Pope a dope

The Catholic church has taken another huge step into the dark ages via the flapping lips of Pope Benedict XVI. Big Ben had been pried out of whatever Vatican mausoleum he is usually stored in and sent off on a pilgrimage of Africa (a continent, by the way, that's population is being decimated by HIV/AIDS.) Unfortunately he took with him the Vatican mind-set and said, condoms were not the answer to Africa's fight against HIV, and that condoms, "increase the problem." Well done there, Pope. I mean, if you're going to say something stupid, say something really stupid.

Now, are condoms the only answer to stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS? No, abstinence works best, but a lot of people are just not going to abstain from sex (my proof? The entirety of human history. People want to have sex and are going to have sex, so pretending that it isn't going to happen is just going to get people killed. If the Catholic church is going to get all moral and "high on their horse" about it then maybe they should take little closer look at their own history first.) It doesn't seem to me that cutting out something that saves lives merely because of some outdated belief system is stupid, verging on criminally stupid.

Of course the Vatican has never really shied away from stupid, the recent de-excommunication of the holocaust-denier, Bishop Dick Williamson being only one example. This is also something to keep in mind when Benny also said that he intended to call for "international solidarity" for Africa during the currently raging world-wide economic melt-down. He admits that the church doesn't actually have any specific economic solutions, it does however have some "spiritual and moral" suggestions. Given what some of the Catholic church's "spiritual and moral" actions have actually been (excommunicating doctors who save children, supporting child-molesters, believing that the washing-machine is the greatest advance in women's liberation in the 20th Century) I think that I'll pass, as I suspect will the international financial community. This is a good thing though as the international financial community has enough bad habits as it is.

Anyway... Humouroceros