ADMIN: The Death of the Pope

[bluesqueak]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Kathryn" <kcawte at n...> 
wrote:

> His rulings on contraception were directly responsible for 
> intensifying the AIDS crisis in some areas of the world. It's all 
> very well claiming that fidelity will protect you but if you're 
> being faithful, probably in part due to lack of time and energy, 
> as you struggle to make ends meet and feed your 8 children while 
> living in a slum somewhere, but your husband is off screwing an    
> infected prostitute then it won't do you the slightest bit of
> good. I understand that the Catholic Church believes contraception 
> to be wrong but this isn't a perfect world and the church should 
> have been making a stand saying that the condom is the lesser of 
two evils in my opinion.


Did you notice that you blamed the Pope rather than the husband?{g} 

The nasty fact is that a 100% devotion of the human population to 
abstinence and/or fidelity to one partner would kill most sexually 
transmitted diseases stone dead within a very few years. It'd 
probably also decrease the murder rate and the divorce rate. {g}

Is it likely to happen? No. Just as a murder free world isn't likely 
to happen. Should the Pope have stopped preaching in favour of the 
abstinence/fidelity his church believes in, when the consequences of 
following that policy are good, and the consequences of not 
following it can be positively suicidal?

I'd say no, just as I'd say he shouldn't have stopped preaching 
against murder because people get murdered every day. Should he have 
told people that if they *must* practice infidelity, at least use a 
condom (which his church also doesn't believe in)? 

Put it this way: carrying a handgun is illegal in the UK. Should I 
tell someone 'don't carry a handgun, it's wrong, people get killed: 
but if you *must*, make sure the safety's on'?

I'm not a Roman Catholic; I was educated in a Convent School but 
joined the Church of England - which probably tells you how much I 
disagree with the views of the late Pope. Certainly I disagree with 
his views on contraception. But ... actions have consequences. Your 
feckless husband killed his wife by giving her AIDS, just as some 
feckless teenager killed an innocent bystander by missing the gang 
rival he was shooting at. You can try to solve these problems (and 
the suffering of the innocent) by handing out condoms - or by 
issuing bullet proof jackets to the general populace.

But there's a deeper root to the problem. The Pope preached that the 
true solution was not condoms, it was for the husband (or wife) to 
not sleep around. I might disagree with his approach, argue that 
there should be a belt and braces approach of preaching fidelity 
*and* wide availability of condoms. But I wouldn't call him a 
hypocrite, or say that his preaching was evil. Because he was right -
 fidelity *is* a true solution.  We want to make concessions to 
human frailty; he argues that 'human frailty' is just a convenient 
excuse for evil conduct. But both of us agree that we don't want the 
wife to get AIDS; what we're arguing about is the best method of 
preventing that.

I'll pass on Liberation Theology, because I don't know enough about 
it. :-)

> Kathryn:
> People are praising him for standing firm and having strong 
> beliefs - but for me many of those beliefs were wrong and I don't 
> really care how honestly he believed he was doing right I believe 
> he was doing wrong.

But there's a difference between 'evil' and 'that's not the best 
method'. I don't think he had the best solution to the AIDS crisis; 
but he had what he thought was a solution, he preached it - and 
practiced it himself {g}. 

You seem to be blaming him because other people decided to do 
things  that his church taught were wrong - and then bad 
consequences follow from those acts.  They made bad choices 
according to his doctrine, choices that he preached against, and yet 
he's to blame because he didn't provide a way of escaping the 
consequences.  

Myself, I'd put the high level of poverty in Africa as a much more 
important reason for the frightening level of AIDS in that 
continent. Poverty means most people can't get a good education, and 
so don't know how the disease spreads, or how to treat it, and often 
they can't afford the medicines to treat it. Condoms sound like a 
nice, quick, simple solution - but can everyone afford them? Can 
debt-ridden governments afford to give them out for free? 

But I accept that other people might disagree with me on that. 

Pip