Thursday, May 03, 2007

Terrorism!

Vatican calls verbal attack on Pope ‘terrorism':
L'Osservatore Romano said a presenter of a televised May Day rock concert, which is sponsored by Italy's labour unions, had launched “vile attacks” on Pope Benedict in front of an “excitable crowd”.

“This, too, is terrorism. It's terrorism to launch attacks on the Church,” it said. “It's terrorism to stoke blind and irrational rage against someone who always speaks in the name of love, love for life and love for man.”
This is exactly what we atheists are talking about when we talk about "anti-accommodationism". It's not that religious thought should be excluded from the free marketplace of ideas. We refuse to accommodate claim that religious thought should be exempted from the political and rational criticism it so richly deserves.

The Pope is an evil man, who has promoted religious doctrines that have lead to the misery, suffering and death of hundreds of millions of people. Go ahead, call me a terrorist.

7 comments:

  1. "The Pope is an evil man..."
    Wow.

    ReplyDelete
  2. So, Deacon, because Ratzo is the head of the Catholic church, he's automatically exempt from criticism?

    Just mention "God" and you can get away with anything, and anyone who criticizes you is a intolerant dimwitted terrorist.

    ReplyDelete
  3. How about the millions of people who have AIDS because the Catholic church has convinced them it's sinful to use condoms? How about the hundreds of pedophile priests protected and actually helped by the church? And don't get me started on Mother Theresa.

    The Catholic church is a thoroughly corrupt institution, and its head automatically evil; they are protected only by their funny hats and accommodationist apologists.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Not to mention the countless women who have been directly victimized by the Pope, through its discomfort with birth control and abortion. And the huge number of people who spend their lives riven with guilt because of the 'teachings' of Catholicism. The sheer evil of this whole establishment is beyond belief, responsible as it is for untold misery and suffering (that is, when it isn't debating where unbaptized dead babies go).

    If there were a hell and a just God, the Catholic Church -- the whole kit and caboodle -- would spend eternity in it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Not to mention the countless women who have been directly victimized by the Pope, through its discomfort with birth control and abortion

    Yes and not only the women who went through childbirth, but the millions, maybe billions of people who were born because of the church's teachings on birth control. The Earth simply cannot afford to support such a huge population, as we are finding out.

    Popes throughout history have done much evil to the world.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Okay, let me see if I have this straight. From a simple "wow" you derive that I'm saying at least the following:
    (1) the Pope is exempt from criticism;
    (2) just mentioning God is enough to clinch an argument;
    (3) you're an intolerant dimwitted terrorist;
    (4) the Pope is personally responsible for pedophile priests.

    Seriously?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Pope Benedict XVI preaches a divisive, back to basics approach for Catholicism. He is far more theologically complex, and politically astute, than John Paul II was. JPII, for all his faults, had a kind of fundamental decency that shone through during a period of time where Cardinal Ratzinger served as a sort of theological pit bull, squelching internal dissent.

    Now, as the titular head of a religion that holds its pontiff incapable of a wrong thought, the man's going to be arrogant and has absolutely no reason to be accomodationist at all in his thinking. But he's also intolerant: of dissent, of alternative theologies, of homosexuals, of social liberty, and of the democratic process. He's an authoritarian oligarch seeking to return Paul's Church to political primacy (such as by announcing that politicians with anything less than a rigid anti-abortion belief cannot take Communion). He and his heralds breathlessly conflate ineluctable, harmless homosexuality with the use of terrorism. He preys on fears and intolerance to push forward what is now a radically regressive political and social agenda.

    I might not call it evil (with the exception of his attitude towards homosexuality), but it is intolerable.

    ReplyDelete

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