freeinfidel

Speaking on his US tour, the Pope has recalled some of the horrors of his own past. But only some.

While in New York, the Pope addressed a Seminary in Yonkers and said:

“My own years as a teenager were marred by a sinister regime that thought it had all the answers.”

It turns out he was talking about Nazism, a cause he briefly served, and not about Roman Catholicism, his current brand of totalitarianism. He went on to praise respect for human rights. Really? What, like the right to control one’s own fertility? Like the right to use condoms to reduce the risk of AIDS? No, thought not. So I guess he favours only some human rights.

An anti-terrorism campaign by London’s police forces is exploiting the public’s paranoia in the hope of catching would-be terrorists in the act. It will also have the effect of making life even harder for press photographers. But maybe the erosion of press freedom might be seen as a bonus by the Metropolitan Police.

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If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. How often do we hear this from those who would promote surveillance, increased police powers and other forms of social control? But there is a basic flaw at the heart of this thinking: who decides what constitutes ‘hiding’? How do you decide what is acceptable behaviour?

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The ordeal of British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who was jailed for blasphemy in Sudan, ended quickly. We can be grateful for that. But the religiously oriented regime in which she was convicted remains unchanged. Who will be its next victim?

It was an act of pure malice. The school secretary, who had been fired, reported Gibbons as a way of getting revenge on the school. Such grudges, such petty behaviour, are a fact of life everywhere. What is significant here is that Sudan’s laws, shaped and enforced by religious observance, provided a mechanism by which an otherwise trivial act - the naming of a teddy bear - could be exploited to extract a savage retaliation.

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Like all totalitarian systems, organised religion is not just intolerant of dissenting opinion or alternative ideas - it is vulnerable to them. That’s why it must crush free speech.

The call, by certain Catholic organisations, for a boycott of the movie The Golden Compass, reveals just how afraid the church is of its adherents being exposed to ideas beyond its own dogma.

The movie is an adaptation of the first book in Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy. (The book is known as ‘Northern Lights’ outside the US, but, predictably, the film has taken the American title.)

The Pullman books have been criticised in the past as an attack on religion - Catholicism in particular. It has even been suggested that Pullman wrote them because he was aghast at the camouflaged proselytising for christianity in C S Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles. He has gone on record denying both charges.

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Naomi Wolf’s prescient warning…