Bang that drum!

Submitted by Sword of Islam & The Babies of Beslan (United Kingdom), Jul 11, 2006 at 08:48

Submitted by LDC, Jul 10, 2006 at 08:10

"You have shifted subjects, sir, in an attempt to deflect a position about which you are clearly sensitive, and we digress."

- The identification of hypocrisy hardly constitutes a digression. Rather than waste my time in researching each of your questions, and providing specific answers to same, I would suggest that given the fact that YOU are attempting to make a point, however feeble, the onus lies with YOU to answer and qualify the supposedly rhetorical questions that you list.

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Submitted by LDC, Jul 10, 2006 at 08:10

"Tell me of the day when the Vicar of Christ offered to surrender his life in place of one concentration camp internee. On the contrary, sir."

A painfully naive question... Presumably Pope Pius was intelligent enough to realise that even if he were to make such a futile gesture that the likelihood of such an offer being taken at face value by the Nazis was as remote as that of LDC (a former 'pastor', no less!) spelling the word 'ecclesiastical' or 'Caesar' correctly! Let nobody forget that Nazism was born a geographical 'stone's throw' away from the birthplace of Protestantism and that Martin Luther had no little influence on Mr Hitler - considerably more than a Catholic Pope, in fact.

Wilkpedia

- "On September 21, 1945, the general secretary of the World Jewish Council, Dr. Leon Kubowitzky, presented some money to the pope, "in recognition of the work of the Holy See in rescuing Jews from Fascist and Nazi persecutions."

"After the war, Israel Zolli, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, converted to Catholicism, taking the baptismal name Eugenio, in honor of Pius."

Presumably, you have examples of similar gestures of thanks from the Jewish community to the Protestants (shouldn't be too hard for you given that Germany is a predominantly Protestant country)

"Most recently, Rabbi David Dalin's The Myth of Hitler's Pope argued that critics of Pius were liberal Catholics who "exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today" and that Pius XII was actually responsible for saving the lives of thousands of Jews"

"According to the December 23, 1940 issue of Time magazine on page 38, Einstein said:

Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks...

Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.

In another, similar statement, Einstein referred explicitly to the Catholic Church (Lapide, p. 251). This is an extraordinary testimony by a German scientist of Jewish heritage. Even though there were traitors in her ranks, the Church still opposed the Nazi movement."

... It may salve your national conscience to project your guilt but the absence of Protestant morality in the US during this period was quite clear and dwarfed the shortcoming of the Vatican. The lifetime of these camps, if not not their inception, could have been considerably foreshortened had the self-appointed Protestant proletariat of pastors done something to galvanise their congregations to take action rather than contemplate their contribution to the church 'fund'. However, the pattern of your posts suggests that you clearly have an axe to grind so no amount of logical observation is likely to make a dent in such a mentality.

That said, I see little point in any form of organised religion. My belief is that priests, vicars, and pastors lost their relevance as soon as the Bible was translated from Latin into English. But their are millions of suckers out there that are ready to fall for a little 'after-life' insurance...

The Catholic church serves as a monolithic symbol. Protestantism? How many denominations are there, exactly? ...

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