Ratzinger talks (more) bollocks

I was in the pub yesterday, and was made aware that catholic wingnut-in-chief Ratzinger had been bad-mouthing science and atheism by playing the old Marxism=teh evul! card and playing up christianity because it offers “hope”. Earlier today, I saw a few posts on blogs (The Freethinker, Atheist Ethicist – highly recommended) and articles in the press (The Times, Reuters) but none of them actually linked to Darth Benedict’s diatribe.

So, after a bit of googling, I decided to read what he actually wrote.

Unsurprisingly, Ratzinger’s ‘spe salvi‘ is simply an over-long morass of groundless assertions, divinely inspired hate-speech and, of course, a generous sprinkling of cherry-picked bible verses. i.e. the usual bollocks.

I’m guessing that this is the sort of level of being-verbose-about-religion-yet-saying-nothing (which I will now start to call “theonasm” – q.v. pleonasm) that Alister McGrath can only aspire to. Here’s a couple of samples:

Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus has revealed himself as Love.

Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a “proof” of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a “not yet”. The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.

See? Utter bollocks.

“Theonasm”… I like it.

/hattip to that random guy in the pub.

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