Three cheers for “the geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death”
Joan Smith is very happy to live in the “geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death” that is contemporary London. Of course she damn well is. She’s allowed to go out in public with without a chaperone there; she won’t be stoned to death there; she won’t be whipped for not wearing hijab there. She can ignore the pope there.
Frankly, I’m tired of hearing religious bigots running down this country….Britain is still one of the most civilised places in the world to live. It’s not Iran, where prisoners are subjected to rape and mock executions; it isn’t Saudi Arabia either…The Catholic Church has picked up this habit of dissing secular culture from hardline Muslims, who dislike pretty much the same things: gay relationships, equal rights for women and the freedom to mock religion.
All good things, you see. Hooray for London – except the reactionary Catholic and Islamist bits of it.
I’m with Joan Smith all the way in her criticism of the Roman Catholic Church and John Paul II’s absurd phrase ‘culture of death’. The way the Roman Catholic Church condemns secular societies is really a huge scandal. Women are no longer consigned to death or despair because they are pregnant; women need no longer consider themselves as mere breeding animals, but have reasonable control over their own reproductivity; homosexual men and women can live fairly normal lives, instead of being haunted by the police and the opprobrium of society; children receive more protection from exploitation; we are free to criticise belief or unbelief, and to ignore the shrieking appeals of the religious, which get more earnest the more they are ignored.
But ‘culture of death’ is perhaps one of the most offensive of the multiple Roman Catholic myths. These are the people who value life so much, that even the most miserable, suffering life is valued, even when those who are suffering beg to be allowed to die. They rename wanting help to die as asking someone else to hope when all hope is gone. It is a lie. That is not what they are asking for. These death merchants of the church value life so much that they will let women die so long as they live to deliver their children. They were prepared to force a nine year old girl to deliver twins! Let them remember! They will support regimes which handcuff women to beds, and make of their bodies crime scenes, because they have, in desperation, received illegal abortions. They value life so much that they think it is more important for a husband to infect his wife with the AIDS virus than to use a condom. They value the lives of children so much that they are hiding pedophiles from the police in order to protect the image of the church. And they dare to condemn a secular world of being a culture of death?! The mind reels in disbelief and disgust against presumption so premeditatedly evil.
In my view, the Roman Catholic Church is a world wide criminal organisation, and all its pretence to holiness and goodness is a sham, a travesty of the real thing — if there is a real thing. The pope is a mafia boss, and his bishops and priests are his enforcers. That is my settled view. There are, of course, Roman Catholics who are genuinely good and devout people, trying to live good lives, but they are hampered in this by the dogmatism of a totalitarian system that seeks to diminish the value of individuals and their choices, and of the secular values and political systems which provide these choices, so that they can recapture absolute rule over people’s lives. Like Islam, Roman Catholicism would extend its rule absolutely if it could. I trust neither popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops nor priests. They are a criminal fraternity, and if they do not use earthly terror like Hamas or Al Quaeda, they would rule just as despotically if they could. Every time the pope condemns the secular culture of the West, he is condemning the one thing that stands between us and rule by priests. Priests ruled Europe for nearly fifteen hundred years. It was a failed experiment. The story of the popes reads more like the story of a crime family than of a religious organisation. I think there is little to choose between them. Bravo for Joan Smith! Stand up and be counted against these mountebanks.
The new issue of The New Humanist arrived in my mailbox yesterday.
It has a piece in which various people say what they would like to ask the pope on his visit. Johann Hari doesn’t bother asking anything, he just arrests him and informs him of his rights.
Talking about cultures of death: I went to this school where they had replicas of torture / murder device at the front of all the classrooms. Many of the teachers had this same symbol hanging around their necks or pinned to their shirts. At the time we all thought this was normal.
From the article:
Hooray for the UK. I hope this Vatican snit fit only serves to bolster the demonstraters, and that the press will cover them as well as the Pope.
Eric: an excellent post. Well said.
“She’s allowed to go out in public with a chaperone there;”
I think you mean ‘without a chaperone’, unless things have changed more than I had realised.
Re: ‘Culture of Death’. Cardinal Bernard Law reiterated, Pope John Paul’s II theme, urging Americans to “spread the culture of life over the culture of death”. It’s a pity that he didn’t adhere to the culture of owniing up to clerical sex abuse; instead of the culture of silence.
Thank you Ian. I’ve been busy with computer management issues for the last 48 hours, and only have a chance to nip in for a peak at my favourite sites for moments during the day, on whichever computer the internet is up and running on for the moment, but I was a bit afraid that my post would sound too much like one of my really off-the-wall rants. I’m glad, anyway, that it didn’t seem to be that way to you.
I guess what really sticks in my gullet is that people so often take the RCC seriously as a moral leader, and to my mind, anyway, it is, as I said, basically, a criminal organisation, engaged in the morally most shady dealings with the world and the people under its tutelage, and deserves to be seen that way. Listening to that awful man’s pontifications against the secular Europe reminds me of the famous triumvirate of Mussolini, Franco and Hitler railing against the modern world and the need for authority and discipline. I have not done of study of the parallels, but I’m sure the fit would be uncomfortably close. I suspect that Ratzinger’s time in the Hitlerjugend was not entirely wasted on him.
It occurred to me after I had sent my poisoned dart swiftly on its way that Uta Ranke-Heinemann, in her little book, Putting Away Childish Things (Ranke-Heinemann was the first woman catholic theologian, a privilege that was revoked after she wrote a book about the ‘Virgin’ Mary), actually has a chapter with the title “Redemption by Execution,” in which she explores the RCC’s cult of death.
@Eric MacDonald.
I don’t think you need apologise for your posts, everything you say about the RCC is spot on. There is a growing tendency amongst the usual suspects to condemn anyone who is hostile to the RCC as an anti Catholic bigot, the more people who are prepared to stand up to this nonsense and speak the plain truth about this corrupt organisation the better.
Speaking a bit more broadly Eric, the worst of it flows from the RC church’s traditional claim to be ‘The One True Church’. They have watered this down a bit of recent times by granting that non-Catholics can be saved – well at least one authoritative-looking article I read on a Catholic site said that. But it seems to be done with reluctance on their part and for political reasons.
Trouble starts when any creed divides humanity into Us Angels and Them Devils, or the saved and the damned, or first class and lesser classes. Yet all religions do this to some extent, because it follows from the special claims (key to Heaven, way to Nirvana, or whatever) made to justify their separate and special existence; which in turn generally arises out of the claims of some prophet/politician at an earlier time, or else some contemporary guru showman or quack. And the need to broaden a tribal identity into a national or imperial one.
I am probably straying a bit off thread, but I am struck by the extroardinary similarity between the careers of Mohammed and Adolf Hitler, and of the political/religious organisations they created. Within 100 years of the death of Mohammed, Islam was ther dominant creed from the Atlantic to Central Asia. It took Nazism only 25 years to go from being a club of rowdy beer-hall dissidents and thugs to something that had taken Europe from the Atlantic to the outskirts of Stalingrad. Both movements shared a vicious intolerance of ideological opponents.
In his book “Brotherhoods of Fear: A History of Violent Organisations’ Paul Elliott begins with the witch hunts of the Middle Ages. Roger Eatwell in his ‘Fascism: A History’ locates fascism’s origins in an 18th C reaction to the Enlightenment. But without the organisational or cultural continuity, the first such intolerant and violent mass movement was Islam, followed closely by mediaeval Catholicism.
According to the scholar Mark Durie (who writes as a Christian) Islam until relatively recently offered its outsiders three choices: convert, surrender or fight to the death. Those who surrendered opted for dhimmitude, or second-class citizenship under Islam. But in many important ways this is still going on: witness the plight of the Copts in Egypt or of the Ba’hais in Iran. And of course, it is the basis of the violent conflict within Islam itself. Only yesterday in Quetta, Pakistan 60 ‘impure’ and deviant Muslims (ie Shias) were killed by a bomb, detonated presumably by a member of a far more pure sect, probably a Sunni.
One of the items on my To Do list is to get some T shirts made with REJECT DHIMMITUDE printed across the chest.
http://www.markdurie.com/The_Third_Choice.html
I just listened to a World Service documentary about the rise of Christianity in China, and it was pretty interesting, if depressing. They are starting to get megachurches as well as Christian employers and factories. It’s more or less all tolerated by the state (though some groups continue to worship underground).
There was a piece about how some academics are trying to work out the connection (if any) between prosperity and the Protestand work ethic.
Most interesting of all, and related to this thread, was an interview with the RC bishop of Shanghai, who is 94 (he seems to be the sitting bishop). He said that people should be able to use contraception, and that the Pope is too conservative. It’s available as a podcast for those interested here (30 mins): http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/cc
Thornavis:
No there isn’t. It’s been standard operating procedure for decades.
@ hyperdeath.
Yes but i was thinking of those on the left who are moving on from appeasing islamists to do the same with all religion, except Judaism of course as that would be ‘Zionist’.