Atheists behind the greatest cruelty, says Pope – Telegraph, By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a powerful attack on atheism, saying that it was responsible for some of the “greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice” in history.

In the second encyclical of his papacy, the Pope urged Christians to put their hope for the future in God and not in technology, wealth or political ideologies.

His 76-page document, Spe Salvi, comes in the context of rising secularism in Europe and a spate of books attacking belief in God, including the “The God Delusion” by the Oxford academic Richard Dawkins.

In the document, the highest form of papal writing addressed to the whole Church, Benedict XVI said that many people rejected religious faith because they no longer found the prospect of an eternal after-life attractive.

Instead, they had put their faith in human reason and freedom in the hope that the “kingdom of man” would emerge.

In a scholarly analysis, he said that these ideas had originated during two periods of political upheaval, the French and Communist revolutions.

He said that Karl Marx and the 19th and 20th century atheism spawned by his revolution could be seen by some as a “type of moralism” responding to the injustices of the time.

Atheists argued that “a world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God,” the Pope wrote.

Whether the error is the headline writer’s or the pope’s, the quarrel is with Marxist Communism or the biggest practitioners thereof. People are capable of astonishing cruelty, whether they are believers in god or not.

Please notice, though I despise this particular line of “reasoning” and have no use for a pope whatsoever, I do not call for his death, as so many devote believers in god would seek for those they disagree with. I don’t claim to be a better person because I’m an atheist. My point is there are good atheists and evil worshippers. We are all human beings and need each other more than god. peace, mjh

It’s minutes until sunset and already 8 hours past the moment of the solstice. Think of the sun at the top of a 47 degree arc, sliding now towards the bottom in mid-Winter.

It is interesting to read that this is mid-summer’s eve and, in some cultures, the *last* day of summer. A special day, any way you look at it. Darkness and cold loom — seeming a long way off, like death to a teenager. And then, light and heat again — a resurrection we witness but are denied. A cycle so long it seems never-ending, though even it will someday. mjh

Sunday Drivers – Los Angeles Times, by Dan Neil

The pre-race activities of the Indy 500 and Coca-Cola 600 were all about the troops. In addition to the usual F-22 flyovers and color guard presentations, Lowe’s track director “Humpy” Wheeler arranged for the U.S. Army to “secure” the front stretch of the racetrack, with troops in full battle rattle, armored personnel carriers, helicopters and a Howitzer. Eight Nextel Cup race teams surrendered $8 million in advertising when they repainted their cars with military-themed graphics as part of an “American Heroes” program. In the money-obsessed world of NASCAR, this was no empty gesture.

Perhaps I was the only one made uncomfortable by this welding of sport and militarism, but it seemed at times I might have been watching the German Grand Prix of 1938. It also seemed to me more than a touch neurotic. It’s possible that, given the fool’s errand on which we have sent our military in Iraq, we feel we can’t say thank you enough, nor can we bring ourselves to say the obvious and more appropriate thing: We’re sorry.

And yet, for all the troop-honoring and American hero worship, the U.S. public is astonishingly illiterate about Memorial Day, which is officially observed on the last Monday in May. ….

The United States wrestled with Sabbatarianism through the latter half of the 19th century and well into the 20th century, but by the 1950s, the Puritan Sunday had given way to enormous pressures for leisure, entertainment, commerce and sports. Particularly sports. Harline begins and ends his book [Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl] with Super Bowl Sunday, an event that in its rituals, prayer breakfasts, helmeted heads bowed during the invocation, represents the sacralization of the secular. NASCAR too has its showy effusions of pre-race piety that innoculate it from charges of sacrilege. Thank God and Goodyear.

According to a 2006 Pew Forum survey, 60% of white evangelicals—an audience not unknown to NASCAR—believe the Bible should have more influence on U.S. laws than the will of the people. But are they willing to live by that? If they check their Deuteronomy, they’ll see racing on Sunday is not allowed. The same goes for football, baseball and golf.

It is a curious corner of the American character that allows people who neglect the simplest conventions of patriotism to wrap themselves in the biggest flag imaginable, that permits people who couldn’t name the Ten Commandments at gunpoint to swear they are the divine law of the land.

We’re a deeply patriotic and religious people. Just don’t bother us with the details.

[read it all (free LATimes account may be required)]

[mjh: Cleanse your palate before you read this bonus Neil.]

A Nation Wallows – Los Angeles Times
Dan Neil
June 17, 2007

There once was a pig named Fred who came to a very bad end in Alabama, as I suppose all pigs in Alabama do. Fred was 6 weeks old when he was purchased by farmer Phil Blissitt in 2004 and given as a Christmas gift to his wife, Rhonda. This brings us to the first of this story’s many truisms: Christmas sucks in Alabama.

For 2 1/2 years, Fred was a happy pig. He would play with the Blissitts’ grandchildren and the family Chihuahua. Fred liked sweet potatoes, according to an AP story, and that may have been his undoing. For Fred grew large, more than 1,000 pounds and perhaps 9 feet long, with huge tusks jutting like Ka-Bar knives from his endlessly rooting maw. Dear, sweet, saber-toothed Fred started to worry the Blissitts, so one spring day, Phil sold him to the Lost Creek Plantation, a private, fenced-in reserve where he would be free to gambol and play, until he was shot.

Which, only days later, he was, and with extreme prejudice too. On May 3, 11-year-old Jamison Stone, hunting with his father and three rifle-toting “guides,” killed Fred with a .50-caliber handgun, shooting the erstwhile pet half a dozen times and chasing it for three hours around a 150-acre enclosure surrounded by a low fence. The trophy picture—of young Jamison posed with his apparently VW-sized quarry—exploded across the Internet, while the story made headlines around the world. “Jurassic Pork,” the New York Post slyly offered.

I smelled a large dead pig the moment I saw the picture. First, the now-famous picture of Fred and Jamison —one chubby and overfed, and the other a pig—used a common trophy-picture trick of having the animal much closer to the camera than the hunter, thus making the animal appear larger. I used to edit a hook-and-bullet magazine and, believe me, hunters and fishermen use the forced perspective gambit more than Roger Corman.

Second, no foraging wild boar gets to be 1,000 pounds. Only a domestic pig—and one fed generously with agricultural feed, table scraps and fast-food leftovers—can pack on that kind of weight. Domestic pigs do frequently get loose and, in the wild, revert to a lean and feral state. The most frightening thing about Fred is that he might be the half-ton, hormone-laced canary in America’s dietary coal mine.

The Stones claimed they thought they were hunting a feral hog, but come on. Fred might as well have been wearing a rhinestone collar. …

[A]s the Fred episode fairly illustrates, hunting today is a sick satire of the sport as it was in the days when Teddy Roosevelt took to the field. The number of hunters is declining rapidly, for all the reasons you’d expect. Increasingly, hunting is confined to private game “reserves” that cater to well-to-do sportsmen, a reversion to the royal game lands of England. In these confined areas, the principle of fair chase is a joke. …

And so at the intersection of our reckless meat-based food system, our swinish media obsessions, our weird nostalgia for tradition-affirming blood lust, there lies an enormous dead pig. What a country.

[read it all (free LATimes account may be required)]

He was so very old, having outlived family and friends. How many miles he’d traveled, no one could know. He had seen so much change — for the worst. Whether or not it was really “his time to go,” he was slaughtered by a gang of heartless, mindless killers. In a world soaked in blood, blinded by a spectrum of cruelty and violence, choked with the nausea from limitless abuse and inhumanity, his death breaks my heart — again.

If there ever was a god, he killed himself or walked away in disgust. mjh

Whale found with 19th-century weapon in neck, By Erin Conroy, Associated Press

BOSTON — A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old. …

“It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a non-lethal place,” he said. “He couldn’t have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years.” …

The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar projectile last month, and the older device was found buried beneath its blubber as hunters carved it with a chain saw for harvesting. …

“We didn’t make anything of it at the time, and no one had any idea about their lifespan, or speculated that a bowhead could be that old,” [some idiot] said.

It is a measure of our indifference that the tone of this article is of amazement, not guilt. Look! We finally got him! Hey, he couldn’t have been hurt so bad — he lived another century. For all we know, he ached every day of that 100 plus years. Regardless, it’s over now. Someone got a museum piece, a moment in the news, a bowel movement. mjh

“What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!”

— Hamlet (II, ii, 115-117)

So, Archbishop Sheehan doesn’t believe in atheists. That’s as self-serving as Wal-Mart’s CEO disparaging unions.

I certainly don’t expect to prove that Sheehan is part of the problem. However, to the “you can’t prove a negative” argument, I say, “so, what?” The efforts of the vast majority of the human race have failed to prove the existence of god — and with very good reason.

Sheehan places the Inquisition and Communism on the scales of justice and pronounces the Inquisition ‘not so bad after all.’ I wonder if his god admits the trivial murders and torturers into heaven while barring the door to the really bad cases. “Lord, it was only a few thousand people and we did it in your name.” The absolution of scoundrels.

Equating communism with atheism comes as no surprise from a religious zealot. It is ‘militant regionists’ who have polarized the entire world. In truth, humans pick and choose their beliefs and behaviors with maddening inconsistency. People of great faith and people without faith turn out to be heroes and ax murders. You can look back and say, “see, of course he did that because ….” It really proves nothing. The Virginia Tech mass murderer came from a deeply religious family and saw himself as christ-like. That’s a specious remark but no less so than blaming the behavior of brutal despots on atheism. Humankind is a murderous breed that embraces lies as readily as the truth. Even if we grow out of our religious infancy, we’ll find new reasons to brutalize each other. mjh

ABQjournal: Letters to the Editor
Atheists Spit Into Rising Wind

The May 26 article on militant atheist writers making an all-out assault on religious faith moves me to respond.

Christopher (an odd name for a nonbeliever!) Hitchens’ book “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” Richard Dawkins’ book “The God Delusion” and others seem to be selling briskly according to the article.

Michael Novak, writing in the June issue of the magazine “First Things,” notes that there is an odd defensiveness about these books, as though they were a sign not of victory but of desperation.

Everywhere on earth except Europe, religion is surging. According to a 2007 Princeton survey for Newsweek, at least 91 percent of Americans believe in God. Only 3 percent say they are atheists. In fact, the whole group of nonbelievers including agnostics and those of no religion is only 10 percent.

These atheistic authors are kind of like men spitting against the wind. Each trots out his arguments for atheism, it might seem, to convince himself. Maybe the books are selling well because there are always people that are curious about authors who attack the respected and the sacred.

Religion throughout history has brought about the establishment of great movements for civilization— the establishment of universities and education, hospitals and various means of helping the sick and the poor.

The atheists typically bring out the sad reality of the Inquisition, but the death inflicted by the Inquisition is a mere pinprick (at most 1,500) compared to what was done by atheists in our times. In the 20th century alone communist atheism has been responsible for the deaths of more than 100 million people.

In reality it is hard to prove the nonexistence of God as one can’t possibly prove a negative. And agnosticism, humanisticly attractive to some, leads to a moral indecisiveness leaving the religion question up in the air. It is hard also because there is a universal hunger in the human heart for the Transcendent.

There will always be the village atheists but those who believe in God, the vast majority, will continue to experience joy and strength in their belief in God.

MICHAEL J. SHEEHAN
Archbishop of Santa Fe
Albuquerque”

http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/letters/567122opinion05-31-07.htm