A few weeks ago, one of the editors of a local newspaper, the Northwest Arkansas Times wrote a column stating that, God, (much like "The Decider" - TGDSOBGWB - whose policies this editor also apparently supports) never makes mistakes and never changes his mind.
Editor indicated that one of the things God never made a mistake about or changed his mind on, was abortion.
How wonderful must it be to be infallible! Surely it is a great comfort for those whom God blessed with this gift, the Pope and T infallible GDSOBGWB. And a few others. Like the lovely Ann Coulter.
Dear Editor,
You make an interesting point in your column today. "People with faith know that God is consistent and unchanging. Any ills associated with religion can be traced to the failings of man, not God."
(I went on to say to the editor...)
I have no idea what your religious beliefs may be, but like many Catholic's, you seem to confuse God and the Pope. There are an incredible series of Papal failings, or as Gary Wills, a Catholic historian calls them in the title to one of his books, PAPAL SINS.
Once, according to 18 centuries of Catholic teachings, the sun circled the world, and was apparently as flat as a coin. The current Benedict's predecessor, JPII, corrected these previously "infallible" teachings at least 2,000 years after the Greeks declared the earth a sphere, and 400 years after Galileo's death and almost 25 years after men first walked on the moon. The Pope of Galileo's day was more than willing for his former friend, Galileo, to burn at the stake for his telescopic observations that confirmed Copernicus's theory that the earth circled the sun. That Pope, just one of the many mistaken Leos, was opposed to Galileo's teachings based on the Biblical myth that the flight of the sun around the world was halted so an Israeli army (Back in those days the Jews were God's Chosen people, before, based on the teachings of religious authorities like the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the white Christian Americans became His Chosen.) could kill more of their enemies, including their women and children and old people. Just as an aside, it looks like TGDSOBGWB, the current chosen of God, is following in that tradition in Iraq and Afghanistan. And maybe soon in Iran and Pakistan. New Biblical stories in the making!
One of the sins that Wills ascribes to a Pope, Pius IX, is the kidnapping of a little Jewish boy, whom he kept for the rest of his life and turned into a Catholic priest. Pius IX also was the Pope who gave us the "sin" of abortion.
It was during his "reign" that the Church first found abortion prior to quickening to be sinful. Pius IX is also the pontiff who rendered himself and all succeeding Popes '"infallible." (Wow. Infelicity! How often do you find anyone, other than TGDSOBGWB, the Decider, who thinks he is infallible!)
And wow again! First, Pius IX discovers himself to be infallible, and then he declares abortion a sin! Two sins at one blow. I will wager there were at least 5 more sins committed by this old Pius!
Of course, the sins of the various Inquisition Bishops, Archbishops, Cardinals and Popes, and the Borgias and their crews, need no retelling. All these occurred at the orders of Popes (One of whom, as myth tells us, was actually a WOMAN! Horrors!), all speaking for God. But apparently all this occured before God himself had discovered and declared them infallible.
Now, imagine the anguish of poor Dr. John Rock - who had been a good Catholic physician who thought that, unlike condoms and the diaphragm, the use of which the Church had found to be mortal sins - after he had he worked like a slave in the 40s and 50s to develop, test and eventually market birth control pills, and then discovered that the reigning Pope of his day (yet another of the infallibile and pious Pius's, the XII) had declared even the pills use also to be a mortal sin! So Catholic women of the world then and now, found/find no effective birth control whose use is not in opposition to the will of God! Oh, my!
But a lot of people, Catholic and non-Catholic, knew that the Church had been very late in declaring its opposition to pre-quickening abortion and even declaring the doctrine of infallibity. How could something that the Church had found acceptable not only to God, but to Pope's, for the centuries of human life before Pius IX's "infallible" finding that all abortion was condemned? And if God is consistant and unchanging, why did He suddenly find it - abortion - at this late date, to be a mortal sin? And given the importance that the Church and its successors grant it nowdays, why (in God's name) is abortion never mentioned at all in all "His" writings?
Could it be (one shutters to ask...) that the BIBLE is NOT "The Word of GOD," but simply the writings of fallible men? men living in an age long before any effective birth control method had been discovered? an age when to travel more than a few miles out of your native village could place your life at great risk, possibly to be kidnapped and enslaved? or killed? Or raped whether you were male or female? an age when floods, droughts and lightening strikes, and all sorts of natural phenomena, even defeats be a stronger enemy, were viewed as judgments of God?
Ah, this is a mystery , eh? And fundamentalist religionists, unlike scientists and most moderns, love mysteries so much that they are willing to blindly accept that they are mysteries, without question or thought. IN fact, mysteries never to BE questioned or thought about!
Well, like Galileo, and Copernicus, and Pathagorus, and scores of other classical Greek, and Roman, and Islamic, and Enlightenment scholars, I and a majority of the world's thoughtful people, am/are not willing to accept the Catholic insanity that accepts any man's, even a Pope's, or the writers-of-the-Bible's, infallibility.
Last night, dogemporer published a diary called Dominionist Mindset, dedicated to the resent events in Birmingham AL, at
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/7/24/22934/8268 that features another "infallible" group." This group, like the RCC when it had the power to do so, is dedicated to attacking, maiming and killing those who dare question its authority. They are convinced those of us who support and provide for women's reproductive freedom are possessed by demons. And the current RCC heirachie apparently agrees with them.
Unlike the dominionists and the RCC, I prefer to examine the mysteries to the extent I am able. And now, when I find them incredible, I declare them so.
As a teenager, when confronted with something so patently unbelievable as much of RCC and dominionist dogma, we used to say, "My mother didn't raise no fool!"
dogemporer