When believers tell others about their ideas, it is 'preaching'. When nonbelievers do it, it is 'aggressive atheism'.
Thursday 23 September 2010
Quote: Preaching
On Pope PR and Bad Journalism
Maybe some of you haven't noticed, but the leader of the Catholic Church visited England last week. Many considered it his most difficult trip so far - after all, it was England which is amongst the most secular countries in the world. With child abuse cases piling up, it also wasn't one of the easiest times to leave the safety of the Holy See. So many people were curiously looking forward on how the Pope would do on his trip, followers and opponents alike.
He didn't disappoint either when he gave his speech in Edinburgh! For somebody who was born 1927 and who had to join the Hitler Youth and serve in the Wehrmacht and who was already deeply involved in the Catholic church at that time, it is astonishing that he managed to suppress all memories about the deep links between Nazism and the church. How else can he say that it was "a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God" and that we should reflect on these "sobering lessons of the atheist extremism" which " let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society"? Maybe, just maybe, he should start remembering what other people (nowadays quite easily) can look up in history books? For example that Hitler was raised as a Catholic and saw his fight as acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator (from "Mein Kampf") and started sentences with "In boundless love as a Christian and as a man [...]" (Hitler speech 1922). That doesn't sound especially atheist to me! If you need more quotes to prove this point, check here.
Apart from the fact that Hitlers antisemitism grew from his Christian upbringing, a quick look at historic documents reveals that Nazism as a whole wasn't an atheistic movement either. Quite the contrary. In the attempt to keep German culture clean from destructive literature, blacklists were produced of books that had to be removed from libraries or burned. One of those lists on books to be removed, includes:
"All writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk."Why should atheists burn their own books? In 1933, Hitler even proclaimed to have eradicated atheism!(Blacklist for Public Libraries and Commercial Lending Libraries)
I agree that the role of the churches under the Nazi government is a difficult one and its subject to much debate. The Nazis intended to take the power from the churches (as institutions) so that they won't pose a threat, but in the same turn destroyed atheist and freethinker movements. It is often mentioned that they tried to instantiate "Positive Christianity" with a bible purged from Jewish content. Hardly an atheist step!
Pope Benedikt XVI grew up in this environment! How he managed to completely forget these teachings, eludes me! A Pope surely wouldn't lie to us to just to cast a damning light on the growing atheistic and secular movements?
Moving away from the twisted history lesson, the Pope also speaks of the aggressive secularist movements. Doesn't he mean atheistic movements? There is quite a difference between believing there is no god and the wish to keep church and government separate! Identifying secularists as the opposition can mean that one strives for a more theocratic form of government. A thought that makes me cringe when looking at Islamic countries like Iran and Saudi-Arabia or at the fundamentalist tendencies in the American tea party movement. Again, history books can provide ample examples that theocratic tendencies are not the way forward. Look under "dark ages".
But enough about the Pope's speech. Somehow that was to be expected. Linking Hitler to atheism is a common attempt to demonise atheism and is often used by religious people who say that a real christian could not have done those things. Hearing this reasoning from a contemporary witness just proves that you can believe in everything if you just tell yourself a lie often enough. So I wasn't too surprised or upset after reading the speech. Business as usual.
Then the first articles in German newspapers appeared, commenting on the Pope's visit to the secular island. It was only then when my blood started boiling. I have to note that I so far thought that compared to American news, which is often clearly biased and quick to abandon journalistic principles in order to make their point (FOX news springs to mind), the big German newspapers, although of course also being biased, would adhere to somewhat higher journalistic standards. Apparently I was a bit too optimistic it seems.
In an article in Spiegel Online the author starts by elaborating on the difficulty that the Pope was facing during his visit to a country that is dominated by the protestant church. She then goes on to report about the march of the opponents. The people that came together to demonstrate against the policies of the Pope are described as "Eine unheilige, eine vergnügungssüchtige Koalition von Missbrauchsopfern, Frauenrechtlern, Homosexuellen, Abtreibungsbefürwortern und Kondom-Fans [...]" (Translation: "An unholy, a pleasure-seeking coalition of abuse victims, feminists, homosexuals, pro-abortionists and condom fans [...]"). Now I might be wrong but I have a hard time to imagine a pleasure seeking group of abuse victims marching against the Pope. I would have expected to read such sentences in a catholic church paper, but the Spiegel?
And it didn't get better when I browsed through other big papers! A political comment on Sueddeutsche.de first praised the humility that the Pope has shown in a country that is so anti-catholic, before going against the "allegedly enlightened, rational group which often lacks reason". The author picks out Richard Dawkins as the leader of that group whose criticism of the catholic church can be summarised as "arrogant, intolerant and ignorant" and first explains to the reader that Dawkins must have missed that the church has also learned "the virtue of humility" in its 2000 year history. I must have missed that as well within all the intolerant and ignorant things that happened! After again praising the words of the Pope (who humbly only wants for his church to be listened to) he then complains about the secular criticisms that are presented "with yapping eagerness" and are "at times filled with hate" and that they are only attacking the christian and catholic faith. The author reaches the climax of his reality escapism by proclaiming that "Aber wenn im Islam Frauen gesteinigt werden, schweigen Britanniens Atheisten" (Translation: "But when women are getting stoned in Islam, then Britain's atheists remain silent."). I always wonder whether they only get those authors out of their box once a year in which they could lead happy lives without knowing what happens outside in the world? Atheists around the world actively and loudly oppose every single stoning in the world (not only Iran). Google is your friend here!
Now there are more examples but I guess I made my point here: I didn't expect German newspapers to write too openly against the Pope and his policies. Germany is a predominantly christian country after all. But that they would publish articles that so clearly lack journalistic standard surprised me. Everybody who knows how to use Google can debunk the claims made against the Pope's opponents in mere minutes and every journalist who did a bit of research and would have bothered to read a bit about Dawkins would know that the accusations made in the second article are ridiculous. This is not opinion in a political commentary. These are direct lies or a lack any form of journalistic inquiry - in any case a shame for serious journalism and what I thought those newspapers stand for.
I agree that Dawkins is one of the more aggressive atheists of our time but why should he be less passionate and aggressive than his opponents who also seem to forget that you should love thy neighbour and turn the other cheek? How can you fight against an opponent who can openly lie to the public just to get praised for his humility shortly after? How can you use reason against a Pope who cries in public when he meets abuse victims but who actively tried to ignore the issue for decades and even tried to cover it up until it became too big? Crying now does not help the victims who have suffered since Joseph Ratzinger received the first hints and chose to actively ignore them. You would expect that from a company that tries to save its shares by all means (don't even know where to start with examples) and the church tried to use the same PR tricks. But one thing you can't do afterwards is claiming moral high ground!
Maybe it needs people like Richard Dawkins and all those unholy, passion-seeking people to throw stones at the tower of cards the churches try to defend, to slowly get people thinking (and it seems to work when I look at the loss of members in the north-western churches). If I look at the pure idiocy in speeches of priests and bishops regarding the child abuse cases, I don't think knocking shyly at the door with reasonable arguments will work.
Quote: An Enemy of Humanity
Joseph Ratzinger is an enemy of humanity.
He is an enemy of children, whose bodies he has allowed to be raped and whose minds he has encouraged to be infected with guilt. It is embarrassingly clear that the church is less concerned with saving child bodies from rapists than with saving priestly souls from hell: and most concerned with saving the long-term reputation of the church itself.
He is an enemy of gay people, bestowing on them the sort of bigotry that his church used to reserve for Jews.
He is an enemy of women – barring them from the priesthood as though a penis were an essential tool for pastoral duties. What other employer is allowed to discriminate on grounds of sex, when filling a job that manifestly doesn’t require physical strength or some other quality that only males might be thought to have?
He is an enemy of truth, promoting barefaced lies about condoms not protecting against AIDS, especially in Africa.
He is an enemy of the poorest people on the planet, condemning them to inflated families that they cannot feed, and so keeping them in the bondage of perpetual poverty. A poverty that sits ill with the obscene riches of the Vatican.
He is an enemy of science, obstructing vital stem-cell research, on grounds not of morality but of pre-scientific superstition.
Less seriously from my point of view, Ratzinger is even an enemy of the Queen’s own church, arrogantly endorsing a predecessor's dissing of Anglican Orders as “absolutely null and utterly void”, while shamelessly trying to poach Anglican vicars to shore up his own pitifully declining priesthood.
Finally, perhaps of most personal concern to me, he is an enemy of education. Quite apart from the lifelong psychological damage caused by the guilt and fear that have made catholic education infamous throughout the world, he and his church foster the educationally pernicious doctrine that evidence is a less reliable basis for belief than faith, tradition, revelation and authority – his authority.
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