“As long as there has been one true god there has been killing in his name.”

Getting rid of God didn’t make it better.

As long as there’ve been humans, there’s been killing. One true God just gives us another excuse.

Oh, and Amen, Brother!!!!

Nice try Suzanne. The implication clearly was that religion is superior to atheism because those “greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice”. He was clearly trying to say we need to strengthen religion because atheism is “bad”… which is crap.

” He was clearly trying to say we need to strengthen religion because atheism is “bad”… which is crap.”

Actually, that wasn’t what the passage was about:

He writes:

The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is—in its origins and aims—a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world’s suffering, protest against God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power—whatever beguiling ideological mask it adopts—will cease to dominate the world.

Religion doesn’t “need” strengthening. It’s good as it is.

and everything to do with the people who pervert and abuse a given philosophy or belief structure in the quest for power and control over others.

The pope might agree to some extent to that proposition. He argues for the necessity of freedom in his encylical. He says that structures (which are necessary) can never replace authentic freedom. There must always be the freedom to choose evil.

Shoah was “inspired by a neopagan racist ideology“, and shortly thereafter when folks started denying that Hitler was a Christian.

Hitler did not believe in any kind of classic Christianity. He did not believe in the divinity of Jesus, or his salvific sacrifice, or the sacraments, or the Church. And if that isn’t proof enough, the pope wrote a whole encylical against Nazi ideology– in German so he’d get the message. It was called Mitt Brennender Sorge. Hitler was not a “good Catholic boy”. Not by a long shot. The Pope did not think so. Hitler repeatedly denied basic Catholic ideas such as the equality of the races, the right to life, and he persecuted the Catholic Church for standing up for her doctrines. Hardly the mark of a faithful Catholic.

And do you not think that a good part of the protest against the injustices of the world and of world history was because the church was ultimately recognized as the cruel, unjust, corrupt, and hypocritical, organization that it was (and
IMO, continues to be)?

A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested.

Exactly!

Hitler did not believe in any kind of classic Christianity. ….. the pope wrote a whole encylical against Nazi ideology

Sorry SUZANNE, Hitler quite obviously believed himself to be a Christian and publicly acknowledged his Lord and Saviour…. btw, what did the pope of the day have to say about the Nazis?

…
AAAND that random comment is brought to you by the rest of the paragraph being cut off. In my copy-paste as I wandered away and then back again.

However, since it is sufficiently surreal, I will leave it.

Surreal is fun.

Regarding the observation “Hitler was not a “good Catholic boy”. Not by a long shot. The Pope did not think so.” , we recall:

The fact that the Curia is now making its peace with Fascism shows that the Vatican trusts the new political realities far more than did the former liberal democracy with which it could not come to terms. …The fact that the Catholic Church has come to an agreement with Fascist Italy …proves beyond doubt that the Fascist world of ideas is closer to Christianity than those of Jewish liberalism or even atheistic Marxism…

- Adolf Hitler in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter, February 29, 1929, on the new Lateran Treaty between Mussolini’s fascist government and the Vatican