Across the pond

Pope Benedict XIV is a decent human being. There is much to agree with in what he has said about the major problems facing the world in which we live in the llast few days. He deserves a gold star for focussing on human fallibility. 

Individual human beings often get it terribly wrong, however clever they are.

The Pope, of course, is no exception. He is quite wrong in his suggestion that Britain is in the grip of ‘aggressive secularism’. Richard Dawkins deserves that label, and in some of his latest pronouncments his tone is as strident and doctrinaire as the religious fundamentalists. But nearly all the other leading secularists use patient argument, and are all too ready to admit that there is still a lot we have not discovered about the creation of the world and just how the human mind works. Even Stephen Hawkins is much more tentative, even though he has now come to believe from his only speciality that the creation of the world probably happened without the guidance of a God-like figure.

Over-whelmingly the media coverage, on television, in the newspapers, and on the radio, has been sympathetic.

Benedict’s problem is that, now  he is Pope, he has an impossible job description. He is supposed to be ‘infallible’. Not to debate and discuss with other gifted human beings, including scientists researching in relenant areas. But to take advantage of being the only human being with a direct line to God. So when he is deciding what to do his aides protect him from all human contact. He goes alone in the garden to talk  to God.

God does not reply, as he allegedly did with Moses, by writing down  his instructions on tablets. He somehow gets the right thoughts into his mind. That is what Benedict and many other religious leaders believe. But there is no evidence to prove that their beliefs are  not delusions, to which all human beings are subject, however much they meditate.

And, of course, when the Pope castigates our celebrity culture, he does  not deal with the fact that he is right up there at the top of the Premier League. Thanks to his army of spin doctors he gets more front page treatment than any of the dolly birds or the footballers.

And this supposedly secular country gave him the full treatment. He was welcomed in Scotland  by the Queen and the Duke, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the deputy prime minister. He was welcomed to London by a gaggle of ex-Prime Ministers.

And David Cameron himself took the trouble to go to Birmingham airport to give him a rousing send off.

So this very fallible human blogger does not think the country is at risk from agreesive secularists.

On the contrary. For the past week the whole country has been in the grip of Popeomania.

Thank God (if he exists) that he is now safely out of the country. And the media can get back to telling us what is happening to the Labour Party leadership and how much Andy Coulson really knew about phone tapping.