# Joey the Rat (aka Benedict XVI) and His Latin American Fairytale **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [May 15, 2007, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234 "2007-05-15T20:58:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 1:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/41 "2007-05-16T13:08:03Z")
[QUOTE=kaylasdad99] I don’t think of him that often, but when I do, I can’t resist calling him [Pope](http://www.stpatrickandstgeorge.org/images/pagemaster/popebenedict.jpg) [Cliffy](http://www.bostonist.com/attachments/boston_caroline/cliff_claven.jpg) in my head. [/QUOTE] Now see, I prefer [Pope Palpatine](http://www.ilovedogsaloha.com/evilpope.jpg) myself. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/42 "2007-05-16T13:21:34Z")
The Papacy has gotten really boring without any [Borgias](http://historymedren.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01289a.htm) leading the church. Where are the masked assassins and conspiracies nowadays? ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/43 "2007-05-16T14:31:26Z")
[QUOTE=Boyo Jim] No, I’m an atheist. I miss out on a lot of prophecies. Enlighten me please. [/QUOTE] Check out BrainGlutton’s post 15. Basically Joey Ratz is the last pope to precede a leader of the church who goes apeshit and purges the church in some sort of magnificent fashion. ---
**Author:** ![AskNott](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asknott/32/5790_2.png) [@AskNott](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AskNott)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/44 "2007-05-16T14:58:41Z")
[QUOTE=Jackmannii] … Where are the masked assassins and conspiracies nowadays? [/QUOTE] On the internet, no one can tell you’re masked. All through this thread, I could hear Randy Newman, singing, “The great nations of Europe, comin’ through!” 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/45 "2007-05-16T15:09:29Z")
[QUOTE=RTFirefly] Actually, I think that if JPII or Paul VI (who was actually a very good pope, aside from _Humanae Vitae_) had given a speech on the subject, it would have been quite different. Neither of them bought into the notion that the RCC is and always has been a perfect institution. Ratzinger seems to believe exactly that, AFAICT: that if the Catholic Church did it, it’s good, and you folks in the pews, shut up and give your tithes, or the door’s thataway. [/QUOTE] For that matter, John XIII, or maybe even JPI, who, if the rumors are right, was thinking of overturning _Humanae Vitae_. Would that he had lived a bit longer to bring about changes. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/46 "2007-05-16T15:25:40Z")
[QUOTE=RTFirefly] Isn’t there a commandment about bearing false witness? [/QUOTE] Wrong. The commandmant is against bearing false witness **against one’s neighbor.** Far as I can see, presenting an overall positive view of the impact of Christianity on Latin America is not slander against Huitzilopochtli or anyone else, disagree though you might with his assessment (inherently subjective and thus not really capable of being “false” in any event). ---
**Author:** ![Mighty\_Girl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7bcc69/32.png) [@Mighty\_Girl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mighty_Girl)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/47 "2007-05-16T15:30:30Z")
[QUOTE=Intravenus De Milo] Gecchhhh. Hey, I’m not too proud of what the Aztecs did - they subjugated their fare share of indigenous Mexicans for centuries - but let’s not lump ALL of Latin America into that cadre. Almost all of the 20 MILLION inhabitants of Hispaniola were estimated to have died of disease, starvation, or slaughter within only a few decades (if that) of Columbus’ arrival, and they weren’t really known for their iron-fist subjugation as the Aztecs were. [/QUOTE] Slight nitpick, there weren’t 20 million people in Hispaniola, in fact it almost certainly there still aren’t 20 million people in the island. I completely agree with the rest of your post though. On the church’s credit, some Catholic (Dominican - as in Dominican order) priests (mainly Las Casas and Fray Antón de Montesinos) fiercely defended the natives (they had been ‘converted’ already), they were rebuffed by the Spanish crown and in some cases exiled from the colony. Of course, to help the Indians they had the magnificent idea of importing African slaves. Very Christian of them. :rolleyes: In the end the entire Taino nation disappeared. All of them. The same happened in Puerto Rico with the Tainos and Caribs and Cuba with the Tainos and Ciboneys. Which doesn’t jive with the flowers and rainbows picture painted by the Great German Inquisitor. I don’t suffer fools gladly, but I am not sure whether The Great Inquisitor is a fool or just a bit more than slightly evil. The results are the same. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/48 "2007-05-16T15:37:20Z")
[QUOTE=Kimstu] Numerically, did the Aztecs really end up killing many more people, either among their own or neighboring societies, than some other ancient/medieval cultures did? [/quote] On one occasion, the rededication of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, they sacrificed [80,400 prisoners](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture#Estimates_of_the_scope_of_the_sacrifices) (or, at least, their historians claimed that figure; it may have been less). [QUOTE=Kimstu] And in terms of cruelty too, I’m unconvinced that the Aztecs qualify as uniquely loathsome. [/QUOTE] It’s not so much that they were cruel as that their whole religion and culture were so gloomy and death-obsessed. They believed in hungry gods who were always ready to destroy the world if not fed. From Kunstler’s _The City in Mind_ (see link in post #6): > [@](#): > > “Nowhere else in the world,” writes [anthropologist Marvin] Harris, “had there developed a state-sponsored religion whose art, architecture, and ritual were so thoroughly dominated by violence, decay, death, and disease. Nowhere else were walls and plazas of great temples and palaces reserved for such a concentrated display of jaws, fangs, claws, talons, bones, and gaping death heads.” . . . > > It was a death-driven culture and its constant undertone was the imminence of cosmic doom. Their universe was unstable and subject to predestined cyclical destruction. The entire purpose of Aztec existence was to provide Huitzilopochtli with his daily ration of human hearts, and Aztec society was wholly organized for and devoted to this task. The sacrificial victims – generally warriors – were assembled and lined up in masses equal to whole armies, and there are no recorded instances of revolt. They shuffled up to the blood-drenched altar like so many sheep. The accompanying pageantry – music, drumming, chanting, the crowds, amplified with hallucinogenic drugs – may have served as a potent mechanism of social control, but a lack of some critical subjected mental ability seems inescapable. > > The evolution of modern consciousness must have been accompanied by the terrible recognition of individual mortality as central to the human condition. And the questions that mortality raised for both the individual and the group must have produced enormous anxiety. It would appear that the Aztecs projected these anxieties over an already frightful collective world-view – obsessed with the foretold collapse of their universe and confused about their role in it – while acting out scripts of violence and terror in daily life that could only have reinforced their state of anxiety. Note also that saints, angels, and agents of goodness or mercy do not exist in the Aztec cosmography. Of course, against this we have got to set the Christian world-view, which **has** saints and angels in plenty, but in which God is so pure and perfect and exalted that the slightest venial sin against His will merits eternal suffering in Hell. Later in the same chapter: > [@](#): > > It is estimated that somewhere between 12 and 25 million Indians lived in all of Mexico when Cortes arrived. One hundred years later, after the introduction of smallpox, typhoid, measles, mumps, and bubonic plague, 1.5 million Indians remained. With the steep decline in population and the introduction of cattle, sheep, and goats, the frightful Aztec theology that supported mass human sacrifice and organized cannibalism withered away to a residual folk-fetish for skeletons and a jokey attitude toward death, under a broad but thin lamination of Christianity. The colonial administration was not devoid of humanism. The viceroy abolished Indian chattel slavery in 1550, and various unsuccessful attempts were made over the centuries to reform peonage. But for their part, the Indians inherited a vanquished, fragmentized culture characterized by poverty, despair, and violence. Among those who came to reinhabit the old central quarter of Tenochtitlan, the drinking of _pulque,_ the fermented juice of the maguey, a species of century plant, reached levels as lethal as the epidemic diseases, and persisted longer as a permanent feature of culture. Not until the twentieth century did the population of Mexico City exceed the quarter million who dwelt there in the last days of Moctezuma. > > In his 1852 _Historia de Mexico,_ Lucas Alaman called his native land “a nation that has leapt from infancy to a state of decrepitude without ever knowing the vigor of youth.” There really **ain’t** no good guys in this story. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/49 "2007-05-16T15:53:15Z")
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton] Of course, against this we have got to set the Christian world-view, which **has** saints and angels in plenty, but in which God is so pure and perfect and exalted that the slightest venial sin against His will merits eternal suffering in Hell. [/QUOTE] It’s really kind of hard, when one sees that sort of drivel, to bite one’s tongue and not blurt out ridiculously stupid interpretations of the atheist world-view, not to mention ignorant backhanded insults directed at someone they love dearly. But one perseveres. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/50 "2007-05-16T16:07:04Z")
[QUOTE=Liberal] It’s really kind of hard, when one sees that sort of drivel, to bite one’s tongue and not blurt out ridiculously stupid interpretations of the atheist world-view, not to mention ignorant backhanded insults directed at someone they love dearly. But one perseveres. [/QUOTE] Look, I’m getting that interpretation from **Catholic priests.** Quoted in one of Durant’s histories, IIRC. There’s also plenty of scriptural evidence **Jesus** believed in Hell; so if you take the doctrine of Hell out of Christianity, what you’ve got left, while it might have value, is not Christianity. (I’m aware of differing interpretations, the issue has been debated more than once in GD, but never persuasively, IMO.) ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/51 "2007-05-16T16:13:35Z")
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton] Look, I’m getting that interpretation from **Catholic priests.** Quoted in one of Durant’s histories, IIRC. There’s also plenty of scriptural evidence **Jesus** believed in Hell; so if you take the doctrine of Hell out of Christianity, what you’ve got left, while it might have value, is not Christianity. (I’m aware of differing interpretations, the issue has been debated more than once in GD, but never persuasively, IMO.) [/QUOTE] Catholicism and Christianity are not synonyms. And even from a Catholic view, your declaration (not stated as an opinion) does exactly what you oppose: it strips Christianity of its doctrine of forgiveness of said “slightest venial sin”. If you don’t recognize Christianity without the doctrine of Hell, then how do you recognize it without the doctrine of salvation? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/52 "2007-05-16T16:26:23Z")
[QUOTE=Liberal] Catholicism and Christianity are not synonyms. [/quote] No, of course not, they’re antonyms – didn’t you know? 😉 [QUOTE=Liberal] And even from a Catholic view, your declaration (not stated as an opinion) does exactly what you oppose: it strips Christianity of its doctrine of forgiveness of said “slightest venial sin”. If you don’t recognize Christianity without the doctrine of Hell, then how do you recognize it without the doctrine of salvation? [/QUOTE] I recognize salvation in there, all right, that’s the **point** of the whole thing; but you have to accept Christ and all that, and if you don’t (or never even hear of Christ), tough luck forever. Why should your soul’s destiny depend in any way on what you **believe?!** More importantly, it’s based on the assumption that salvation is necessary because you really **do** deserve Hell. You don’t even need to commit that one venial sin, you were born deserving it. That’s an utterly psychotic world-view. Makes the Aztecs’ look rational and compassionate and civilized by comparison. YMMV. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/53 "2007-05-16T16:34:14Z")
[QUOTE=Huerta88] Wrong. The commandmant is against bearing false witness **against one’s neighbor.** [/quote] And that’s exactly the sort of cop-out that Jesus would have ridiculed, if his words as recorded in the Gospels are any guide. And given that we’re discussing a subset of Christianity here, I think they kind of _have_ to be. > [@](#): > > Far as I can see, presenting an overall positive view of the impact of Christianity on Latin America is not slander against Huitzilopochtli or anyone else, disagree though you might with his assessment (inherently subjective and thus not really capable of being “false” in any event). Only to the extent that any falsity about a review of the performance at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865 that omits any mention of Lincoln’s assassination is strictly subjective. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/54 "2007-05-16T16:54:04Z")
[QUOTE=DrDeth] And mass slavery too. And OK, let us condemn the rest of the other Meso-American cultures with mass human sacrifice and an economy based upon slavery. [/QUOTE] And the vengenance the Spaniards brought was to enslave and kill nearly everyone. The Aztec nobility, fine. But did the peasants do any better? How about the enslaved tribes? Maybe the Allies should have killed 90% of Germany in 1945 and enslaved the rest? Would have been too bad for Ratzi, wouldn’t it? (And the point is that he was not culpable back then, to head off any rants.) Owning up to the sins of the Church in Latin America while he is in Latin America would seem a bit timely. ---
**Author:** ![Autolycus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/22d042/32.png) [@Autolycus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Autolycus)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 5:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/55 "2007-05-16T17:13:46Z")
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton] No, of course not, they’re antonyms – didn’t you know? 😉 [/QUOTE] That sounds like something Chick would say :eek: > [@](#): > > I recognize salvation in there, all right, that’s the **point** of the whole thing; but you have to accept Christ and all that, and if you don’t (or never even hear of Christ), tough luck forever. Why should your soul’s destiny depend in any way on what you **believe?!** Faith has many different definitions. What many Catholics believe by salvation by faith has less to do with the intellectual component and more to do with the action component of opening one’s life to Love(agape). There are many who intellectually profess faith in Jesus but who dont have love in their hearts > [@](#): > > More importantly, it’s based on the assumption that salvation is necessary because you really **do** deserve Hell. It only takes one sin to make onself seperate from God and thus unable to enter communion with him in Heaven. It’s not about deserving it; it just happens. > [@](#): > > You don’t even need to commit that one venial sin, you were born deserving it. I’m not studied up on original sin, but I think of it as ‘humanity’s inclindation towards sin,’ rather than an actual sin. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/56 "2007-05-16T17:33:13Z")
Apropos of nothing, I once read an action-packed alternate-history novel, [_King of the Wood,_](http://www.amazon.com/King-Wood-John-Maddox-Roberts/dp/0812552067/ref=sr_1_1/104-9877726-4934363?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179336303&sr=8-1) by John Maddox Roberts. It’s set in a world where the Scandinavians colonized the east coast of North America starting in the Ninth Century, eventually forming two large kingdoms, Treeland (Christian) and Thorsheim (pagan). Meanwhile, the Mongol Empire survives, conquers the Islamic world, but leaves Europe alone as it’s too poor to bother with. Around 1485, the hero Hring is exiled from Treeland for kinslaying and eventually winds up in the Aztec Empire, whose religion and customs horrify him, and he flees. In the end, the Mongols invade North America from the west, intent on conquest. Hring persuades them to ignore the Norse kingdoms and instead conquer the much richer Aztec Empire. They do, and suppress the cult of human sacrifice – but with much less destruction than the Spanish in OTL. Otherwise, they leave their new subjects’ religion and culture alone – all the Mongols want is order, obedience and taxes. ---
**Author:** ![Intravenus\_De\_Milo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/bbe5ce/32.png) [@Intravenus\_De\_Milo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Intravenus_De_Milo)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/57 "2007-05-16T17:46:08Z")
[QUOTE=Mighty\_Girl] Slight nitpick, there weren’t 20 million people in Hispaniola, in fact it almost certainly there still aren’t 20 million people in the island. I completely agree with the rest of your post though. [/QUOTE] Oops, sorry about that. My source (the excellent “That’s Not In My American History Book” by Thomas Ayres) states that “as many as ten million” people lived in Hispaniola ca. 1492. I fuddled his number. It’s not out of the question that there COULD have been in the order of a few million natives living there; Puerto Rico today has around 3 million, and although there’s obviously much more development in the Caribbean today, PR is also smaller than Hispaniola. The point to drive home is that there were almost no healthy natives left within a few years of the Spanish conquest, and those that were left were enslaved. Not even the Aztecs perpetrated that sort of mass die-off (in fact, there’s quite a bit of evidence to support that their weaponry was not designed to be especially lethal…live captives for sacrifice or slavery were more prized than dead people). So to say “well, the Aztecs had it coming”, as some have done here, is a bit of a straw man, IMO. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/58 "2007-05-16T17:56:04Z")
It is true, I’ve often read, that almost none of the inhabitants of the Caribbean Islands today have any Indian ancestry – only African, European and East Indian. (There are believed to be some descendants of [Carib Indians](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carib) in St. Vincent, Dominica and Haiti, but the Carib language and culture are entirely extinct.) ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/59 "2007-05-16T18:12:01Z")
[QUOTE=Huerta88] Wrong. The commandmant is against bearing false witness **against one’s neighbor.** [/QUOTE] You’re aware that everyone is your neighbor, are you not? ---
**Author:** ![Omegaman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/e480ec/32.png) [@Omegaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omegaman)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2007, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234/60 "2007-05-16T18:23:21Z")
[QUOTE=Monty] You’re aware that everyone is your neighbor, are you not? [/QUOTE] It would be a better world if everyone knew that . [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/joey-the-rat-aka-benedict-xvi-and-his-latin-american-fairytale/404234.md?page=4)