Pope visits Britain, attacks atheists, is shocked on hearing about the sexual abuse in the church.

Pope Benedict. Sinner?

Defender of rapists gets royal treatment in Britain but Snoop Dogg is banned.  Go figure.
The pope of Rome, a staunch defender of rapists, was in Glascow today on his visit to Britain. He kissed a small baby, the child of a young Polish immigrant and held an outdoor mass. He met an ageing monarch with lots of money wearing a ridiculous hat much like his own but not as costly and they exchanged gifts.

or saint?

He made numerous comments throughout the day and espoused the importance of good Christian values and the dangers of "a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society". Atheism is quite popular and becoming more so, and being a former member of the Nazi youth he is all too familiar with that philosophy. "Even in our own lifetimes 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.”, the pope reminded his flock.

He never mentioned the rampant sexism in the Catholic church, an organization that can see fit to equate advocating a woman be ordained as priests with paedophilia and that excommunicated women that practiced mass but couldn’t excommunicate Hitler. And we should recognize here that excommunication to a catholic is pretty serious; you can’t get in to  heaven if you’re excommunicated.

The Christian values he talks of apart from denying women the right to be priests are opposing gay marriage and considering gays as less than human in general. Opposing abortion rights and stem cell research and anything that weakens the hold of this organization over people. This pope, that the British taxpayer forked out millions to bring over here as the “secular” British politicians honored him with a state visit, opposed the liberation theologists who fought for the rights of the poor in Latin America. They were wiped out, murdered as in the case of El Salvador’s Archbishop Romero, assassinated by right wing death squads with the Vatican’s blessing.

The pope is a very educated man and speaks a few languages.
"As we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th 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 a reductive vision of a person and his destiny."

He is clearly equating atheism with totalitarianism here, both the Nazi and Stalinist form. But what chutzpa given the history of the catholic church and his own history that this man would talk of atheism being a cause of extremism. Er, the Spanish Inquisition? And when compared historically to Christianity, extreme Islam is mild, especially when we are talking of Jews. Jews and Muslims lived in relative harmony for centuries compared to the plight of the Jews in Christian Europe for 1000 years.

I am an atheist and a socialist. I defend the right of an individual to have religious beliefs and to be open about them and practice them free from persecution. But religion is a private matter, a personal issue, and has no place in public life and in the affairs of society or the state as a whole. There has to be a separation of church and state.

The popes, pastors and priests, the functionaries of the various organized religions all have one thing in common, they all teach that every religion other than their own is a human creation except theirs which is divine, comes from god. I agree with Marx when he wrote:
“The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition that requires illusions.”

This is what the politicians and functionaries in the hierarchies of the religious organizations are afraid of, that we will see the world as it really is and they will lose their mystic hold on our consciousness; I am so glad I’m free of it.

I recognize that many workers are genuine about their beliefs and do not hold them for dishonest reasons or to manipulate and I respect them for their honesty and decency. But the pope and people like him are another issue entirely. I am stunned though how so many people especially women can still belong to such an organization given the recent revelations about rape in the church and the pope and other functionaries not only covering it up, but sending the perpetrators to new areas where they continued raping children. One rapist here in the US was sent to serve tribal people in the Amazon.  What a field day he must have had with those children.

The pope’s first comments in this visit were aboard the plane as it landed. He said with regards to the abuse scandal, that the recent “revelation was a great shock and great sadness” to him. This is after the world now knows that he knew.

If he’s nothing else, he’s a blatant liar.