Almost too good to be true, TYVM Almighty and Merciful Allah.
Lemme tell ya, I saw this earlier today,and the severely disgruntled, pedophile priest dodging, lapsed RC in me practically had a dry orgasm. I was going to post this myself, and rant about RC incoherence, but Salema Scott posted on the General Biscussion Board first, so I'm borrowing her thread.
So, what's Benedicr XVI not going to allow us to do? He casts the jaundiced and gimlet eye of eternity upon the following :
1. pollution
2. genetic engineering [well, considering how well man has done with nuclear energy, perhaps there's something to this one]
3. being obscenely rich [hey Ben, that palace you live in, with all the great and priceless artwork, all the land held by the RC Church worldwide, lots in incredibly impoverished countries where The Church has long been a de facto ally of the entrenched, traditional forces...]
4. drug dealing
5. abortion [only #5? this is NOT my dad's RC Church!]
6. pedophilia [one can understand why this get ranked so low on the list; so many seminarians, so many altar boys, so many penitent confessants, so little time, so little AstroGlide]
7. causing social problems [like overpopulation? social injustice leading to revolutionary violence?].
Well, you can see Ben's incoherence [as well as his good intentions] clearly here. And i like the way he's sort of split the difference politically, at least as far as the US political audience is concerned?
He gives the left pollution and being obscenely wealthy. {Is that in distinction to being pornographically wealthy? and is it OK for one to be, say, erotically wealthy, or teasingly wealthy, or somewhat stimulatingly wealthy? Or just everyday, run-of-the-mill wealthy? And if one is self-made and obscenely wealthy, is that auto-erotically wealthy, and is it verboten?]
The right gets a healthy serving of abortion.
Both the left and the right get to share concerns over [for different reasons, and for different dimensions of the issues] genetic engineering, drug dealing [how is it that arms trafficing and sexual trafficing do not make this list, or are they subsumed under #7?], and causing social problems [like contributing to inter-faith misunderstandings and hostilities?].
No words about war-mongering foreign policies? Or arms races? Or genocide/ethnic cleasning types of unpleasantness? Oh, I guess that's just too secular, right?
Back when I was goofing on Ben's views of Islam, which i felt parrotted very conviently the political worldviews and foreign policy perferences of the Tel Aviv/Washington Axis of Absurdity, I wondered why Pontifus Maximus had tried to render unto Ceasar what was Caesar's and not just confined himself to rendering unto God what was God's. At least there he had some claim, however dubious, of some expertise. Well, here he goes again. I fear his flock will bleat all the more pathetically and all the more confused.
The Unitarians are looking better every day.
-- Modified on 3/10/2008 6:50:04 PM
