Much to Confess

[unhappycamper]

Pope Benedict XVI and Vatican spokeman Federico Lombardi meet BBC journalists before recording the pontiff's Thought for the Day.


Much to Confess
by Richard Dawkins
12.24.10 - 11:22 AM

~snip~

More shameful than the death itself is the Christian theory that it was necessary. It was necessary because all humans are born in sin. Every tiny baby, too young to have a deed or a thought, is riddled with sin: original sin. Here's Thomas Aquinas:

". . . the original sin of all men was in Adam indeed, as in its principal cause, according to the words of the Apostle (Romans 5:12): "In whom all have sinned": whereas it is in the bodily semen, as in its instrumental cause, since it is by the active power of the semen that original sin together with human nature is transmitted to the child."

Adam (who never existed) bequeathed his "sin" in his bodily semen (charming notion) to all of humanity. That sin, with which every newborn baby is hideously stained (another charming notion), was so terrible that it could be forgiven only through the blood sacrifice of a scapegoat. But no ordinary scapegoat would do. The sin of humanity was so great that the only adequate sacrificial victim was God himself.

That's right. The creator of the universe, sublime inventor of mathematics, of relativistic space-time, of quarks and quanta, of life itself, Almighty God, who reads our every thought and hears our every prayer, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God couldn't think of a better way to forgive us than to have himself tortured and executed. For heaven's sake, if he wanted to forgive us, why didn't he just forgive us? Who, after all, needed to be impressed by the blood and the agony? Nobody but himself.

Ratzinger has much to confess in his own conduct, as cardinal and pope. But he is also guilty of promoting one of the most repugnant ideas ever to occur to a human mind: "Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness" (Hebrews 9:22).

[Sal Minella]

1. Many, Many years ago I took "instruction" from the RC priest

and now I am reminded how Holy Mother Church has her powerful grip on a baby as soon as it's born, by convincing the "believing" mother that her newborn is already lost in sin and is doomed, and only a guy in a long black dress can "save" the baby from its nasty fate.

What a godawful thing to do to people, especially new mothers. And the church has been getting by with this for centuries.

I actually heard a RC bishop on Public Radio tell an interviewer (who was asking about the importance of Jesus in the church) that the weight of tradition and dogma in the Catholic Church is so great that it doesn't matter whether historical Jesus actually existed or not. It doesn't matter!

- - - -

So it is the semen that "transmits human nature to the child," is it, St. Thomas. Good to know. The ovum is just an empty shell, as a woman is an empty nothing unless she's pregnant.