Paraguayan President and the Pope's godlessness

[Photo by BBC News]

Pope Benedict XVI warned us against "godlessness" and "secularism" on Good Friday [see post below].

Perhaps he was thinking about his former bishop, Fernando Lugo, who is now the president of Paraguay.

Seems the president, when he was a bishop, had an affair with a 16-year old girl which resulted in the birth of a boy child.

The president, at first, denied any such shenanigans, but doggone it all, the girl, Viviana Carrillo, filed a paternity suit.

So, finally, he confessed and said he is going to "assume all responsibilities."

That's nice.


This is no big deal, of course; happens all the time; and not infrequently, it seems, of bishops in the Roman Catholic Church.

The problem is that such behavior, which I'm sure Pope Benedict would classify as "mocking" Christ, or a "desert of godlessness," does not appear to be caused by "secularism" or "the faith ... being trivialised." The man was a bishop, for Christ's sake!

Nor it is caused, I think, by the fact that "Values and norms that held societies together and drew people to higher ideals are laughed at and thrown overboard."

A bishop wouldn't do that.


In fact, the bishop was horny and his church said he could not do what was normal -- get married and have children -- so he was caught between a rock and a hard place...or hard something.

I don't think the bishop is a bad person; in fact, it seems he was a good bishop in many ways and that he's been a good president for Paraguay in other ways.

I do think the Pope and his so-called "values and norms" which insist that Catholic clergy be men and be celibate are, in fact, creating the rise in what he bemoans as "secularism."

I also think the Roman church is filled with hypocrites of the highest magnitude.

There's more here.

Good Friday Godlessness

It was on Good Friday, April 10, that Pope Benedict XVI spoke out against what he called "the rise of aggressive secularism in Western societies, warning them [the people?] that they risked drifting into a 'desert of godlessness.'"

Some of us think that a "desert of godlessness" would be like a dessert, when we consider the so-called "godliness" of the Pope and his minions in the Vatican and his other menials spread, like a cancer, around the world.

The Daily Mail tells us all about it: To remove religion from public life, said the pontiff, is the same as "the mockery of Christ by the mob as he was led out to be crucified."

Benedict said that "'Religious sentiments' were increasingly ranked among the 'unwelcome leftovers of antiquity' and 'held up to scorn and ridicule.'"

That sounds about right.

And all of this "humiliates" Jesus. The "sense of the sacred is allowed to erode."

"Values and norms that held societies together and drew people to higher ideals are laughed at and thrown overboard. Jesus continues to be ridiculed."

And then, [this is so riddled with irony and hypocrisy it's a wonder he could keep a straight face] Benedict "condemned the oppression of women, saying there were 'many societies in the world where women fail to receive a fair deal.'

"'Christ must be weeping for them,'" said Bennie.


Pope Benedict is quite careful to threaten the faithful by implying that the adoption of secularism [which has something to do with rejecting the Catholic church's doctrines] is to break the heart of Jesus, is to betray Jesus once again, is to join the mob [read "damn Jews] in the courtyard, is to crucify the Lord anew.

But what he doesn't get is that many "religious sentiments" should be "ranked among the 'unwelcome leftovers of antiquity' and [be] 'held up to scorn an ridicule.'"

And those "values" and "norms" which used to hold society together are nothing more than threats of purgatory/excommunication or fear of hell. Who needs them?

Finally, if there is any place in the world where women "fail to receive a fair deal" it is the Vatican, ridden with hidebound misogynists and celibate (or not so celibate) bigots and bishops!




The Daily Mail article is here.

Vatican is afraid of Caroline Kennedy

It matters not that Caroline Kennedy is a lifelong Roman Catholic and comes from a family that has knelt before the Pope for many years; she is, according to the Vatican, unqualified to be the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See.

President Obama has not appointed an ambassador to the Holy See as yet, but word was that Ms. Kennedy was a likely choice.

Enter the pious prelates from Rome's heavenly realm. No, no, no, they said. She's pro-choice. We can't have anyone here who believes women should have the right to choose with regard to what they can do with their bodies! Furthermore, we can't have anyone within these holy precincts who favors stem cell research (even if those stem cells come from fetuses tossed in the garbage).


Now, the Roman Catholic Church is free to believe and promote whatever religious nonsense it so desires. Ironically, however, the majority of Catholics in the U.S. do not agree with nor follow the lead of the Vatican when it comes to issues such as abortion and contraception.

Nevertheless, it wouldn't make sense to appoint someone to the Holy See who is not wanted by the pompous papists in Vatican City.

So, if President Obama is restricted to persons who are anti-choice and anti-stem cell research, then perhaps he should consider not appointing an ambassador to the Vatican at all. The Vatican is like an appendix...at one time it was a political power...now it's a useless appendage.

That's right. As crazy as it sounds, the Vatican is not only a religious institution but a political entity, a political state.

Who needs it? And we do not need to send an ambassador to this pitiful little political realm in Italy.


Obama and his aides can send the Pope an e-mail if and when the need arises to communicate with the old guy.

The Word from the old rich guy himself

The Pope speaks out on condom use

Now, if you wanted to know about condom use and its effectiveness or the lack thereof, especially in Africa which is rife with AIDS, where would you think to go for such information?

Of course! You would hike your bony little bottom right up to the Vatican, and there you would seek a private audience with his majesty, Pope Benedict XVI, known in a previous incarnation as "the Rat."

You would do this because you realize that only old, celibate men running around in dresses know about such things. So, ask God's vicar on earth. Go ahead. See what he says!

"Condoms are not the answer to AIDS on the African continent. You can't solve the problem with the distribution of condoms. In fact, it increases the problem."


There, from the mouth of God to the brain of the Pope to you! How exciting is that?

Except the Pope is WRONG! The Pope doesn't know what he's talking about! The Pope must have got his wires crossed and was talking with James Dobson instead of God.

Jimmer, at Gods4suckers, tells us what Rebecca Hodes of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa has to say about this misguided papal pronouncement:

"...his [Pope Benedict's] opposition to condoms conveys that religious dogma is more important to him than the lives of Africans."

Of course it does, but that should not be surprising for that is the way it has always been in the Roman Catholic Church, forever and ever, world without end, amen!

Jimmer points out that Hodes did note "that the pope is correct that condoms are not the sole solution to Africa's AIDS epidemic ... [but] they are one of the very few HIV prevention mechanisms proven to work."

That's misleading, though, for the Pope was not talking about condoms as being the "sole" solution. He was talking about any condom use.


Jimmer puts it rightly: The Pope's opposition "is part and parcel of the ideology of superstition and ignorance that we have been fighting since time began. The wilful disregard for actual life is a symptom of the need for the sociopaths to promote a belief that is only sustained by abject indifference to suffering which they have reframed as sacrifice.

"The Pope has in one sentence effectively sentenced thousands and perhaps millions of Africans to their slow painful deaths. Way to go Ratzi. You are the scum of the earth.

"Unfortunately, he is not alone. In the USA our fundies have the very same attitude and would have you 'believe' that abstinence is the answer. Many politicians agree and have voted to continue the Faith-based programs started by Bush. Our tax dollars [are] being spent on failure and ignorance."

Vatican to the Jews: Stop bitching!

[Riccardo di Segni - Chief Rabbi of Rome
Image from European Jewish Press]

In the second century, Literalist (orthodox as opposed to gnostic) Christians began turning against the Jews with a vengeance. They wanted to claim the Jewish bible but not the Jewish faith or Jewish traditions.

Thus they began calling the Jewish bible the "Old" Testament, and ensured that it was "suitably rearranged so that it ended with a prophesy, which appeared to lead seamlessly into its apparent fulfillment in the gospels."

Not only that, but New Testament material was rewritten to cast aspersions on the Jews. Thus in the Gospel of Matthew we read that at the trial of Jesus, the "Jews" cried out to crucify him and demanded that "His blood be on us and our children."

One modern theologian notes:

"The legacy of these words has been terrible. They have been cited to justify centuries of Christian persecution of the Jews. It is significant that only at the recent Vatican council has a formal declaration been made exonerating subsequent generations of Jews from responsibility for the murder of Christ."


Hatred for the Jews was fired up as early as the second century by numerous Church "fathers." "Bishop Melito of Sardis (c. 170) denounced them as 'God-killers'--criminals who had invented an 'entirely new sort of crime.' The devastation the Jewish nation had suffered at the hands of the Roman Empire was deemed to be God's just revenge. The Jews had brought their sufferings upon themselves."

Circumcision became a rallying point for Christian anti-Judaism. Justin Martyr wrote:

"For the circumcision according to the flesh was given to you from Abraham as a sign so that you might be distinguished from other nations and from us, and so that you alone might suffer what you now rightly suffer; so that your land might become desolate, and your cities burned, and strangers eat the fruits of your land before you, and not one of you set foot in Jerusalem."

Many other church leaders wrote even stronger and more hateful diatribes against the Jews, including the revered St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom.


All of which brings us to the present. Pope Benedict XVI is bringing back the old Latin Mass, and with it the Good Friday prayers which pray for the conversion of the Jews. Minor, but insufficient changes have been made in the modern mass.

Although the Roman Church has backed away from blaming Jews and their descendants from killing Christ, and even though the Roman Church has said that the Jews are God's chosen people and will be saved in the end, offensive language remains. It appears to many that the Roman Church speaks with forked tongue.

Jewish leaders in Italy and elsewhere have made their feelings known and relations between the Vatican and these leaders have cooled considerably.

Now the Vatican is hitting back. L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, is complaining about "excessive" Jewish complaints relative to the Good Friday prayers in the traditional Latin Missal, which does, still, pray for the conversion of the Jews.

Damian Thompson, a conservative/traditional Catholic writer for the Telegraph in the UK, says "'Enough, already!' is the message from Rome. And quite right, too."

You see, Thompson and evidently Pope Benedict and probably most of the high and mighty poohbahs don't believe that the Jews are or will be saved. Thompson is forthright, if nothing else:

"But if you ban all prayers for the conversion of the chosen people, then you end up misrepresenting the founder of Christianity. It's an inconvenient fact that Jesus of Nazareth called loudly for the conversion of the Jews."


Not even close to true! I wonder if Thompson has read the Gospels. His first error is to claim Jesus founded Christianity. Oops! Not so! Paul would be the most likely founder of Christianity if you had to blame any one person. The legendary Jesus as presented in the gospels was a devout Jew for all of his brief life. There was no such thing as Christianity when he walked the earth so what on earth would he have the Jews to convert to?

Thompson simply does not know what he's talking about. In fact, Jesus said that he had come to fulfill the law, every single piece of it. He knew nothing about converting anyone.

And the entire Passion story is suspect from beginning to end, with contradictory tales told by the writers of the four gospels which contain episodes that could not have happened in any first century context, such as a Sanhedrin trial on the eve of Passover.

In other words, the trial and crucifixion of Jesus is so garbled and non-historical in content, even if it weren't essentially mythology, we would have no clue as to what actually happened.

The Jews were made the scapegoats for Jesus' death many years later, and anti-Judaism reached fever pitch in the late second century when Christian writers edited the gospels in such a way as to remove the blame for the crucifixion from their Roman rulers, and forged other letters which now appear in the "New" Testament and which target the Jews for the death of the Christ.


So, I would urge Jewish leaders around the world to stand up to the Vatican, which remains an historically anti-Semitic organization, and insist that if religious dialogue is to continue, Benedict needs to delete, excise, erase, burn those prayers for the conversion of the Jews!

Then we'll talk.

[Some of the material above comes from "The Jesus Mysteries," by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy]

A Vatican parable - "Fleecing the Sheep"

This story has been discussed by several excellent bloggers, but I can't help myself.

An AP article sets the scene:

"Pope Benedict XVI has blessed two lambs whose wool will be shorn to make shawls for newly appointed archbishops to wear."

Annually, on St. Agnes' feast day, two sheep are placed in a basket, tied down, and a crown of flowers is placed on their heads.

The pope then says the magic words and the sheep are "blessed" and can be shorn to make the appropriate shawls.

"New archbishops receive the wool pallium on June 29. The pallium is a band of white wool decorated with black crosses that is a sign of pastoral authority and a symbol of the archbishops' bond with the pope."


The Freethinker tells us more. These sheep are raised by Trappist monks. But it wasn't all so warm and woolly. In the Middle Ages, popes charged a fee from the prelates who received the pallium, "earning hundreds of millions of gold florin for the papacy."

That didn't go over so well and the Council of Basle, in 1342, condemned the practice.


Today, the pope is still blessing sheep to be shorn and handing out the pallium to his new archbishops. In fact, you can see a YouTube video of him doing so here.

But there's more to all of this pretty, pious, pallium performance.

'Tis a parable, methinks. For 2000 years, the church's sheep have been shorn of their hard-earned cash to promote the lavish lifestyle of popes and princes. These sheep, though, received no pallium, but rather a palliative (the latter word being derived from the Latin, pallium). They were treated to the illusion that safely ensconced in the bosom of Mother Church, they would live forever with God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) in the heavenly places.

Today, the church's sheep are also being shorn of their hard-earned cash to finance the payoffs to thousands of the lambs who were molested by the church's priestly pedophiles.

And that because the Church, for years, tried to pull the wool over everyone's eyes!

Pope Benedict's take on the Gospel of John

The former Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, is playing biblical scholar and claiming the Gospel of John confirms the "historical reality" of Jesus. That, according to an article from Richard Owen, at timesonline.

Actually, Pope Benedict is just engaging in wishful thinking. He wishfully thinks that the Gospel of John is "'the passionate testimony' of a man who as a young, humble fisherman had been attracted to Jesus, had loved him as a disciple, had shared his experiences at first hand for three years, and had seen Him die on the Cross and then rise again."

He also wishfully thinks that "From this experience, which he meditated in his heart, John drew an intimate certainty - that Jesus was the Knowledge of God incarnate." Pope Benedict insists that "incarnation" was an historical reality.


Ah, if only it were so. Scholars, however, have known for years that the Gospel of John is fiction, a creative writing exercise by someone who used legends of godmen to put together a new and more extensive tale of the Jesus story as told by Matthew, Mark and Luke.

The writer of John, utilized only a fraction of the synoptic material. The rest he made up. Ninety percent of the Gospel of John does not appear in the synoptics. John gives an entirely different and quite gnostic picture of the godman, Jesus, putting long homiletical dialogues in his mouth, none of which were known to Matthew, Mark and Luke, who wrote many years before the Gospel of John was put to papyrus.

One glaring example of John's "creativity," is his three-year time span for Jesus' ministry. The synoptic gospels agree that Jesus wandered around Palestine for only a year. There are numerous other major inconsistencies and contradictions between John and the three Synoptics.


Pope Benedict may find St. John fun to read, and may wish it were all historical stuff as that would serve to further justify Roman Catholic theology and practice. But wishing does not make it so.

We get a clue in chapter 1:1-4 -

"When all things began, the Word already was. The Word dwelt with God, and what God was, the Word was. The Word, then, was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him. All that came to be was alive with his life, and that life was the light of men."

No silly little Christmas story here. John doesn't want to hear anything about his Jesus being born of a woman in a cave/manger. His Jesus was the Logos, the Word, of God!

The writer of John uses motifs from the pagan mysteries and the gnostics to portray his Jesus as the "Word" of God. Freke and Gandy, in their most excellent book, The Jesus Mysteries, explain that "The concept of the Logos is completely foreign to Judaism and is entirely derived from the Pagan Mysteries. As long ago as the sixth century BCE Heraclitus set out on a journey of self-discovery and discovered the 'Logos shared by all.' ...

"The Pagan sage Epictetus preaches: 'The Logos of the philosophers doth promise us peace which God proclaimed through his Logos.' The Roman Vitruvius writes: 'Let no one think I have erred if I believe in the Logos.' Clement of Alexandria [a church father] acknowledges that: 'It may be freely granted that the Greeks received some glimmers of the divine logos,' and quotes the legendary Pagan sage Orpheus, who proclaims: 'Behold the Logos divine. Tread well the narrow path of life and gaze on Him, the world's greatest ruler, our immortal King.'"

Freke and Gandy further explain that the concept of the Logos, St. John's "word," is very old, "found in the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts of the Third Dynasty, which were written more than 2,500 years before the Christian era!"


The Logos, or "Word," in the Gospel of John had many meanings to the ancients. Clement suggested it was "'the Idea of Ideas.' It was God's primal thought. The legendary Pagan sage Hermes Trismegistus expresses exactly the same concept. He describes the Logos--the Idea of Ideas--emerging from the Oneness of God like a word or thought."

Furthermore, the notion expressed in John's Gospel that the Word was with God and the Word was God, derives from ancient Pagan doctrines. The Son of God, the Word of God, is a personification of the Oneness of the the soul or God of the universe.

For the Pagans, however, the Logos represented "an eternal philosophical principle" and was mythically represented in various godmen down through the ages.

For Christians, as represented in John's Gospel, the Logos (now Jesus) no longer mythically embodied the principle, but actually, literally, became the incarnate representation of the Logos principle. He was, explains St. Augustine, the "Word made flesh."


All of the above was unknown to the writers of the Synoptic Gospels. The Gospel of John presents a new and mystical savior, different from the pagan godmen only in his incarnational representation. John is not writing history, but theology, taking Christianity out of its Jewish roots and moving it into the realm of the Pagan Mysteries from which it borrowed much.

So sorry, Pope Benedict. You can believe what you wish, you can wish for what you would like, but none of that makes it so.

The Gospel of John is not an historical portrait of a human being who lived and died upon this earth, but a creative theological representation of the Logos incarnated; a mythical construct that is based, not on historical reality, but on the wisdom of the ancient sages who taught that various godmen embodied mythologically, the Logos, the "word" of the one God.

Pope Benedict speaks out on the "order of creation"

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican enforcer prior to his elevation to chief poohbah, is now known as Pope Benedict XVI. As Cardinal Ratzinger and now as Pope Benedict, this cleric has held to the Roman Church's line on homosexuality:

Homosexuality, in and of itself, is not a "sin." Homosexual actions are a "sin."

But, as another Vatican official said recently, homosexuality is "a deviation, an irregularity, a wound."

Benedict believes it is a contradiction of the order of creation!


Thus, yesterday, Benedict compared homosexuality to the destruction of the rainforest. It's just as important to save people from homosexual or transexual behavior as it is to save the rainforest from destruction.

Humans need to "listen to the language of creation" in order to truly understand the place of man and woman. Any sexual behavior other than heterosexual relations are "a destruction of God's work."

How would he know that? Well, he is God's vicar on earth and gets his information straight from the deity. And it is important that everyone understand the Roman Catholic Church has the right to "speak of human nature as man and woman, and ask that this order of creation be respected."


There is so much wrong with Benedict's statement it is hard to know where to start. Let it suffice to say that in God's "order of creation," homosexuality is prevalent among numerous species. It is not an aberration. And while the Roman church, aka Benedict, can speak about whatever it wants, it most certainly does NOT have the right to "ask that this order of creation be respected."

Maybe Benedict got his signals crossed and was talking to James Dobson when he thought he was connected to the Almighty.

Pope Benedict XVI, George W. Bush, and signing statements

During the tenure of George W. Bush, aka the Smirking Chimp, when he didn't like a law passed by the Congress of the United States, he simply signed a statement saying he would not necessarily follow the law. If what he wanted to do was against the law, he would ignore the law.

That's a neat trick if you can get by with it.

George W. Bush has gotten by with it many times, and in fact has signed more signing statements than all of our other presidents put together.


Pope Benedict XVI plays that same game. Maybe he learned the rules from Bush? Nah. Popes have been playing the "signing statement" game for hundreds of years.

Benedict has in mind to reinstate the Latin or Tridentine Mass. He intends to issue a decree that would declare the Latin Mass an "extraordinary universal rite." The vernacular mass, now in use today, would continue as "an ordinary universal rite."

Whatever else that means, it certainly symbolizes that the former Cardinal Rat is bent on overturning some of the reforms instituted by the Second Vatican Council of 40 plus years ago.


Here's the thing. A number of "senior cardinals" are opposed to this move by Benedict. It is a regression, they think, to when the church was even more dictatorial and totalitarian than it is now. It symbolizes priestly authority even as the faithful are clamoring for more real involvement in the life of the church.

But Benedict doesn't care about what the faithful think or what the cardinals wish. So, as new editions of the Latin missal go to press, Benedict is considering issuing a papal "mou proprio" (which means, literally, on his own initiative), in order to bypass the need for approval by various church bodies.

A mou proprio is like a signing statement.

Mou Proprio is Benedict giving the middle finger to the "modernist" cardinals.


Hail Mary and welcome to Bushdom!