Pages

Saturday 17 January 2015

The punching pope

The pope announced that anyone who insults his mother can expect a punch. Well, naturally, I forgive him for his sin, but I'm quite surprised that he would say such a thing, even as a joke, because some people will take him seriously. Whatever happened to turning the other cheek?

If someone smote the pope on his right cheek, he's supposed to "turn to him the other also".
 But, of course,  in practice, the pope is just a fallible human like the rest of us, and says stupid stuff without thinking, just like the rest of us.

In the pope's opinion, "one cannot make fun of faith". In a sense, he's right - it's too easy a target. Making fun of someone dressed as the pope does, would be like making fun of someone dressed like a clown. There's no point - we can already see the absurdity.

But in another sense, he's deeply wrong. It would be wrong to poke fun at someone on account of their height, or hair colour. But it's fine to criticise ideas. If you think that an idea is wrong, it's perfectly fine to say so, and if it's so wrong as to be absurd, that that's worth pointing out.

And if you don't think that religion can be absurd, have a look at  Scientology for example, or Mormonism. 

Or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
 

2 comments:

  1. You don't need ANY religion to be a nice kind person. A world without any religion would be a far safer place We should all worship the Sun page 3 is my favourite

    ReplyDelete
  2. I read that they're covering up on page three

    ReplyDelete