Pope
I can see why the new atheist commentators Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins want to take on the Pope. Here is someone who fears what Gareth Evans called “relevance deprivation”. He fears it for himself as Pope, he fears it for the Church. To bolster the declining authority of the Church, he has set up the straw man of “aggressive secularism” and sets his adherents against it.
Religion, the Pope told Britons in his trip this month, is being “marginalised”, relegated to the “purely private sphere”. Believers holding public roles are being asked to act against their conscience, he claims. Secularism, Britains were warned, no longer values or tolerates their traditional values such as honesty, respect and fair-mindedness.
Your Holiness, this is rubbish – ideologically motivated rubbish.
Welcome to Friday @ The Punch
Today in 1978 the Vatican elected a non-Italian leader for the first time in 455 years. Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II. At only 58 years of age he was also one of the youngest popes in history.
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stephen says:
He’s a bit different than the chap they have now. The current fellow can speak 10 languages, writes a book a week and when he looks into space, suddenly a wall comes up.(He’s not a common man) John Paul was a man for everybody, because he loved people. He had… Read more »
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shabangabang says:
@Simmo, I know quite a few places that are doing that, mostly overseas, though. What happens is they work 10 hours a day Mon-Thur and have Fri-Sat-Sun off. Would happily do it myself. Read more »
One of the logical difficulties in being an atheist is the body of well-documented cases where individuals have used faith and prayer to defy the odds when science and reason suggested that all hope was truly lost.
Atheism holds that all religion is fantasy and that its adherents have deluded themselves into believing in the existence of an all-powerful being with whom you can communicate via prayer.
On paper it sounds absurd. The only difficulty is – and I write this as a non-believer – it sometimes seems to work. If I were Sophie Delezio’s Dad I would probably regard the fact that this poor little girl had been hit not once but twice by a car as an argument against the existence of an all-powerful, all-loving God. But for the Delezios, whose faith was already strong before these two crashes, their convictions were strengthened by their ordeal.
Continue reading "Sorry PM, who are we trying to canonise here?" »
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John says:
“...the body of well-documented cases where individuals have used faith and prayer to defy the odds when science and reason suggested all hope was lost.” Really? What a load of rubbish, please use some thought and reason before you write anything so stupid again. There have been several studies that… Read more »
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B.wendt says:
The oldest trik in the spy game.tell the double agent what to tell the enemy so the enemy ends up with eggs on the face Read more »
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