end in itself without presenting life-alternatives to chronic stranger-sex has been a failure in other communities (namely gay men) who are now having to discuss previously taboo subjects like re-stigmatization as a fall-back prevention technique now that the bottom has fallen out of the proverbial bucket in terms of "condom discipline". At its logical extreme, Condom Culture places people on a sliding scale of risk/fulfillment, in which increased risk-taking over time become sexualized and part of the exhilaration. Perverse, I know, but believe me it's true.

Yes, nightbloom, much of what you say about condoms is true,(many of them contain the dangerous microbicide, nonoxynol 9, which clears hydrogen-peroxide producing lactobacillus from the vaginal tract) although you have the wrong angle on it regarding Africa.

But your suggestion about apparent risk-taking in he gay community is pretty well right on.

The high risk behaviour for Aids is drug usage not contracting HIV, which is a harmless retrovirus. Retroviruses do not cause disease in human beings.

I wouldn't have believed it (the amount of drug usage)--I'm not gay--if I hadn't studied it obsessively with my research into hiv in young males.

Here's a challenge for you. Go to:

"Longtitudinal Study of Homosexual Couples Discordant for HIV-1, Palenicek J" and study it carefully.

Remember, this is a peer reviewed study.

It was basically research into the transmissability of HIV within couples, one member of which was HIV positive and the other was HIV negative.

The positive spouse had been engaging in the highest risk sexual behaviour on average for 40 months.

After 1 year of following these couples. NOT A SINGLE SERO-NEGATIVE SPOUSE HAD BECOME SERO-POSITIVE after engaging in continual sex of all kinds with his partner.

Take a look at the Nancy Padian study, which found similar results regarding heterosexual transmission.

Padian refuted the meaning of her own work and got a multi-million dollar grant to go study HIV in Africa.

I had the abortion debate recently with a devoted Baptist , I went on to say that we either choose to make steps to make abortion happen less or we support right wingers who talk the talk but make abortions happen more.

Example --- More Liberal governments = More services to poor women = Less abortions happen

Conservative right wing governments = Tax cuts to the wealthy = massive service cuts to programs = more poor women having abortions as the solution.

Do the research , its a fact that more abortions happened under BUSH Sr than Clinton. So if you want abortions to happen less don't vote for governments that attack women.

So, our Christian brothers and sisters have to decide what is more important , feeling self righteous or
taking the steps to solve the problem. (keeping right wing nuts out of office)

Well I was confronted with the usual glossy eyed talk about the rights of the fetus, right over their head. They went as far as to say that dangerous procedures that may kill women is okay because they should have made the right decision in the first place.

I asked them about the sin of killing and what's happening oversees, about dead kids and women in Afghanistan and Iraq , once again glossy eyed responses.

I see the modern church as quazi right wing parties, just like the churches of south America giving
communion to death squad leaders.

Alive, You said it all: The tired old arguments and hair-splitting over the meanings of illiterate peasants' stories that were rewritten, edited and added to by monks, donkeys' years after they occurred, all making up a hugely inaccurate history that would suppress science and control the masses for two thousand years ongoing.

Here's a cheerful thought to share with you. Vancouver Sun, 16-01-02, quoting the 2001 Census, "20 percent of Canadians and 30 percent of British Columbians said they have no religion". Every 5-year census in Canada shows the number of people thinking for themselves increases by around 5%, a large number of these being apostates.

So here's to education and its inverse ratio to religion which gives hope for the future. The more educated the country, the less dependent on religion. As the developing countries learn, so the people turn from churches to universities. Cheers!

There is a god, but it's name is Conscience. It is bought and sold daily.
Those of you shooting goobers at religion fail to recognize the value of spirituality as a force for empathy. True, the "organizational" aspects are as problematic as one might expect from any pissing contest, but religion per se can have resonance for people in their daily lives.
The well known, secular, purely abstract god "The Almighty Dollar" has spilled blood too. Lets see you turn away from a belief in it.
As for aorangi and others "reasoning" about education being a panacea for religious ignorance... ever heard of "tenure"? It's awfully "Popeish" in its origins.
"Standardized" religious beliefs are no different from "prevailing" educational ideologies. Churning out MBA zealot after MBA zealot hasn't made the world any less fundamentalist, but it has made it far far less empathetic.

This is precisely the approach to abortion which the Jesuits take - their anti-abortion efforts are directed entirely at what they identify as the root causes - poverty, education, opportunity. This is the proper way, in my opinion, while allowing safe therapeutic abortion services. This is a valid, ethical and moral way to be anti-abortion. As someone who is generally pro-choice (with caveats), I nevertheless accept the ethical validity of the anti-abortion position. Men and women who are anti-abortion are articulated a valid viewpoint for which room must be made in the public discourse. It is a form of killing, no matter which way you spin it. Those who argue for the unrestricted "right" to abort right up to the moment of birth are irrational fanatics, in my opinion.

aorangi - didn't a similar survey of Britons yield a significant portion of the population that reported their religion as "Jedi"? But on a serious note, the assumption that the developing world will proceed in the footsteps of Europe and America is a big one. We can't assume that will be the case. Sure, Western culture and techné will have an impact, but we're really a drop in the bucket once the rest of humanity is enfranchised, engaged, and accounted for. The "Old West" is about to get swamped, and will be seen only in museums, remembered only by antiquarians.

jwstewart,

I think you missed the point, or perhaps navigated around it.

If a woman has a right to control her reproductive functions, then it's wrong to counsel against, threaten punishments, or otherwise attempt to deny that right. It's not a mutable point, and it's not relative, depending on the woman's involvement in whatever religion, etc.

But your comment seems to allow the possibility that you'd deny that such a right exists, so this might all be moot.

In any case, the Roman Catholic Church has done much more than merely adhere to it's dogma. It's campaigns against abortion are simple evidence of that.

I can't speak for what's happening in the U.S., but in Canada the anti-abortion 'movement' has become very genteel and oblique, compared to the sticky confrontations outside of abortion clinics we were forced to witness in the early eighties. I think the pro-choicers can claim a victory in that they have succeeded in molding their opposition over time, and have forced the anti-abortion movement to critique the root-causes rather than confronting poor terrified women outside of the clinics, which was the norm 20 years ago. So the debate has progressed, notwithstanding its continued ability to bring out the atavists and the nuts (on both sides).

Incidentally, Antiquity was indifferent to or tolerant of abortion, and (if I'm not mistaken) the scriptures are mute on the subject. So scriptural arguments must necessarily devolve to the injuction against killing found in the 10 Commandments (variations of which are to be found in all major world religious and ethical systems). The question is whether it is killing or not, which is difficult to deny rationally.

As for abortion being a 'right', I can think of no better way to needlessly galvanize the opposition internationally than to push the UN to adopt that into its right agenda. It should be quietly made legal and subject to regulation through the state healthcare sector on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction (i.e. country-by-country) with as little fanfare and rhetoric as possible.

nightbloom,

Not having sex is not the same as having the right to control one's own reproductive function. It has something to do with it, yes, but it's certainly not a moral position when attempting to deny the more fundamental right.

The Roman Catholic position, that contraception, fertility control, abortion, etc., are all bad promotes a culture where male privilege overrides a core right. It might take generations for male sexual behaviour to change, but it will certainly take much longer if a key element of the culture is actively denying the alternatives.

"Condom-Culture" and "chronic stranger sex" sound like delicious red herrings. Would you like some ketchup with that?

Let me clarify for Aorangi

What I meant is pretty simple. An all powerful God can easily resurrect people, make wine and bread become blood and flesh and so on. Because He can do these things it would be illogisal of me to say I accept an all powerful God and then deny him all mighty power.

My position is that it is unnecessary to deal with those matters because Jesus' message said nothing about them as he articulated his simple to understand but hard to abey commandments. I neoither accept nor deny the complicated dogma the priests have spun because it's totally irrelevant.
Am I to believe that a catechism never expounded by Jesus, but onferred by bishops must be accepted? I accept the teachings of Jesus but reject as, in Elizabeth I's words "a dispute over trifles."

Rafe, your problem is that you don't understand the implications of saying that "all is possible with god," and for all you know everything in the Bible could be true.

(But it doesn't matter, somehow)

Christianity is basically the belief that Christ died on the cross, and came alive again--and everyone who believes this will be saved and given grace by virtue of his/her belief.

Now if you say that you believe that all is possible with god, you must also accept that the words of the disciples and henceforth even the priests and popes could be inspired by god, because it is , ACCORDING TO YOUR ALGORITHM, perfectly possible that god actually sent his son to live among men and by so doing INSPIRED the hangers on and epistle writers, exactly as the Catholics or any other church claims.

(Remember, all is possible with God)

And so your thesis is basically an insipid tautology, meaning absolutely nothing--signifying a complete absence of the falsification requirement which usually accompanies serious thought.

Notwithstanding aorangi's essentially agreeable suggestion of "contradiction," your "all is possible" thesis does not actually rise to that level, but is simply meaningless, but for the refuge it provides from the serious criticism of ideas.

Because if "all is possible" with god, it is also possible that Jesus Christ might have just been, as I believe, a goofy little fake messiah, running a narcisstic cult, and therefore totally unworthy of your confidence.

All is possible, eh.

Well, there is something I agree with. There is as much proof of "god" as the Tooth Fairy. I personally worship The Left Front Hubcap of a Fifty-Six Chevy.

And it's my constitional right, too.

And the Hubcap is Great and All Powerful. It is not a christian Hub Cap because it does not hate fags and condoms.

ALL HAIL!!

And so, Rafe, when you say, "all is possible," you don't really mean it; you're merely abusing yourself, your readers and our language. Because, notably absent from your "possibilities" is likely the possibility that Jesus Christ is full of crap--and not only him but also god, because what "totally powerful god" would not make a world absent of the kind of suffering of the innocents this world has seen?

So, your illusion of an all powerful, yet benevolent god is just not going to fly; (It's a contradiction, eh) You're going to have to start thinking of god as having done the best he could with what he had to work with.

Truman
I think you've misrepresented Rafe's thesis.

Truman, that's actually an over-simplification of the narrative Christianity makes use of. There's a meaning behind the words and images, and that meaning has become bound, over time, to the Western philosophical tradition concerning the nature of God and man, the intersection of both, and the origin of creation. The only people who insist on Christianity as you articulate it are the most back-to-basic Protestant sects like the Methodists and Baptists. The Resurrection Narrative of Christianity is a meme that is best conveyed using the counter-rational means of symbology, imagery, storytelling and ritual. The degree of literalness with which believers rely on it is dependent on individual need. Literal belief in the Resurrection Narrative alone should not be the litmus test of who is and is not a Christian, although there are lots who would say otherwise.

Re. the article you refer to - I got my hands on the abstract. Interesting. At first I assumed the reason sero-conversion didn't occur was because the "top" was the 'negative' partner in the pair, but it stated that this was not a factor. It's not 'correct doctrine' to say, but I know from my own observations that the 'top' can get away with a lot more in terms of the liability of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. I can't explain the findings - have they been duplicated since 1992?

No, G. you've just continued Rafe's fallacy by contributing exactly nothing with your proclamation of of my misrepresentation.

Explain why you think I've misrepresented Rafe's thesis please, and while you're at it, both you and Rafe will do well to study the "historical fallacy" for a couple of days first. (google it, maybe)

Here's a hint: Jesus did not put himself into history. Nobody really knows what he said for sure. We all must depend upon the veracity of his biographers to know if Rafe's confidence is justified.

Nightbloom, Christianity is about salvation and the grace that comes by faith, but of course, there are infinite stories and nuances about what it means and how to get it.

Regarding seroconversion did you have a look at the Nancy Padian research, in which she found that hiv is only barely transmissable between heterosexuals, on average 8.6 % of the efficiency of the transmission of hepatitis B. As I said, hers is one of the major works, and she recants the conclusions that should be drawn. Her original abstract says that hiv will be transmitted on an average of 9 times per ten thousand sexual contacts. (.0009, or approximately 1 in 1000) She writes that" hiv is not significantly transmissable by sexual activity." But this is only for you to determine for yourself by reading her research and then her denials and explanations which can be found at Aidstruth.org. Nightbloom, it's up to you to decide which time she was telling the truth.

G. West and Rafe, I'd recommend, "Inconsistencies in the Gospels," wherein every word that Jesus apparently spoke can be found. Maybe!

Nightbloom, Padian concluded that hiv is transmissable from female to male only 9 times in an average of 72,000 sexual contacts. Her study was the longest ever--ten years.

"Padian NS et al. Hetersexual transmission of HIV."

Yep! and people still buy GM and Ford because that is what "our family" does!
Individual thinking is not a typical condition, it is much safer to just do (or believe) what "everyone else" does!
On political issues the media tends to make people aware there are options, even if their spin is one-way only!
And on religion, as you learned people are simply pigheaded!
Probably figuring that pretending to be religious may save them from some terrible fate?
Yes, 5% of our population drop off the converteds list at every census, so with luck eventually this bs, will become another joke, -----------just like circumsicion is becoming a joke now!

Hey G.West, would it be wrong for me to interpret "I think you misrepresented Rafe's thesis, Truman." as: "I still like you, Rafe. I'm on your side against that awful Truman."

Cause it sure as hell ain't no argument!

No matter what they say, no matter what they have proffessed to have studied, No one especially the Virgin Pope, knows any more than a decently educated open minded individual. Most of the powers of clerics in tribal societies were used to enforce common sense (ie.dietary restrictions in the dessert). (Don't kill the cows at the onset of drought). This worked for a while because the main population was uneducated, and needed a 'religious reason' to practice common sense. Now that we no longer have a dearth of communication in the 21st century, religion, in all of it's known forms can be abolished. Leaving the human mind to make the tough calls. Religion is the intellectual restraint of human evolvement. (please dot reply about how prayer cured your cancer ridden relative, s=== happens.

Rafe:

You need to stay away from any topics concerning the Catholic Church because you are so obviously biased that your opinion has no merit. With this article you demonstrate your prejudice and complete lack of objectivity. Here's just one example of your thinking:

Now, if you would just get over your hatred of the Catholic church for one second and think logically: the Catholic church does not approve of condom use, but the Church also does not approve of sex outside of marriage. It makes no sense to blame the "all powerful" Church for causing death by morally preventing people from using condoms (which are widely available), but not applauding the Church for trying to morally stop them from behaving promiscuously, which would at the very least reduce the spread of HIV. It also makes no sense to think that Catholics in Africa would pay attention to the ban on condoms but not the ban on promiscuity.

Furthermore, it's become increasingly disappointing, whenever the topic of religion comes up at The Tyee, to read some of the hateful comments posted here by otherwise reasonable commentators. If you want to know why Christians are seemingly right-wing, it's because the right-wing does not mock them for their beliefs like the left-wing does. The irony is that Jesus was a socialist, because He cared about others, while Judas was a capitalist, because he cared about money.

Truman:

If you don't mind, I would like to take a stab at it, a critique of summations and therefor's earlier provided by yours truly earlier philosophical pokes and digs at Rafe's similar efforts.

A God that believes in FREE WILL? Remove free will, control it, and what do you have... a hypocrite. A control freak. Evil. Is that the "totally powerful" God you had in mind, or would you rather stick with the one who believes in and practices freedom, albeit at a great initial cost and sacrifice to innocence itself...

...until the order that the environment of freedom itself establishes prevails, through and by faith, by all who believe in it, and yes, most definitely so, by a totally powerful God.

The book of John mentions Jesus dying on a tree, contrary to the other gospels, but why split hairs. Its the "everyone who believes this will be saved and given grace by virtue of his/her belief" bit that I can't buy as a Christian. Satan and Beelzebub and the rest of the flies Beelzeebub is "lord over" might believe it (the immacculate conception, the resurrection and the teachings and predictions on a count of they all happen to be characters of the same story for starters, lol), but it won't be saving them either.

"believing in something" just isn't good enough. It begins there, and the belief has to be real, sure, but this isn't the half of it. Its like having the belief in peace and love. The belief, merely thinking it, and knowing its worth saving and aspiring to, isn't enough. The talk is for the most part, all it is. For lack of better words at the moment, a commercial. At some point, we just have to walk the walk. Its our actions that define whether or not we are yet fit to run with the pack, or go back to pissing with the pups. And for that, honesty and the pursuit of truth through the face of humility had best be one's strongest suits.

No truman, it wouldn't. I could care less what Rafe Mair thinks of me and I'm sure the feeling's mutual.

Move On . ORG
has got themselves into a little bit of trouble for allowing comments like we have here, to get pretty extreme against Jews ( Joe Lieberman )Jew Lieberman.
They claim it's conservative bloggers fault, for flooding their website ( George Soros ) with racist comments. Nobody really believes that.
There is no easy out from these very detailed discussions that need to occur, about how we can respect the unique differences between us.

Thats where you lost me, buddy. I really don't want to, myself. :-)

For example Ron?

I guess your profound feelings of respect for Muslims provide everyone here with a good example, eh?

Muslim is not the antagonist, it's a twisted yet popular version that's a concern for us western judaeo christian types out there. As well as our brethren can get twisted ( KKK , White Supremacist ) so can everyone.
Of course I am scared of the confrontation between Western and Eastern values.
Rudyard Kipling said " East is West, and West is East, and never the twain shall meet. " This has been apparent for over a very long time.

Once again:
We will not survive unless we grow out of our irrational emotional need for religion. Overcome by the ghosts and demons in our heads, we are ready to kill for the Ultimate Good, to fight others who have different names and visions for the personification of their mental illness.

Yes, mental illness, . . what else can you call it? When we realize the world is run by those who hear voices, who discern terrible things from old translations of old translations of old stories, we know our time is limited.

We are killing each other over things we have made up from whole cloth, terrible imaginings from the ids of an ignorant, illiterate, and superstitious rabble two thousand years ago.

When it comes to decisions, fear and emotion always trump rationality - Karl Roveblossom showed us that.

SO you freely admit that you hate and distrust Muslims, is that right Ron? And you share Kipling's sensitivity for the 'white man's burden'?

Why am I not surprised?

gkam:

You mean like the rationality of ideology or nationalism. Those are the leading causes of death throughout history, not religion.

http://www.answers.com/topic/list-of-wars-and-disasters-by-death-toll

The ultimate mental illness is not believing in God...it's believing in man.

Stan, with all respect, Jesus was not a socialist, he was an anarchist. He turned orthodox Jewish belief on its head. Rather than the observant Jews who kept the Law given to Moses by God finding a place reserved for them in heaven it would be all sinners who would be forgiven by the "Father" and taken to his side. Pretty radical stuff.

And Judas wasn't a capitalist, he was an Iscariot, people like the Zealots (who also were among his disciples) who actively rebelled against the cruel Roman emperors and their quislings such as Herod, often with terrorist style actions such as randomly stabbing a man in a crowd to incite riots (funny how history repeats itself, the players change but the game remains the same). There is a theory that at the Last Supper, Jesus had got wind of a Jewish rebellion in the making and sent Judas to talk the rebels out of it, but he'd been caught and interrogated by the Romans. I find this more credible than the myth about Judas turning Jesus in for pieces of silver, then committing suicide out of guilt.

But the myth remains all-powerful for believers. That makes sense in a funny way; after all, can you imagine someone writing a book called "Zeus: His human side"?

The ultimate mental illness is not believing in God...it's believing in man.

I have seen that rationalism from many groups of believers, from the Crusaders to the Children of God, to the Christians of Nazi Germany and Bosnia to the fundamentalist Christians and Wahabbi Muslims of today.

Not all religion is bad, of course, but it certainly does make a damn fine excuse to do what you are emotionally charged up to do.

And just what does "believing" do, anyway? It's really just thought, a form of electrical activity in the brain. How would that send us to some other plane? We are no more important to the Universe than the earthworms in your garden. Do you think that electrical activity in their nervous systems does something magic? Do you think anything notices or cares?

The whole idea of worship is ridiculous, of course. What does that mean? Would a perfect being need to be liked, let alone worshipped? Would such a divine being inflict terrible punishments for such silly slights?

Sorry, but the whole idea is simply preposterous, and shows our insecurities, our weaknesses, our fears of nonexistence.

It's okay to tell ourselves lies and make up stories to feel better, but to kill for such nonsinse is not the glorification of good.

Regardless of what you think, gkam, most people in the world believe in some sort of higher power. However, if you're happy being nothing more than a meat sack, who am I to argue. It only becomes a problem when one side or the other INSISTS that only they are right and everyone else must agree or they are stupid.

No, Stan, it becomes a problem when true believers burn others alive, chop off heads, or demonize the others leading to physical and/or economic tyranny.

I don't disagree that most people claim to "believe", but what does that mean? Are they just hoping, like most folk, perhaps covering all bases, just in case? And does the fact that people will accept ideas for which there is no proof, proof itself of Truth?

But I feel that mouthing certain sounds, making certain gestures, going to certain buildings will not affect what happens to us after life.

Do YOU really believe that you will live forever in some fashion?

And if religion is genuine, which one is it?

Not stupid, Stan, . . weak and fearful.

Here's an interesting article, which just happens to be out now.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14638243/site/newsweek/

Good post, Stan. And your point above is something I've tried to articulate in the past. One of the reasons we're in such a 'conservative' religious backlash with a distinctly evangelical flavour is because the moderate and Left-leaning Christians were attacked and pilloried right out of public debate by secular ideologues of the Left back in the 1960' and 1970's. Liberal Christians were seen as the 'enemy'. The Left still has great difficulty even acknowledging a Christian Left, let alone a long tradition of Catholic participation in the anti-war movements through the ages. In fact, Roman Catholics practically invented the whole notion of an organized cross-constituency anti-war 'movement'. It's been fascinating to watch other sects involved in anti-war activities over the last five years belatedly mine Catholic scholarship and philosophy in this area in order to tap its intellectual firepower.

And yes, I'll agree about the hateful and/or irrational posts - people who proclaim a blanket unconditional hatred for Roman Catholicism are probably really doing so out of a hatred for Western civilization and history itself, or out of a self-loathing rejection of human nature with all its flaws. They're disgruntled ideological perfectionists who refused to engage the world until it's been refashioned in their own image, and that means wiping out any social or institutional bulwarks which challenge their fragile identities.

nightbloom
I don't think the hateful and irrational attitudes of the left are actually as prevalent as you'd have us believe. Spend five minutes on any rightwing website and you'll see what I mean. There are an awful lot of disgruntled ideological perfectionists trying to refashion the world in an image appropriate only to themselves on the 'right' these days too. I daresay far more of them in that camp than on the left.

The Christians I respect are nearly all, with very few exceptions, left wing. Most of them Catholics and most of them still going to Mass pretty regularly. There are a few non-conformists and the odd Anglican among them, but, to my recollection – not a single Baptist.

We're talking about Christianity and Roman Catholicism in particular. The Left needs to stop consoling itself with the sins of others, and recognize its prejudice against even moderate manifestations of faith. As for re-fashioning society, that is a project distinctly associated with liberalism and the ideological Left, whereas the Right is more often associated with the status quo, exposing it to different (and perhaps equally valid) forms of criticism. But it's important to make these distinctions. The Right on gets 'revolutionary' on its lunatic fringe. The Left gets to manifest gradients of revanchisme as soon as your start moving away from the Centre.

In any case, the Left hasn't handled the modern religious discourse very well.

On another note, i saw this book during my last grazing session at Chapters. Interest premise...

Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class

"In this impassioned but hard-to-swallow treatise, Dworkin, an M.D. and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, laments the rise among primary care physicians of the "ideology" that "unhappiness [is] a disease" to be treated with "external cures" from psychotropic drugs to "obsessive" exercise. This view, he argues, has led doctors to push antidepressants onto patients at an explosive rate. Dworkin argues that primary care doctors initiated and conquered a turf war with psychiatrists in which antidepressants are their main source of power. The author shows how placebo science, the desire for happy patients and a desire for more personal doctoring led to a rise in dubiously beneficial alternative health practices. He belittles the 1980s buzzword "stress" with its accompanying surge of mind-body activities and denigrates the moral deficit he perceives to be underlying a widespread obsession with fitness culture. He also argues that "many Americans are only superficially religious, outwardly professing belief in God while crossing over to medicine for help when life grows really difficult." Dworkin's thesis is provocative but its sweeping claims, heavy reliance on the term "ideology" to describe doctors' motivations and his confrontational approach undermine the book's power to persuade."

How does anyone know what Jesus actually said? Jesus left no written records of his teachings. I'm sure many of the contributors to this blog are familiar with the various source theories regarding the composition of the gospels.

The comments with regard to the Left's prejudice against even moderate manifestations of faith may be correct in as much as it refers to the armchair Left. However, grassroots social activists know better. In Vancouver, the United Church funds at least 2 community advocates to assist people living in poverty.

SO what else is new nightbloom? You'd be surprised by that thesis?

As to your penultimate remark, just because there are leftists among the Christians I know - funnily enough, the Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, agnostics and atheists I hang with happen to be leftwing too - I've never found the philosophy we happen to 'share' is at all restrained or restricted by the religious beliefs (or disbeliefs) of those in my group who don't happen to have a common theological point of view.

On the right however, that kind of intolerance is pretty much everywhere - as even you, nightbloom, must acknowledge. The obvious conclusion is that there is NO religious discourse to speak of on the right.

That's why, I'd suggest, you hang around here posting the same thing again and again and again.

Religion comes in many forms. I know some guys who believe in the God of Ever-Evolving Technologies and some women who believe in the God of Shoes. It's all in what you worship.

And I agree with The brain, the argument for or against the existence of God..should not depend upon the existence of suffering. In other words, the expectancy that an all-powerful God will fix all things, remedy all things and that we, like spoiled children won't have to....ultimately leaves man no responsibility for his own actions in the state of this world...and no free will...nor need of developing critical thinking in order to make the necessary critical choices.

...much agree, though, that we'd definitely be better off without the hypocrisy of religions be they of the Vatican-based kind or the oil-pipeline-based kind...if there is a God he would both condemn the inherent greed in these as well as laugh at man's silly pretensions of grandeur. And if He does exist he is more than likely found in the small simple things... flowers as they nod towards the warm sun, the lift of a bird's wings in flight, a certain guy's smile. I don't think it's anymore complicated than that.

Gwest - I can't make sense of your post. No religious discourse on the Right, you say? - They've established a hegemony over it by default. Not sure how that can be denied in the current climate.

I my post was in reponse to one of your ripostes, so obviously you still find something debateable about the whole issue. You're posting the same schtick too ;-)

...and to be fair, Rafe is peddling the same schtick in this article, and the posters here are peddling the same stock responses. The debate is stagnant.

Okay, I'm thru helping out this thread. If Rafe wants to be complimented by a nice, long, fiery discussion thread, he should stop preaching to the choir and write something new and original on the subject. We're doing his work for him, Gwest.

nightbloom
There is no debate on the right at all. Christianists and guys like George Bush and the project for a "new American Hegemony" have the 'revealed' truth; facts don't matter and intolerance rules.

WHy do I have to explain these things to you?

Goodbye, thanks for all the help.

Man is a Religious Animal. Man is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be-a Christian.

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.

O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it...

Twain

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931 -), S. African cleric and peace activist:

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, "Let us close our eyes and pray." When we opened our eyes we had the Bible and they had the land.

Exactly, Stuart.

When the Christians followed Columbus to the Caribbean they soon figured out that the Tainos and Arawak Indians were totally useless as slaves so they ran them all to ground and massacred every last one of them with their steel weapons of mass destruction --like killing rabbits--to make way for the blacks from Africa, who, being totally disoriented from going to another planet, fit the bill perfectly and became perfectly enslaved.

The Christians prayed for and received gods's blessing all the while, or at least, so it seemed to them.

Oops, I guess I exaggerated. Seems as though the Christians didn't kill them all. There's a few left apparently.

hi lynn and brain. I saw a documentary about the massacre in Rwanda. A 14-year old boy was told to kill some little kids and stuff their bodies in a hole in the ground. He didn't want to hurt anybody, but the townspeople threatened to cut him apart with machetes if he refused.

So he poked these little kids (three or four) to death with a sharp stick and dug a little hole in the mud and stuffed their bodies in.

I'd suggest to "free-willers" that they try to live that scene and BE those little kids, blood gurgling from their mouths while mud is being stamped tightly on top of them, before getting too excited about "free will."

Is this kind of stuff really necessary so god can be seen as not interfering in the free will of human beings? What free will did these little kids have, and what free will did the 14-year old boy have?

You see, the problem with the free will-all powerful god program is that an all-powerful god must, by definition, have the ability to create a world without the non-edifying suffering of the innocents. The boy's choice was to save his soul by choosing to be murdered.

This god of yours has become a devil for these little children and their killer.

I'm not talking about a tribe or individual dying by the sword because they lived by the sword here--who failed to exercise free will by resisting evil.

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“The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.”
— Adolph Hitler, Proclamation to the German nation at Berlin, February 1, 1933

“In the same way, the Government of the Reich, which regards Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation ...”
— Adolph Hitler, Speech at the Reichstag, March 23, 1933

“Let us pray in this hour that nothing can divide us, and that God will help us against the Devil! Almighty Lord, bless our fight!”
— Adolph Hitler to the SA in 1930

“The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. Especially if it is repeated over and over.”
— Adolph Hitler

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“The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State.”
— Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels

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“Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship…Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”
— Leading Nazi leader, Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg Trials before he was sentenced to death

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“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”
— Thomas Paine

“Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.”
— George Orwell

“As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.”
—Voltaire

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“Herein lies a riddle: How can a people so gifted by God become so seduced by naked power, so greedy for money, so addicted to violence, so slavish before mediocre and treacherous leadership, so paranoid, deluded, lunatic?”
— Philip Berrigan

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“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”
— Noam Chomsky

Here is an interesting answer to Philip Berrigan's riddle.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12642.htm
The Century of the Self
It is a four part program done for Channel Four by Adam Curtis(who also did the Power of Nightmares) on how we were manipulated all during the 20th Century.

The is the hint that we are starting to come out from under the trance.

I'll be back, but two things:

http://www.amazon.com/rival-philosophies-Jesus-Paul-Christianity/dp/B00087HAFI/sr=8-2/qid=1157590192/ref=sr_1_2/002-0771576-9379209?ie=UTF8&s=books

The Rival Teachings of Paul and Jesus etc by Ignatius Singer, 1910s. Unavailable through Amazon currently but sometimes in uni/city libraries.

As for Catholicism and hundreds of millions of deaths....hmmm, the African context is definitely hyperbole, but when you stop to think about the Wars of the Conversion, the Wars of the Reformation, the Wars of Religion etc in Europe (including recently in the former Yugoslavia) it's not as if the church didn't have a lot of blood on its hands in Europe alone. Hard to calculate in Latin America, but Africa to me would seem last on the list (other than in Asia, where there has little Christian penetration relative to the other colonized continents).

Arguing religion is like arguing economics - we made them up.

...reason I said that is the general drift of the Catholicism of Latin America was widespread conversion rather than slaughter; although the church had its hand and often gave it sanction to same (including in modern times). So it's not a clear-cut case of killing heretics and unbelievers, it's an issue of church sanction of an oppressive and often brutal socioeconomic system. But, well, it's always been that way - since Constantine's legalization/institutionalization of the Faith, in fact.

Speaking of which everybody here should remember the irony of the Literal Word types taking stock in a Bible built out of the sweat and tears (and not a few torture racks) of the Councils of Nicaea and other gatherings of imperial prelates working out what was in the book and what wasn't. And getting rid of all the good stuff, and also vetting out the more mystical stuff (now in the apocrypha and the gnostic writings and such; the big chunk of mysticism left is the Revelation, of course) and entrenching the moralistic, practical stuff - St. Paul lecturing people on what they shouldn't do, and "how their members have been used with unrighteousness, and must be dedicated to righteousness" (the word righteousness in ancient Greek also means "justified", as in judge/justice); the euphemism to the Romans to stop obsessing over their genitalia (as apparently even the Roman Christians he was lecturing were still Roman in their sexual appetites/behaviour, cf. Saint Augustine...)

Whatever; the point is that if the biblical literalists were serious about the text being the truth, you'd think they'd go looking for the actual text instead of one authorized by the imperial government. By Caesar, no less....

"righteousness-justified" = dikaiosyne[/O] for anyone who wants to look it up. If you're going to read any of Paul you'll need it; he uses it or a form of it up to six or seven times in a sentence, in dang near every book and chapter (exaggerating but only a bit). Rarely mentioned in the Gospels; the Singer book I cited discusses in part a comparison - the contrast - between the Beatitudes and the repressive rantings of Paul ("don't do this, don't do that, and don't even [I]think of doing THAT.").

Parting thought: part of the repression of homosexuality within the church is because the ancient intellectual class - the pagan intelligentsia - was often at least bisexual, and homosexuality was more socially acceptable in pre-Christian society; i.e. in the pagan lifestyle, as were the priesthoods; this is part of Augustine's conversion story, as he'd been something of a multisexual lecher and, if I recall, whore in the old Roman province of Africa (or was it Carthage?) before his Platonism, or discontent with it (I've never read City of God) led him to Christianity...through St. Paul, sadly enough.

The banning of what was clearly pagan behaviour, part of the pagan morality, was therefore very much also part of the general conversion of pagans to Christian terms of morality....

The history is interesting, but those actions were still based on imaginings. We have been killing ourselves based on emotional weaknesses.

I don't care as much about what tragedies have happened in the past in the name of the Ultimate Good, as I am interested in how we are to survive if we all still willing to kill for our imaginary companions.

When will we be free of this inability to face our irrelevance to the Universe, . .or our mortality?

Well, I guess I chased everybody away by bringing up the real questions. I don't blame everyone for not wanting to face it, . . it's much more fun to argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Lets see now... disgruntled ideological perfectionist... here we are, if I could just quote God for a moment...

Revelations Chapter 3:
15 I know thy works that thou art neither cold nor hot; I would thou wert cold or hot.
16 So, then becuase thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.
17 Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing, and knowest not that thou are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked,
18 I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with salve that thou maest see. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten; be zealous, therefore, and repent.

Yes, no longer do I want to show the skinny of my sins to the great, washed, group of onlookers in the heavens, all the holy angels and saints and such and so on... sign me up to be a zealot, I'm ready (and appropriately due) to repent! Repent! For the kingdom of the heavens is at hand! Uh... anyone got any gold they wish to part with? Not that easy come and go dough Joe fit for fools variety, I mean the real stuff. That tested with fire stuff, thats what I'm talkin about! Gimme the gold!!

Truman, you definitely have the easier end of the stick to argue, who would not ask for intervention on behalf of that child? But if we are assuming for the sake of argument that there is an all-powerful God, then at what point do the interventions stop, to what degree is your situation not critical enough to be intervened on? To what degree are you no longer innocent enough to be saved? So intervention as to the critical nature of your situation becomes a matter of degree, as does the establishment of the degree of innocence worthy of intervention. And if everything becomes intervened on by an all-powerful God, then why live at all?

I still don't think suffering either proves or disproves the existence of God... although I do think it proves the existence of man.

If there is a God, I don't perceive him in that manner....not an outside decider of outcomes or arbitrator of good and evil which seems a very man-centered approach to God... but more the God inside the alive nature and interconnections between all things...akin to "chi"...the life force that flows through all things...the absolute power of that.

Hi, Lynn & Truman :-)

That suffering thing... the human condition. Never was one to suffer or watch the suffering of others, myself. One tries to make sense of it, of course, as there is no justice on this earth for murders and lies that go unpunnished... in this life. And the next?

There are some things that define Christians as separate from others in the smorgasborg of beliefs. What is missed in some circles from within or of those looking on, is that Christians in general, do believe in two bodies, the natural and the celestrial. And so, for the Christian, the natural precedes the celestrial, and the celestrial cannot exist, except for this first natural body as a host or vessel to "give birth" to the celestrial one.

Christians also believe that since the natural body is a host to the spiritual body, that the only form of reincarnation that can occur is where a separate spiritual entity forcefully enters a natural body. It is known in the realm of spirit that no self respecting spirit "robs" the spirit of another through the theft of that spirits destined "experience" in the natural as this goes against the general will of God.

Hence, this is the explanation as to why certain Christians believe that "reincarnation" is really only a form of possession and since we have two bodies initially, even if the natural dies horribly, the second body is still very much so alive and functional and it is with the second body that "justice" is done, a heavy component to "forgiveness", I might add.

And so too, Truman, you are not alone with your complaints of a lack of justice:

Revelations 6 : 9 - 10

9 And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held.
10 And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?

Yah... how long. How long will it take for humanity to learn to clean up its own messes? To learn and practice all that it takes to sustain freedom and peace, and to give love freely, since it cannot be taught, the greatest flaw of all within the minds of humanity, to actually think that love can be taught... how long will it take for us to collectively understand that we are worthy of this precious gift and give and recieve it freely... how long shall we continue to be tested?

well said rafe!!!

Skookum - Fascinating input re. Augustine. I've never heard about the multisexual/whore part before, but we do know from his own admissions that he had a profligate lifestyle prior to conversion. Interesting that he came to Christianity through Paul, whose writings contain oft-noted "queer steam" between the lines. Augustine and Paul are at the core of the Church's (and therefore the West's) love/hate mentality towards sexuality and the body. It's interesting that so much baggage (and, of course, a rich intellectual tradition) can be traced back to these two. Hans Kung's criticism (i.e. Kung is the long-time intellectual nemesis of Catholic conservatives, and of Pope Benedict in particular, and there has been a thaw in relations of late) of Augustine's ongoing influence at the Vatican comes to mind.

As an addendum to an earlier point above, Leviticus (19:28) also says this:

"You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh on account of the dead or tattoo any marks upon you: I am the LORD."

But you don't see fundamentalists on a crusade to outlaw tattoos, or claiming that civilization is ending as a result of our social tolerance for them.

Indidentally, Christians in favour of tattooing justify it by citing the "Old Law" status of Old Testament Leviticus as opposted to the "New Law" of the New Testament. "Jesus never said anything about tattoos"....But he also never said anything about homosexuality. So...

(Leviticus quote courtesy of this website about Judeo-Christian tattoos and body art - nice pictures, if you're into body art: http://www.religioustattoos.net/)

Another interesting by-line, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan:

Conservative Judaism likely to end ban on gay ordination, marriage
http://www.forward.com/articles/conservative-rabbis-predict-gay-ban-will-fall-can/

Times they are a'changin'

We are our deeds, Stuart is what Stuart does or says. You can have all the biblical knowledge in the world , the bible memorized front to back, even read it in Hebrew , go to church every Sunday and be the biggest prick that walked the earth. I have seem many so called religious folks who are like this but call some gay guy abnormal or evil , mean while the gay guy is a anti war , poverty activist and does more good work in a week than the religious guy does in a decade.

Yep the church has always been at the forefront of repression and discrimination, it we look back
to the colonial days, slavery, native rights, women's rights, gay rights etc. The church has always justified its evil doing via the bible . But I feel the church is evolving or becoming irrelevant, I think by say 2020 80% of churches will perform gay marriages, allot of old white haired conservatives hiding in churches , making themselves feel less guilty.

I personally feel that the right has hijacked the church, We have millions of glossy eyed folks voting for BUSH , Harper due to the religious beliefs, the church being silent on issues of war and social justice is the church acting like they did in south America giving communion to the war criminals.

Attention church goes , don't be hoodwinked by wicked people in high places, only fundemtalist pray
for the blood of others. War is not following in the path of Christ. Osama and BUSH have much in common.

GENEVA - Christian leaders around the world condemned the U.S.-led war against Iraq Thursday, pleading for an end to the bombing and a resumption of diplomacy.

In Geneva, the World Council of Churches called the assault "immoral, illegal and ill-advised."

The group, made up of 342 churches in 100 countries, urged Christians to stand together with members of all other faiths, especially Muslims, "to restore confidence and trust amongst the nations of the world."

That's the flipside of my argument (that the Left alienated, disavowed, ignored and disenfranchised liberal Christians in their ranks).

Perhaps both are true. Lynn touched one something (not sure if she meant too) - the difference between doctrine and revelation. For example, St. Francis of Assisi, the most animist, nature-oriented and Christlike figure in Christianity aside from Jesus himself, would likely have been quite comfortable with her assertions:

Incidentally, Stuart, since this article (and some on the thread) have taken pot-shots at the Roman Catholic Church, it's only fair to acknowledge that the Vatican was the first and loudest voice against the current war in Iraq, before it even started.

Some background here (The Houston Catholic Worker):
http://www.cjd.org/paper/jp2war.html

nightbloom

nightbloom, you must admit that the church in general has been conservative in nature and the left has not capitalized on the organizing that the church has done etc, the left is now seeing progress on the church front but is still behind , but its natural to get a backlash against traditional tools of repression, the church and its members are not exactly victims here. As far as being moral or truthful does not depend on the time of day or your mood, if I alienate you , the answer is not to quit on doing what's right and follow the wrong path. Personal responsibility plays a role, I was recently at a party where 97% of the guest disagreed with me and were quite rude but it did not shift my values, it made me fight harder. liberal Christians need thicker skin not petty resentments.

Exactly I know the catholic church is against war, many churches are , that's why I am saying , Many folks are being hoodwinked into voting for conservatives seeing them as more moral which in fact is not the case.

I agree with Rafe's comments on the Catholic Church, and its role over the past 2,000 years in the creation of misery, war, death, suicide, and human suffering in general.

The single point I take issue with is the statement about what Jesus is supposed to have said. None of the reports in the Bible was by an eye-witness. All was hearsay, from the Gospels themselves (written decades after the events described) through writings by later followers like Paul.

Each author had "an agenda" as we now say, and set out to prove his particular thesis. Much like corporations, political parties, and special interest groups do today, the authors in the Bible hoped to shape the thinking of the people of their day.

A wise consumer today receives such messages with a healthy skepticism. I suggest reading the Bible should be undertaken in a similar frame of mind.

I think we have to adopt a different relationship with our past. The trend over the past forty years has been the demonize it, congratulate ourselves on having outgrown it, and then set about perpetuating the very same flaws in our new models of existence. Old wine in new bottles.

Yes, much misery has been created by Churches, governments, social hierarchies, economic structures, families....but we're blind if that is all we can see when we look back. Exploitation belongs to the dark side of human nature, and is not a patented monopoly of the Catholic Church, so progressives are falling in the same trap as the protestant fundamentalists did when they build up an icon of evil (e.g. the Catholic Church and its sinister Papists in our midst), and invest all their negative assumptions and prejudices into it. You see it everywhere - when is any discussion of Church history not met with a totally unbalanced recitation of decontextualized genocides, inquisitions, and burnings as though these had been totally conceived in the vaults of the Lateran Palace in Rome. We have a bloody history, and a lot of co-factors have contributed to that bloodiness, not least of which is human nature itself.

So all the critique is valid. Same goes, for example, for feminist critiques of marriage and family as tools of female oppression. Fine. But we also have to look at the other side of the coin: marriage and family were also tools for the protection of women, and not infrequently for their social advancement as well. So maybe it's outdated, who knows - but let's not demonize it; let's study it in its proper context. Another example is the Church (and Christianity generally), which I used to regard as an instrument of oppression of gay people simply because it is based on the OLD way of being queer in society....But in addition to the sexual repression which was necessarily pervasive in pre-industrial society (another maligned 'protection' mechanism), it also afforded massive opportunity to sexual minorities through the ages. It was their refuge, and in large part it was their creation, the sum of all their hopes, anxieties, conflicts and fears. This isn't to whitewash it - but just to see it within the context of the times.

So yes, let's acknowledge the bad stuff - great - but let's also exercise perspective in evaluating where we've come from and where we're going. I don't believe in vandalizing or burning down the past as a means of creating a new utopian future. That's scary. It's the the Jacobin way - rampage, vandalism and murder - and it leads eventually to totalitarianism of one sort or another.

"Decontextualized genocides," eh, Nightbloom. I seriously and sincerely believe that only a specific allele would permit the expression of such an intellectual travesty, and I have little faith that you'll ever recognize how evil that idea is.

In fact, I can't really read your stuff much anymore because the lengths to which you will go to rationalize evil are becoming too embarrassing.

Here is another, the Bible tells you so story, this one about juvenile JW female. Again proof that those under 18 should not be made to participate in religious study.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2006/09/03/1798655-cp.html

Truman - that's just silly. At no point have I ever rationalized evil.

Just think about it for a moment Truman - people (yourself included) have laid total and absolute responsibility for New World genocides entirely at the feet of the Roman Catholic Church.....As if England and Spain had nothing to do with it, and everything in between - politics, money, land, avarice, accidental (and deliberate) pestilence & contagion, demographics, economics, technology, imperialism, and just plain old fashioned unreconstructed human brutality.....That all means nothing, because it all boils down to the evil Catholic Church. That's just nutty. If injecting a bit of an ameliorative into the dialogue is 'evil' to you, then I would suggest that you have a problem with reality itself, not with me.

Ditto for the Spanish Inquisition, btw - the worst abuses occurred when the secular government & aristocracy wrested control of it away from the Church and used it to wipe out their political enemies and purge social upstarts and agitators. That isn't to say that the Church doesn't have a shitload to answer for....but it's historically factual caveats like that which are somehow always missing from the critics' condemnations. Curious, that.

You have to take the bad AND the good at face value and grapple with it as mature thinkers and observers of human nature, not simply invent politically useful untruths to compliment a short-sighted and ideologically-driven program of social and institutional dismemberment.

My beef is not with the past - my beef is the dishonest use to which we are now putting the past.

nightbloom, I'd suggest you leave the contextualization of genocide to the concentration camp guards--after they get caught.

In fact a perfect definition of evil might just well be "the contextualization of genocide."

If you want to deny that contextualization is rationalization go for it. I've never on Tyee read anything so monstrous.

And who the hell ever said all the evil in the world was attributable to the Catholic Church?

Even Rafe with his "hundreds of millions" dead in Africa wouldn't make that claim.

You're just like a rotten kid who keeps telling his mom that all the other kids threw rocks at the old homeless guy, too.

Nightbloom says, "At no point have I ever rationalized evil."

Your whole commentary about the church is a bizarre attempt to rationalize evil.

That's your opinion, Truman, which I don't agree with. The Roman Catholic Church has been described as evil many times on these threads, and a poster just did it again, above. I think we have to own up to our history, and not pretend that the last 2000 years would have been all milk & honey if only Christianity (and the RC Church in particular) had never existed. You would have still had genocides in the new world, inquisitions & purges of one sort or another, mass pain and suffering. We're talking about eras in which no systems of accountability existed - the only sense in which they even understood the concept was in the religious sense. So I dunno about your accusation regarding rationalizing evil. You're twisting my meaning like a pretzel.

You're really reaching with this one, Truman.

So explain your comment about "decontextualized genocide" then, nb. I bet a few of us would like to see it.

No, wait. I'll be you. I'm getting to know your rationalizations for just about everything pretty well...

So Truman, here's what I meant to say:

First, this is what I said...then I'll explain it.

"You see it everywhere--when is any discussion of Church history not met with a totally unbalanced recitation of decontextualized genocides, inquisitions, and burnings as though these hd been totally conceived in the vaults of the Lateran Palace in Rome? We have a bloody history, and a lot of co-factors have contributed to that bloodiness, not least of which is human nature itself."

See what I mean, Truman. It's self-explanatory. If you think this sounds like my penchant for slinging mud at
bearers of unpleasant news, you're just being silly.

And what makes you think I'm trying to contextualize the evil done by the Catholic Church, Truman? (That'd be rationalization, or putting it in its proper context, don't you know) You're losing it, eh, Truman. I was just trying to point out that the Catholic Church isn't the only church that's done bad, which you must have claimed, although I can't quite remember you saying it, Truman. Though I'm sure you did.

"When is any discussion of church history not blah blah blah" eh, Nightbloom.

Answer: Only in about 95% of the time.

Do you see a pattern?--similar to your calling critics of Israel, anti-semitic-- Nightbloom. I saw this pattern in your commentary months ago. This is what you do; you pout; you blame and you think it wins you points.

But it all seems hollow.

And there's no "contextualizing of genocide."

That's what genocide means: No excuse--ever!

So Mohammed never lived? That's strange because I studied him in a Middle Easter History class in University.

Cute, Truman.

And at no point did I call rational critics of Israeli policy anti-Semitic in the thread you refer to, or in the earlier one on that topic (where that whole exchange began). The fact that some elements within the organized Left and anti-War movements are flirting with anti-Semitic sentiment and arguments is a recognized reality that has been widely discussed and debated. Go back to that thread now, and check out the idiotic turn it's taken. My point is vindicated, unfortunately.

Tom Joad - Good one. And contemporary historical sources on both the Roman and Jewish sides (non-Christian) make direct reference to Jesus. He definitely existed.

Well nightbloom, since we're all rational here; other than the neocons - I think you've succeeded in proving the reciprocal of your own theory.

Does this mean you'll now move over to a right wing site and enter into a thoroughgoing critique of the anti-Semitism of conservatives and members of the moral 'majority'?

Btw, what is your take on Benedict’s leçon du jour for the Canadian bishops?

http://www.atheists.org/christianity/didjesusexist.html
I did a search and the above is one of many articles on the subject. the argument has been going on since the 19th century.

It was I think the Jesus Seminar which concluded that there was only a 9% chance that Jesus did exist. Even if he did exist, the message was totaly distorted by the politics of whatever day we are talking about in the 1700 years of the Church of Rome's rule.

I was struck by how the Canadian RC bishops grabbed onto the mention of God in our law. I do not recognize the pretensions to authority of men from such a corrupt organization.

I left the church at 14 because I had read too much history. Sadly, it took me years to get that there is an intelligence that informs the universe... there is an order to it...it is not chaos.

All I have to do is be as loving and kind to all I meet and be responsible in my use of what was given to me. I don't need child abusers to tell me what to do.

Anglicans and the United Church are not off the hook...just ask those who had the misfortune to be sent to residential schools run by those hypocrites.

Tom Joad misquotes previous quote

To which Tom Joad said,

Tom Joad rather take up middle east studies, you should have taken up reading studies ( also nightbloom), the quote doesn’t state that Mohammed never lived, clearly it states there is no, Jesus, or Mohammed, in order words they are no longer alive, I have to wonder though, with their apparently super natural powers, why aren’t they writing there own rebuttals?
So you studied in the Middle Easter you say.Hummm interesting

Ever heard of a recently published book called Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11?
I'm pleasantly surprised that some of the "religious right" has accepted the view that the Bush Administration knew about the 9/11 plane hi-jackings and let them happen.

The author of Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11:A Call to Reflection and Action
is David Ray Griffin, a theologian and the publisher,Westminster John Knox Press, 2006, is the Presbyterian Church's publishing wing.

I would have to characterize the above as mainstream. It might have some beneficial effect on right wing Christians, at least one can hope.

the brain:There are some things that define Christians as separate from others in the smorgasborg of beliefs. What is missed in some circles from within or of those looking on, is that Christians in general, do believe in two bodies, the natural and the celestrial. And so, for the Christian, the natural precedes the celestrial, and the celestrial cannot exist, except for this first natural body as a host or vessel to "give birth" to the celestrial one.Uh, no, you've got that backwards, at least as far as classic christology goes, or as far as Christian ideas of the profane and the divine are concerned; from the Nicaean Councils on down, the natural world is seen to be an expression, an emanation, of the spiritual world. NOT the other way around.

And it's the same in other religions, particularly some of the more intellectual branches of Hinduism, and then there's Taoism, in which the two are indistinguishable; it's only our construct that separates them. Islam technically doesn't have a metaphysics, but in certain sects and followings (notably Sufism) once again the idea of the natural world being an expression of the spiritual realm is built into the school of thought: a school of thought branched out from Christian Gnosticism. In some branches of which even our perception of the Divine is itself gross illusion, and the unknowable is utterly unknowable...in severe Gnosticism, even the God that can be conceived of is only a deception or illusion, with the Absolute lying behind the senses, i.e. beyond the natural world. As also in some branches of Brahminism and also the Qabbala. Plato's parable of the cave can be seen in the same light (not meaning to make a joke but it's there for those who know the parable), and ultimately the roots of this kind of thinking are in the mysterious Egyptian philosophers spoken of in Herodotus. Not so with the Babylonians, for whom the two realms were inseparable and implicitly magical, i.e. workings of the natural world could affect the spiritual, and vice-versa.

Obviously there's more to all this than I'd care to go on about. Just posting this because I see so many "off" renderings of what this or that spiritual tradition is supposed to mean or be saying; this was one glaringly clear case of "nope, you've got that backwards".

postscript: most card-carrying, church-going modern Christians - of the Bible-thumping, Bible-quoting variety - would run screaming if ever confronted with the implications of the Big Metaphysical Questions grappled with by church fathers, heretics, philosophers and others over the years, a few of which are alluded to above.

So much easier to boil down the spiritual understandings to "don't do this, don't do that, and don't even think[/] about doing THAT", as if telling yourself "no" was the path to heaven and/or righteousness. Being a stuck-up prig all your life apparently being the surest way to the right hand of the Saviour or whatever - pretty pathetic that somebody would lead their life thinking only of death, huh?

There's something refreshingly banal about Calvinism in respect of all this: all you have to do is be born into the right family and you're assured a place in heaven [I]no matter what you do. No wonder they got so many converts...

As for Catholicism and the historical bloodbath it's responsible for, pointing at recent-era denunciations of the war in Iraq is a nice sop to liberal feeling. Has the Vatican ever denounced the Rwandan Catholic priesthood for their role in the massacres there? Not that recent history matters: the burnings of witches and heretics, the slaughter of pagans and more heretics, the rapine of the Conversion, the wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Irish Wars.....need I go on??? That modern-day Catholics can go "who, us?" so glibly is rather disappointing; better to say "yeah, we were bunch of bloodthirsty fuckers like everybody else"; haven't heard anybody trumping up a campaign to get the Pope to apologize for the Albigensian or Waldensian Crusades yet; mind you all the Albigensians and Waldensians (and Arians and Monophysites and countless other heretical groups) were wiped off the face of the earth. By the virtuous, oh-so-holy Catholic church and its henchmen: The Bishop of Saone famous quote at Carcassone when asked by the Baron de Montfort how to recognize the faithful among the heretics once the city was fallen: "Kill them all. God will know his own".

It would help if Catholics stopped trying to posture that they have "always" been a voice of "stability and righteousness". Stability, perhaps at least - but at enormous cost in blood, and with no righteousness at all. Other than the righteousness that any victor can claim, having won.

The Conversion of Norway is one of my favourites: Olav Tryggvasson would persuade recalcitrant pagans of the need to convert by the quaint pasttime of putting a funnel in their mouths and slipping a few adders down their gullets. Hot stones up the anus was another tried-and-true method to persuade the unbelieving of the Glory of God, also.

Hot stones up the anus was another tried-and-true method to persuade the unbelieving of the Glory of God, also.
Hence the saying, “Getting your rocks off.”

And Rafe, while trusting exclusively in your Lord, Jesus Christ, maybe consider why he couldn't have invented a religion wherein these kinds of lower colonic tortures would have been proscribed, especially in his name. Certainly, being "The Word," and all, he would have seen it coming.

Pretty cold-hearted on Jesus' part, wouldn't you think, and especially if he was a member of the trinity, which as God's kid, he'd have been in a position to know exactly EVERYTHING, past and present, especially if he was in contact with the holy ghost at all who apparently, also has all knowledge, not to mention god, the father...

These guys were at best a bit malfeasant.

Gwest, I thought you'd never ask.... =) The short answer is that the Pope is only doing his job.

I wasn't terribly surprised, as it's basically the same line the Papacy has upheld since these issues (legalization of same-sex marriage and legalization of abortion) first arose in the public sphere. So he's basically re-affirming the 'religious' position on these issues (a position also re-affirmed recently by the Dalai Lama, incidentally, much to the dismay of fashionably Buddhist West Coast yuppies). He was also merely pointing out the obvious - i.e. that politicians who lay claim to the title of 'Roman Catholic', who seek support from Roman Catholic constituencies, and perhaps even seek oblique endorsements from Roman Catholic parishes, are not actually behaving as conscientious Roman Catholics by supporting policies which are antithetical (according to Catholic belief) to Sacramental Marriage and the sanctity of life. He is absolutely within his rights to make this point. If you're not really Roman Catholic, then why should politicians be allowed to get away with labelling themselves as such? It's hyprocritical.

So he's basically doing his job. Even as a pro-choice and slightly tepid supporter of gay marriage, I know I'd be somewhat disappointed if the Pope himself came out and said abortion was 'A-OKAY' and that marriage was no longer a sacrament ordered towards the creation of new life. Someone has to keep the hard end up, and I'm okay with the job he's doing. Religious leaders are absolutely within the rights to articulate absolute truths as their faith interprets them. Just as secular citizens are within their rights to ignore them. The fact that most Western European and North American Roman Catholics are actually liberal on both the abortion issue, the gay issue, and the marriage-divorce issue is another subject altogether, though it highlights the divide between religious traditionalism and mainstream secular values.

As for the Roman Catholic hierarchy and priesthood, it is motivated by two doctrinal imperatives - which for them are existential issues: the need to maintain the integrity of the Seven Sacraments (of which marriage and ordination are two), and the need to uphold the rationale of a celibate priesthood. I make no apologetics for them - I'm just pointing out that these are the cornerstones upon which they've built their lives, so don't hold your breath for them to change any time soon. They've seen what's happened to the Anglicans, and there's no way in hell they're going to allow anything similar happen to the RCC - better to write off post-Christian Europe and America altogether and consolidate their massive gains in the South and East. They've got China, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, and are still the fastest growing Christian denomination in the world. Why jinx it with same-sex marriage for a minority of the world's population that doesn't even go to Church anyways...?

Today while watching a story about Charles Manson, it was mention that he was looked upon by his followers as a prophet, ( apparently he has many, even today) in other words, in another era, it may have been possible for his ideology to have been taken into scripture in some bible, leaves one to wonder how many other Charley Manson’s that could have had an influence upon the bible.

SO, not that I disagree with your ‘summary, but…………..

Does that mark the end of the road for observant Catholics and active politics, at least in the west? Seems to me there's a pretty fundamental misapprehension of the role of the politician as a representative of the 'views' of his constituency under such a set of prerogatives for Catholic people. We clearly don’t see the political animal in the same sense of community leader as we used to, do we?

Pretty much amounts to agreeing with the nominal attitude about religion around here: That it is passé and irrelevant. Wouldn’t you agree.

The fact that religion has some meaning for communities in some of the areas you cite is likely just a passing fancy. Anything that gets in the road of the pleasure principle (once the basic needs of life have been met) is anathema to human beings. That’s why the Church is having such a difficult time of it these days.

No, I believe that was Heliogabulus (Elagabulus), who decided to be castrated during orgasm in order to attain femininity. Can't remember if it worked, or if he survived. First transgendered head-of-state that I'm aware of, although there may have been others in pre-literate times who went unrecorded. Caligula wanted to be both sexes, but didn't live long enough to pull it off, getting a little impatient for apotheosis and achieving immortality by being hacked to death in mid-orgy...

The Romans had all the fun, didn't they? Took another few hundred years to fall to the repressive grip of Christianity after the Julian dynasty's bad-boys depravities, so Rome didn't fall for that reason, for sure. In fact, the later emperors IMO were a bit boring relative to their predecessors. No panache, other than Constantine, and he sold out.

Speaking of Julian though in a different sense, the Emperor Julian tried to restore official paganism but seems to have been "offed" by the Christians in what the more purified histories say was a "riding accident"; and so Theodosius II ("the Great") came along and made paganism illegal and began burning the temples and their libraries and, presumably, also their priesthoods. The Roman Conversion goes largely undocumented, numbers-wise, but given the size of the Empire and the number of those who still stuck to the old ways, the number has to be in the millions; Christian historians dissemble on this, or discredit the idea at all, but it's hard NOT to conceive of Theodosius' edict against the pagans and paganism not being taken seriously in the most bloodthirsty kind of way. These were, after all, Romans - Christians or not.

I don't think it's the hedonism problem, Gerald. I think the church is passe because it's just so darn stupid, (blood of the lamb and all, eh)--even stupider than most people, so it's a mostly a matter of diminishing reciprocity, eh.

It's like the Peter Principle. Just how long can people go on believing all of that pathetic crap?--like dieties' sons playing hide-and-go-seek for thousands of years and killers getting virgins for bonus prizes and dalai lamas getting huge immobilzed stupid audiences who fawningly listen to him saying absolutely nothing for hours on end even postponing the need to go to the bathroom and stuff like that.

Have come very late to this but feel compelled to suggest that anyone interested in this topic read The End of Faith by Sam Harris. What a doozer of an argument for getting rid of "faith" as a vehicle for decision making. Not just extremists, but the moderates. Takes a swipe at Chomsky and also Ghandi!
Cheers

And that's just the Conversion within the then-imperial boundaries; the Wars of the Conversion lasted another thousand years, until the suppression of the old pagan order by the Teutonic Knights and others in what are now the Baltic States; the conversion of Scandinavia and Germania and The Russias was a long, and bloody, process.

The Conversions abroad - Africa and Latin America - were comparatively peaceful and largely evangelical in nature; i.e. willful conversion. Of course, in Mexico's case a religion that didn't require a few of your kids for the blood altar every so many years was probably a welcome relief....

greengreen - Interesting. Can you summarise? So he takes a swipe at utopian ideologies as well? Sounds like I should pick this book up once I'm done with my current stack.

Truman, I think an afternoon of holding your bladder to listen up to the Dalai Lama might actually have done you some good.

Also he's not relevant to this discussion; Buddhism is not exactly a religion, and he epitomizes - embodies - the renunciation of religion that is really what Buddhism is all about; confronting the self, then transcending it. The rest of it - the rituals, the reincarnations, and more, is not the teaching, and it cannot be equated with the Church (RC or otherwise) or even the disorganized collective that is Islam.

Before conversion to Buddhism, Tibetans were among the most warlike and the most feared of all Asian peoples; this ended with their conversion, and absolutely. Obviously one reason the Chinese cooptation/occupation happened so easily is because the Tibetans did not maintain a standing army...and their religion preaches non-violence.

Exceptions to this about Buddhism exist: Burma and Thailand are both Buddhist states, both with long military and militaristic histories - though rarely persecuting minority religions or breakaway sects (the irony of a Buddhist totalitarian dictatorship oppressing fundamentalist Christian arch-democrats exists in Burma/Myanmar). And Asoka obviously built his empire with troops as much as temples. But Buddhists don't slaughter other Buddhists for following the wrong boddhisatva, or singing a sutra in a different way.

Internecine warfare within religion is purely a western vice - "western" here including Islam, which is a branch of the same religious tradition, ultimately, as Christianity and Judaism (and insistently declares itself to be so, also).

Well, to that last comment there's a rider, as Chinese Emperors occasionally persecuted different religious sects and orders; if Confucianism is a religion (which it isn't exactly) the suppression of the Confucians by the First Qin Emperor is a well-known example; later persecutions of heterodox Buddhist and perhaps Taoists and other came later, but I don't know the details. Similar to Rome, there was some absolutist application in the official religion - the Emperor as deity, or close to it (the Son-of-Heaven)- was part of how the place worked but traditional superstitions and other lore - ancestor worship and its rituals, as distilled by Confucius and others into philosophy - worked their way in; so there was religious warfare, of sorts, in China and elsewhere in Asia. But not on the ravaging, slaughtering scale conducted in Europe, and in Europe MOST OF ALL[/I[] (well, and the Mid-East, which again is part of the Ancient West, i.e. west of the Indus or Persia).

One reason we don't consider ourselves a 6,000 year old civilization is because of a lack of continuity; but ours is a continuity of diversity, opposition and hostility. Some theorists point at it all being material, others at it being fundamentally tribal, others in terms of the development of state or of the benign aspects of civilization such as literature and art. But it boils down to us flourishing in so many different ways, and in finding reasons to hate - and kill - others with different ways [I]even if they looked just like us that it's pretty horrific if you stop to think about it. The number of dead since whenever-BCE in Western Europe alone, never mind west of the Euphrates, I mean, and the inanity of it all.

That it's all being done in a fight over who has the right name for God is nothing new...that's what I'm getting at. Three religions with a common Holy Land, two of them built by the sword and one of them living by it (as in ancient times), well, it's a recipe for disaster, never mind the prophecies...

I'm sure God gave up on us along ago, perhaps before we did him...

dang I always try to type my italicizations instead of using the I button....sorry

Last comment meant in reference to Nietzsche and the Englightnment and the growth of science, not in any sense of the godless times.

Speaking of gods, there's one that came to mind while browsing the above comments and the article: Robert E. Howard's "Crom", in the Conan[\I] books, who doesn't care, doesn't want to know, and wants to be left alone. It's up to man to fend for himself, what's he expect a god to help [I]him for??

And a favourite quote, from the opening scene of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser: "Jede fuer sich, und Gott gegen alle."

Every man for himself, and God against them all.

I dunno why those of us on the left feel we need to hate religion so much. Tommy Douglas was a Baptist Minister. When asked why he gave up the pulpit for politics he answered "When you have committed your life to the fighting of sin, might as well go where the action is!"

Good one, Skookum, about me learning something in spite of a full bladder in a Dalai Lama concert. I haven't had the particular pleasure of getting up and walking out in one of his big talks, but I'm really looking forward to it--and preferably slamming some big doors like I did once for a Christian evangelist up from Alabama, I think, in Abbotsford.

The best fun I ever had in that regard, was refusing to stand up at an Eldridge Cleaver concert at the Orpheum about twenty years ago. He had just finished telling some silly lie about seeing the face of Jesus, Fidel Castro, and several other luminaries in the Moon, and asked the audience to stand to see if any of them had gone for it. Everybody in the entire theatre stood up except me. Pretty good, eh.

I've got you down, according to my IQ algorithm, as being 104 times smarter than the Dalai Lama, Skookum, so I'd much rather come to one of your talkfests if you do one, eh.

The Dalai Lama just doesn't seem to know anything, which detracts from the interest of his speech, in my view, as G. West sometimes says.

The comparison of Rome with China is an interesting one. Both practiced a form of pragmatic religious tolerance, provided the various cults stayed within established social norms, did not disturb the peace or challenge the 'state religion' and/or government authority. 'Official' Confucianism did exercise a form of monopoly over governance however - the entrenched imperial bureacracy was a bastion of institutionalized Confucianism. There were religious massacres in China...but as with the West, they were usually politically motivated, and their religious character was incidental. Even the not-so-distant Boxer Rebellion was really a political act in religious disguise. Most of the religious violence in Europe was political in nature - it was about competing dynasties and oligarchs as must as it was about doctrinal schisms. This is why I say that much of the bloodshed over religion would have occurred in one form or another anyway - that's not to be blasé about it, but just to be realistic about the nature of organized violence in history.

nightbloom
One might have thought you’d find a better justification for religion than that sort of negative analysis.

If the best one can say about the effect of 'faith' in some kind of transcendent 'God' is that the violence practiced in ‘his’ name would have happened anyway, then one has a hard time seeing the need for belief in anything but 'power'.

Buddhism, at least for the most part would have some kind of authority for claiming an existence outside that sort of analysis. Now, whether the followers of the Buddha qualify as practitioners of a religion at all is a fair question; but they do, at least nominally, hold themselves outside the violent traditions that form a significant part of other religious histories – Quakers, Shakers and some Mennonite sects among others being obvious exceptions.

As to the 'power' aspect of my assertion just above, I suspect it is that characteristic of the way the Magisterium operates today - and has operated since the beginning of Church history - that causes so many problems for those who see the Catholic Church in such a jaundiced light.

Clearly, despite the equally inane and reprehensible actions by (and in the name of) a great many Protestant and non-conformist sects (slavery and Protestant colonialism among which), the fact that individual belief and a more 'personal' relationship with 'God' is central to Christian practice outside of Roman traditions has tended to mean that they do not present as big a target to critics.

I would actually disagree that this is the origin of the anti-Roman vitriol. I would also disagree that Protestants emphasize communion with the personal God more than Catholicism does. Protestant prejudices run deep, and it has to do with a number of things, namely their rejection of the "Jewish taint" inherent in Catholicism's adherence to both the Old as well as the New Testament (remember: Luther was deeply and profoundly anti-Semitic - this is well-documented - and much of Protestantism is based on his rejection of the non-Christian roots of Christianity in the Hebrew sciptures and traditions...as well as his rejection of Apostolic succession and priestly celibacy). This is why Protestant critics (and lapsed neo-Protestant secular critics like Rafe here) always hit the same buttons when they attack Catholicsm: the Trintiy, the Virgin Mary, the Immaculate Conception (actually referring to Mary's, not to Jesus' conception), and the incorporated, hierarchical and patriarchal celibate male Priesthood based on the fundamental principle of Apostolic succession. If we gave Rafe a little more space, he'd doubtless launch into the standard diatribe of how the isn't really an unbroken like of succession from St. Peter to all subsequent Bishops of Rome. I've heard it all before - Too tedious for words, really.

...that last line should have read: If we gave Rafe a little more space, he'd doubtless launch into the standard diatribe of how there isn't really an unbroken line of succession from St. Peter to all subsequent Bishops of Rome...

I still think it's more this:

than the Old Testament/New Testament dichotomy which separates Catholics from Protestants but I acknowledge the point has some validity.

Still, you didn't really deal with the fundamental question of 'power', which was the root of what I wrote, or with the essential difference between Buddhist traditions and those of most other 'religions'.

Clearly, the Protestant conception of 'power' is manifested more in the secular world than Catholic power is (it has generally – other than in Quebec in the first half of this century – stayed fairly clear of the public square) - pace Max Weber, and that’s another clear area of conflict between the two. You can bet the Pope's appeal to his Canadian bishops to start pushing the responsibility of 'Catholic' legislators to their church as opposed to their constituents will have a somewhat chilling effect on anyone who thinks about it. Because it is a point central to the power base behind Mr. Harper’s, liberal and secular opponents of the current government would be mad not to make it an issue and I think they’re right to do so.

Rome could have kept the first 'protestants' in the fold without compromising itself if it had been farsighted enough at the time. The great schism didn't have to occur, although it complimented a far more temporal power struggle that was going on at the time. Roman Catholicism is actually the most flexible 'brand' of Christianity I know, notwithstanding outward appearances. Even Henry VIII could have been accomodated if only Pope Julius II hadn't been Emperor Charles V's prisoner (the brother of Henry's first Queen, Catherine). Henry would have gotten his annulment and Rafe could happily recite his Pater Nosters today without angst.

Buddhist doctrine has been used to justify structures of power - don't kid yourself. The theocracy of Old Tibet was hardly a virtuous democracy. Buddhism is far more accomodating of rigid and oppressive caste structures than true Christianity is. Read about the Fraticelli, the radical anti-private-property Franciscans that had to be put down forcibly lest their radical proto-socialism upset the socio-economic order of the day. There have been many such upsets in Christian history, the recent dust-up over Liberation Theology being only the most recent and placid example.

Buddhism is attractive to Western yuppies precisely because of that fact - it is accomodating of wealth, undemanding in terms of personal morality and outward behaviour towards society at large (I believe it accomodates the latent anti-social tendencies of modern society) and is an auto-erotic spirituality that makes minimal demands on the conscience and does not oblige the practicant to situate themselves morally in relation to their fellow human being or to a personal God. It's just the individual striving to transcend his ego, and everything outside of that is unreal. Having said that, it's an interesting philosphy.

I'm not a woman and hardly qualify as a feminist, but my fundamental problem with RCs (and Muslims etc.) is their modern-day misinterpretation of scripture to justify shutting out half the population. If St Paul could ordain Lydia and other women as priests, Benedict is a hypocrite not to follow suit.

Certainly, you can't, as I see it, call Tibetan Buddhist violent - why do you think the Chinese Communists felt they could walk over Tibet with such impunity?

On the other hand, I agree that there is a fundamental personal selfishness about the Buddhist quest for mastery over the ego at all costs. Nevertheless, in terms of historical damage to other human beings - the kind of charges that can often be justified against Christians (at least historically) it's benign.

A Buddhist monk that I know sums it up this way:
'It's better to be kind than right.'

And, in personal matters, I think that's very often true.

As to the ‘power’ aspects of the Church, again in the historical context, I’d say it is difficult to make the case that much of the controversy and conflict has always been about who’s in control. Further, I’d wager Benedict didn’t write that address to the Canadian bishops himself anyway – it has the stamp of the curia all over it.

Kurt - The queston of women's ordination is frought with secondary issues. For a lot reasons, a lot of people don't see it as an 'equality' issue alone. It's also important to note that, outside of the hierarchal ordained ministry, women wield vast and disproportionate influence over most Church activities. Go to any locality, and "churchy stuff" is clearly a female-dominated sphere in Roman Catholic parishes, and has been since the 19th century. So the issue of "power sharing" has a flip side to it. Ordained ministry is actually the last redoubt of male involvement at the local level.

I must admit I've waffled on this issue. I've met female Anglican clergy, and listened to interviews of the same, and I am impressed. Then I look at the women's ordination movement in the RC Church, and I despair. The most recent round of "riverboat ordinations" this summer was an embarassment to their own cause. Not only were several of the ordinands only nominally Catholic, but the event looked like a neo-pagan lesbo-feminist jamboree. That's not what Roman Catholic congregations want to see. Particularly annoying was the deliberate referance to God and Christ using the female pronoun. That's fine in itself...but it ain't Roman Catholic, thank you very much.

The follow-up interviews of the ordinands only reinforced my perception that some of these people were just plain insane. It's important to remember that priests exist for the congregation, not for themselves, and if they can't avoid using language that is fundamentally confusing and inconsistent with the documents and narrative upon which the religion is based, then Roman Catholics are justified in saying "No Thanks".

So the movement for women's ordination on the Catholic side has done a poor job of alleviating the anxieties which congregations have about the issue. If they were more like their Anglican sisters, it might be a different story.

So as it stands, I can't support the current movement for women's ordination in the RC Church. It's got problems. What they're preaching is not recognizable as Roman Catholicism, and I already get my fill of radical lesbian feminist ideology through other means. Keep that out of the pulpit.

Okay, it's obvious that you believe in the Catholic Church with all its scabs, nightbloom, but do you believe in God?

Well, he seems to believe in me, so it would be impolite of me not to return the courtesy.

And actually, one of the Dalai Lama's achievements, largely overlooked relative to its importance, is his successful persuasion of both Tibetans in Tibet and Tibetans in exile to NOT undertake violence against China in any way. Otherwise there would have been Tibetan guerrillas, Tibetan terrorism at Chinese embassies and consulates, and all the usual scripted "exile protest wars", and intense and no doubt brutal campaigns of re-repression by China against Tibetans still in Tibet as a result.

Many in the exiles, and apparently within those not born in Tibet, have been restive for more tangible actions than waiting for China to respond to long-standing offers to dialogue. The Dalai's response to that runs along the lines of "and how successful have the Palestinians, Armenians, Kurds, Irish and others who use those methods been?"

Jaw, jaw, jaw instead of war, war, war.

Of the four principal Lamas of Bon Buddhism - the Dalai and the Panchen are two, I think the head lama in Sikkim is the third but I'm not sure of the title - there's a Dorje Lama - Lightning of Wisdom - who's known to walk the dark side of Buddhist theology vs a vs potential resistance, and attracted a lot of followers who liked his "stronger" mesage, but he backed down from what looked like a split in Tibetan Buddhism, sometime back in the early '90s, and re-endorsed the Dalai Lama's position. The Dorje's is a variant on Tibetan Buddhism - action instead of inaction - have never found out much more but I understand there are some doctrinal differences between the four main sects.

Not much on the politics mentioned above, but here's who I'm talking about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaye_Dorje

Skookum - Interesting. I don't think there was anything really to be gained by resistance in this case. The Chinese policy was fairly simple, and required no guns or armed repression: simply swamp this under-populated region with Chinese 'surplus' population. Make it the focus of intensive diaspora. And let the inevitable turnover of the generations slowly make a museum culture out of Old Tibet. It's exactly what's happening. Now that's long-term planning. At best, the Dalai Lama simply made a virtue out of necessity.

As opposed to the traditional 'Catholic' methodology of trying to argue that the 'expedient' was somehow virtuous. In other words, go along with whatever imperialistic thug would take a few priests along with them to 'save' the heathens. Spare me. I'll take the Buddhist method every time - it results in a lot less blood on the ground.

Usually mostly of one side's...y'see, the Cathars tried that, and got burned, impaled, cut to pieces and other acts of devout Catholic dedication to the True Faith.

For sure Skookum1. Awhile back I posted Milton's ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT and nightbloom was not amused!

It's important to acknowledge the historical record, which takes me back to my original point about the way we treat our history.

Alcibiades, you stated (or implied) that there was something intrinsic to the monotheistic faiths of the West that predisposes us to the violence you condemn. Can you support this assertion? Are there no co-factors you'd like to account for....or does it all really boil down to evil Catholicism and the Big Bad Pope?

nightbloom
I think it stems largely from the fact - as has been pointed out above, that the Christian church made a deal with the Romans. It married its dogma, Christ's teaching and its nascent theology to the world view of a militaristic empire and a lot of pagan traditions (not so much Jewish ones). The whole ethos of 'fighting' for the faith and extending 'God's empire' here on earth comes as much from Roman roots as it does from Paul - in my view. Loyola and the Jesuits are just later manifestations of the same aberration. In my view.

I'll ignore the slur.

I am unimpressed by nightbloom's apologia for the religious based treatment of women, whether RC or whatever.

Alcibiades is on the right track, but a few quibbles. Paul was a Roman and quite proud of it. He was born a freeman of Tarsus, a hellenized Roman city and a fairly cosmopolitan one with a variety of faiths including pagans and of course the Roman Julian emperors who believed themselves to be gods. He was a Jew as well and served the Jewish Sanhedrin (constabulary, but essentially the servants of the Roman invaders at the time — read Josephus's Jewish Wars). This would explain the Immaculate Conception belief, as all manner of gods were impregnating mortals in those times — Zeus knocked up a mortal (what's her name? Esmele?). It would also explain Paul's mission to proselytize gentiles, unlike the Christian church in Jerusalem led by Jesus's brother James, as it would be hard to understand why James would feel inclined to convert gentiles (there weren't any around Jerusalem aside from the despised Roman soldiers) or wish to abolish the observance of Jewish rituals. This probably also explains why James gets such short shrift in the Bible — it's a Pauline book, with Luke as his senior apologist. Jesus is said to have had a number of brother and sisters and what I would give to hear their impressions of the suggestion that their mother was a virgin... or the dogmatic argument between Paul and James when Paul visited Jerusalem.

I thank Jesus for Tolstoy as we'd be poorer without the great fiction but the idea that Jesus was a pacifist is also suspect. He was a Galilean, a hotbed of dissidents, as were his more radical followers, the Zealots and Iscariots (read Josephus). And if that's the case what were Jesus and disciples doing in the garden of Gethsemane, on the eve of passover, with swords, which they used? And no, I don't believe Jesus magically re-attached one victim's ear.

I value the Platonic ideal of doing good for good's sake, and bear no grudge against religious believers, but I am an apostate.

Kurt - Interesting historical context. I should point out that haven't met a Catholic theologian yet who doesn't acknowledge the essential caveat that the scriptures are man-made interpretations, each with their own spin. Catholics are very different from Muslims and literalist Evangelical Christians this way. We are also taught that the Old Testament is part allegory, part transcriped and elaborated oral history.

On the divinity of Roman Emperors, I doubt any but the crazy ones actually believed they were divine, and according to the state religion, this divinity was supposed to occur after death. Caligula couldn't wait, and wanted his statues placed in the Jerusalem Temple....But the belief has its origins in Roman posthumous ancestor-veneration/worship.

Re. the women's ordination thing, I doubt any non-Catholic not sentimentally or emotionally tied to the tradition would appreciate why it's such a divisive issue for Catholics. It's clearly not 'your' issue, so you're free to project your ideology onto it. I think the reservations I expressed are valid...As I said, I've been mighty impressed with ordained Anglican women-clergy. Something has gone a little "off" with the movement in the RC Church. The "illegitimate" ordinations of women earlier this year elicited vocal criticism not just from conservative Cathlics, but from RC women theologians and women religious congregations. So something's up. You might want to take a closer look at the nuances before casting judgment. The manner with which change is accomplished is at least as important as the change itself.

Finally, the West puts a leader on the world stage with brains, backbone and balls:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/13/world/europe/13pope.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

It's a refreshing contrast to the simpering attitude in the West towards radical Islam - if anyone in the "Godless West" can address Islam face to face at the religious level, it's this guy.

...and a little Roger Scruton never hurt nobody either...

http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/25/09/have-spoken/

So, you're an apologist and a dissembler when it comes to 'violent' conversion to Christianity but not with respect to the Muslim variety? You can do better nightbloom, the Pope notwithstanding.

No time for more.

A progressive voice on women's ordination in the RC Church. The thread following the article is interesting too. Obviously, it's the topic of much debate all around:

Sr. Joan Chittister
Kiko and Couric: Whew, that was close
http://ncrcafe.org/node/430

Tell me Rafe, Did you have religion imposed on you as a toddler? Were you taught by religious parents to pray to an omnipotent, invisible god in times of strife and fear and grief?

Gwest, that's a disgusting misrepresentation of my viewpoint. Dunno what private resentments are fueling your need to spray shrapnel and flak on such a continual basis. Religious violence is even less excusable today than it was 1000 or 500 years ago. To say that Chistians have not advanced beyond that is to display appalling blindness to the reality of your times. Religious violence and intolerance - organized and otherwise - is today now predominantly an Islamic vocation, not a Christian one. It's a real problem, as is integration of Muslim minorities into mainstream Western society. Again, I dunno what's in your drinking water than induces you to attempt to obscure the self-evident realities here.

What do you mean, nightbloom? Every time someone points out the Church's record, whether it is with respect to the Inquisition, colonialism, persecution of nonconforming sects - I could go on - you suggest the record has to be considered contextually and doesn't really reflect accurately on the church and its record. You can't have it both ways - if you (and the Pope) see Islam as such a violent and proselytizing institution and historical force then you can't ignore the same strong and persistent tendencies in the Christian church as well.

I could go back and pull out the qualifying quotes from your own posts but I trust you're intellectually honest enough to know what I'm referring to. If you're not, then I'll have to concur with James Burns's assessment of you on another thread (23-year old vasectomy) this morning.

In my view.

Your argument is pretty poor when you've gotta reach back a good 500 to a thousand years in order to help you relativize Islamic violence and coercion with Christian offenses. That's just weak and ahistorical.

I've simply provided the historical context of some of the abuses which have been entirely attributed to Catholicism to the exclusion of all other historical factors. Everyone else has provided the present day context for the present day abuses and problems of Islam. If I understand the standard line of blinkered argumentation on these threads, the problems of Islam all boils down the Israel, Jews, America and George Bush. That's just dumb.

Baloney, There are plenty of 19th and 20th century examples of RC complicity in involuntary conversion. Including a Pope in 19th century Rome and numerous examples of forced conversion during the last war. THe fact that they saved some Jewish lives notwithstanding: Your memory is extremely selective.

For cryin' out loud, Gwest...You forgot all about that Pope who ordered those beheadings a few years back. And the one who put all those death fatwas on all those poets and writers...and who called for unveiled women to be publicly horse-whipped. Hey, wasn't there an RC bishop in Western Canada who ordered the gang-rape of a teenaged girl because her older brother was diddling around out of wedlock...?

Yeah, Gotta watch out for them nasty Papist Roman Catholics....next thing you know they'll be bombing subways and flying passenger planes into buildings...Gee, What's the world coming to, Gwest...?

...and no matter how you twist it, Gwest, Christianity does not call for conversion by the sword in any of its religious texts....Islam makes such conversions an explict religious obligation articulated in its foundational texts, which are said to be the direct Word of God. You and I are infidels, and we can be murdered with impunity by faithful Muslims - Allah says so. In fact, Allah says Muslims have a duty to murder us.

There's a quantum difference here that can't be relativized, no matter how hard you try. I'm starting to suspect you're simply daft, Gwest.

So, when Jewish children who were baptized to keep them from the Nazis and weren't subsequently returned to their parents or surviving relatives you're OK with that? As to specific biblical injunctions to spread the faith at the point of a sword or the muzzle of a gun - there is plenty of evidence for that sort of thing and it is very explicit - and not only in the Jesuit order either. You might also want to check your Latin American history for the collusion of the church with right wing governments in Guatemala, Bolivia and Argentina - to mention just a few obvious examples.

I don't think your interpretation of Koran is any more reliable than your recollection of Christian dogma - especially St Paul. Muslim teachings of the kind you cite are not ahistorical either. If you’d done any work on the Koran you’d realize that it has a specific context too – which is exactly the point you’re always trotting out with respect to Catholicism. Further, it would take a blind person not to recognize that a great many Muslims in the Middle East since at least 1918 have felt both persecuted and victimized. Most of the violence has grown out of that circumstance – just as the violence espoused by some of the adherents of Liberation Theology grew out of the repression Christian and native communities felt in Mexico and in Central and South America.

Again with the insults. What is about you that makes it impossible to have a discussion without it turning into an opportunity for you to call me, or someone else names? I think I may have to bring this to the attention of the editor.

The point is, you want everyone to tiptoe gently around and ignore the suppurating boils on the body of the Church everlasting while you poke your finger in the eye of the Muslim world. It ain’t kosher, believe me!

In fairness, it's not just you.

I get dozens of these appeals every week:
https://www.colelchabad.org/form.asp?cn=R06&id=363&f=e

And there is never a single mention of the hungry children of Gaza or the sick and ill of the West Bank; not a word of encouragement for donations to support and assist the Palestinians who are suffering far more difficult hardships than the poorest Israeli. It's not hard for me to understand the anger of the Muslim world nightbloom. Not only have we created the Qutbs of the area, we now make things worse by giving them more reasons to whip their hatred into even hotter flames.

These appeals expect me to donate to help provide food for the high holy days of Jewish tradition and never mention, for even a moment the far worse problems of their neighbours.

Wrong again, nightbloom, it was Claudius, not Caligula who ordered a statue of himself as a god erected inside the Jerusalem temple. Thankfully his commander in Judaea recognized the folly of the imperial instructions (a blasphemy that would have resulted in outright insurrection, as no graven images, or anyone aside from the high priest was permitted inside and that only once a year — and women weren't allowed anywhere near it) and found ways to postpone delivery of the statue until the royal court achieved his assassination, making the order moot.

And I assure you that all seven of the Roman imperial line of Caesars were considered gods in their lifetimes. They were all shortlived... and Claudius was considered eccentric by his compatriots because he actualy preferred the company of women to young boys. These seven emperors were the seven "kings" plainly referred to by the (weird) author of Revelations, who were all bound for Hell when the horsemen of the Apocalypse wreaked their vengeance on the Romans — this author, "St John" must have been dissatisfied when instead the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple, in 70AD, sent the Jews to the diaspora, and rebuilt it as a Roman city.

Gwest, you're again ignoring the realities in your little vendetta against Catholicism. There is not contextualizing in Islam - the Koran is the Word of God - not an interpretation. Islamic scholars of all stripes make this very clear. Moreover, Islam stated definitively a millenium ago that "The Gates of Knowledge are closed" - there can be no further inpretations, no scholarly introspections on context. The Koran is the state of the holy art, as it were. This is the exact opposite of Catholicism's approach to scripture. It is subject to interpretation according to rational thought and by oberserving "the signs of the times." True, they haven't always lived up to that ideal, but who does? It's nevertheless an incorporate doctrine of tolerance which maverick theologians have used in their defence innumerable times.

Again, a little perspective please...

Kurt - Thanks - Can you refresh my memory: Did Claudius not reach an agreement with his friend Herod Agrippa (the nominal king) not to place the statues in the Temple proper because of the unrest it would undoubtedly cause...Was it not during Caligula's reign that the tulmult of the imposition of the Emperor's statues in the Temple exploded, because Caligula finally enforced the directive?

Might equally be applied to your own posts nightbloom. Irrespective of the 'alleged nature' of the revealed truth of the Koran, you must also acknowledge that there are enormous numbers of moderate Muslims take that with as much salt as the Catholics among us take a 19th century doctrine called ex cathedra infallibility. The last time I saw a comment from you about moderate Muslims and their desire for change within their own culture and society, it was fashioned into a personal and sexist slur against Irshad Manji.

How come? Hidden agenda, perhaps.

You’ve never read Russo’s book have you?

You might want to look at this story from this mornings NY Times for a little more evidence of the way hate and intollerance are being watered and fertilized in the Middle East:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/world/middleeast/14gaza.html?hp&ex=1158292800&en=9a96db5861ee6365&ei=5094&partner=homepage

In the end, a much more significant factor than the scriptural 'justifications' that will be found for the eventual 'fruit' these policies produce.

Not by any stretch of the imagination. You're lost if you actually believe that. Sure, there are moderates...but of what consequence are they? If those moderate muslims occupy positions of any influence, then they must be too petrified to speak out. And who can blame them really? The last prominent Canadian Muslim who adopted a tolerant mainstream stance, Tarek Fatah, communications director of the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC), was driven out by a barrage of death threats from within his own community(http://www.xtra.ca/public/viewstory.aspx?AFF_TYPE=3&STORY_ID=1991&PUB_TEMPLATE_ID=1) Now, I've received death threats before, but I took account of the source and reasoned that they wouldn't act. Tarek Fatah could take no such solace. They meant business.

The public performance of these almost mythic moderate muslims in public life and the Islamic clerical establishment is underwhelming, to say the least. How long did it take U.S. muslim groups to repudiate the terrorist attacks of 9/11...? Some of them still don't dare because of the backlash it would cause without their own communities.

As for your other tangential point: My thumbnail critique of Irshad Manji's politics and motivations were neither ad hominem nor sexist, as you gratuitously imply. Manji and I have been moving in some of the same circles for the last 15 years. I was simply calling a spade a spade.

LOL - And who the hell's "Russo", you ninny??

Again with the insults.

You obviously don't even read what I post. And you don't 'know' Richard Russo?

Months ago I suggested you read his little book about academia called 'Straight Man'

One man's spade is just another man's shovel. The way you're going off, my friend, we're all soon going to need one.

I suggest a trip to North Africa.

Insults? You should talk. Perhaps I just need to ignore you for a while. Incidentally, your friend and fellow gang-banger is back on The Tyee threads. Not sure if you noticed. I guess Nightbloom and the Jewish Cabal couldn't keep keep him down, eh Gwest?

I suspect the Coyote decided that his self-imposed exile had gone on long enough. Why leave the field to the Yahoos!

The point about selective editing and the kind of commentary which is ignored from the right has been made and amply illustrated. Not least by yourself and your own example - of which this morning's record is just another brick in the wall.

Ignore me if you like, confronting the truth about oneself and one's prejudices is never easy.

You now admit to believing in a Jewish cabal too? LOL

Not at all - I was simply paraphrasing your own and others' hysterical insinuations in the wake of Coyote's hissy-fit and the minor attempt by the editor to keep the thread on topic. It became obvious soon afterwards that it was a hopeless task.

I can't make sense of the rest of your post. I gave up on that thread when it disintegrated into yet more anti-Semitic nonsense....the only saving grace was that the anti-Semitism became so stupid it didn't even warrant moderation - it simply incriminated itself with its self-evident idiocy.

As usual, your recriminiations tend to characterize nothing so accurately as your own single-purpose postings.

Thanks for never surprising me with a fresh humanistic instinct.

Read the Russo, you deserve it!

LOL - okay, if you say so.

Incidentally, I'm not in academia per se. I think that's been the running assumption for a while now.

Gwest, touching on an olde argument, it looks like Powell's fighting the good fight (below). Note that it's the uniformed professional who is drawing the line on the civilian suits who should know better. His critique is all the more resounding because of it...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091400160.html

Note Powell's actual words. This guy sees the 'signs of the times'...

I agree. It's too bad he held his tongue 4 years ago though when speaking up might have prevented the current debacle.

The Russo's a good book. Trust me, you'll enjoy it.

Speaking up wouldn't have changed the Administration's course. But he did have the choice to resign, which he should have. I think people were willing to forgive him fairly late into the debacle if he had made a public mea culpa and resigned. That's how high expectations were. He was seen as a much-needed 'bridger' in American society, I think. It's a little late for Iraq, but I'm glad he's taking a principled stand on this issue at least. His voice does still lend a certain moral authority. And to return to my original point, it demonstrates the extent to which America's civilian leadership (and civil society) has lost its way that it takes a soldier to speak Truth to Power. Did you checkout the former IDF Chief's comments about Olmert needing to resign? Another soldier speaking Truth to Power. See what I'm getting at? They're doing civil society's job, because civil society is asleep at the wheel.

BTW - you disregarded my riposte regarding the systematic intimidation of moderate muslims by their own community. Did you read the link? There's simply nothing comparable to that kind of religious intimidation in the West in the present day. The RCs, Orthodox and Evangelicals together can't shut down a Madonna tour, for cripes sake. The integration of Muslims into secular society is going to be a growing problem as we cope with social integration...And the Left - which has carved out a niche for itself through its Oppression Narratives and its vote-getting strategies as the spokesman of minority rights - is being irresponsible in glossing over the issue, or trying to draw specious analogies with really rather timid and low-key RC and mainstream Protestant religious leadership. Any comparison that doesn't rely on reaching back a good thousand or 800 years is just absurd. There's just no rational comparison there.

Oh I don't think you have to go back quite that far. Quebec in the first half of the 20th century was a pretty repressive and church bound state; Spain and Portugal too for that matter. And speaking of ignoring things, what about Latin America. You'll remember of course, the cause of all the kafuffle in Mexico in the early years of the 20th century too.

I honestly don't know enough about the situation in nominally Islamic countries to debate this rationally. I suspect there is a real need for a change in the fundamentals of Islam. Still, I'd argue that the dynamics which have served to change society in the west haven't really had an opportunity in the Middle East for a number of reasons including colonialism and imperial designs on the region by the West.

I have done some work on Indonesia and was surprised to find that there are significant forces working for change within that culture.

Yes, Gest, but does it really compare with Islamic offenses against fundamental and universal norms of human rights? We both know you don't believe that. Sure, Quebec was run like a fiefdom, and thank Allah that has changed...but were there beheadings and death-fatwas and whipping of unveiled women? Again, you're stretching. It all comes back to my point about the uses to which we put the past. Yes, let's acknowledge the evils of the past, but let's not exploit those evils to deliberately obscure the realities of our day. Radical violent and coercive Islam in the present day finds no analogy in modern Christianity today - none whatsoever.

Well, nightbloom, it is very interesting that the international reaction - in places like Turkey which has been doing its best to make a kind of secular state with a Muslim majority population work - to the Pope's speech has been far from positive.

It's one thing for an international leader like Bush or Harper to say what can be interpreted as hateful things about the religion of more than a billion people; it's quite another for the spiritual leader of the world's Catholics to do what Benedict's done. And, I think you need to look at lot closer at the church's record in Latin America if you want to find indications of the church either condoning or 'sanctioning' death squads of one kind or another.

What precisely has Benedict said, Gwest...This is yet another example of hysterical and overheated "Muslim outrage" that is totally disproportionate to the remarks (which have been taken grossly out of context).

Free speech isn't just of the secular nihilists of the liberal-Left. At some point, this ongoing intimidation and murder of artist and writers and priests is going to have to stop.

Incidentally, the half-hour talk the Pope gave at Regensburg was at academic as it gets. You've gotta really want to be upset to see anything vaguely incendiary in it. I think that describes the nature of this (yet another) overblown Muslim reaction.

For more balanced coverage, see John Allen's commentary on it: http://nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/

For a man with the experience of a Ratzinger the very best that can be said of this latest incident is that he is extremely naive. No spiritual leader should ever throw fuel on the fire; whether or not Benedict intended to do so, that's precisely what he's done. Even if I acknowledge that much of the reaction is hysterical and overheated, it is understandable and no appeal to context is going to be sustainable at this time. Like his remarks about the German people and the Nazis at Auschwitz, one wonders where the man's head is.

I know you’re enamored with the fellow, nightbloom, but in my view he is a rolling disaster area.

It's his job to address these issues...moreso than anyone else on the planet, actually. He doesn't need to couch anything in polite untruths or politically correct bromides. Again, you're pointing your finger in the wrong direction: what about the tiresome drill of hate-filled "muslim outrage" we're being forced to endure every second week...? I mean, when can they even find time to stop and pray five times a day when they're so busy showcasing their "Muslim outrage" for the t.v. cameras on such a continual and predictable basis...?

No, no. Nightbloom is fed up with that shit.

Let's face it, you'd find reason to complain regardless of what he said. Did you read the full version of his comments? Those condemning him right now should be embarrassed. And the irony of it is that the whole thing reinforces the point he was trying to make (about the God of Reason). It's almost humorous if only it didn't carry with it the entirely believable tacit threat that people might actually by murdered or beheaded by Muslim fanatics over something like this.

When nightbloom begins to refer to himself in the third person I know it's time to bring out the howitzers. Give me a break, the Vatican is currently back pedaling all over the media. I don't care who the Pope is, it is irresponsible to make the kind of statement he has. Instead of focusing on a pastoral return to his natal country, he has stirred up the embers and set back Christian/Islamic relations immeasurably - all because of some quotations from the 13th century.

Your own 'outrage' would have a little more credibility if you weren't so rabidly hostile to everything the man represents. Since when are you the avatar of religious sensitivity?

Nevertheless, it's difficult to see how this will play out. The remarks in and of themselves were a quote included in a larger argument against religious violence and forced conversions (something Christians and Catholics in particular are still subjected to in Muslim countries). It's up to Muslims to prove the quote wrong. The last thing Benedict should do is back down. It's about time someone draws the line, and it's a signal occurance that it's the pontifex maximus himself that's finally drawing the line rather than the invertebrate postmodern intellectual brats of the Enlightenment in Western academia and media.

A more sober analysis is linked below, though I suspect this tempest is still in its early stages. Let me stress again that I am totally and completely unimpressed by the continual show of hair-trigger "Muslim outrage" we're being subjected to every time some public figure or artist or writer or newspaper editor or whoever says something that ruffles a few fundamentalist feathers. Salmon Rushdie's fatwa was our first warning sign, and it's been a steady stream of casualities ever since. Enough.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060915/D8K5HDJ00.html

What outrage?

None on my part. Surprise, disappointment, consternation perhaps, but no outrage. I think that's your department nightbloom. And I can't understand quite why that is.

For evidence see above:
"No, no. Nightbloom is fed up with that shit."

Why accuse me of what your own words so amply demonstrate?

And why remonstrate about what is 'enough' to me? As has been remarked about your attitude before, you are not my teacher, my counsellor nor my better. I am happy to discuss things with you or anyone else, but I won’t submit to your arbitrariness or your interpretation of events and motives – ever.

Nothing exists in a vacuum. The Muslims' outrage is primarily a function of the last half of the 20th century - prior to that, they were little heard of and less noted by the west after the middle of the 15th century. Without the oil resources of the Middle East and the wild card of the new state of Israel the west would have been more than happy to have continued to ignore them for the duration. My mother always said she could never understand why the people of Africa didn’t rise up to take from us what we stole from that continent for the last 400 years. I’m not surprised that some Muslim extremists feel the same!

TO consider Muslim violence and intolerance in isolation of the events since 1914 is madness: My view.
WHy would anyone to expect free people to continue to 'take it' for generations?

I wasn't even talking to you Alcibiades - you're jumping in all hot & bothered straight out of left field. Can I not have a conversation with Gwest for once without you gnatting away from the back seat?

In any case, BBC News online has exerpted lengthier tracts of his speech, which news outlets initially and irresponsibly truncated.

That's absolutely nothing whatsoever in his comments to justify the criticism. I'm willing to bet dollars to diamonds you didn't even give the remarks a fair and complete reading.

Not buying that anymore. 'Muslim outrage' is staged, sponsored and supported from above. You can't blame the Pope for U.S. foreign policy, and you can't say he's tip-toed around criticism of Israel either. Your argument is too stale for what this particular incident is demonstrating. This is new.

These orchestrated displays with diligently-supplied english signage for the t.v. crews have become so habitual they're on autopilot now. These protests come together with a few cellphone calls and a green light from the jihad office. They're only proving the point about unreason, and making illiterate fools of themselves in the process. Again, how long are we going to have to endure these kinds of implicit threats, and how long are you going to emit meaningless apologetics for it?

Exerpts: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5348456.stm

Chancellor Merkel defends Pope: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5351324.stm

Until, I guess, you and George Bush and his handlers whip the fascists of the right into a froth of equally irrational hatred of a billion human beings and we start a real 'holy' war.

This is not new. It's the same old, same old all over again and the Pope, of all people should be ashamed of stooping to Jerry Falwell tactics.

Not buying your apologetics any more nightbloom. I think you have fascist tendencies yourself and you'd be just as happy to loose your own jihad on the infidels. What would you expect Angela Merkel to do? Attack a famous native son of Germany. Of course she defends him.

How long must we endure, indeed?

I've seen the underemployed and reviled Muslims at the airports and train stations in Germany and Austria cadging coins from the luggage carts they corner, schlepping bags for their well-dressed 'clients' - it's not a pretty sight.

Yet more intemperate, overblown and largely meaningless statements issueing from your facial orifice, Alcibiades.

And you're stooping to the level of the vacuous 24-hour news pundits and "Crossfire" talking heads by making such an absurd comparison. You're also revealing your ignorance.

Of course you do, because I've critiqued the received truths of the Left, for which I must surely be a "fascist" and therefore akin to Hitler....and also for the simple reason that I refuse to carry my tail between my legs and huddle in fearful silence on a continual basis - the only acceptable socio-political pose for an archetypal "oppressor" as defined by your ridiculous and deceitful Oppression Narratives.

It's clear from your tangential statements regarding George Bush (not even a Catholic) and Muslims in Germany thats you're projecting a whole shitload of baggage onto Pope Benedict. That's not rational, appropriate, nor fair. Who have to look at the speech itself.

If anyone should apologize, it's the 24-hour news circuit which structures its information in such a truncated, deceptive, decontextualized and provocative manner so as to elicit the maximum emotional impact from the intended audience...as well as the inflamatory remarks by political personalities in the Muslim world trying to cover their asses and stay clear of their own mobs.

The Pope's talk at Regensburg in full:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en.html

I let the discourse speak for itself. If this is cause for recrimination, then Freedom of Speech has truly died in the West.

So this is temperate? Where do you suppose the protesters learned those communications skills? Western society reaps what it has sown.

You condemn yourself with your own words.

I never feel compelled to call you names, nightbloom, because you make a perfect fool of yourself without any added illustrations on my part.

I've already read the Pope's text. Just as I've heard the Vatican's abject apologies. As for covering one’s ass, it’s pretty clear that that is one lesson you’ve retained from your military training

As to freedom of speech, after your recent excoriation of the Coyote for exercising his, I would think you have no lessons for anyone.

Then why are you compelled to do so?

It's pretty clear that your jaded "radicalism" would have nothing to contribute to these threads were it not for my participation on them. That alone speaks volumes about. It's not out of place to conclude that posting anonymously on an internet blog is the most "radical" you've ever gotten. You're a critic by nature, and all else is pretension on your part.

In any case, it would be interesting to read your synthesis of the Pope's actual discourse. As you've probably surmised, it's hardly a discussion that lends itself to one-line sound-bites. Hopefully this generates a tertiary debate about how the media is incapable of conveying nuance and actual meaning (let alone truth - but you've probably reached that conclusion yourself already). This is a tempest in a teapot that actually hands Muslim moderates a platform on a silver platter. Once the hotheads simmer down (including yourself), it will be interesting to see what develops from this.

September 16, 2006
Pope Expresses Regret for Remarks
By REUTERS

Filed at 9:16 a.m. ET

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict is sorry Muslims were offended by a speech on Islam that provoked fury around the world and led to calls for the leader of the Catholic church to apologize, an aide said on Saturday.

``The Holy Father is very sorry that some passages of his speech may have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers,'' said Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone in a statement.

The worst crisis since Benedict was elected in April 2005 was sparked by a speech in his native Germany on Tuesday that appeared to endorse a Christian view, contested by most Muslims, that early Muslims spread their religion by violence.

Nightbloom
You are not a garden variety bigot, I will give you that.

Most of the hateful and mindless stuff posted here requires absolutely no notice from someone like me - it can be handled quite nicely by others. You, on the other hand, have some intelligence, a bit of knowledge and some interesting, if hardly mainstream, experience. All and all, enough to provide a few moments of distracting entertainment and intellectual stimulation despite your frequent and unfortunate habit of confusing cause and effect.

Now, that's a compliment. If you want another, you'll have to sharpen your pencil

I didn't post the whole of the NYTimes story. You can find it on the web if you're interested, btw.

And, to complete my current session on this subject, I'll just post in here one other thing: The Editorial from that same New York Times:

There is more than enough religious anger in the world. So it is particularly disturbing that Pope Benedict XVI has insulted Muslims, quoting a 14th-century description of Islam as “evil and inhuman.”

In the most provocative part of a speech this week on “faith and reason,” the pontiff recounted a conversation between an “erudite” Byzantine Christian emperor and a “learned” Muslim Persian circa 1391. The pope quoted the emperor saying, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Muslim leaders the world over have demanded apologies and threatened to recall their ambassadors from the Vatican, warning that the pope’s words dangerously reinforce a false and biased view of Islam. For many Muslims, holy war — jihad — is a spiritual struggle, and not a call to violence. And they denounce its perversion by extremists, who use jihad to justify murder and terrorism.

The Vatican issued a statement saying that Benedict meant no offense and in fact desired dialogue. But this is not the first time the pope has fomented discord between Christians and Muslims.

In 2004 when he was still the Vatican’s top theologian, he spoke out against Turkey’s joining the European Union, because Turkey, as a Muslim country was “in permanent contrast to Europe.”

A doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue.

The world listens carefully to the words of any pope. And it is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly. He needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology, demonstrating that words can also heal.

You still haven't commented on the Pope's actual discourse. So far, all of your comments reflect only the most precipitous of the internet headlines.

Yes, I caught the NYT editorial. It hints at some of the other issues bound up in this, which are totally tangential to what the Pope was actually articulating. This is outside of even the NYT's program, I'm afraid.

What can I say? The Pope was speaking truth, and has done the Christian thing to avert escalation and bloodshed on innocent Christian minorities in Muslim lands (already the target of official intolerance and persecution). Don't be feel too vindicated in your unfair and illiterate reading of the Pope's words. Now that the mob has been pacified (hopefully) sober minds will inevitably realize that this entire scenario has demonstrated the very point the Pope was making. I am certain the irony won't be lost on you for long.

Was the Pope speaking truth? Are you so certain of that?

Look, as I said yesterday, I don't 'know' enough about the Muslim faith or its foundations in the Koran to be able to comment intelligently on whether or not the Pope's dichotomy between reason and revealed truth, fundamental Islamic principles and violence and coercion are valid. I do know that there are scriptural contradictions between early and late Koranic verses.

This should be a surprise for Christians?

A religious tradition that never tires of exploring, discussing and "fighting" about the tensions between the Old and the New Covenant.

What I do know, and what I posted at the very beginning of this conversation - you can check back if you wish - long before there were any negative reactions either in the press or among Muslims themselves - is that the Pope misspoke in what I take to be a fundamentally inflammatory and basically ignorant way, period.

He, and the Vatican now seem - days late and several pounds lighter - to have realized this.

I'm not surprised you'd take advantage of the opportunity to conclude that the reaction seems to validate the claim - once again confusing cause and effect.

Alcibiades, now that you've read Benedict's entire talk, do you not agree that the Muslim reaction was an overreaction, not justified and therefore unreasonable.

Don't you think someone should apologize in return for all the unwarranted statements that cascaded from Islamic officialdom about the Pope (i.e. the inevitable Hitler analogies, etc.), to say nothing of the assaults by the mob on Christian places of worship (only one of which was Catholic, apparently, highlighting again the irrational nature of the reaction, and the real hatreds underlying it).

'Mob Rule' indeed.

But that's the problem with hyperbole. Once started, one thing just inevitably leads to another. There's no doubt at all that much of the reaction is overblown - but the blanket condemnation of Islam and the suggestion that there is such a thing as organized Islamofascism is equally overblown.

Everyone needs to step back ten paces and take some deep breaths. The Pope should have known better; someone in the curia is giving him very bad advice.

The Vicar of Christ ought not to be in the business of stirring up hatred on the basis of writings from the 14th century.

My opinion.

Where does it all start?
In my view we in the west have to wear it.

The idea that because the US is the most powerful country in the world that it is also the most moral is the most dangerous assumption in the world today, In my view, if we don't get past that in a hell of a hurry we may well be done for as a civilization. It’s equally fallacious to assume that our brand of ‘religion’ is any more valid than any other brand. They are all just facile ways for human beings to deal with their essential disquiet about their place in the universe and the inevitability of death.

It is long past time we grew up and faced the existential reality that God is not much more than a placebo.

Your continual conflation of America, its foreign policy, and the current issue with the Pope's speech suggests that you have difficulty seeing any issue touching on Muslims or the Middle East without colouring it with the same basic set of assumptions. Try to step outside that box for a moment:

The Vatican was the loudest voice on the world stage condemning the invasion of Iraq. They've also been highly critical of Israeli policies, and blasted Israel over it's recent actions in Lebanon. Moreover, Benedict himself came to the defence of moderate protest by Muslims over the cartoon fiasco. Whether we're talking about France banning the burka or what have you, the Vatican is decidedly pro-moderate-Islam.

Secondly, we can't be afraid of discussing history. Benedicts remarks were historically factual, and were used as a starting point to discuss the relationship of faith to Reason. Absolutely none of that has made it into coverage of the remarks, yet that was the central point of his talk. In fact, such discussions are essential to the progression of West-Islam dialogue. Faith and Reason - no other figure in the West can address that #1 question of our times on the world stage. Muslims are going to have to acclimatize themselves to a new environment in which responsible freedom of speech is practiced...expecially within the university (where Benedict made his remarks). Otherwise we're going to have to go through this same drill every two weeks because someone says something that makes the mullahs and their mob restless.

Their is no true dialogue without truth, and part of that truth is the historical record and the validity of beliefs on both sides. Catholicism has made the massive step of making Allah synonymous with the Judeo-Christian One God. That's as inter-faith as it gets. Muslims should be challenged on the divine commandment to spead the faith by the sword, and it's our duty to challenge them. In doing so, the Pope was acting not only as the figurehead of Christendom, but as a spokesman for fundamental Enlightenment principles....In fact, he is arguably the exclusive, singular and last remaining spokesman of unadultered Enlightenment principles in the West on the world stage today. Academics, the 'clercs' of the media, and shallow vote-hungry politicians have gone totally supine on all these big and existential questions.

This isn't 'public relations' - these issues bear directly on the course of society into the future.

I recommend Julien Benda's 1927 work 'La Trahison des Clercs' (Betrayal of the Intellectuals)
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/11/dec92/treason.htm

Here we go...

Israeli-US plot behind pope's remarks: Iran hardline press
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/09/17/060917085717.hyi6hm06.html

Stoking the mob.

Professor Adel-Théodore Khoury, editor of the cited writings has come forward to criticize the lack of understanding of the historical context in the debate and has denounced both the Emperor's argument and the Muslim reaction to the Pope's speech. Apologies to those who don't read German, but the English wires don't appear to be picking up the story:

Islamexperte: Papst-Vortrag hätte Differenzierungen bedurft
http://de.news.yahoo.com/15092006/3/islamexperte-papst-vortrag-haette-differenzierungen-bedurft.html

AS I was about to say, there is considerable controversy about the 'quality' of the Pope's material and the validity of his conclusions.

Just more confirmation of what I said yesterday.

You deny that the US ethos conflates power with morality? Surely not.

The problem is that the ministry of the church, the mosque, the synagogue - to be true to the message of all three - has to be most fundamentally concerned with the state of the poor and the dispossessed. If the Pope and the prelates the imams and the evangelists kept their eye on that ball, the world would be a better place, in my view.

Benedict has, as was his wont when he was merely a cardinal, a predilection for making stupid, insensitive, public statements. This was just another one in a long line of them, again, in my view. I'm certain it won't be the last. This is hardly in the service of truth.

The truth is that the West has done nothing but feather its own nest for the last 100 years and the chickens are coming home to roost. Without confronting that 'truth' there will be no progress of a fundamental kind in terms of people actually 'living' together in peace and some kind of harmony. We in the west have far too long behaved as thought we are the only people who count. If the Pope wanted real dialogue with Islam, making his statements in Germany, where the tensions between the locals (and Angela Merkel's government) and the huge Turkish/Moslem underclass of non-citizens is festering on many levels this was NOT the way to do it. The anachronism of the way the EU is dragging its feet about admitting Turkey as a member is not far from the surface of this debate either. If the Pope wanted to address an important public issue in a constructive way he could have found dozens of avenues to open that sort of debate. Instead, not unlike the well remembered Danish cartoons or the Iranian show of anti-Israel art, he chooses to poke a stick into a pile of coals and stir the fires of hate into flames again.

Tantamount to shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre. Irresponsible!

Christian? Hardly!

The church is barely 50 years along from a background in which every parish priest spent several homilies each year on the sins of ‘Protestants’ in the next town for God’s sake. Has it learned nothing?

"These (words) were in fact a quotation from a Medieval text which do not in any way express my personal thought," Benedict told pilgrims at his summer palace outside Rome.

The Pope sparked the controversy when, in a speech to German university professors Tuesday, he cited the words of a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam's founder, as "evil and inhuman."

"At this time I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims," the Pope said Sunday.

Still dissembling, I see. Why not just say: "I'm sorry, I was wrong to say what I did and I do not think that Islam is an inherently 'violent' religion"

Sadly, we haven't seen the end of this. I just hope no Mehmet Ali Agca comes out of the woodwork with a gun.

Because that would not be the truth of the matter, now would it. It would be a sacrifice of truth for the convenience of sound-bite media and facile p.c. bromides. As for the second part, the Cardinal Secretary enlarged on that yesterday, to which the Pope called attention (read the remarks - it quotes official Catholic doctrine on Islam, which you are apparently content to ignore). The meaning of the Pope's remarks were grossly distorted (by both media and machination). You still haven't acknowledged the unreasonableness of the Muslim reaction, it's total lack of honest congruence to the Pope's actual speech, and the bizarre interpretations which have been extrapolated therefrom. Perhaps dialogue with you is as pointless as dialogue with the mob. You made up your mind on this long before the event even occurred. It doesn't matter what the Pope says - it's the very institutionalized existence of a Pope that you can't abide.

Much of your other points are entirely tangential to the issue, so I will turn the proverbial cheek and allow you this opportunity to blow off more of your accumulated steam ;-)

The point is, the Pope and his advisers are adults - not worldly perhaps, but adults. They and he should have known better. If I could anticipate, which I'd say our exchange and its timing proves is the case, the likely consequences of Ratzinger's speech then it's hardly tangential for me to assert that the bloody curia should have had enough good sense to do the same.

As for steam, I take no lessons in that department from you, nightbloom. I think you are capable of dialogue but frequently something, perhaps your wounded ego, seems to get in the way. Too bad really.

In the final analysis, this incident, created as it was by the vicar of Christ, is neither helpful nor Christlike.

Furthermore, since you've brought it up, the media and its shortcomings are a fact of life in the post-modern age. During his short papacy to date Benedict has now managed twice - once at Auschwitz and now again in Germany - to completely misapprehend what he was saying, whom he was dealing with, and what would be the likely consequences of saying something inimical to a broad range of public opinion.

In actual fact, I don't think I've ever recorded anything that even remotely implies I have a problem with the 'existence' of this or any other Pope. With their actions, decisions and pronouncement - yes indeed. With their 'existence' never. Kindly refrain from applying your ad hominem brush so liberally.

That's the most predictable spin you possibly could have put on it. You've ducked every good pitch I've sent over your home plate. That's no way to debate, but the pattern is well-established here, malheureusement.

No - pop media does not and cannot determine the format of all other social, political, and religious discourse in civil society. If that's the case, then we need to start regulating the format (note I said format, not content). This is actually one of the areas where my viewpoint coincides closely with Chomsky's. In fact, this is the latest in a string of fracas
that demonstrate just how dangerous an unmonitored 24-hour sound-bite pop media is in the current environment. Media is the new crypto-demogogue, haranguing the masses into vandalous and murderous frenzy.

The medium cannot be allowed to become the message.

Try not to be too self-satisfied, Alcibiades...

Italian nun slain in Somalia, Pope link speculation
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060917/wl_nm/somalia_italian_dc_3

From tomorrow's NYTImes, it's long so it'll be in two bits but, since we're probably the only ones paying any attention.

And no, I'm not gloating.

ROME, Sept. 17 — Pope Benedict XVI sought Sunday to extinguish days of anger and protest among Muslims by issuing an extraordinary personal apology for having caused offense with a speech last week that cited a reference to Islam as “evil and inhuman.”

“I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address,” the pope told pilgrims at the summer papal palace of Castel Gandolfo, “which were considered offensive.’’

“These were in fact quotations from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought,” the pope, 79, said in Italian, according to the official English translation.

“The true meaning of my address,” he said, “in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.”

His statement came amid much worry in the church about violence and any erosion of the status of the papacy as a neutral figure for peace among faiths. In Somalia on Sunday, the Italian Foreign Ministry reported, an Italian nun was shot to death, although it was unclear if this was related to the pope’s remarks. A day earlier, five churches were firebombed in the West Bank and one in Iraq.

Although Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, issued several apologies for the historical failings of the church, experts said it appeared to be the first time in recent memory that a pope had made such a direct statement of personal regret.

“This is really, really abnormal,” said Alberto Melloni, professor of history at the University of Modena who has written several books on the Vatican. “It’s never happened as far as I know.”

Beyond the anger among Muslims, the pope’s comments have also provoked a complicated debate in Italy and among many Catholics, on issues including whether he appreciated the reaction he would provoke and whether the pope’s speeches, which he usually writes himself, are properly vetted by a Vatican undergoing a bureaucratic transition.

Several Vatican officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, said they had expressed concern before the speech was delivered that it might be negatively received by Muslims or be misconstrued by the news media as an attack on Islam.

And for many conservatives here, fearful of terrorist attacks in the name of Islam and rising Muslim immigration in Europe, the remarks of the pope — despite his own denial that he meant to criticize — amounted to a rare public airing of a delicate concern many of them share: whether, in fact, Islam is at the moment especially prone to violence.

Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister, said Saturday that the comments amounted to “an opening, a positive provocation, and so for this reason he is a great pope, with a great intelligence.”

And here is the rest of it, Berlusconi notwithstanding:

“He said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,’ ’’ the pope said.

He also briefly discussed the Islamic concept of jihad, which he defined as “holy war,” and said violence in the name of religion was contrary to God’s nature and to reason.

At the same time, without mentioning Islam specifically, he suggested reason as the basis for “that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”

In the speech, he did not say whether he agreed with the quotations he cited about violence and Islam — but on Sunday he distanced himself strongly from them.

It was not immediately clear whether this would tamp down the anger, which recalled the furor earlier this year after European newspapers published cartoons unflattering to the Prophet Muhammad.

In Egypt, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been critical of the pope, initially said Sunday that the pope’s remarks represented a “good step toward an apology.” Later comments from the group, however, seemed to cast doubt on whether it fully accepted the pope’s statement.

In Gaza, the Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniya, denounced attacks on some half-dozen churches there and in the West Bank. In Bethlehem, sacred to Christians as the birthplace of Jesus and home to many Arab Christians, police presence was higher than usual.

“The Christian brothers are a part of the Palestinian people, and I heard the highest Christian authority in Palestine denouncing the statements against Islam and against Muslims,” Mr. Haniya told reporters.

On Sunday, meanwhile, protest continued around the Muslim world.

In Iran, several hundred theological students were given the day off to protest in Qum, the nation’s center for religious study, as the Vatican envoy in Tehran was summoned for an official complaint about the remarks. Several radical Iraqi groups posted threats on the Internet against the Vatican and Christians in general.

In Mogadishu, the capital of the former Italian colony of Somalia, the Italian nun died after being shot several times in an ambush in a hospital in which a Somali bodyguard was also killed. It was unclear if the attack was retribution for the pope’s remarks, though the Vatican issued a response.

The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the chief Vatican spokesman, was quoted by the ANSA news agency as calling the killing “horrible.” “We hope it remains an isolated incident,” he said.

While anger remained high in Turkey, the nation’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, said Sunday that he expected Benedict’s planned trip there in November would go ahead. But he called the pope’s remarks “really regrettable.”

The Vatican’s new secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, also said on Sunday that he expected the pope’s visit to Turkey to proceed.

“For the time being, there is no reason why it should not,” he told the ANSA news agency.

One more small section to come.

Sorry about that, I thought I could fit in in two posts.

First among the questions — which the pope denied Sunday — is whether he in fact intended to make a statement about Islam and violence. Second is whether he realized the extent of the reaction.

But more concretely, experts said, the issue raised questions both about how the church operates under this new pope, and to what extent his statements are checked and balanced diplomatically now that he is no longer an academic but leader of the world’s billion Roman Catholics.

Benedict is used to writing his own speeches, and several Vatican officials said he wrote Tuesday’s address, one of the most significant of the papacy, by himself. The officials said there was concern in the Vatican before he delivered it, both about the reaction among Muslims and how the news media would portray the passages relating to Islam.

That concern was relayed up the chain of command, the officials said, but it is not clear if it reached the pope.

At a time when the Vatican has just replaced its second-in-command and its foreign minister, many experts also said that did not have enough experts on Islam to gauge reaction to any papal statements.

“They have nobody to really ask,” said the Rev. Thomas Michel, secretary for inter-religious dialogue for the Jesuit order of priests. “Whoever looked at it and let that go through is someone who doesn’t understand Muslims at all.”

In February, Benedict reassigned the Vatican’s most senior Arabist, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, then the head of inter-religious dialogue, to Cairo as the Vatican envoy there. The move was seen at the time by some church experts as a sign of Benedict’s skepticism about the value of dialogue with Muslims.

“I think one may say, if it is not too impolite, that it is time to bring back Monsignor Fitzgerald,” said Mr. Melloni, the Vatican scholar.

I'll only add that I might suggest a careful reading of the last 3 paras. That doesn't constitute gloating does it?

I just reread the original transcript of the Pope's speech (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en.html).

I was again struck by what a brilliant talk it was. The point needs to be reinforced that there's absolutely nothing whatsoever to apologize for.

The "offending passage" itself actually contains several levels of meaning. The reaction only demonstrates ignorance of Islam on the part of those very mobish protesters claiming to be Islamic themselves. No wonder they were told my their mullah-masters to go out and make a scene for western t.v. crews. The keyword in the offending passage was the word "new" - that's the raw nerve here:

After all, there can be no re-writes and second drafts in a book dictated by God himself. Note that later in the talk, the Pope talks freely about re-writes and improvised translations with reference to the principal Christian corpus. This might be equally offensive to some Evangelical fundamentalists, but has been an academic fact in RC theology for a long time now.

In any case, it's time for Islamic scholars and Islamic moderates to finally step up to the plate and speak the truth, if they're not too intimidated by the mob. The Pope was actually inadvertently doing their job - not to mention the job of secular humanist scholars and journalists here in the West who are too petrified to address these issues for fear they'll have an up-close-and-personal encounter with Abu al'Jihad on their way to their car one night.

If he were still just 'cardinal' Ratzinger addressing an academic audience there would be no problem.

But that's not the case and since Benedict now says he doesn't share the medieval critic's opinion of Islam, why not say what he actually does believe? He had to know it was going to cause a splash (see the NYTimes article posted above) and yet he did it anyway.

This is not, repeat not, responsible behavior for any head of state and even less understandable from the head of the Church.

Further, this business about the word of God as a Muslim Achilles heel is a dead letter for a church whose hierarchy decided in the last half of the 19th century (1870 I think) that it was a good idea to promulgate the concept of ex cathedra infallibility. It is a wise person, who, living in a house made of glass who remembers that although he can see outside clearly it is also equally possible for others to see in with the same clarity.

That NYT article contains no new information of substance. The religious murder has already been on the wires since the 6 PM news.

The NYT has their own liberal secularist agenda, of course. The Papacy presents a delicious target to them. I had to laugh when the article seemed to pose the question almost rhetorically of whether Islam is associated with violence. Duh. The acumen of the NYT never ceases to amaze. Notice the article skirted the actual content of the speech, as well as the full context of the offending quote.

The comments from the Jesuits are not out of place (I told you they're the most liberal Order now). The NYT obviously knew whom to call...maybe Thomas Friedman has been following my threads here. Trust me, the Jesuits did not want this Pope.

It's endemic to any organization when this kind of p.r. shit hits the fan for internal oppositional elements to exploit it. The Jesuits have been on the outs with the Vatican for about 40 years now - virtually since John XXIII. We also saw the same centrifugal tensions emerge during the sex abuse crisis, with the Jesuits demanding openness to gays and the Legion of Christ demanding that gays be banned outright. It's all a little too remiscent of politics, unfortunately, but we've seen it all before.

But Alcibiades, more to the point: what dd you think of the actual speech? Or let me put it this way - in 25 years when scholars review the speech itself and the public reaction to it as an episode in history, do you think they'll be reaching the same conclusions that the headlines are current blaring...? And one more question: does the Koran - the literal Word of God, we are told - not exclicitly sanction violence against the infidel (i.e. you and me)?

Then you concede, along with just about everyone else, that the problem isn't the speech - The problem was the way the speech was spun and perceived. Therefore we must examine co-factors influencing its perception...

As for the Doctrine of Infallibility (which has only been used twice, to my knowledge, and over 100 years ago at that), you'd have a point if they used it to say "kill all Muslims", which is the proper analogy here. As it is, they've only employed it to resolve internal docrinal disputes that arose as a result of the popular rise of Marian worship at that time. The first instance proclaimed the Immaculate Conception of Mary, and the second proclaimed her Bodily Assumption into Heaven (the case of the missing body...where did Mary go??)

It was widely opposed within the Church at the time, by Lord Acton and every other thinking Catholic in Britain, Germany and America, and Ratzinger himself has stopped just short of calling the Doctrine of Infallibility a rueful mistake. And it has only been used in the most innocuous of ways in response to a populist phenomenon.

No analogy there. You'll have to do a little better than that. You're really reaching here.

What I actually said was this:

Would it be wrong just once to actually look at what I said and not what you 'think' I'm saying?

As for the doctrine of infallibility, I'm quite aware of what it's all about and upon what it's actually based - to wit, the idea that the authority of the Holy See is complete. Augustine, I think, put it something like this in the fifth century, when he remarked, "Rome has spoken; the case is concluded" (Sermons 131, 10).

Now you may think this is very different from Muslims saying that the words of an illiterate nomad like Mohammed are also the words of Allah but, I think the analogy cuts very close to the bone - alas!

Not reaching at all.

He already did in the talk - dunno what you want.

You've ducked everything I've sent your way, and continue to ignore anything pertinent to the actual speech itself. I'll take that as a mute concession that you agree that the Muslim reaction was unreasonable and totally out of wack with what the Pope was actually articulating. In other words, the crisis was pretty much conconcted by sound-bite media and mullahs hungry to exploit anything for political purposes and ready to sic their mob on innocent people.

It's terrible that Islamists murdered a young Roman Catholic nun in apparent retaliation. It again demonstrates the urgency of the very message which the Pope articulated so lucidly in Regensburg.

The speech was a scholarly address criticizing the West for submitting itself too much and too often to nothing but reason, for excluding a belief in God from science philosophy and metaphysics; perfectly reasonable and proper, given the context and the audience. However, why not leave it at that? Why throw in the comments about Islam? They were, in my view, almost sui generis in the context of the rest of the speech. And then, a few days later come out with what seems to be one of the first times in recent memory that a pope has made a direct statement of personal regret about something he was apparently advisee about doing before the speech was delivered.

I don't care how unreasonable the Muslim reaction has been; it was foreseeable. Foreseeable by Benedict's advisors and foreseeable by me, among others. Simply because something can be done or said does not mean it should be done or said. These are the kind of mistakes people always make when they conflate 'power' with truth. Christ taught us that the opposite is almost always the case and it is a sad day when the man who claims to be his vicar doesn't know the difference or have the wit to take the advice of those who do.

The death of that nun must rest heavily on the Pope's own conscience tonight.

Indeed you don't. I suspect there is a perverse delight in it, in fact. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is proving to be the template of "Islamic dialogue" irrespective of how reasonable and frank it is, and there seems to be no shortage of apologists among those on the Left who see radical violent Islam as a short-term foil to help lever their own program here in the West.

This statement is incongruous to the situations. In fact, I would reverse the the direction of that statement entirely. This has demonstrated that, for the moment, rational argument is powerless, and the mob rules the day. Wait for it: something is going to change now.

I'm picking up a great deal of self-satisfaction here, Alcibiades. Perhaps an examen de conscience is in order on your part. They've been popping off Western foreign aid workers for a while now in those parts, so we can't assume there is an automatic connection. This is simply what the internet wires have fed us. It's nevertheless tragic that the murder of an idealistic religous young person is of so little consequence. Words are words - but bullets and firebombs warrant at least some recrimination. In fact, you're acting as somewhat of an apologist. Have you absolutely no words of criticism for those who employ violence and mob intimidation as a means to their ends, or in your universe did that young woman deserve to die because of the habit she wore--?

Again I say that the ongoing irrational intimidation and murder of artisist, writers, and men/women of conscience has to stop. This is the essential moral element that is missing from all of your tracts here.

Interesting short interview:

Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Catholic Church's ecumenical representative, discusses the Vatican's relations with Muslims and the furor over the pope's recent remarks.
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,437587,00.html

Always nice when you lift the quote you want and leave the rest of the statement that makes the point you're arguing.
What I actually wrote was this:

Taken as a whole somewhat different from what you'd have me say. Sadly typical of your methodology nightbloom.

Since we know rational debate is frequently out of the question and people often behave badly, intelligent and sensitive leaders don't say or do things to inflame matters; this is particularly the case when one's advisors tell you that you are treading dangerous ground.

They didn't call Ratzinger the Rottweiler for nothing I guess.

You're picking up a self-satisfied vibe because that's the way you seem to think.
Nothing could be farther from the truth and it's you who brought attention to the note in the Times article. Why? Because, I'd like to suggest, it fits 'your' Weltanshaung, not mine. You 'want' it seems, to have Muslims fit the irrational and emotive mould you've decided they belong inside.

Look at my words again. Closely. Have you ever seen me post anything that doesn't decry violence? Why do you think I criticized the Pope's words? Simply because I was convinced they would lead to violence and misunderstanding.

I think there is a strong element of empathy missing from whatever constitutes your moral universe. If we expect God's children to behave decently toward each other, it's time we all started recognizing their common parentage and making less of what divides us.

Only then can true dialogue and healing begin.

What divides us is the quantum issue of religious violence.

Alcibiades, that's the gorilla staring each of us in the face, which you refuse the acknowledge, but which the Pope addressed in a scholarly way.

So it is mistake to even attempt to engage in rational debate, is it? Even when rational debate provokes irrational responses? You have a peculiarly inversed value-system. How viable do you think your anti-leadership model is, and how far will it get us on all the hard issues of the day?

The Pope's comments, taken at face value, are not inflammatory. It's the use that has been made of them that has proven to be inflammatory. We know the effect - you're misidentifying the cause. Anyone in public life is now a potential target for such 'terrorism'.

Try not to cream your shorts, Alcibiades:

The Pope must die, says Muslim
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23367232-details/The+Pope+must+die%2C+says+Muslim/article.do

I believe you were discussing religious violence and responsible use of language...

I was waiting to here what Hans Kung would say. His comments are fair, although I the debate over when that Sutra was penned is ultimately ancillary, if in fact there even was an error. The source the Pope used is credible:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2360087,00.html

Kung may be mistaken in his summary - It's Kung's job to put ecumenism above all other facts, and others have seen in the Pope's speech a call for a Muslim Reformation rather than a suggestion that Islam cannot be reformed (Andrew Sullivan, in 2 short parts herehttp://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/09/faith_and_reaso.html and here http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/09/benedict_and_is.html ...granted, only a talking head rather than a theologian or man of the cloth).

The upside is that more considered debate seems to be working its way forward.

More follow-up analysis emerging...This interesting tid-bit, courtesy of John Allen:

http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/update/bn091806.htm

You are not convincing. Benedict blew it - if anything good comes out of this it will be because he'll have learned a valuable lesson in humility. Something all of us could use in huge doses these days. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
For they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
For they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
For they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

That last one from John Allen is just stupid. I saw Andrew Sullivan's take and wondered if you'd pick it up. You did - no surprise!

Again with the insults - which are, I can tell you, not endearing and contribute nothing to your argument.

It is provided by MEMRI (who I suppose did the translation. Nevertheless, you will notice in the woman's speech the very point I've been trying to underline that is problematic about Benedict's statement. We ought not be in the business of criticizing others' religions. This woman, judging by her Arabic, seems to be of Islamic extraction - but she calls herself a secular humanist. In any case, Islam needs more people from its own ranks who are willing to speak out. It doesn’t not need brickbats , or perceived brickbats, from the Pope.

My last word on the subject - here's the link:

file:///C:%5CDOCUME~1%5CAdmin%5CLOCALS~1%5CTemp%5Cqiq78D.htm

THis:
http://switch3.castup.net/cunet/gm....1050wmv&ak=null

Will probably work better, sorry about that!

Also sorry for the double negative - what I was trying to say is that Islam does not need brickbats from the Pope - it needs them from its own people. What it needs from the rest of us (and the Pope) is patience and understanding and a hell of a lot more financial help for Palestinians who are currently suffering. I get at least a half-dozen appeals from Jewish charities every week asking for help for needy Israeli citizens. I get no requests for help for Muslim victims and appeals to counteract Muslim poverty.

How come? Truly my last word on this thread.

I still maintain that this is the latest in a serious of escalating "freedom of speech" fiascos to be blown totally out of proportion by mob politics. The remarks in and of themselves were twisted (in some cases deliberately), and still are being twisted in the MSM. Perhaps they don't want to touch the issue of the authorship of the Sutras for their own reasons, but to continue replaying the one "offending" line without that vital piece of context is irresponsible.

It again brings us back to the question of whether any truly substantial rational debate on the big issues is possible in the MSM, without mob politics derailing it. Unfortunately, because of this new and more virulent form of Political Correctness, we are now back in the same intellectual climate that pertained following Socrates' execution, in which thinkers were obliged to encode their ideas in obscure language that was totally inaccessible to the mob, and in which the 'noble lie' emerged as the wise and expedient way to pacify the mob in order to allow thinking men the freedom for thoughtful discourse and decision-making. Dark times ahead.

Rushdie, Hirsi Ali, the Pope -- Who's Next?
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,437684,00.html

Pope Benedict's long mission to confront radical Islam
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,,1874385,00.html

Times Online: Why the Pope was right
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2362630,00.html

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-harris18sep18,0,1897169.story

Rushdie, Hirsi Ali, the Pope -- Who's Next?
By Claus Christian Malzahn in Berlin

The pope has apologized for the outrage amongst Muslims sparked by his recent comments. But the episode proves once again that criticizing Islam is dangerous.

Twenty years ago in the German city of Bremen, Dutch comedian Rudi Carrell's life depended on police protection. His offense? In a satirical program on German television, he let fly with a lewd joke about the then leader of the Iranian revolution Ayatollah Khomeini. Mass demonstrations in Iran -- orchestrated, no doubt, by the government -- were the result. The threats of violence led to an apology by Carrell, and he never again made a joke about any Muslim -- at least not on television.

Photo Gallery: Muslims Angry at Papal Comments
Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (10 Photos)

In February 1989, the Ayatollah then released a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie for his novel "The Satanic Verses." The book, he and other Muslim leaders claimed, was a grave misrepresentation of Islam. Rushdie's Japanese translator lost his life as a result of the fatwa and Rushdie himself went into hiding, though the Iranian leadership distanced itself from the fatwa in 1998. There remain, however, a number of fanatical Muslims who yearn to see Rushdie dead.

Feminist and Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch parliamentarian who recently left Holland, also lives under threat of murder. In addition to a number of interesting books about the oppression faced by women in the Muslim world, she also wrote the screenplay for the short film "Submission." In one scene, a verse from the Koran -- demanding that women bend to the will of their husbands -- is projected onto a woman's naked body. The film was provocative, and the filmmaker Theo van Gogh paid for it with his life. He was killed on the streets of Amsterdam by a Muslim fanatic.

And then there's Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who a year ago published a series of Muhammad caricatures in his newspaper. Months after they originally appeared, the Muslim world erupted in protest against the drawings. He too must fear for his life.

One thing should be kept in mind, however: The often violent protests that erupted in the Muslim world in the wake of the cartoon controversy have often been manipulated and fuelled by Islamists. The bile currently being flung at the pope is no different.

But the attacks against the pope are especially grotesque. The severe criticism -- often coupled with threats of violence -- directed at the speech held last Tuesday by Benedict XVI is not just an attack on the head of the Catholic Church. The malicious twisting of the pope's words and the absurd allegations made by representatives of Islam represent a frontal attack on open religious and philosophical dialogue.

That so many in the Muslim world joined the protests against the pope merely show just how influential Islamist extremist groups have become. The political goal of the Islamists is clear: any dispute between Christianity and Islam must obey the rules handed down by political Islamism.

Rushdie, Hirsi Ali, the Pope -- Who's Next?
By Claus Christian Malzahn in Berlin

The pope has apologized for the outrage amongst Muslims sparked by his recent comments. But the episode proves once again that criticizing Islam is dangerous.

Twenty years ago in the German city of Bremen, Dutch comedian Rudi Carrell's life depended on police protection. His offense? In a satirical program on German television, he let fly with a lewd joke about the then leader of the Iranian revolution Ayatollah Khomeini. Mass demonstrations in Iran -- orchestrated, no doubt, by the government -- were the result. The threats of violence led to an apology by Carrell, and he never again made a joke about any Muslim -- at least not on television.

Photo Gallery: Muslims Angry at Papal Comments
Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (10 Photos)

In February 1989, the Ayatollah then released a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie for his novel "The Satanic Verses." The book, he and other Muslim leaders claimed, was a grave misrepresentation of Islam. Rushdie's Japanese translator lost his life as a result of the fatwa and Rushdie himself went into hiding, though the Iranian leadership distanced itself from the fatwa in 1998. There remain, however, a number of fanatical Muslims who yearn to see Rushdie dead.

Feminist and Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch parliamentarian who recently left Holland, also lives under threat of murder. In addition to a number of interesting books about the oppression faced by women in the Muslim world, she also wrote the screenplay for the short film "Submission." In one scene, a verse from the Koran -- demanding that women bend to the will of their husbands -- is projected onto a woman's naked body. The film was provocative, and the filmmaker Theo van Gogh paid for it with his life. He was killed on the streets of Amsterdam by a Muslim fanatic.

And then there's Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who a year ago published a series of Muhammad caricatures in his newspaper. Months after they originally appeared, the Muslim world erupted in protest against the drawings. He too must fear for his life.

One thing should be kept in mind, however: The often violent protests that erupted in the Muslim world in the wake of the cartoon controversy have often been manipulated and fuelled by Islamists. The bile currently being flung at the pope is no different.

But the attacks against the pope are especially grotesque. The severe criticism -- often coupled with threats of violence -- directed at the speech held last Tuesday by Benedict XVI is not just an attack on the head of the Catholic Church. The malicious twisting of the pope's words and the absurd allegations made by representatives of Islam represent a frontal attack on open religious and philosophical dialogue.

That so many in the Muslim world joined the protests against the pope merely show just how influential Islamist extremist groups have become. The political goal of the Islamists is clear: any dispute between Christianity and Islam must obey the rules handed down by political Islamism. (...cont'd)

(...cont'd)

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Bending to this demand would be a mistake -- indeed it would be tantamount to turning one's back on freedom of expression and opinion. What will come next? Perhaps a complaint that Allah feels insulted by the numerous European women who don bikinis during a summer trip to the beach. It could be anything really -- militant Islamists will always find something. But the response needs to be firm. Freedom of speech, after all, is a vital value and needs to be defended. Any attempt to make political speech hostage to some imagined will of God must be resisted.

There are -- few -- critical voices that should be taken seriously when it comes to the pope's comments. Shouldn't Benedict XVI have known that the quote he included in his speech -- a passage he himself described as "brusque" -- might be misunderstood? Couldn't he have made his meaning a bit clearer? Even if he had, it should be welcomed by all, including leftist atheists and agnostics, that we now have a pope who can pose challenging academic questions. In any case, a close reading of his speech reveals not a single insult directed at a single Muslim.

And there's no reason to respond to every presumed insult. Consider an example from Denmark. Recently, a paper there published a number of rather tasteless Holocaust cartoons which had been shown in Tehran. The reaction of Copenhagen's rabbi was instructive when considered against the bloody response to the Muhammad cartoons -- outrage which ended up costing lives. When asked if he would call for protests, the rabbi merely said: "You know, I've seen worse."

- end -

(apologies for the double-posting of the first segment of this article)

Even several days later, the MSM is still misrepresenting Benedicts remarks. They don’t want to touch the distinction he made between early and late drafts of the Koran. This from the Evening Standard (note the elimination of Benedicts use of the word “new” to introcued the quote, which changes the meaning in a crucial way):

“The Pope enraged Muslims in a speech a week ago in Germany quoting 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who said everything the Prophet Mohammad brought was evil "such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".”

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23367507-details/Papal+assassin+warns+Pope+Benedict+his+'life+is+in+danger'+if+he+visits+Turkey/article.do

Of course, Benedict said no such thing - What Benedict said was quite a bit more subtle than that.

Apologies, that link again:

Papal assassin warns Pope Benedict his 'life is in danger' if he visits Turkey

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23367507-details/Papal+assassin+warns+Pope+Benedict+his+'life+is+in+danger'+if+he+visits+Turkey/article.do

Considering Ratzinger's views on Turkey 'ever' becoming a member of the EU - widely publicized, I'm sure you'll acknowledge - I think he has a lot of nerve going to Turkey anyway. He obviously believes that the Greco-Roman/Christian/logical school of thought and tradition has more 'value' than the 'Orientalist' approach. I'm actually surprised he hasn't managed yet to significantly offend the Jews too. Some Role Model!

His views on Turkish membership are a matter of public record, although he has not repeated them since becoming Pope. They are uncontroversial mainstream views supported by many in politics, academia and European society at large. There's no scandal there, and I'm sure that a lively debate is brewing. People are just going to have to accept that not everyone is "on board" with the extension of Europe's borders to the edge of the Middle East. As Helmut Kohl said, "Europe stops at the Bosphorus".

I take it you've seen the following:
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1743

And a record of which Benedict/Ratzinger should be truly ashamed. The last thing Europe needs to do is reject Turkey's bid for membership in the EU - and as the expressed policy of a prince (now king) of the Church this is truly shameful.

Uri Avnery has an interesting take on Benedict's 'analysis' of the bloodthirsty record of Islam relative to foreced conversion.

I'll see if I can find a link for you - it's a little too long to post here, try this:

http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/35750

It's not shameful at all - it's a morally neutral question, in my opinion. People are opposing Turkish membership for very good reasons. I can see both sides of the issue, actually. Your constant "Benedict-should-be-truly-ashamed" is beginning to sound like the boy who cried wolf. Is there anything you don't find fault in?

The idea that Benedict was doing Bush a favour with that quote is absurd (as suggested in your linked article). The whole trajectory of the Pope's speech - the dehellenization of Christianity and the syncronicity of Reason and Faith - is one which pivots on the fundamental difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. You could just as easily argue that he was placing the protestant/evangelical "Christianists" and the radical Islamists in the same boat of unreasonableness.

The speech defies easy categorization, and will probably be mulled over for some time to come. There's actually a lot of thought behind those words - far too much for the 24-hour news cycle.

I don't think it's neutral, obviously. I think the suggestion that Turks - because they are nominally a Muslim nation - somehow don't deserve the benefits and advantages that go with being members of the EU is appalling and immoral. Especially given the vast underclass of Turkish workers who currently peel the vegetables, drive the cabs and do the grunt work in many western European countries. In a way it is Europe's Mexico relative to the 'guest workers' from that country in the US.

Again, Ratzinger proves he's not up to the job.

I though Avnery's piece was interesting and quite insightful - not surprised you'd disagree since your chief effort here seems to be defending the Church these days. Nice to see the Left is getting a little holiday from the ad hominem stuff you usually throw in that direction.

I have faith that reason will eventually demonstrate the fact that the two just are not compatible but I'm not holding my breath - there's still too much emotionalism around for people to realize that they are on their own - like it or lump it.

By the way, there was an excellent piece on Islam last night on CBC Radio 1 – Ideas. You would have found it interesting, I think.

That qualifier is pure assumption on your part - many opposed expansion eastward, even into Eastern Europe. These are important issues which shouldn't be subjected to p.c. make-believe or destructive social engineering efforts that backfire spectacularly 20 years down the road. Again, there's more than one side to this, and your invocation of "morality" to bolster to pro-Turkey argument is silly. You sound like a bit of a zealot yourself.

That's not the consensus that seems to be crystallizing around this issue. For once we have someone who refused to become a creature of the popular media. Someone in his position should be the very last to buckle to those insidious warping forces.

Again, my critique of the Left is not, and never has been, ad hominem. That assertion is a non sequitur, in fact. The Left is not a person, it's a pastiche of ideas. And my critique has always been reasonable - far more reasonable that the name-calling that passes for critique on the other side of the coin (which you have defended).

In any case, let's face it: you don't like the man, you don't like the institution, and you don't like the whole phenomenon, so it doesn't matter what anyone says or does, you will always find fault with it, period. That's all well and good, but it's a very narrow viewpoint to use when judging these issues.

I don't like some of what he says and I reserve the right to criticize, in fact, I have no feelings about him as a man other than that I respect his intellect and am bemused by his lack of the common touch that so endeared John Paul to me.. However, I reject the judgment in your last paragraph. It's neither true nor reflective of my feelings about the Church. Surely you've read enough of what I write not to make such a chauvinistic judgment about someone else's feelings - it's almost as if your antipathy for the left has begun to absorb your other evaluative faculties.

Someone in the Pope's position should be the last person stoking the fires of intolerance and xenophobia. It's you and the Pope, I'm afraid, who have the narrow viewpoints.

I don't understand why you are congenitally unable to discuss any issue without putting it through the grinder of your hatred for the left - especially the left in this country.

Frankly, you puzzle me. For someone who is widely read and intelligent you have an enormous and debilitating blind spot, my friend.

That's not what he has done - that is what his critics have tried to say he has done. See the difference? Unfortunately, when enough people are hostile to something (say "papists" or "organized religion" or "men in white dresses" or what have you) then they are receptive to the most blatant falsehoods about that thing.

The only people in that whole scenario who were promoting intolerance and xenophobia were the ones who pumped five rounds into the back of an elderly nun in Somolia, or who called on devout Muslims to murder the Pope, or who tried to burn down those Churches.

This is the significance of the link I posted on the other thread (about Islamists and secular liberal-Left social decontructionist nihilists making strange bedfellows). Everyone knows the Pope said something reasonable and innocuous...but everyone wants to pretend he said something hateful so they can turn up the volume on their own agenda.

You're telling me it's not xenophobic to imply that Turks, qua Turks (still people last time I looked and the national entity that was the home of the Eastern bloc of the Roman empire - Byzantium - for centuries - doesn't belong in Europe. I can understand it from the Neonazi German right wing but from the leader of a church that ought to be more concerned with distributing more widely to any and all people (regardless of their faith or ethnicity) the benefits of modern pluralistic society - not so much.

You are the biggest deconstuctionist I've ever encountered. And pretty hateful to boot in terms of your attitude toward people you don't happen to agree with.

Everyone does not know the Pope is reasonable and innocuous - the fact that you can't understand such a truism tells us more about you than it does about the Pope.