Geoffrey Robertson at Protest the Pope

Another elitist Atheist demonstrates he doesn't know what he's talking about.
The video shows the lies preached by Roberston:


Geoffrey Robertson speech at Protest The Pope march


And below, the facts Roberston chooses to ignore:

The Pope demeaning women? Demonising homosexuals? Wishing that IVF children had never been born? Maybe Robertson is suffering some mental disorder???

The Pope has never demeaned women. As for as Demonising homosexuals here is what Pope Benedict as Cardinal Ratzinger said to the Catholic Bishops of the world in 1985 on the pastoral care of homosexual persons:

"10. It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law."

And of course the pope never said that he wished IVF children had never been born. What the Church teaches is that most artificial reproductive methods injure the dignity of the person conceived. Once conceived every human being has a right to be protected.

Why do film makers have to distort the history of Christianity?

By Michael Cook, MercatorNet, 24th June 2010

Is it a sign of exhausted creativity that anti-Christian film makers are exhuming Enlightenment myths? In the arthouses this summer are two films recycling tattered canards which have been mouldering in history books for centuries, repeatedly refuted and repeatedly revived.
Pope Joan (Die Päpstin) is a German production about a female Pope who — supposedly – was elected in 853. Mediaeval legends about the Popess are sketchy, but what legend leaves out, the imagination of the director, Sönke Wortmann, fills in. …

The other film, Agora, is a Spanish blockbuster by Alejandro Amenábar which takes place in Alexandria in 415. Its heroine is Hypatia, a young unmarried and virginal woman of genius who teaches philosophy and astronomy in the Agora, the ancient world’s version of a university.
Hypatia is a pagan, one of a declining minority in a city torn by feuds between Jews and fundamentalist Christians led by the scheming Patriarch Cyril. It is a tough time for lovers of the truth, especially when Christians destroy Alexandria’s rich library. When Hypatia refuses to recant her belief that the earth revolves around the Sun and then refuses to become a Christian, the mob seizes her. To spare her the agony of being stoned, one of her admirers euthanases her. (Amenábar also directed The Sea Inside, an award-winning film about euthanasia.)

Read more at MercatorNet.com


Wikipedia entry on Pope Joan

Wikipedia entry on Hypatia

Spirituality Without Spirits (I’m spiritual but not religious)

By David Mills - May 28, 2010 First Things.

 It’s a great and self-serving mess, this claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” which we hear from almost anyone who talks about religion in public, outside those the worldlings define as fundamentalist (me, probably you, Joseph Bottum, David Goldman, Benedict XVI, Hassidic Jews, devout Muslims, religious families with more than four children).

It’s one of those easily remembered phrases that work like a “get out of jail free” card for anyone who feels he has to explain his lack of religious practice, and as a claim to superiority for those who care about being superior to those who practice an established religion. It’s the religious equivalent of “I gave at the office” or “There’s a call on the other line” or “I don’t eat meat.”

So we find Lady Gaga, the pornographic songstress, telling a reporter for The Times that she has a new spirituality just before taking her out for a night at a Berlin sex club. Asked by the reporter, “You were raised a Catholic — so when you say ‘God,’ do you mean the Catholic God, or a different, perhaps more spiritual sense of God?”, she responded, “More spiritual. . . . There’s really no religion that doesn’t hate or condemn a certain kind of people, and I totally believe in all love and forgiveness, and excluding no one.”

You see what I mean. To be truly spiritual—on a scale on which “the Catholic God” seems stuck in the middle—apparently means indifferently inclusive or (what is another way of saying the same thing) undogmatic.

I don’t think Ms. Gaga or anyone else who talks like this has really thought it through. That God who forgives everyone and excludes no one doesn’t object to debauches in Berlin sex clubs. A point in his favor, from one point of view. But then he doesn’t object to murderers and torturers and corrupt bankers either. A point in his favor from no one’s point of view.

Continue reading at First Things

Give Me That Old Time Atheism

By Fr. Robert Barron – Word on Fire Blog.

Recently, Chicago has been the target market for a campaign of billboards and bus placards sponsored by the Freedom From Religion Foundation which advocate a dismissal of all things religious. Father Barron offers his thoughts on this initiative here:

I have no particular political objection to the recent advertising campaign launched by atheists and agnostics, which involves placards on the side of buses urging religious people to sleep in on Sunday morning and stop wasting their time going to church. I mean, it’s a free country, and people can express their views publicly, even on controversial matters. But what I object to is the stupidity of the view that’s being advocated.

Continue reading at Word On Fire

Pope Joan? Pioneer or Protestant plot - film revives debate about female pope

 From the Sydney Morning Herald
… a film, which last week reached the top 10 box office list in Italy, has revived the story of Pope Joan - an Englishwoman who, legend has it, disguised herself as a man and became the only female pontiff.
The film will fuel debate over whether Pope Joan really existed or whether, as the Catholic Church maintains, she was a mythical figure used by the early Protestants to discredit and embarrass Rome.

-----------------------------------

Given how gullible anti-Catholics seem to be I’m sure they’ll be flocking to see the movie.
Wikipedia provides some details as to why the “Pope Joan” story can’t be true:
"Between [Popes] Leo IV and Benedict III, where Martinus Polonus places her, she cannot be inserted, because Leo IV died 17 July 855, and immediately after his death Benedict III was elected by the clergy and people of Rome; but owing to the setting up of an Antipope, in the person of the deposed Cardinal Anastasius, he was not consecrated until 29 September. Coins exist which bear both the image of Benedict III and of Emperor Lothair I, who died 28 September 855; therefore Benedict must have been recognized as Pope before the last-mentioned date. On 7 October 855, Benedict III issued a charter for the Abbey of Corvey. Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims, informed Nicholas I that a messenger whom he had sent to Leo IV learned on his way of the death of this Pope, and therefore handed his petition to Benedict III, who decided it (Hincmar, ep. xl in P.L., CXXXVI, 85). All these witnesses prove the correctness of the dates given in the lives of Leo IV and Benedict III, and there was no interregnum between these two Popes, so that at this place there is no room for the alleged Popess."^[6]

More at Patrick Madrid's Blog.

More at Catholic Encyclopedia.

IS ATHEISM RATIONAL? IS RELIGION? - New Oxford Review

By Carl Sundell, May 2010.

“… perhaps we might begin to suspect that the atheist's position is rooted not in the intellect but in the will. Is it possible that the atheist does not want God to exist, and that he therefore orders his intellect to supply the necessary objections? It certainly seems so. There isn't any reasonable argument why men should choose to live in a purposeless universe and be doomed to eternal death. It becomes all the less reasonable a choice when we remember that there is not and cannot be any shred of proof that God does not exist or that we exist without an ultimate purpose. Then why choose atheism? Why would anybody want God not to exist?”

Read full article at the New Oxford Review

Twisted Thinking on Abortion » Bill Muehlenberg’s CultureWatch

Those who seek to defend the indefensible have to resort to increasingly bizarre argumentation and twisted thinking to make their case. A prime example of this is the attempt to justify the killing of unborn babies. Some of the most inane and vacuous reasoning can be found coming from the pro-abortionists.

Continue reading at Twisted Thinking on Abortion » Bill Muehlenberg’s CultureWatch

Above image of the feet of an unborn at 7 weeks gestation courtesy of Priests for Life.

If the deliberate terminating of the life of the unborn wasn't such a serious issue I wouldn't feel guilt at having a laugh:


Of course for Catholics guilt can be a good thing. It's a reminder that something is not right. Everyone Against Abortion Please Raise Their Hand:



Rachel's Vineyard (Australia)- Repairing hearts broken by abortion.

InsideCatholic.com - Five Myths About the Rapture

From Carl E Olson writing at Inside Catholic.

About ten years ago, I mentioned to a Catholic friend that I was starting to work on a book critiquing the Left Behind novels. I explained that it would thoroughly examine premillennial dispensationalism, the unique apocalyptic belief system presented, in fictional format, within those books. Premillennial dispensationalism teaches that the "Rapture" and the Second Coming are two events separated by a time of tribulation and that there will be a future millennial reign of Christ on earth. "Why?" she asked, obviously bewildered. "No one really takes that stuff seriously."
That revealing remark merely reinforced my desire to write Will Catholics Be "Left Behind"? (Ignatius, 2003). Other conversations brought home the same point. Far too many people -- including a significant number of Catholics -- don’t recognize the attraction and power of this Fundamentalist phenomenon. Nor do they appear to appreciate how much curiosity exists about the "end times," the book of Revelation, and the "pretribulation Rapture" -- the belief that Christians will be taken up from earth prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming.
In the course of writing articles, giving talks, and writing the book, I’ve encountered a number of questions and comments -- almost all from Catholics -- that indicate how much confusion exists about matters of eschatology (theology of the end times), not to mention ecclesiology, historical theology, and the interpretation of Scripture. The five myths I present here summarize many of those questions.
Continue reading "Five Myths About the Rapture" at InsideCatholic.com

Dawkins preaches to the deluded against the divine.

LIKE revivalists from an alternative universe, 2500 hardcore believers in the absence of religion packed into the Global Atheists Convention in Melbourne last weekend to give a hero's welcome to the high priest of belief in unbelief, Richard Dawkins.

The bestselling author of The God Delusion was similarly fawned over by the Australian media, which uncritically lapped up everything he said.
This was even after (or perhaps because) he referred to the Pope as a Nazi, which managed to combine defamation of the pontiff with implicit Holocaust denial.
By comparison, Family First senator Steve Fielding may feel he got off lightly when Dawkins described him merely as more stupid than an earthworm.

Continue Reading at the Australian March 16th ...

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Neo-Pagans Are Giving Ancient Paganism a Bad Name

A Christian who has not at some time felt a sharp twinge of annoyance at the antics of that disparate group of humbugs who can be loosely described as “neo-pagans” can only be a Christian of the most privileged isolation or of the most phlegmatic disposition. As “Goddess” spirituality finds a secure home in religious studies departments and chain bookstores, as the “solstice” nudges Christmas out of Episcopalian cathedrals, Celtic music festivals, and PBS children’s programming, and as C.E. replaces A.D. in academic books, a Christian cannot help but suspect that there are a great number of people with a great deal of influence in public life who would like to see the name of Christ removed from any position of eminence and submerged in a sea of other names.
Continue Reading at the New Oxford Review

Parody - Dawkins discovers he can't arrest the Pope.

These parodies are funny even though they've been around for a while now. But of course Dawkins is not really like Hitler. I might see the original movie one day.

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