In short order he begins to realize how culturally determined his own values are, and sees with great clarity how much the Teduray can teach him about gender equality, tolerance for difference, including homosexuality, and generosity and cooperation.By turns funny, tender, and gripping, Wisdom from a Rainforest honors the Teduray's legacy and helps us see how much we can learn from a way of life so different from our own.
The Teduray are just one examples but there are many other gay friendly rainforest groups and Native American love of cross dressing, homosexuality and institutionalised alternative sexuality, upset moralistic Christians so much they had to send them blankets full of the plague ...sad to see this prejudice still going on today.
Well I am going to say the obvious but it needs saying anyway. The Pope is promoting hate, in just the same way as the BNP or a wahbist Muslim of the worst kind. If you condemn homosexuality as 'unnatural', you encourage just a little, may be a lot, of gay bashing and intolerance.
Several members of my family are Catholics and yes I like cathedrals and liberation theology as much as everyone else but the papacy is a bucket of sweating excrement if you ask me.
The Papacy turns Christ's teachings on their head by turning the church into the realm of Caesar, I don't want to appear all Ian Paisley here though...guess what there are protestant homophobes as well.
Tolerance seems to be part of the teaching of Christ, I believe he hung out with prostitutes and sought those who were oppressed and didn't moralise too much to them about their personal behaviour.
Surely the idea of a deity obsessed with who we do or do not sleep with is, well an obscenity.
Arguments from nature can be a little suspect, watches, the internet and cake are not natural but social....none are innately evil.
Nature is diverse, I could list nearly as many examples of homosexuality in nature as I could of gay popes....there is an argument to say that homosexuality is ecologically vital, sexuality is social as well as natural.
Essentially we have the spectacle of a man in a dress, apparently a celibate, criticising all of us who have indulged in non procreative sex, everything from oral pleasure to masturbation is a sin for this man.
Shockingly the Dalai Lama has come out with similar sentiments.
Anyway that's enought of my seasonal posting on religious 'leaders', they may have diverse theology but too many of them are more concerned with fucking than the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, ecological meltdown, war, injustice.
Have a look at the novel 'Memories of a gnostic dwarf' if you want the real dope on the popes.
Don't get me started on the Catholic Church's appalling record of child abuse or the attraction of some popes to men in tight fitting uniforms back in the last century.
STOP PRESS: assuming this to be her real site a 'controversial' Conservative councillor is backing the Pope, how will Cameron's new people friendly Tory Party react?
http://johannakaschke.blogspot.com/2008/12/pope-benedict-xvi.html
7 comments:
The Pope seems to have kept on to some of the doctrines he learned in the Hitler youth.
Mr. Andy seems to have forgotten the butch roots of Nazism, and their playground: Hitler youth.
Given the demographic freefall in Europe, the pope is right to critique the attack on heterosexuality, and to denounce the floating gender concept. While Jesus frequented outcasts, he was pretty clear on gender:
Matt 19:4 "Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female, 5 and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? 6 So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."
It's hard to put words in Jesus' mouth because he was so clear on gender as being a gift from the Father.
Speaking of fatherhood, responsible fatherhood is key to keeping mothers and children out of poverty worldwide, and children are best raised in a family made up of both biological parents in a stable marriage.
Benedict is bang on when he points out that the Church "must also protect the human being from his own destruction." Look at Europe in demographic freefall! This is not the place nor the time to brook a full attack on heterosexism: "It is necessary that there be something such as an ecology of man, understood in the proper manner," he says. And again: This human ecology, he affirmed, is based on respecting the nature of the person, and the two genders of masculine and feminine.
And that just brings us back to Jesus, and his very clear statement on gender, and its importance. Benedict is clear: "the contempt of (the language of Creation) will lead to the self destruction of humanity."
"Man wants to create himself, and to decide always and exclusively on his own about what concerns him.", and sometimes we are wrong about that.
It's a good thing that Benedict doesn't just go with the flow, because his questioning is totally valid.
Dear anon,
don't you think you should get out a bit more.
Jesus was gay friendly...sadly the pople is a heretic and full of hate.
and please don't get all biological with me, I am a parent and many worry about my kids is that their mum sometimes takes them to church...I don't think any of the local clergy are as full as discrimination as the pontiff but it is a matter of concern.
What does the pope know about parenting...
Mr Anon. I am glad that many of the Christians I meet are not as bigoted as you and the Pope. You selectively pick passages from the bible to justify your petty prejudices.
What the Pope actually said, courtesy of the Papa Ratzinger Forum:
Since faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian Creed, the Church cannot and should not limit itself to transmitting to its faithful only the message of salvation. She has a responsibility for Creation, and it should validate this responsibility in public.
In so doing, it should defend not just the earth, water and air as gifts of Creation that belong to everyone. She should also protect man from destroying himself.
It is necessary to have something like an ecology of man, understood in the right sense. It is not outdated metaphysics when the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and asks that this natural order be respected.
This has to do with faith in the Creator and listening to the language of creation, which, if disregarded, would be man's self-destruction and therefore a destruction of God's work itself.
That which has come to be expressed and understood with the term 'gender' effectively results in man's self-emancipation from Creation (nature) and from the Creator. Man wants to do everything by himself and to decide always and exclusively about anything that concerns him personally. But this is to live against truth, to live against the Spirit Creator.
The tropical rain forests deserve our protection, yes, but man does not deserve it less as a Creature of the Spirit himself, in whom is inscribed a message that does not mean a contradiction of human freedom but its condition.
The great theologians of Scholasticism described matrimony - which is the lifelong bond between a man and a woman - as a sacrament of Creation, that the Creator himself instituted, and that Christ, without changing the message of Creation, welcomed in the story of his alliance with men.
Part of the announcement that the Church should bring to men is a testimonial for the Spirit Creator present in all of nature, but specially in the nature of man, who was created in the image of God.
One must reread the encyclical Humanae vitae with this perspective: the intention of Pope Paul VI was to defend love against consumer sex, the future against the exclusive claim of the moment, and human nature against manipulation.
Derek Wall, you don't just take the biscuit but the full tin.
It's abundantly obvious from your fatuous post that that you haven't even glanced at the Gospels and that you are soaked in an antiquated anti-Catholicism which would make Jack Chick blush. But even worse than that, you are so brazenly unethical that you respond to a speech flagrantly invented in your own head rather than the actual text, which you very obviously hadn't read.
Your post was studded with howlers but picking a few at random:
"The Papacy turns Christ’s teachings on their head by turning the church into the realm of Caesar," you declared in a magnificent sentence which didn't even make any sense at all, still less demonstrate any knowledge whatsover of Christ's teachings or Roman Catholic ecclesiology.
"Tolerance seems to be part of the teaching of Christ." Rubbish.
"I believe he [Jesus] hung out with prostitutes," and told them to go and sin no more, you buffoon "and sought those who were oppressed and didn’t moralise too much to them about their personal behaviour" CRAP. Only someone who has never read the Gospels would say such a stupid thing. Jesus Christ advocated a stricter, not a laxer sexual morality (cf Matt 5: 27-28, Mark 10: 2-12, Luke 16:18). Jesus was "gay friendly" you assert again, typically without any reference to the Gospels. Now being gay-friendly is undoubtedly a good thing but it is shameless fiction to claim that the Jesus of the gospels, who insisted that he came "not to destroy the law but to fulfil it" was anything of the sort. I repeat Jesus, who preached radical self-abnegation, expounded a tighter, NOT a laxer law on sexual morality. To claim Him for liberal sexual values which he fiercely resisted in His own time, would be grossly dishonest in someone who knew what they were talking about but in your case is testimony to your profound ignorance and habitual disregard of evidence.
"Essentially we have the spectacle of a man in a dress", vestments actually "apparently a celibate, criticising all of us who have indulged in non procreative sex, everything from oral pleasure to masturbation is a sin for this man. Strung out or what… " You've never heard of, still less read Casti Connubii, Humanae Vitae, or even more basically Genesis 38: 9-10.
And where do your ludicrous notions come from? Not Christian theology or even basic Christian texts of which you are so embarassingly ignorant but a pulp historical novel, not to mention tabloid newspaper accounts, hence:
"Don’t get me started on the Catholic Church’s appalling record of child abuse." No, do get started, exhibit your evidence-free tabloid prejudice for all to see, Derek, please do.
Quite ludicrously you accuse the Pope of being a heretic, which coming from one who doesn't have a clue what the word means or the faintest idea of what the faith is, is a charge which can be safely brushed off by Peter's successor.
But for you, so steeped in prejudice and freely expressing your ignorant opinions to accuse His Holiness of being full of hate is pure hypocrisy. It is people like you who encourage the vat-loads of anti-Catholic swill to slosh around in society who are the real purveyors of hate and mendacity.
Incidentally, your replies to Anonymous, who rightly called you out on your shockingly dishonest exposition of the Pope's words were characteristically juvenile.
A riposte as pathetic as "don't you think you should get out a bit more" (question mark missing) would embarrass a teenager.
Let me make a suggestion to you in turn, Derek Wall: Don't you think you should read a bit more before you pontificate on subjects you know nothing about, eh?
And you may want to stop the exaggerated responses to speeches ostensibly made by others but actually invented in your own head. If you carry on with that kind of thing, people will think of you as a dishonest fantasist and like the fate of the boy who cried wolf, disregard everything you say.
"I don't want to appear all Ian Paisley here though...guess what there are protestant homophobes as well."
Yup, it's something they can all agree on, along with abortion, euthanasia and human supremacy. Never forget, they are all too capable of conveniently forgetting their animosity to each other and team up as People of the Book to enjoy bashing us godless heathens and idolaters ... and the environment and our fellow species.
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