Simple Common Sense

Ace Of Spades is not Catholic or even religious. But he is smart.

excerpt:

But it is rather revealing that our "diverse" media cannot view a centuries old spiritual institution, concerned primarily with, you know, salvation and God and Jesus and all that stuff, through any other prism but the nakedly political. The Church exists, in their minds, only to either thwart or advance their domestic material-world agendas. It is just an NGO like Amnesty International, only with weird headdresses and censers and subpar wine.

To be fair, as an agnostic and non-Catholic to boot, that's sort of the way I view the Church, deep down. I'm not religious and I never received Communion and frankly it doesn't really matter to me what the Church might have to say about transubstantiation.

But, you know, I'm just a lowly blogger. One would imagine that these idiots could manage at least the pretense of acknowledging the Church as something more than the Red Cross with Latin lessons.

We also have Jeff Goldstein:

Mort Kondracke and Andrew Sullivan are among the pundits I’ve heard express outrage today that new Pope Benedict XVI actually believes his religion enough both to profess it’s truth and condemn those who stray from its teachings. Essentially, both Kondracke and Sullivan would like their religion inclusive -- and so each eschews orthodoxy in favor of a, well, a...living Bible. One that isn’t so picky about who it excludes.

Now, I’m no Catholic—and I ain’t really religious—but I suspect the point of following a religion in the first place is to actually believe in the thing. And so were I gay, and you decided from your perspective as a Catholic that because I put my thingie into the Devil’s slot, I will burn in a lake of fire for eternity, that’s cool by me—just so long as you don’t drop a stone wall on me in order to hasten the process.

The problem with the kind of boutique multiculturalism advocated by both Kondracke and Sullivan is that it pretends to celebrate diversity and “open conversation”; what it really does, however, is refute the “Other” at precisely the point where it matters most, the point at which beliefs genuinely diverge.

Kondracke is upset that, should Pope Benedict XVI stay true to form, he will attempt to fight back a tide of cultural relativism with ecumenical certitude. But really, should anyone be surprised when a worldview that itself relies on a leap of faith sees fit to express that faith in a form of prescribed metaphysical certainty?

I’m not. But then, I’m a Christophobic pagan, so what the hell do I know.

Also, Ace notices something about Andrew Sullivan in a post entitled, "Sullivan: And I'll Keep Leaving the Church Until Someone Notices". If you check out Ace's entire page today, you'll see he's got a lot of Sullivan stuff, including imitating his posting style.