| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"johac" |
| Date: |
23 Sep 2006 02:22:34 AM |
| Object: |
Drunken With The Blood Of The Saints |
The Pope and others who have engaged mouth before brain.
---
Published on Friday, September 22, 2006 by the Wiscasset Newspaper
(Maine)
Drunken With The Blood Of The Saints
by Christopher Cooper
So His Holiness says he's sorry. Sort of. Or not really so sorry for
anything except the bad press his opinions and, well, pontifications
have recently generated, one guesses. Suppose I made some intemperate
statement right here, and my editor extracted the most shocking and
incendiary phrases and bold-typed them in a prominent sidebar. After the
outraged telephone calls and E-mails and letters from the decent and
drab and dull descended from the higher moral plateaus onto my corrupt
and boggy ground I'd be forced to make some thin and grudging apology. I
doubt I could craft a less generous or more revealing mea culpa than
God's right hand man on Earth has brought forth.
The Pope is extremely upset that some portions of his speech were able
to sound offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers and have
been interpreted in a way that does not at all correspond with his
intentions". A masterpiece. Some portions of his speech were able to
sound offensive. Get that? The speech is at fault for being able to
sound offensive. And if that doesn't redirect the heat away from the
Pontiff, let's not overlook the culpability of those interpreters, that
is, the Muslims against whose beliefs he directed his original remarks.
And what precisely did the man in the big funny hat say and about whom,
for those of us who maybe don't get much news beyond the ball scores or
Tom Cruise or Paris Hilton updates from People magazine? He quoted "the
erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus", a man whose works I
admit I have not read. Manny, according to the former Mr. Ratzinger,
said, "Show me just what Mohamed 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." Evil and inhuman.
Well, how bad is that? Ronnie Reagan called the Soviet Union The Evil
Empire and we loved the dimwitted old actor for it. G. W. Bush, putative
leader of the free world, discovered that Iraq, Iran and North Korea
constituted a modern Axis Of Evil, and he got re-elected and has
apparently been issued a free pass for all crimes past, present or
pending, including but not limited to draft dodging, election rigging,
lying, torturing, violating international standards of decency,
cronyism, ignoring the Geneva Conventions, sounding like an idiot,
letting Rumsfeld smoke indoors, and giving the keys to the Constitution
to ***** Cheney.
Recent history is replete with public men who jack their jaws too
freely. Remember Earl Butz? In 1976 the then Secretary of Agriculture
volunteered, on Air Force One, in the company of reporters, "I'll tell
you what the coloreds want. And he did. Only the Madison Capitol Times
and Toledo Blade printed the full text of his opinions, and I don't
suppose The Editor Mrs. Gibbs is going to let me join their brave ranks,
so I leave it to my readers to make the appropriate substitutions:
Loose shoes, tight xxxxx and a warm place to xxxx. Mr. Butz resigned.
Curiously, throughout his long career he never bothered to change his
offensive last name.
And who doesn't remember loose cannon extraordinaire, Interior Secretary
James Watt? In 1983, describing his staff to the U. S. Chamber of
Commerce, he said, We have every mixture you can have. I have a black, a
woman, two Jews and a cripple. Now, I'm not certain just which point of
this direct and probably true statement was so offensive; I'd guess the
term cripple had already passed out of favor by then, having gone the
way of gimp. At any rate, he resigned. This was a good thing,
regardless, because he was crazy. Religious crazy. End-of-the-world
crazy. Which brings us back to Pope Benedict XVI.
He shouldn't have said it. We can all agree that had he read his speech
before he delivered it, perhaps while enjoying a couple Heinekens,
sitting naked in his office with his feet on his desk and some dogs on
the floor and a Bo Diddley record playing, as I am often disposed when
proofreading my hastily wrought essays, he'd have deleted the reference.
But maybe the Pope don't know Didley.
He's right, of course. Foolish to say it, but, I mean, Christ, read the
texts. Where do Muslim fanatics get the juice that infuses them with
such a taste for dynamite suits and martyrdom? They read the Koran. And,
yes, they do interpret it variously according to what they're interested
in finding there. This is not unlike the White House mining the vast
volumes of intelligence data for tiny factoids that could be built into
a shaky (but convincing, with such horrible consequences, to pretty much
all of Congress and most citizens) tower of evidence that Iraq was awash
in poison gas and nuclear (that's noo-klee-ar) warheads. Except of
course the intelligence contained no such evidence. But the Koran does.
The only problem, Pope-wise, is that the Bible does too.
And the Bible, some say, is the direct word of God. I have a Bible. I
first read it when I was thirteen. Most of it made no sense. Much of it
was excruciatingly boring. Quite a bit was repetitive. Revelation was
fun, but laughable. Here and there (in the King James version, but not
in watered-down, more accessible later iterations) one does find a nice
turn of phrase. Bob Dylan has incorporated most of the better ones in
various of his songs, and if you don't like Every Grain Of Sand, listen
to his brand new record, inscrutable though it occasionally is, for such
delights as the line, Spirit on the water/ Darkness on the face of the
deep....
I took a comparative religions course in college. The professor was
unabashedly in favor of the then-popular (among white college kids and
hippies at least) Eastern religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism.
He was quite full of himself, and a fervent fan of the Upanishads. I
passed the course, but took the largest lesson from some of the
discussion generated during lectures. Everyone liked comparing all the
other religions, but many balked at the notion of throwing his or her
own faith into the pot for equal consideration with Cargo Cults and
Zoroastrianism. In a classroom in a public university where one might be
expected to bring an open mind and a spirit of rational inquiry, the
discourse frequently degenerated into defense of the beliefs and
practices of the religions in which most of my classmates had been
raised, Judaism and Christianity. Which brings us back to the bloody
Bible.
Bloody, indeed. Much slaying. Every other goat and bullock gets
sacrificed to God's blood needs, not to mention, almost, Isaac by the
hand of his father Abraham until God steps in and says, just fooling.
Job got boils, Lot's old lady was turned to salt. It's slaying and
slavery everywhere you look. Some of this stuff is funny; little of it
comes to any point except this: God plays favorites. There are Chosen
People. If you and yours are favored by God, you worship him in whatever
arbitrary and demeaning way he directs, and if he doesn't change his
mind for reasons known only unto him, he might protect you from your
enemies.
The problem, of course, is that your enemies have their own god, who,
given the origins of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the same part of
the world at pretty much the same time by persons mostly
indistinguishable from each other, is the same god you think is pulling
the strings in your behalf. Which brings us to John Lennon, I guess.
Imagine there's no Heaven.... We won't be Raptured, we won't be raised,
we won't meet God or Jesus or Muhammed. Maybe none of what you believe
is true. Then all any of us has is this three score and ten, this vale
of tears. Why make it worse by finding fictitious differences between us
common sufferers? Don't ask me; I'm not a believer.
But Pope Benedict is. And he's Infallible! Well, infallible according to
an evolving, slippery definition, the history of which, like all history
of all religions, informs us much of culture and politics and power and
greed and not much of the illusive gods upon which the constructs of
faith and practice and policy are anchored.
And I'm prepared to say what few dare say. The Pope is right. Islam is
soaked in blood. And the most vicious of the Muslim clerics are right,
too. Christianity is a violent religion. Judaism? Read your Old
Testament. Watch those Hollywood movies. Not one man righteous; no, not
one. Not a religion untainted in proclamation or practice. So how to
choose among them? Why try?
Every State of the Union address, every out-of-power-party rebuttal,
closes with the earnest injunction, Good night, and may God Bless
America. It's boilerplateunquestioned, unchallenged. Whose God? How
blessed, for what purpose, and at whose expense or to whose detriment or
death? Let's gather at the water for the blessing of the cluster bombs.
Give the Pope a break, people. He says what he believes. He says what he
sees. He only doesn't go far enough. He doesn't speak of the
Inquisition, tells no tales of the Crusades. Archimedes asked for a long
lever, a fulcrum, and a place to stand, and promised to move the Earth.
All I'd require for that purpose would be the place to stand, one
distant from the culture and indoctrination and fear of free thinking
that inhibits nearly every human being. Get far enough away from the
things your parents believed because their parents believed them, far
from the half-truths, outright lies, misdirections and fear-mongering
that have put priest and politician in alliance against the interests of
the mass of men and women since early history, and one set of unlikely
beliefs does not seem a bit more believable than another.
And who wants to end up in Heaven anyway, spending Eternity listening to
James Watt?
---
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0922-21.htm
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
Contact - Throw a .net over the .com
.
|
|
| User: "stoney" |
|
| Title: Re: Drunken With The Blood Of The Saints |
30 Sep 2006 07:12:37 PM |
|
|
On Sat, 23 Sep 2006 00:22:34 -0700, johac <jhachmann@sbcglobal.com>
wrote in alt.atheism
The Pope and others who have engaged mouth before brain.
---
Published on Friday, September 22, 2006 by the Wiscasset Newspaper
(Maine)
Drunken With The Blood Of The Saints
by Christopher Cooper
So His Holiness says he's sorry. Sort of. Or not really so sorry for
anything except the bad press his opinions and, well, pontifications
have recently generated, one guesses. Suppose I made some intemperate
statement right here, and my editor extracted the most shocking and
incendiary phrases and bold-typed them in a prominent sidebar. After the
outraged telephone calls and E-mails and letters from the decent and
drab and dull descended from the higher moral plateaus onto my corrupt
and boggy ground I'd be forced to make some thin and grudging apology. I
doubt I could craft a less generous or more revealing mea culpa than
God's right hand man on Earth has brought forth.
[]
Give the Pope a break, people. He says what he believes. He says what he
sees. He only doesn't go far enough. He doesn't speak of the
Inquisition, tells no tales of the Crusades. Archimedes asked for a long
lever, a fulcrum, and a place to stand, and promised to move the Earth.
All I'd require for that purpose would be the place to stand, one
distant from the culture and indoctrination and fear of free thinking
that inhibits nearly every human being. Get far enough away from the
things your parents believed because their parents believed them, far
from the half-truths, outright lies, misdirections and fear-mongering
that have put priest and politician in alliance against the interests of
the mass of men and women since early history, and one set of unlikely
beliefs does not seem a bit more believable than another.
And who wants to end up in Heaven anyway, spending Eternity listening to
James Watt?
EEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
[]
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
.
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
