Monday, March 22, 2010

johann hari: The Pope, the Prophet, and the religious support for evil

mar 21st, 2010

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ANAND


Though Johann's views on liberty is atheist and radical, this piece in his site  , especially  the vatican  trying to silence the truth
 
"  It has emerged this week that when Ratzinger ( the present pope) was Archbishop of Munich in the 1980s, one of his paedophile
priests was "reassigned" in this way. He claims he didn't know. Yet a few years later he was put in charge of
the Vatican's response to this kind of abuse and demanded every case had to be referred directly to him for
20 years. What happened on his watch, with every case going to his desk? Precisely this pattern not always ..........
............""         -   is shocking !!

 
R V Anand
 
 
http://www.johannhari.com/2010/03/19/the-pope-the-prophet-and-the-religious-support-for-evil

  The Pope, the Prophet, and the religious support for evil
       
               Johann Hari
 
What can make tens of millions of people – who are in their daily lives peaceful and compassionate and
caring – suddenly want to physically dismember a man for drawing a cartoon, or make excuses for an
international criminal conspiracy to protect child-rapists? Not reason. Not evidence. No. But it can happen
when people choose their polar opposite – religion. In the past week we have seen two examples of how
people can begin to behave in bizarre ways when they decide it is a good thing to abandon any commitment
to fact and instead act on faith. It has led some to regard people accused of the attempted murders of the
Mohamed cartoonists as victims, and to demand "respect" for the Pope, when he should be in a police
station being quizzed about his role in covering up and thereby enabling the rape of children.
In 2005, 12 men in a small secular European democracy decided to draw a quasi-mythical figure who has
been dead for 1400 years. They were trying to make a point. They knew that in many Muslim cultures, it is
considered offensive to draw Mohamed. But they have a culture too – a European culture that believes it is
important to be allowed to mock and tease and ridicule religion. It is because Europeans have been doing
this for centuries now that we can no longer be tyrannised into feeling bad about perfectly natural impulses,
like masturbation, or pre-marital sex, or homosexuality. When priests offer those old arguments, we now
laugh in their faces – a great liberating moment. It will be a shining day for Muslims when they can do the
same.
 
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1 comment:

sansk said...

there is no doubt about it. Religion is evil. Every sane person of West has come to the same conclusion.
Still religion exists because there is a demand for spiritual enquiry.

Religion offer dogma (and throttles enquiry) while Dharma offers enquiry.

No wonder a particular desert cult calls itself a complete religion, where even the size of stones is specified for the purpose of rubbing the behind after taking a dump.