I know its a small piece in the big article and well just a metaphor. I like the whole article and everything but here when you say that a thing was banned there is a reason. Fish was banned because it was a test ( I know it sounds stupid but thats when the ‘leap’ of faith comes in) to see who obeys and who doesn’t and there was always good and more abundant fish in the river on Friday and God wanted to see who actually obeys the orders and who doesn’t. But unfortunately we found a way around that, at that time they used to make small puddles to which the water was diverted and the fish got stuck in the pond and they caught it the next day :p

Most aspects of society are hierarchical. With respect to the Pope, the mythology states that he translates the will of God and passes that along to the people. Without a Pope the people would have to interpret God for themselves, and do a bad job of it, according to the Church. The Church serves a similar function – an intermediary between God and people.

The Pope must be male since the Bible prefers males, and the Bible is the word of God. With respect to the Bible, it makes as much sense for a cow to be the Pope as it does for a woman to be.

I really don’t understand why an organisation that has a history of supporting mass-murdering fascists (EG: Franco, Duvalier, to a lesser extent Hitler) & of systematically sheltering paedophiles, allowing them to continue molesting children, is treated as a moral authority. To say nothing of the inquisition or the crusades. Or the way the church hierarchy continually sides with the rich & powerful against the poor & oppressed. Admittedly the poor are allowed to politely beg for alms, but god forbid that anyone should ever try to change things.

And where the hell does the pope get his priorities? He could condemn the war-mongers, arms dealers, profiteers, mercenaries & armies that are busily slaughtering innocent people. Or he could condemn the economic system that deprives literally billions of people of their most basic rights & kills tens of thousands every day. But no! He’s more concerned with condemning consensual sex between adults that harms no one. That is his idea of a sin. Other ‘sins’ include using contraception & (according to John Paul II) being sexually attracted to your wife.

Not only is this sort of dangerous prejudice & idiocy preached at mass, it is also taught in schools, & much more explicitly than in this particular speech.

As a recovered (yep, I did it!) Catholic, I am still stunned at the absurdity and arrogance of that unholy religion with its prancing Gucci Bishops and tons of gold bullion in the US and Switzerland (and not inconsiderable amounts of cash, stocks and bonds, some derived- and they have admitted this and do not apologise- from indirect arms dealing. The Vatican Bank was also dealing with counterfeit Coca-Cola stock for awhile, and there was a warrant out for chief banker Archbishop Marcinkus. Public record.) This while how many children starve every single dayof the year?

Oh yes- and Ratzinger was the holier-than-thou guy who instructed every Bishop to drag his (or her? Nah!) feet regarding priestly sex abuse, or face possible excommunication.

Suffer the children, indeed. Nice article, Michael.

Since faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian Credo, the Church cannot and should not confine itself to passing on the message of salvation alone. It has a responsibility for the created order and ought to make this responsibility prevail, even in public. And in so doing, it ought to safeguard not only the earth, water, and air as gifts of creation, belonging to everyone. It ought also to protect man against the destruction of himself. What is necessary is a kind of ecology of man, understood in the correct sense. When the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected, it is not the result of an outdated metaphysic. It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God. That which is often expressed and understood by the term “gender”, results finally in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator. Man wishes to act alone and to dispose ever and exclusively of that alone which concerns him. But in this way he is living contrary to the truth, he is living contrary to the Spirit Creator. The tropical forests are deserving, yes, of our protection, but man merits no less than the creature, in which there is written a message which does not mean a contradiction of our liberty, but its condition. The great Scholastic theologians have characterised matrimony, the life-long bond between man and woman, as a sacrament of creation, instituted by the Creator himself and which Christ – without modifying the message of creation – has incorporated into the history of his covenant with mankind. This forms part of the message that the Church must recover the witness in favour of the Spirit Creator present in nature in its entirety and in a particular way in the nature of man, created in the image of God. Beginning from this perspective, it would be beneficial to read again the Encyclical Humanae Vitae: the intention of Pope Paul VI was to defend love against sexuality as a consumer entity, the future as opposed to the exclusive pretext of the present, and the nature of man against its manipulation.

anyhow, i had been happy for my readers while i’m here; after i go, well, i don’t know.

I hope that clears that up for you.

You will find some of my writing on spinwatch not to mention some of my research.

I am not a member of the advisory board but I do not claim to be.