Barbelith Underground > Temple > Pope warns against DIY Religions

I’m not convinced that either of us knows enough about that context in order to fully comment on it. We’re being fed quotes and highlights from what news sources think are relevant for us to know. We cannot know how the ways in which the Pope’s system of belief operates apart from certain brief, limited flashes at certain points in time.

But to half-heartedly play your game for a second and play with the context of the quotes you mentioned above, it seems that he certainly isn’t afraid of fully speaking his mind when it comes to rock and roll. Or women’s empowerment. So it’s interesting that he seems to have handled this subject matter with such a light touch, and rather than speaking out against in all instances as you might have expected has instead called for a commitment to stronger faith with a young heart.

You’ve appealed to context here, but only in terms of dismissal. You’ve picked the context that suits you. So there’s a second reading of the same context. I’m not convinced that your spin on these comments is accurate. I’m not convinced mine is either, but there’s nothing from the above link that concerns me too much. It’s business as usual from the Church, just handled more gently than I would expect.

What concerns me here is that it seems to be evidence of one of your more questionable patterns: that an individual can reach a critical mass of wrongness in the eyes of Flyboy before any utterance that leaves their lips is tainted in some way by the perceived whole. That there is some kind of cut-off point beyond which they can be dismissed, or the become the butt of the Snide Post Rejection pile (a venting mechanism that tends make one wonder which post was a response to which person), or be targeted by rude and often arrogant misbehavings. Once the threshold is crossed the critical mass needed to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction is considerably… massier.

I say questionable because it tends to undermine most of what you have to say on issues of fair, just treatment of people. Because a person is always more than the sum of their stated opinion. And in this case all we have to go on are fragments of someone’s stated opinion. I’ve never seen how Ratzinger treats his family, or how well he meets people, whether he’s shy one-on-one, whether he can share a joke or look out for someone, whether he’s quick to attack and how angry he gets when he doesn’t get his way.

To an extremely limited extent we can comment in part on what little we’re presented with. But to say that’s the truth about a person will never hold. I regularly talk to people who are referred to in terms of their criminal record, for example. It can be incredibly hard to think of a person as anything other than a sex offender, or anything other than someone who’s defrauded the person who’s calling me out of thousands of pounds. But they are more than that. Knowing that and acting accordingly is too important to throw it out of the window just because of some perceived economy of scale in terms of how much power and influence a person may have.

To be concerned with what is just and understanding matters on the macro-level but to so often ignore it on the micro-scale cannot hold. The same principles have to apply right through, from one to the other. The one is safely in the abstract, the other often dangerously immanent. It’s worth remembering that before an idea can hurt a person it has to be agreed with an acted upon by a person. It’s the person that comes first and chooses where to place value and what is done. So yes, I object to context wielded in a weighted manner that intends only to dismiss, and I hold to my comment on your contribution to this thread.