Pope compares Atheism to Nazism

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny” (Caritas in Veritate, 29).

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Societies without God are more benevolent

The pope's visit to Britain has been the perfect excuse for many commentators to traduce secularism

Writing sometime around the 10th century BC, the furious author of Psalm 14 thundered against those who say there is no God. "They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good." If the denunciations of wicked atheists coming from today's apologists for religion are any guide, the spirit of Iron Age Israel is abroad in 21st-century Britain.

In advance of the pope's visit, clergymen and commentators are deploying every variety of bogus argument against those who advocate the superiority of secularism. Edmund Adamus, director of pastoral affairs for the Catholic diocese of Westminster, led the way when he denounced the "wasteland" secularism produced. If he had been condemning the atheist tyrannies of communism and fascism, I would have no complaint. However, Adamus was not objecting to Cuba, China or North Korea, but to the wasteland of secular, democratic Britain "with its ever-increasing commercialisation of sex, not to mention its permissive laws advancing the 'gay' agenda".

Rightwing columnists and, depressingly but predictably in these appeasing times, leftwing journalists have joined the moaning chorus. The arguments of Geoffrey Robertson QC and Professor Richard Dawkins that the cops had grounds to ask the pope to account for his church's failure to stop the rape of children in its care drove them wild. "The hysterical and abusive nature of some of the attacks on the pope will do nothing but discredit secularism," said Andrew Brown in the Guardian. "I accept, of course, that lots of secular humanists are tolerant and reasonable people," says the more restrained and judicious Stephen Glover of the Mail. "But there is a hard core which embraces and promotes atheism with the blind fervour of religious zealots."

Not that I agree with Robertson and Dawkins that the police should arrest the pope. The best way for anyone caught up in religious crimes to make amends is to convert to secularism. The odds are that they will be better people for it.

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Protest the Pope! Be there!

For those of you living in or around London, we bring news of the latest details of the Pope’s visit. I’ve written twice for this blog about the Pope’s disgusting actions (both of which can be found by following this link) and if you share the sentiment that all decent human beings would, then I encourage you to attend as many of these events as possible.


Why “Protest the Pope”?

The diverse groups who support this campaign have many different reasons for not approving of the State Visit to the UK by the Pope in September 2010. They all however share the following view:

• That the Pope, as a citizen of Europe and the leader of a religion with many adherents in the UK, is of course free to enter and tour our country.
• However, as well as a religious leader, the Pope is a head of state and the state and organisation of which he is head has been responsible for:

1. opposing the distribution of condoms and so increasing large families in poor countries and the spread of AIDS
2. promoting segregated education
3. denying abortion to even the most vulnerable women
4. opposing equal rights for lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people
5. failing to address the many cases of abuse of children within its own organisation.
6. rehabilitating the holocaust denier bishop Richard Williamson and the appeaser of Hitler, the war-time Pope, Pius XII.

• The state of which the Pope is the head has also resisted signing many major human rights treaties and has formed its own treaties (‘concordats’) with many states which negatively affect the human rights of citizens of those states.
• As a head of state, the Pope is an unsuitable guest of the UK government and should not be accorded the honour and recognition of a state visit to our country.

If you believe, as we do, that the Pope should not come to the UK without hearing from the millions of people who reject his harsh, intolerant views and the practices and policies of the Vatican State please get involved.

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Pope Benedict rejects Irish bishop's resignation

Big. Fucking. Surprise.

In a move that has stunned critics Pope Benedict XVI has rejected the resignations of two Dublin auxiliary bishops.

Bishop Raymond Field and Bishop Eamonn Walsh had both tendered their resignations in 2009 in the wake of the Murphy report into clerical child abuse.

Both men had come under intense pressure because they had served as bishops during the period investigated by the Murphy Commission into clerical child sex abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin.

The Murphy Commission in Ireland found that sexual abuse was 'endemic' in boys' institutions but that the church hierarchy protected the perpetrators and allowed them to take up new positions teaching other children after their original victims had been sworn to secrecy.

'Following the presentation of their resignations to Pope Benedict, it has been decided that Bishop Eamonn Walsh and Bishop Raymond Field will remain as auxiliary bishops,' Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said in a letter to priests of the Archdiocese reported in The Irish Catholic.

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For I have sinned...

Allegations of involvement in covering up child abuse have dogged Pope Benedict VXI, and now senior figures in Scotland say there is a criminal case to answer under Scots law. Steven Raeburn investigates whether the Pope could face prosecution when he visits Scotland in September.

Your eyebrows may have been briefly raised during April by a series of press reports claiming that noted anti-theist and proponent of evolutionary theory Richard Dawkins was calling for the arrest of his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Britain in September. The reports treated rather hilariously the genuine and serious contention that the incumbent Pontiff may actually have a case to answer arising from his claimed historic knowledge of ritualised paedophilia undertaken by priests under his authority.

After a few follow up comments the story has moved off the agenda and Dawkins -together with colleague Christopher Hitchens - has been largely silent on the subject since then. Both had in fact engaged solicitor Mark Stephens and human rights counsel Geoffrey Robertson QC to shore up their argument, and on the face of it there appears to be a compelling logic to the proposal, which considers factors including jurisdiction, civil and criminal liability, and the question of the Pope's immunity as head of state, a defence which they dismiss on the basis that the Vatican is not recognised as a state under international law.

However, with typical anglocentricity, the coverage totally omitted any reference to Pope Benedict's trip across the Hadrianic divide into our jurisdiction, which not only has a completely different criminal justice system and process, it also has its own priorities which have -post Operation Algebra and the Strachan & Rennie case- set new benchmarks and standards of evidence for securing convictions not only for sex offenders, but for those who assist in conspiring to cover them up. Dawkins, even if he was minded to, couldn't get near the Pope during the English leg of his trip, but the prospect of Strathclyde or Lothian and Borders Police slapping the handcuffs on the Pontiff just as soon as he has kissed the tarmac may yet be such a sufficiently real prospect that the visit may be cancelled. The Crown Office have not ruled out the possibility of a prosecution, and a recent papal excursion to Malta was marred by fresh allegations of his involvement in covering up for paedophile priests. The defining event of his tenure as Pontiff could see Benedict XVI escorted from the tarmac to a Reliance van and into the dock in Glasgow's High Court, and off to Barlinnie thereafter, which would make for quite a photograph.

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Pope Alert

Hopefully not a sign of whats to come when Ratzinger arrives on British shores. ;)


Crude I know, but it made me giggle.

Pope launches mission to re-evangelise the West

Pope Benedict XVI has created a new office to "re-evangelise" the Western world in an attempt to roll back secularist advances in what the Vatican sees as the traditional heartland of Christendom.

The Pope has made no secret of his dislike for secularism and has been determined to persuade Western countries to rediscover their Catholic roots. He has frequently railed against some of the key pillars of secular liberalism such as the acceptance of homosexuality and abortion rights and the use of contraception.

At one of the last vespers' service before the Vatican shuts down for the summer break, the Pope announced the creation of a Pontifical Council for the promotion of New Evangelisation which would be dedicated to what he described as "a grave crisis in the sense of the Christian faith".

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Bishop: 100 cases in 10 yrs for Italy priest abuse

ROME — Italy's bishops' conference provided the first ever statistics of clerical sex abuse in the country on Tuesday, saying there had been about 100 cases over the past 10 years that warranted church trials or other canonical procedures.

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The Spectacle of Faith

As you may have come to realize I am not particularly fond of religion. In fact I'm not that fond of anyone telling me what I can or can't do. Although I know I'm not perfect and if I'm proven wrong then I'm happy to be corrected.

However, when an organisation tries to dictate how I, my friends or my fellow man should live their lives based on something so questionably bogus as the Bible and/or the rules they've made whilst listening to the voices in their head, well its hard not to question why anyone takes them seriously.

See I quite like politics for exactly the reason I don't like religion. Even when I don't agree with someones political point of view I know that through debate and discussion we the people can vote and fight to change laws and bills to suit the needs of the majority. I believe something similar is what Sam Harris means when he talks of a "Science of Morality".

When the organization tries to enforce their bronze-age doctrine on society behind the veil that they are the voice of an omnipotent creator of heaven and earth and their views on what is right and wrong cannot be questioned, well this starts to look an awful lot like a dictatorship. A dictatorship that spans ordinary political boundaries.

Then we hear that at the same time that this organization spins its "infallible" lies, it has been trying to cover up the rape and torture of innocent young children to protect the guilty, and not the innocent, so that the organization can continue to prosper, you have to ask why isn't society trying harder to bring these sick individuals to justice.

When it comes to anything else other than religion we the people stand up together as one and say that is not right, we do not want this in our society, and we put these people before the judicial system.

Josef Fritzel, Gary Glitter, Fred West, Baby P, Shannon Matthews, Jaycee Dugard are all names that we recognize because of their relation to child abuse scandals in recent history.

What is the difference between these stories and the Catholic Church?

Nothing is happening to the Catholic Church.

Below are some links for those who want to read up on just who truly horrible the Catholic Church really is:

For Years, Deaf Boys Tried to Tell of Priest’s Abuse

Pope May Be at Crossroads on Abuse, Forced to Reconcile Policy and Words

Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys

In Abuse Crisis, a Church Is Pitted Against Society and Itself

Abuse Case Offers a View of the Vatican’s Politics

Bring the Pope to Justice

A Woman’s Place Is In The Church

The Great Catholic Cover-Up

We Can't Let the Pope Decide Who's a Criminal

The Pope Is Not Above the Law

Tear Down That Wall

The pope should stand trial

Ratzinger is the perfect pope

GOD! I need a beer.

Amid Calls for Transparency, Pope Describes Dangers of Digital Age

A report by Margret Warner of PBS Newshour from the Vatican to investigate how the Catholic Church is planning to deal with the Child Sex Abuse scandal, and instead describes the dangers of people communicating their opinions more freely over the internet.

VATICAN CITY | We've come to Rome for a week to explore how the new wave in the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal is being seen and dealt with by the Vatican, the power center of worldwide Catholicism. Pope Benedict XVI is coming under increasing pressure, as hundreds of charges of alleged priest abuse of minors explode throughout Europe -- so we were eager to see him at the earliest possible opportunity.

It was the last morning of a three-day conference on how the church should use and deal with the digital media of today. "Have they talked about the sex abuse scandal?" I whispered to a young reporter for Avvenire, the country's dominant Catholic newspaper. She smiled and shook her head: "Not a chance."

So what did the Pope have to say to the masses of people wanting answers and guidance from their religious leader when he arrived?

"The times in which we living knows a huge widening of the frontiers of communication," he said (according to our Italian fixer/producer) and the new media of this new age points to a more "egalitarian and pluralistic" forum. But, he went on to say, it also opens a new hole, the "digital divide" between haves and have-nots.

Even more ominous, he said, it exacerbates tensions between nations and within nations themselves. And it increases the "dangers of ... intellectual and moral relativism," which can lead to "multiple forms of degradation and humiliation" of the essence of a person, and to the "pollution of the spirit." All in all, it seemed a pretty grim view of the wide open communication parameters being demanded by the Internet age.

We'll be keeping a close eye on what happens and what is said on this issue from the Vatican in the coming weeks.

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The Third Strike

This article by Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish is a few weeks old, but as I'm creating this blog by adding things that I found interesting from todays news, I figured I'd add a few things I've found interesting recently as well.

It explains why the media, and anyone with an ounce of compassion paying attention, was so angry at the Catholic Pope recently.

In fairness to his holiness it was not he who tied up and sodomized innocent children, it was a priest in America called Father Kiesle.

However, when Bishop Cummins who was in charge of this particularly nasty piece of work started to get complaints about this asshole, he wrote a letter to Cardinal Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict) asking for guidance and permission to defrock this poor imitation of a man.

"It is my conviction that there would be no scandal if this petition were granted and that as a matter of fact, given the nature of the case, there might be greater scandal to the community if Father Kiesle were allowed to return to the active ministry," Cummins wrote in 1982.

Instead Cardinal Ratzinger concluded that removing this child molester from his position, even if it was temporarily for investigation, not as important the good of the universal church, which is bad enough but when added that this was the case because he didn't see the potential threat it could case particularly regarding of the age of the petitioner (sodomized child) it makes you sick.

This court, although it regards the arguments presented in favor of removal in this case to be of grave significance, nevertheless deems it necessary to consider the good of the Universal Church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ's faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner.

This letter is signed by Cardinal Ratzinger (the now Catholic Pope) himself.

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