Blame socialized health care. Here in the states insurance would get her a real healer, maybe a Pentecostal that will swing a snake or two in her direction. Except we see that she has been treated by two Popes so this is clearly a pre-existing condition. Sucks to be her.
As an atheist I am not shocked or surprosed by the Popes comments, but I do find them a little offensive.
Not least because, IIRC, Nazism was not a strictly atheist movement anyway. All of the leaders had expressed some kind of religious views and many were obsessed with occult items and places like Atlantis and the Spear of Destiny. Not really the actions of rational non believers.
Hopefully this hateful attack will further diminish the influence that nutters like Ratzinger and his paedophile church have in the UK.
WRONG. The protestant Christians split into the small Bekennde Kirche, who realized that as Christians, they had to stand against Euthanasia, concentration camps and killing people, and the bigger Deutsche Christen, who thought they had a national duty to stand with the Reich. Only those pastors speaking out against the Nazi’s politics openly, like Niemöller and others, were persecuted. Those pastors of both confessions that helped hide Jews or went with their Jewish children to the concentration camp like that polnish pastor, died for that, not for being Christian.
The Catholics were seen by the Nazis as problem not for being Christian, but for their allegiance to Rome, an outside force. Additionally, Christianity itself was seen as “weakness with semitism”, since Nazi ideology was that life was a battle which only the strong survive, so emphathy and helping the poor etc. was bad.
At the same time the Nazi leaders realized that Christianity was rooted deep in the population both tradtionally and spiritualy, so they did not officially force conversion to their newly created Norse tradition. Locally, some low-level Nazi officals put pressure on people to stay away from Church or become Deutsche Christen. Some Nazi officials made public pagan ceremonies instead of a normal baptism for their children. Some days were celebrated publically with sun worship.
Sects like Jehovahs witness were sent to concentration camps for their general being against the state (no oath, no army service), rather than specific christianity.
That’s why Rudolf Hochhuth criticised the Pope in “Der Stellvertreter” for not speaking out against the Nazis, using the excuse of “it could get worse” though it was his moral duty to speak out against evil. (And in the early years, the Pope, along with the US, was too happy about the Nazis being anti-communist to care much about the rest of their ideology.)
After the war, after all, the president of the newly founded Protestant Church of Germany, made the Stuttgarter Declaration of Guiltbecause the Church had failed in their entirety and on behalf of most pastors to speak out more and act more against the wrongs of the Nazi regime.
Yes. Which is half of Christianity. But as you said - subverting. That meant no open terror and prosecution. Arresting a handful of pastors who spoke out on their pulpits or wrote leaflets was not a broad persecution for Christians in general.
Um, that’s completly unrelated. The traditional Catholic countries of Italy and Spain were also ruled by fascist dictators, and there was no problem with that. The traditional Catholic country of Ireland wanted to ally with the Nazis to go against the UK. And the US, Canada, UK would not have gone to war with the Nazis over the religion issue. That was never a cause or reason for the war.
For that matter, secular France was at war with the Nazis.
Fuck the Pope, that statement is clearly the rantings of a religous loony and shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than that twat who wanted to burn the Koran. Or in fact those twats that got upset that he was going to burn the Koran. They’re all as bad as each other.
I actually had a fantasy of turning up to one of the events in a comedy Pope costume with a massive rubber cock hanging out. Shame I have a job really, I’m pretty sure I would have got on the national news.
Thanks for that 
What percentage of the UK is atheist these days anyway? A Nice high number I would hope.
Then he should have shut the fuck up then. When i want a disapproving rant about my beliefs and lifestyle from some old out of touch person in a dress i’ll go see my mother.
And while we’re at it. If I’d been the person in charge of dealing with paedo priests for a large number of years then I wouldn’t be this frackin’ surprised.
I would think that actually a very high percentage of people would classify themselves as Christian while actually being, for all practical purposes anyway, atheists. We just don’t care about religion much in this country (well, our own anyway), and we don’t think about it. Most people who classify as Chirstians won’t have been to a Church for services (weddings etc. excluded) in many years.
We are the opposite of the US in that respect. We are an officially relgious country that’s actually secular while the US is an officially secular state that’s actually heavily religious.
My thoughts on the matter - in song!
Warning seriously NSFW unless your office likes a lot of profanity set to a catchy beat.
For serious. And what’s up with the ethnic minorities hogging all the Popecare, anyway ?
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf
A tricky number to pin down. A lot of people will put down CofE or CofS on a survey, but would have to be dragged kicking and screaming to a non-funeral/wedding service. I’m in my early forties, and I don’t know anybody my age or younger who actually goes to church. Our local minister is great though, she’s well liked and does a valuable job in the community, a sort of roving social worker role, always there with patience and a kind word and a cup of tea. I’m not convinced she’s all that big on the whole “God” thing.
I just heard a brief snippet on the radio at lunch time, William Hague was waxing lyrical about the great people of our nation who have benfited from a catholic education. Not sure which station it was on as I was walking and heard it from a stationary car.
Hope he climbs out of the Pope’s arse soon.
According to wikipedia 20% of the UK population are atheists, but as many people just opt for CofE for ease and due to laziness I suspect the actual figure is higher. Particularly if you figure in agnostics who lean towards atheism.
And much more of the same:
Hitler and Christianity - quotes from speeches collated at nobeliefs.com and sourced from:
And while we are at it - do we hear Joey The Rat bashing the explicitly roman catholic fascists in Italy, Portugal and Spain at the same time?
No we don’t.
It’s the same dishonest shit we always get from this vile little man. The way he bangs on about the failings of the Church to deal with abusive priests when it was precisely his job to do so for many years.
And meanwhile - let’s look at just how seriously JTR takes dealing with abusive priests shall we?
Yes. Let’s. I wonder what we will find?
Quick - someone with a feather. Knock me the frack down.
Surprised anyone? Bueller?
Quite. We never stop hearing about the ‘shrillness’ and ‘stridency’ of atheists who speak up about their beliefs, even though for the most part they speak up only when confronted directly in dialogue with theists, or indirectly by asinine public statements (such as the one that is the subject of this thread), and don’t usually do so by comparing theists to Nazis. By contrast, when the Pope spews offensive and divisive drivel, the Mr. Motos of this world brush it off with “it’s his job”. Mr. Moto’s thesis appears to be, that if it is someone’s job to be a cunt, we can’t criticise them for being cunts.
It does, however, suggest one way in which any atheists who might want to tell theists that they’re evil scum who should just fuck off and die, can avoid Mr. Moto’s whining. Establish your own religion, which carries as one of its core tenets, that everyone who is not a member of that religion should FOAD. Declare yourself the head of said religion. Then go and preach the gospel of ‘everyone else FOAD’. Mr. Moto would not dream of criticising you for just doing your job! Would you, Mr. Moto?
Now tagos, I don’t think you’re being quite fair to the Pope here. I’m quite sure he’s telling the truth. He’s not expressing ‘great personal shock’ at the abuse of children by Catholic priests. He’s expressing shock at the scandal surrounding such abuse! And I can believe he really is shocked by that.
I don’t know whether his shock stems from say, a feeling that there’s really nothing terribly wrong with kiddie-diddling, or a feeling that it is only wrong when carried out by people who aren’t God’s representatives on Earth, or just that he didn’t expect these abuses to be found out by the rest of the world. And I won’t put any of those ideas forward as the definitive answer.
No need to, when he’s doing such a bang-up job of discrediting his disgusting organisation all on his lonesome.
Here’s an idea: how about both the Pope and the various atheist attention whores shut the fuck up and let normal people get on with their lives.
In Spain, more than just okay with it - the Catholic Church was strongly behind Franco during the Civil War, and they did quite well under the Fascists.
My daughter is teaching in German public school this year, and they started the school year with a church service, so they are hardly secular even today by American standards. I’m sure this is a long tradition, and I never heard that the Nazis stopped it. Anyone know?
In practice that amounts to telling atheists to shut up and take it. The believers aren’t going to shut up, and “atheist attention whores” (aka atheists who don’t grovel properly) exist in the first place because the believers won’t leave us alone.
More properly, the evangelists aren’t going to shut up. How do you deal with belief sets that require people to push them on you?
[My Name]Ooooh, I know! Ignore them, and they’ll just go away, right?[/My Name]