More on the Vatican jefe.

Hell is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise the faithful, the Pope has said. Addressing a parish gathering in a northern suburb of Rome, Benedict XVI said that in the modern world many people, including some believers, had forgotten that if they failed to “admit blame and promise to sin no more”, they risked “eternal damnation – the inferno”…God had given men and women free will to choose whether “spontaneously to accept salvation … the Christian faith is not imposed on anyone, it is a gift, an offer to mankind”.

Sorry, jefe, that won’t wash. You can’t call it a … Read the rest

So Louis Theroux goes to visit the Phelps family – you know, the ‘God hates fags’ crowd, the people who go to funerals to shout about ‘fags’. Hell’s angels have started policing military funerals to help keep them at a distance – just in case people who have lost someone they love to a violent death in a war don’t much feel like hearing from Fred Phelps and his descendants at the funeral.

What we did, I think, was try to understand how a group like this operates; its group psychology, the way the beliefs are passed down the family…We’re exploring what is cruelty, trying to explain how something that really does very often just amount to cruelty could be

What’s the pope furious about?

[The pope] has reiterated the existence of Hell and condemned society for not talking about eternal damnation enough. A furious Pope Benedict unleashed a bitter attack during a sermon while on a visit to a parish church and said: “Hell exists and there is eternal punishment for those who sin and do not repent. The problem today is society does not talk about Hell. It’s as if it did not exist, but it does.”

He’s furious because today society does not talk about Hell? That makes him furious? Really? Well what a horrible sadistic cruel wicked little man then. (Little morally, mentally, ethically, cognitively. I don’t know whether he’s little physically or not, and … Read the rest

Okay so people like rationalists and humanists and similar are supposed to value reason and truth and accuracy and getting things right, right? Or am I confused.

I ask because of some comments on Jeremy’s post on The British Humanist Association’s opinion poll. They make me wonder.

So, less of this ivory tower disdain, please, for the honest labours of those who are trying to defend the secular principle in the face of sustained attack by the most religious government for over 100 years…In the real world of politics you cannot always be academically nice – your opponents will make mincemeat of you if you try…On rationality and truth – come down out of your ivory tower! The BHA