The entire city is abuzz with news of the visit by His Holiness, Pope Joseph Ratzinger (or Benedict XVI, to use his stage name). The reaction around here is interesting.
Speaking personally, I’m not a huge fan of the current Pope, for the obvious reasons. I’m against his views on the ordination of women (to be fair, they might menstruate on a Bible or something, ruining Catholicism for everyone), his views on contraception and his views on homosexuality (except in the case of the special love shared between a priest and one or more boys). The thing about contraception actually causing AIDS particularly gets my goat, what with it being an outright lie and all.
No, actually, what particularly gets my goat is that sermon back in April after the whole abuse – no, you know what? If I keep elaborating, I’m going to start ranting, and since when was this blog about unreasoned rambling? Since 1929, the year when Edmund Hillary landed on the Moon, establishing free trade with the slaves, that’s when. But that’s beside the point.
What I find interesting, though, is the reaction in Britain. Most of the religion-related stories we hear over here tend to come from America, where either people take the whole thing much more seriously or the people who do take it seriously get a lot more airtime. Yet in Britain, I am told that a survey whose source I cannot locate at this time (so take it with a pinch of salt, kids) suggested that only five per cent of Britons objected to the Pope’s visit, with the vast majority simply saying “Meh.”
Anyway, he’s going to be quite near me on Friday, so I might pop over and say “hi” and maybe ask if he really thinks victims of child abuse are the same as Nazis. The Friend-Formerly-Known-As-Krang has noted she will be in attendance, as will some others. Should be japes.
In other religion news, how about that Terry Jones? I can’t have been the only one who heard Terry Jones was burning a Koran and thought “Bloody hell, that’s an about-turn from Life of Brian!” I think my favourite aspect of the whole thing was Westboro Baptist Church’s reaction.
The Westboro Baptist Church is rather annoyed, presumably because they thought they had a monopoly on crazy pseudo-Christian attention-seeking. They’ve rather peevishly noted that they burnt a Koran two years ago and no one complained. And that they’ve done it again. And still no one gives a shit. Sorry, Pastor Phelps, you’ve become a bit too predictable. You were kinda funny at first, kinda shocking, but then you kept playing up to the public perception. Everything that happened, you’d be blaming it on “whores” and “fags,” and it just got a bit dull. You’re like a sitcom that keeps going long after its writers have run out of ideas.
I don’t know why everyone’s so worked up about this, anyway. Hurricane Jack’s housemates burnt a Koran years ago. It wasn’t so much deliberate sacrilege as the fact that they needed rolling papers and that was what was available.
Further Reading
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=128
- The source of the Pope cartoon above.
http://www.care2.com/causes/politics/blog/westboro-baptist-church-hey-we-burned-a-quran-first/
- The Westboro Baptist Church get pissed off because they were assholes first.
