Our freedom paladin

If there is anything that nerves me that is people asking for something they don’t give first. Like old Bush Administration, fighting for freedom by cutting freedom everywhere, from Iraq to Newark Airport. I don’t like either extremists; they are dangerous, even more if they are intelligent. That’s why I don’t like the radical approach to the conflict of Hamas and Israeli government. The later also doesn’t like to be measured by the same standards he measures others.

There is, however, an institution that adds both extremisms and inequality. I’m talking about the Church. More specifically, Roman Catholic Church.

It’s right to say that all religions share, more or less, the same distinctive characteristics. The fact of being based in the faith makes for them easy to fall into extremism. And the will of divide the world between them and ours, good and bad, it’s a perfect field for the inequality to grow.

But the Catholicism, maybe because it always has been the closest, has been always specially unpleasant. And in the last month, they are doing even more merits to be a pain in the arse.

We could be inclined to think that the recent rehabilitation of Galileo -after four centuries!- may make things easier. But then you can find some few bishops (specially in the US) still defending the teaching of creationism in the schools, with the beneplacit of Ms. Palin, even though the Church already begged for pardon to Mr. Darwin and admitted that, again, they were wrong.

But it is even worse to see that more than half of the Britons don’t believe in evolution either. Or the fact that a scientist like David Attenborough is getting hate mail from creationists for defending evolution theories.

It is too funny hear the bishops talking from their pulpits about others’ intentions to cut the freedom of the believers. As everybody knows, the Church has been since 1888 the pioneer promoting all kind of freedom.

That’s why I find funny to hear Monsignor Rouco Varela, head of Spanish Church, saying that the so called atheist buses are a risk for the freedom of religion for the believers -only the Christians, obviously; nothing about Muslims or Jews. Of course, the fact that the same thing (advertise in and on public buses, as shown in the photo at the bottom; sorry for the quality) has been done for years by the Catholic Church in places like the US or Ireland, doesn’t affect them. It is something completely different.

With that and the suppression of Religion as an obligatory subject in schools -the laic “Education for Citizenship” will be taught instead-, it is understandable they aren’t really happy.

May God help us...




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