I have been following Pope Benedict utterances on Islam in various media. His seeming endorsement of the view that Islam spread through the sword, had some of us across the world choking with anger, many of us choking with the sheer embarassment of a Head of State being an utter idiot, and some others of us choking with chortles of guffaws. Mine was actually a combination of all theree.

Anger - because in an already polarised world - a head of state and a head of religion has no business behaving like an absolute idiot. While people are dying of hunger, women getting raped for getting educated, people dying of AIDS while organised religion demands prevention of sex education rather than prevention of AIDS, where women still believe that burning themselevs to death with their husband is required, quoting some bigot from the 14th century to stir the pot of bigotry seems to be a good way to divert attention from the issues. After all, we must accept that all fundamentalists have a common agenda. And this current Pope is probably as fundamentalist as any of them. And I define a fundamentalist view as one that believes his/her way is superior to all others and consequently all other views are inferior to his/her’s.

Embarassment - because this kind of stupidity is horrifyingly embarassing. It is like watching a Ben Stiller film or Kareena Kapoor trying to ape a Helen in Don. A kind of horrified fascination as to how much lower can it sink - and they show you :). I have been following the Pope’s condoms cause aids’ logic and his abortionists are sinners thread - but this is by far the most embarassing in its stupidity. It is a bit like quoting the Nazis to describe the allies in the second world war - after all the 14th century was a period of war between the ‘civilizations’.
Amusement because I love it when the pot calls the kettle black. The sheer gall and hypocrisy of his statement made me chuckle. How does the Pope think that Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, spread. What did he think that the armies of Spain and Portugal did in South and Central America and in whose name; what did he think that happened in Europe between the time Charlamagne converted and the begninig of the Crusades, what did he think happened in Africa - enslaving a people because they are heathen and then coverting them, and what about the rights of Jews in Christian Europe - even before the 1930’s! And what was his own Church’s position when it came to the Holocaust or even women’s rights, or in the fight against AIDS. Or indeed to knowledge, science and human rights. If left to the Church - Europe would still be in the dark ages, women would still be barefoot, perpetually pregnant and in the kitchen and there would still be the Divine Right of Kings.

If it comes to a choice of organised religions - there is not much to choose from. They all have their moments of glory, compassion, wisdom and caring and long centuries of just the opposite. The Pope’s attempt to score brownie points - in this context - is simply stupid.

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