Feeding The Fish

It’s really seeming like That Pope is abandoning all traces of subtlety. It’s not quite on the same scale as saying the indigenous people in America were ‘longing for Christ‘ before it was forced upon them (making it all ok) and saying Muhammad did nothing good with his life, but it’s notable. First, he made it possible for people to use an old form of mass that is specifically anti-Jewish.

However, the older rite’s prayers calling on God to ‘lift the veil from the eyes’ of the Jews and to end ‘the nblindness of that people so that they may acknowledge the light of your truth, which is Christ’ - used just once a year during the Good Friday service - have sparked outrage.

Yesterday the Anti-Defamation League, the American-based Jewish advocacy group, called the papal decision a ‘body blow to Catholic-Jewish relations’.

And now bizarrely the Vatican is claiming exclusivity on being ‘the church’, apparently being the ‘one true universal church’ wasn’t enough, now they won’t even acknowledge other denominations as being ‘churches’. That’s great inter-faith action there.
To be honest, I really don’t think these are on scale with previous gaffs. They’re massive steps backwards in terms of ‘playing nice with others’, but not real departures from doctrine. ‘Darkness’ might be just a tad insulting, but people of one faith thinking that others are wrong and wishing for them to renounce their wrongness is hardly uncommon but It’s the focus on Jews here that’s the real issue, ‘Not only are we righter than everyone in general, but that group in specific is wronger’. It’s like he took a checklist of all the people John Paul II built better relations with and set out to piss them all off one by one.

Perhaps this is just a bad series of events and things will pick up. The optimist in me shall never die.

I’ve got a new job so my posts here might drop off a bit but I couldn’t resist commenting on this.

So Bush reduced Scooter’s sentence from an actual sentence to just having to pay a lot of money (I doubt he’ll have much trouble coming up with it). I’m sure this comes as a huge shock to everyone. What’s more fun is watching James Forsyth try to defend it in The Spectator.

From the basis that the jurors (while quite sure he was guilty of hell of purjury) not being sure why they were trying him instead of the higher-ups who, you know, actually did it, Forsyth tries to argue that because Libby was loyal to the President, he was right to pardon him. Riiight. Libby is the former chief of staff to vice president Cheney, who recently tried to claim he wasn’t a member of the executive branch in order to escape handing files over. This is the class of clown we’re working with here.

Just because the much bigger crime nearly went unpunished does that make all others non-existent? I’d absolutely agree that Libby shouldn’t be the one on trial here, but the fact remains that Libby lied in order to cover up a crime. The reason why the people who deserve to be in jail aren’t going to trial is because Libby and people like him lied.

Libby’s readiness to put his boss’s interests ahead of his own throughout the case culminated in his defence team’s decision not to call Cheney to testify at the trial.

Yes…how self-sacrificing! He was willing to cover up his boss’s crimes instead of telling the truth, How noble!

This whole investigation and trial has been a political affair from the start. So it is only appropriate that it should end with a political decision, not a legal one.

This began as a political move to damage a political opponent by endangering lives, and ends with the President deciding to let someone off the hook for political reasons, they’ve abandoned all hints of subtly now. I think this is great for the narrative value; if the President had done the right thing and let justice progress it wouldn’t be nearly as good a story.

Way back in 2001 after 9/11 the (now deceased) Jerry Farwell said:

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

Now while this repulses me, I could take some comfort in the fact that he lived a very long way away and could have no impact on my life whatsoever. However, Iain Dale just pointed out the Telegraph’s piece on the Bishop of Carlisle comments regarding the recent flooding:

While those who have been affected by the storms are innocent victims, the bishops argue controversially that the flooding is a result of Western civilisation’s decision to ignore biblical teaching.

The Rt Rev Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle, argued that the floods are not just a result of a lack of respect for the planet, but also a judgment on society’s moral decadence.

“This is a strong and definite judgment because the world has been arrogant in going its own way,” he said. “We are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation, as well as the environmental damage that we have caused.”

“We are in serious moral trouble because every type of lifestyle is now regarded as legitimate,” he said.

“In the Bible, institutional power is referred to as ‘the beast’, which sets itself up to control people and their morals. Our government has been playing the role of God in saying that people are free to act as they want,” he said, adding that the introduction of recent pro-gay laws highlighted its determination to undermine marriage.

“The sexual orientation regulations [which give greater rights to gays] are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance.”

He expressed his sympathy for those who have been hit by the weather, but said that the problem with “environmental judgment is that it is indiscriminate”.

This isn’t the ravings of a fanatic on the far side of the world, he’s a leader in the established religion and as far as I can work out, he’s next in line to sit in the House of Lords on the seniority basis the Lords Spiritual work on. He’s really saying that people have lost their lives because we as a society don’t hate and discriminate enough. If we’re going to have people who sprout this sort of thing in Parliament, I’d really rather they were elected so we could have some constituents to blame for them.

Fortunately the Bishops of Liverpool and London redeem the Church later on in the article by reducing it from a god-sanctioned punishment for a gay-tolerant society to a wake-up call of the effect people can have on the environment. While I’m hesitant to connect every piece of dangerous weather to climate change, this is a far more intelligent and constructive line to take and helps me restore a little of my faith in humanity.