Popewatch, Day 1

I’m just appalled by all the politics surrounding this. Those “Gondola Veterans for Truth” ads were the last straw.

Purple smoke = (Oh give me a break, they’re all gay anyways), either that or they just turned the church over to an annoying, singing dinosaur.

I thought red smoke was accompanied by one of the cardinals screaming “I’m melting, I’m melting! Oh, my beautiful wickedness!”

From the Ratzinger Fan Club website guestbook:

” Look at all the wickedness! Look at this sick world! Who could still have his doubts about the urgency to proclaim new crusades?!! Nobody could! Ratzy is a tough guy! He’s allright! He can do this job and lead us to final victory! Halleluja! God bless yo’ll!”

Sounds like Arnold has cast his vote.

CNN (Catholic News Network) is having an hay day with all the news to report (This just in: the Pope is still dead) There is nothing like power, politics and secrecy to get people’s attention. The fancy outfits just cinched it.

They have decided on a campaign song “Smokin’ in the Boys Room”.

Good one, Mary! Smoking in the boys room…one toke over the line, sweet Jesus!

Yes, Catholic News Network is a joke.

If only those cardinals were loose enough to toke up. But, they DO drink

My poor dogs are confused by all of this. My husband keeps referring to his eminence as “The Poop”. They are most interested in all reports on poop. 8-D

Heh. www.vatican.va is blocked by my company’s SurfControl. Objectional content, I guess.

Anybody but Ratzinger, anybody but Ratzinger…

“Objectionable content”, I mean.

A little late on this addition, but:

White AND black smoke coming out of the chimney and windows, cardinals screaming and jumping out of the windows: “The Vatican is on fire. Please send help.”

I missed the red carpet walk with Joan Rivers… What was Cardinal Ratzinger wearing? Was he clad in a crimson robe, shoulder cape and pointy hat? Weather wreaks havoc on my cable!

I’ve been listening to the news. Every commentator they bring on has the same look–that haunted, “what the hell just happened” glaze. Their voices carry that note of absolute incredulity. And they’re all trying to put such a brave face on the news. I’ve heard a lot of, “Well, this is a decision that I suppose we should have seen coming…” Like they’re trying to convince themselves that everything’s fine, but they just can’t quite reconcile it.

I’ve seen this somewhere before… Recently, I think… But I’ll be DAMNED if I can place where… Oh, blast, I’d better clean up this sarcasm before someone slips.

Oh, and here’s to Interesting Times.

It’s just a play on that old Italian saying “After a fat Pope, a skinny Pope.” Only in this case it’s “After a Nazi-resister, a Nazi.”

Thank Lobster I’m a UU.

Would “We don’t give a Ratzinger’s ass” be an acceptable addition the College of Cardinals’ stock phrases when anyone suggests they might have made a wiser, more forward-looking choice?

On the other hand, could Ratzinger wind up being the Earl Warren of the Truly Supreme Court? Just a thought - sort of.

Another UUer for a little sanity in the “faith community,” which strikes me as a global East L.A., since the world’s great religions have quite a history of producing crips and a lot of spilled blood.

I don’t know why anyone would have been hoping that the new pope would be able to make everything all right. Did anybody really have that hope?

Nothing about this choice surprises me at all.

By the way, isnt it true that “Eggs” Ratzinger has until now been the head of the part of the church that used to be officially called “the holy inquisition.”

To edit my previous post:

Prostate should be “prostrate.” Though if things go the way I expect in the future, the former may be more appropriate.

And, of course, Almighty Lobster with a “y”

The Inquisition - What a show
The Inquisition - Here we go
I bet you’re wishin’ that we’d go away
But the Inquisition’s here and it’s here to stay.

–

Cliff was John Ratzenberger, but you did make me check.

The new pope, Benedict XVI nee Josef Ratzinger, was the head of the organization formerly known as the Inquisition. So, let’s all give a hearty welcome to Pope Torquemada!

Torquemada? Let’s face it, we’re not gonna torquemada anything! (Hope you weren’t drinking Dr Peppers, Katie)
So. Who’s paying up? If I recall correctly (and I do), I think I might have called this a couple of weeks ago. (He shoots! He scores! The crowd goes home!)
So Ratz the Kool Katz looked pretttty slinky in his white pinafore and crimson cape. Course, he just looked like someone hiding BBQ rib stains and pretending to be a Super Hero. What’s that? He really thinks he can’t fall? No, no, that’s “infallible”…

I have a technical question that I’ve long been too ashamed to ask. But here goes:
When I click the Comments link, the windows that appears is quite small and not resizable. Thus, when one of you inserts a link in his or her own comments, say, to another Web site, clicking that link opens the new Web site in the same small, nonresizable window. If I’m lucky, I can see what the URL is and enter it in a new browser window. If not…
So, is there a way I can resize this tiny window? Is there some other obvious-to-techies solution?

And, oops, the window that opens with the “Comments” link should be resizable. When it opens in Opera or Firefox, it is resizable. In MS Internet Explorer, it isn’t, for some reason know only to the goons in Redmond.

Sorry, I misunderstood your question, and didn’t check it our first. What I wrote is a workaround, but drop IE like a hot rock and get Firefox. Free.

Ann,
The easiest way is to click on the “Posted by Adam Felber at …” section in stead of “Comments”
This puts the entire post and comments in a full format and when you click on a link it does so full page.

Are they sure that if we give them plenty of combustables they can’t go back and do it over until they get it right?

Ratzinger’s pope? Crap, he looks like Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Dracula! Yeah, that really makes me want to join the Catholic church.

Jerry and Murray, thanks for the advice. I, um, actually work at that place in Redmond, although not in a technical capacity, so I think I’d better stick with their products!

Emmarie…you mean they picked someone to burn? That is one tough conclave!

I do have to admit, the recent physical trend to newly-installed figures of power is pretty disturbing. I mean, we’ve got Chertoff, who’s got that 6-month-dead corpse thing going. We’ve got Yuschenko, who looks like something you’d expect to find just outside a medieval village with an “unclean” sign around his neck. We’ve got Rat-zinger, who looks like something fished out of the Hudson after a bad night with the Torrelli mob. I’m almost afraid of what the next one will look like. Maybe 7+ feet tall with a zipper across his forehead and bolts in his neck.

Hm. Maybe then we’d learn to take reponsibility for the monsters we create…

Oh, I’ve got nothing against Yuschenko. But you’ve got to admit, since the poisoning, he does have that one-foot-out-of-the-grave look. I’ve seen the “before” pictures. He used to be a damned handsome man. Dioxin poisoning is an ugly thing.

Doesn’t change the fact that he no longer has that healthy glow about him. Nor does it necessarily put him in the category of the monsters among us that we need to recognize.

But, Murray, at the time you speak of, the Church was the only game in town. There are so many more options today - including “None of the Above” - that people can - and do - vote with their feet, rather than frustrate themselves trying to get a battleship to turn on a dime.

Okay- we didn’t get the kind of pope we wanted, but um… I think it’s pretty safe to say that they were not picking a pope for us. How many of us are Catholic to begin with? I mean it’s one thing to badmouth our goober of a president, after all he is our president- he directly affects our lives, but the pope? C’mon… how is a new conservative pope, (you know, as opposed to a moderate or progressive pope,) going to change a thing for any of us? Come on people, we have enough evil at home to snark about.

So what you are saying is that you cannot imagine the pope (as leader of the largest, and dare i say most powerful, politically speaking, religious organization) would have any control over governmental policies on any issue. Look what happened when Bush got into office, he bowed to the wishes of his “constituants” and withheld funding to oversees programs which supported families in poorer countries who recieved birth control. Yup, womans health clinics, which 99% of their work was passing out birth control and information, delivering babies, and doing surgical sterilizations, got their funding cut because it wasn’t kosher (to mix religious metaphors) to give out information on birth control or abortion. Giving out any information that would cause anything but all fertility all the time is evidentally a sin. Who knew that babies babies babies are always a good thing. I suppose it is one way to make sure the congregation keeps growing though.

I don’t think that I’d be the person to lead the new reformation, I’m one of those “none of the above” people.

Tess — I don’t know how much further the “no condoms” agenda CAN be taken. The position is already about as extreme as it can be, isn’t it? Short of rounding up and shooting people who use condoms or artificial birth control, what more can Benedict XVI do?

I’m with you. It’s unconscionable for any organization to encourage rampant population growth, when just about every problem we face can be traced to human overpopulation. Eventually we as a species will begin to suffer worldwide for having reached Earth’s carrying capacity, but until then we’ll just have more people continuing to make unwise decisions.

I always thought that one of the responsibilities of being a Christian of any flavor is to take care of the poor. Seems to me that putting energy into coercing people in developing countries to keep having babies, instead of focusing on providing health care (including contraception) and education to the people who already exist, goes counter to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Common sense, right?

As a recovering Catholic, I can’t say that I’m a bit surprised at the choice. The American Catholic Church is not the largest branch of the Catholic Church. Right now the most dynamic growth is occuring in Africa, a very conservative Christian area. Latin America is actually losing Catholics to the evangelical Christian sector, and even though American Catholics disagree with many of the rules of the Catholic Church, they simply remain in the Church and disobey the rules. That’s what I did for several years until I decided that was crazy and joined (hey, Allison!) the Episcopal Church.

I’ve tried to understand the Catholic Church’s stand on birth control. That one line in Genesis that says “be fruitful and multiply”? Is that it? What about the many references in the New Testament about being a good steward? How good a steward are we being to this earth if we overpopulate it and deplete its resources?

I’ve tried to understand why priests can’t marry. Paul said that it would be better to marry “if you wouldn’t burn”. Well, it sounds to me like we’ve got a lot of fricaseeing priests.

I gave up, though, when I got to homosexuality. Too much law, not enough spirit.

“I’ve tried to understand the Catholic Church’s stand on birth control.”

I think it basically boils down to “the more babies catholics make, the more catholics there will be”. Really, it’s that simple. Where I come from (Quebec), the catholic church had up to the sixties a HUGE power on people, especially the large poorly educated rural population, and the priests constantly exhorted women to make as many babies as was humanly possible. It was common for them to threaten with excommunication women who wanted to take a breather. The point was to grow the population of catholics (especially since the mainly french-speaking catholics were at odds with the mainly protestant english speakers). Consequently most families were enormous (my paternal grandma had 13 live siblings; my maternal grandma had 16). And they largely stayed poor. It did make a lot of catholics for the nation; it also played a large part in the massive disaffection that the population developed towards the church in the sixties, and that is generalized today. These days most every french speaker in Qc is still baptized catholic, but most catholic under 60 stays as far away from churches as is possible. And the pope is viewed more as a laughingstock than anything else.

For a very long time, I’ve been trying to find a Biblical source which supports the Catholic Church’s position on birth control and/or condoms. If The Man From Nazareth didn’t consider it important enough to harp on it for awhile, why does the Priest Caste dwell so heavily on it? In fact a lot of so-called dogma and doctrine seems to have been concocted by a bunch of guys who, themsleves, have forsworn to participate in any manner of behavior which might get one to thinking about using condoms. And one more small point, where did Jesus say “Love they neighbor as thyself, except for lezbos and faggots”? I could have sworn his Church was supposed to be based on the concept of love, forgiveness, acceptance, turning the other cheek. But never mind me — I’m one of those who believe that paganism makes more sense than following a religion which has been severely distorted from its original tenets and precepts.

As a non-Catholic, my only real concern about the election of the neo-Torquemada is that, by his death, John Paul the Great has dropped the torch of spreading Christ’s gospel of love, and that now there is no one to pick up that torch and carry on.

I can understand why the Catholic church wants to keep the Dark Ages status quo: keep ‘em dumb, keep ‘em scared, keep ‘em paying tithes. (Hey, that works for Bush’s policies too!)
What confuses the hell out of me is why so many of the Catholic church’s natural predators (fundies) agree so foolishly with these precepts.
Once again, we have to assume that all these organisations believe in Life At Any Cost. Quantity is NOT equal to Quality. Sigh.

Of course no on one mentions the fact that there was one married pope, Peter The Apostle.

Mike Z,
Sure the world can hold the people who are alive today but only because most live with a fraction of the resources that we consume. If the rest of the world went on a super sized beef diet, drove SUVs, lived in McMansions, like us, how much of the world’s surface would need to be diverted to growing crops in order to feed the cattle so that everyone can eat steaks. How much C02 would the world produce? How long would it take to short circuit our climate?
The good thing is that most of the world lives with very little, the bad thing is that they all want to be like us.

Auros,
Interesting, didn’t know that one. One more thing to hold against the catholic church - yey !

Mike Z, I think it is alo flat-out impossible for the average American to have the standard of living enjoyed by the average American without going so heavily into debt that they must then dedicate their lives to trying to pay it off - which is exactly what is happening. I think our economy has become based on the presumption of the existence of a stable “debtor class”, whose stabilty (lack of job mobility) is dictated by their need to maintain their current levels of income and “benefits”. Without people going so deeply into debt for their needless expenditures, the economy would lose its pool of highly-skilled wage slaves. And then where would we be?

Hey, didja hear they elected a pope?

Ah. I thought the “enjoyed” bit referred to the heart disease and colorectal cancer brought on by the all-beef diets, the crappy gas mileage and poor handling of the SUV’s, and the dangerously shoddy construction of the McMansions. All this and a lifetime of debt, too!

Err, I don’t know, I heard some of the older boys talking about a “pope”, and thought I would sound cool if I mentioned it, too.

Murray -

Thanks, and I certainly understand your point. If I say that there’s enough resources to go around, I don’t think that it’s just fine to just keep pulling them all from the environment until it’s dry. If everyone wants to be exactly similar to us, then we definitely do have a really big (I guess I should say “bigger”) problem. I hope, however, that it doesn’t turn out to be the zero-sum game that you describe. I also wonder how much they really do want to be exactly similar to us.

Anyway, this is all very complex, and I can’t claim to be any sort of expert. But I do see some signs for optimism, such as the apparent fact that market forces are quite close to favoring alternative energy sources over fossil fuels, and that various international (non-western) movements for sustainability are gaining momentum.

On a side note, although some may regard it as irrational, some people actually do think that humans are substantially more important than the vast majority of other species. However, I think that many (not all) of the environmentalist conclusions are still valid from that vantage point. In other words, humans would be better off if they live more like good environmentalists.

“God said take care of my zoo -
I made these creatures for you.
So he won’t mind if we
Wipe out a species or two.”

Libretto, MASS, Leonard Bernstein

After Murray’s last post, I couldn’t resist it…

Pete in VDL,

Bingo! There is, however, a pro-environment movement taking shape among a segment of the evangelical movement, being led by liberal evangelicals (oh, yeah, a minority of evangelicals, to be sure), but it has the potential to catch on because of fundamentalists who grew up loving nature and accepting the idea that the concept of stewardship applies to our relationship to nature. It’s a sentiment and they are a group which can be tapped into, once they understand we are actually destroying the creation. That’s why so much right wing propaganda regarding things like global warming is aimed at conservative Christians. It’s more than just wanting their votes, it’s wanting to make sure they don’t become environmentalists, or at least that they are too busy worrying about outlawing gay marriage, killing terrorists, and keeping their guns.

Conservative Republican has, of course, become an oxymoron (Benjamin Disraeli called a conservative government an organized hypocrisy, and man does that ever fit our current govermnent). One can simply drop the oxy in describing our Glorious Leader.

That would be a fat 5″ stack with a spark arrester and metal flake fire and brimstone paint job.

By the way, was the above spam or can we work Cialis into this somehow?