Miscellanea Agnostica

At one of his recent general audiences, Pope Benedict XVI added yet another to the long list of cosmic crimes he claims is being caused by atheism. This time it’s environmental damage:

If the human creature’s relationship with the Creator weakens, matter is reduced to egoistic possession, man becomes the “final authority,” and the objective of existence is reduced to a feverish race to possess the most possible.

His argument appears to be that a lack of belief in God leads people to not value anything enough to care about the planet.

This, of course, is rubbish of the worst sort. Damage to the planet is not being caused by atheists or atheism. The principle way I know this, is because, quite simply and very obviously, the majority of the world’s population is religious. Atheists and atheism are in the minority — by a wide margin.

Simply put, if the world’s environment has been and/or is still being damaged, it’s not at the hands of atheists or atheism … it can’t be, because there aren’t enough of them to account for all the damage!

What’s more, one would think that materialists (i.e. people who don’t believe in any transcendent reality; matterial existence is all there is) would treat the material world as inherently more precious than transcendent thinkers — like the Pope and the rest of the world’s Catholics and Christians — would.

I’m afraid the Pope’s latest slanderous lie against atheists places him in my “lying liars for Jesus” club. Isn’t it time for rigid theists like the Pope to stop blaming atheism for things it cannot have caused, and instead, take responsibility for what theists themselves are doing? Or is this kind of integrity and moral uprightness too much to ask of the man who claims to be the final arbiter of morality in the world?

Hat tip: Unreasonable Faith blog.

Tags: atheism, atheists, benedict xvi, catholic, environment, environmentalism, liars for jesus, lying liars for jesus, materialism, pope benedict xvi, roman catholic church, secularism, secularists, vatican

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Christianity, Fuzzy Thinking, Metaphysics, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.