Decoding the Pope's words about the dangers of secularism in society

I have to grant the Catholic Church that this is even more important. What were those naughty little buggers thinking, seducing priests like that?

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To pick up on Eorl's theme though, did you catch the part where His Holiness compares us to Nazis now?


Hmmmm .... I bet this will be interesting news to the A2K atheists. Perhaps I should cross-post this to littlek's thread?

Yes, I did, Thomas.



And I noted that quite a few of the British posters responding to the Guardian article took deep offense to it.
Did his comment mean that it was godlessness which led to the Nazi excesses, or perhaps that British atheists are in fact Nazis? Or both?

... have I got this wrong, but weren't there a few connections, at the time, between the Vatican & the Nazis?

so i'm watching the coverage of the pope and the archbishop williams, hugging and kissing and wearing their big fancy dresses and i'm thinking, the pope has a problem with homosexuality, cause from where i'm sitting it doesn't look like it

It's complicated, Ms. Olga. The relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazis has been complicated. But it was quite clear that the opposition was not down-the-line opposition.

Yes. These things so often tend to be complicated. Many shades of grey.
His Holiness, however, should probably have steered clear of the subject altogether in his address. It sort of backfired on him, didn't it?

Actually, I'm feeling a sort-of-grim pleasure about how desperate His Holiness's institution must be. Hissy-fits like these signal a strong sense of insecurity.

It was also not a great tactic to throw such a public hissy -fit at the British taxpayers expense, Thomas.

OK so, hands up, who has actually been an official Nazi member?
Oh... Just you Herr Ratzinger?

Ratzinger was a member of the Hitlerjugend, which wasn't part of the Nazi Party. And it wasn't as if boys of his generation had a choice about it---he got conscripted. Why recycle this tired old chestnut? With so many legitimate gripes about the Catholic Church, why play dirty?

As the leader of a church that support the Nazi Party, I find his comments disturbing.

I thought we had separation of church and state?

My personal rejection of the Pope's church is not his concern.

My personal belief is that until the attitude of Christians and Muslims that their religion is the ONLY proper religion is contained, we will continue to have the bloodshed that we still see today. Arrogance is not a virtue.

Yes, but there were other conscientious objectors who were not.
I just find the irony and hipocracy astounding, is all.
I'm not so much attacking as introducing a kettle to a pot.

So, is militant atheism an actual movement in Britain or something? Or is the church just regarding disdain for religion and separation of church and state as "militant atheism"?

I'm aware of action in the US to prevent religion from creeping into government buildings and activities, but I certainly don't consider those actions to be militant atheism, or even atheism.

Is there something different happening in Britain?

I'm afraid we must agree to disagree on this point. It doesn't concern me that a fourteen-year-old boy---growing up under a rotten regime, having seen nothing else in the world---would fail to see the rottenness and to become a martyr. It also doesn't concern me when he decides, instead, to follow what he must then have seen as the call of his country, let alone the common practice of his peers.

By contrast, it does concern me that the same person, having grown up, seen the world, and pursued a successful academic career, then devoted a theological career rationalizing the institutionalized inhumanity of his church: the homophobia, the misogyny, the abuses of power, and all that. It does concern me that he now supports his rationalizations with historical fabrications of Rush-Limbaugh-esque plumpness.

Unlike the teenager Joseph Ratzinger, pope Benedict XVI knew exactly what he was doing when he went off the deep end. To compare the two is a cheap shot. Why take cheap shots at the Catholic church when we have so many good shots to fire?

I was wondering about this as well.

It's one of those things that are difficult to pin down. But it is palpable in Media. Nothing that is banned from advertising in Media is safe from Media denigration. Once tobacco advertising was banned all the rest follows like night follows day.

Imagine the leading edge of something diffusing by osmosis.

Maybe someone who lives in Britain will let us know.

I tried to help ros out but he has me on Ignore.

No system of thought and action which is subversive to the setttled interests is going to come out and say so. It is going to work behind the scenes and scream "Who? Me!!" if anyone seeks to give it a label and identify it. Maybe ros is just a squaddie who doesn't really know what the war is all about. Which doesn't mean nobody knows.

The Pope's words were not addressed to me. They were for those whose minds need a focus for a force they are hardly aware of. I know there is a miltant atheism abroad and have done for a long time. Militants precede movements.

Media is a complex entity. It has a collective conscious as do all other important institutions. This collective conscious is a thing and, as such, has no morals. It works, at a deep level, like the mind of a Yorkshire mill-owner who regretted every drop of water that went past the mill-wheel and which gave us the water turbine in which none does. Further perfections in mechanical processes require long and difficult study and are the pastures of the few. So we, the people, are next as we are still in a raw state. To be perfected by second stringers.

I think left-wing ideology starts right there. And if they do perfect us they'll be redundant. As will everyfuckingthing else.

And I just don't fancy it catching on big-time. I prefer the Flying Spaghetti Monster truth to tell. That seems harmless enough.

But don't tell ros.

THe Church is as I understand it running into significant funding problems, as they pay out a lot in damages for Priest misdeeds and as the flock is not that interested in using their hard earned money for that. Also, states are increasingly willing to bring the Church up on charges. I think that the invasion of church offices a couple of months back using warrants to come in unannounced to look for evidence on pedophile charges has knocked the church back a good bit. I have also seen several calls to drastically increase the use of law to go after the church, so this "problem" is in danger of getting much worse.

The increasing lack of respect for religion, the religous, and the offices of the Church is a huge shift, and the Church is having trouble dealing with it.

So did I. And since I'm currently procrastinating about cleaning the house before my parents visit tomorrow, I decided to search the Web about the issue.

On the first page of hits that came up when I Googled " 'militant atheism' Britain", by far the most came from Ratzinger himself. Others refer to the wave of atheistic bestsellers that started to appear perhaps five years ago. (The most notable authors were (in my opinion, and in alphabetical order) Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens.) More comments than not are negative. But the most militant actions the "militant atheists" are accused of committing is that they believe in evolution "publish books expounding an atheistic worldview" (Forbes).

The oldest Google hit, and presumably the one that started it all, links to a 2001 talk by Richard Dawkins in whose topic was "militant atheism". The starting point of Dawkins's talk is that activists defending the teaching of evolution in America accuse him of rocking the boat whenever he mentions that they are also atheists. But the creationists these activists are fighting have a point, Dawkins argues: "If I were a person who was interested in preserving religious faith, I would be very afraid of the positive power of science generally, but evolutionary science in particular, to inspire and enthrall precisely because it is atheistic." Therefore, instead of promoting evolution by "not rocking the boat", he prefers to use evolution to attack religion head-on instead.

As usual when Dawkings speaks, I was thoroughly delighted to listen. Perhaps you might be interested in the talk too. Here's part 1 of the three-part YouTube video.


Again, Dawkins's talk contains nothing "militant" in the sense of "prone to violence"; only in the sense of taking a stand, and taking it passionately.

My best guess: Originally, Dawkins coined the term "militant atheism" in a sense where "militant" meant "vigorous". Now, atheism's religious competitors exploit the equivocation in the word "violent" for rhetorical profit. They never explicitly state that atheists pose a threat to public safety---but they're happy to insinuate it.

I agree with that assessment. The church is losing the foundation of their control and they don't like it.