It is said that for a celebrity, there is no such thing as bad press.
If this assertion is true, then Vatican City and its most famous resident are getting great press following recent efforts to heal aschism in the Catholic Church by lifting the excommunication of British Bishop Richard Williamson.
Williamson has achieved notoriety for himself by denying the scale of Adolf Hitler's slaughter of Jews during the second World War. Given the current spirit of the times, this is an unpopular view, and the Pope and his staff seem anxious to avoid any transfer of notoriety onto the Catholic Church. Since Williamson has been enigmatic in his retractions to date, the Vatican is clearly feeling the heat.
I see a problem with all this.
Bishop Williamson is in hot water because he is denying well established facts that can be independently verified any day of the week. But as a man of faith and a guide of God's children, that is the job that he is paid to do.
The bare fact is that for quite some time now, no one has heard anything from God, any God. Many are those who claim to represent the Gods. But Gods seem to speak only through self-identified representatives and for some strange reason are reticent to contact the rest of us directly.
There have been no emails. No giant faces in the clouds. No burning bush. No DNA or fingerprints. All we have are ancient promises of great kindness if we submit to God's will, and oft repeated threats of terrible, penultimate, never-ending violence if we do not. That and books with a spotty chain of custody. Continually reinterpreted texts written by and held convincingly aloft by men, some with police records.
There has been nothing you can actually use to split an atom, or a hair.
One might justifiably hold the view that these past two thousand years of thundering silence have been very convenient for men of God.
Because from the Pope on down, all officials of the Catholic Church and its derivatives, derive their authority status and wealth from the assertion that God exists, that Jesus Christ was his son, that God is a man, and judging from popular depictions, that he is an oldish Caucasian man who abhors homosexuality, gambling and the wanton consumption of certain kinds of meat.
Any man who rises to be a Bishop in the Catholic Church derives his authority from assertions that are difficult to verify independently. In fact, it's quite safe to say that no one present today on God's green earth is able to provide irrefutable evidence of the existence of God, any God.
In the absence of verifiable proof of this phenomenon, what does clearly exist is faith.
To be fair, those who deny the existence of God have a problem. The actions of God are generally assumed to be the reason for the existence of the Universe. And when the Pope offers the view that God created the Universe according to "his" own design, he does so secure in the knowledge that so far not a man jack has been able to offer a convincing refutation.
And so the Pope and his employees really have us all by the balls.
And now the Pope is putting this Bishop Wiliamson's balls in a vice over his evinced faith that Hitler murdered no more than a few old Jews and homos nobody was going to miss anyway.
Well what does the Pope want from us? Or put another way, what does God want from us?
Are we to be sent a never ending stream of confusing messages forever onto eternity? Shall the messengers forever taint the spirit and actual words of God with the Devil's spite and Holocaust denials?
Why does the Pope want Bishop Williamson to be a man of faith on Friday, Sunday and during Lent, but at no other time?
Next up, we examine this business of God's chosen people (Jews), the exact number of them who shall be saved (exactly 144,000) and the surprising facts, according to the Bible, of the last moments of the existence of this world.
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