[FoRK] " Atheists behind the greatest cruelty, says Pope"

[Tom Higgins]

I found the link for this on the great blog OVO, which included a
picture that I think goes a ways into showing why this is ust more of
the same form the usual suspects

http://www.ovo127.com/blog/2007/12/jonathan-petre-atheists-behind-greatest.html
 Im posting  Trevor's commentary before the article simply because I
think it has some context to what is being slung around here.

"
[Article continues at link. Image above depicts a devoted and
life-long Roman Catholic, never once censored by the Pope, leaving a
house of worship. Socialism, the true target of the Pope's missive,
has indeed killed so many people that it is almost showing up on the
charts as a distant number two compared to the body count of those
killed by religion. Give it a few thousand more years and maybe it
will be an honest contender. For now, nothing competes with religion
in the murder department. What is it about religion that makes people
so sure it is morally right to kill? Faith. Faith is not to believe
where there is a lack of evidence. Faith is to go on believing when
there is counter-evidence. That is where socialism and religion meet.
Religion has an invisible monster that lives in the sky on its side,
which justifies everything it does. Socialism has the Material Concept
of History on its side, which justifies everything it does. I'm not a
fan of faith, religion or socialism. I'm a fan of acknowledging that
humanity will inevitably err, and the best we can do is limit the
scope of our errors before we make them and learn from our errors
after we make them. That is how democracy and science are linked; they
grow on a mountain of errors, not from a soil of Absolute Truth. -
Trevor Blake]"

" Atheists behind the greatest cruelty, says Pope

By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent
Last Updated: 3:43am GMT 03/12/2007

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.
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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.

But ideologies such as Marxism that hold that humans have to establish
social justice because God does not exist had been proved wrong by
history.

The idea that man can do what God cannot by creating a new salvation
on earth was "both presumptuous and intrinsically false."

He added: "It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest
forms of cruelty and violations of justice.

"A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope."

Marxism, the Pope wrote, had left behind "a trail of appalling
destruction" because it failed to realise that man could not be
"merely the product of economic conditions". For man to be redeemed,
he also needs God's unconditional love.

Benedict XVI, who was elected in 2005, is working on a third
encyclical on the theme of social justice which is due to be released
next year."