THE Pope has called for a new world financial order blaming the global crisis on the greed of financiers and investors.

Denouncing what he termed a profit-at-all-cost mentality, Pope Benedict XVI was also critical of governmental oversight and the absence of global regulation.

In the most socially rooted Vatican encyclical letter since 1967, the Pope wrote: “In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations organisation, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth.”

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The German-born Benedict, 82, stated: “There is urgent need [for] a true world political authority” to manage the global economy.

“The economy needs ethics in order to function correctly – not any ethics, but an ethics which is people centred,” Benedict wrote in the 144-page document.

Because centrally-managed economies always work out, right? Maybe he should have talked to his predecessor about life in Poland. Then he’d know that he’s proposing a formula for universal poverty. And does this mean conservatives can now object to this agenda on the ground that it is forcing state-sponsored religion on people?

I have a lot of respect for Pope Benedict. But just because he took a vow of poverty doesn’t mean he should promote poverty for everyone else.

H/T:  Pat Dollard.

UPDATE (7/8/09): Hat tip goes specifically to Erik Wong, writing at Pat Dollard. Check out comments from “vincenzo4″ at Wong’s post here and here for an opinion on how Benedict’s statement relates to biblical prophecy. I’ll leave that to others.

The collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia has banned the from editing the site. The Register reports Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, or ArbCom, voted 10 to 0 in favor of the ban, which takes effect immediately.

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[According to one Wikipedia contributor involved in the arbitration:] “The edits coming out of Church of Scientology servers were of the sort that made their organization look better.  Up to a point that’s justifiable, when it comes to correcting inaccuracies or removing poorly sourced negative information. There were times when they went beyond that and deleted well sourced information that was unflattering, and there were times when they insulted other editors in a manner that would reflect poorly upon any religion.”

On a related subject, I have never understood why Scientology has ever been considered a religion at all. I don’t claim to know a lot about it — I’ve never read Dianetics and, from what I understand,  the “church” keeps much of its doctrine secret even from its adherents, who are gradually allowed to learn more as they advance toward their ultimate state. When I’ve seen celebrities like Tom Cruise and John Travolta promote it, they do so usually by describing only its benefits, not what it is.

But this, I know: I have never heard a single scientology outlet — not a celebrity, not a man on the street, not someone at the scientology booth at a street fair, no scientology pamphlet, no scientology print advertisement, no scientology billboard — mention God.

So how, exactly, is it a religion?

Why should we care?

95% of the population is Sunni Muslim. And the legal customs they need to abandon are sharia-based. From Reuters via the NYT:

Mayotte will have to ban polygamy, raise the minimum age of marriage to 18 from 15 years old, and give women equal rights.

The Islamic justice system will be replaced by secular courts, though qadis [religious scholars who act as judges] will retain a consultative role.

95% of a 61% vote among 186,000 people, assuming 1/3 of the population is of voting age, means that roughly 36,000 Muslims voted in favor.  That’s  0.003% — or 3/1000s of 1 percent of the world’s Muslims.

But it’s a start.

So anyway, Gateway Pundit has a post up saying that a bill proposed in the Connecticut legislature that would “put local laymen leadership over the Catholic Church in the state.”  And I’m thinking, “Can’t be.  No way.”  

And GP’s first link is to an “action alert” type of bulletin at Family Institute of Connecticut, which makes me doubt the story even more because action alert-type calls make me suspicious.  I’ve received way too many forwarded e-mails touting the latest outrage over which I’m supposed to write my congressman, phone the White House, or sign on online petition, only for the outrage to be entirely manufactured, and sometimes obviously so.  (“Write your congressman now to object to the Obama administration’s plan to make the military chaplain’s corps exclusively Muslim!”)

But then, GP also linked The Corner.  OK, slightly less skeptical now.  Uh oh.  The Corner’s post has three more warning signs against the authenticity of this story: (1) its title includes the word “outrage”; and (2) the writer learned of the “outrage” through an e-mail from a friend at the institute; and (3) it mostly quotes from the institute’s website.

So, what’s a skeptic to do?  Look  up the actual bill. Even then, I wasn’t convinced, because I had simply followed the link from a few different blogs, and I thought maybe someone posted a bogus bill to stir controversy.  So, to make sure I was really looking at the authentic website of the Connecticut General Assembly, I googled “Connecticut Legislature” and, sure enough, this seemed to be the real deal.

So I read the bill, and  . . . wow.  These folks are not exaggerating one bit.  

The bill would delete language from the existing statute regarding incorporation of Catholic churches (why there is a separate statute for them, I can’t say) that makes the pastor and local bishop ex-officio members of the corporation responsible for appointing two lay members (only one of whom is necessary for a quorum).  In place of that governing body, it would substitute a 7- to 13-member board of directors consisting entirely of lay people and making the pastor a non-voting ex-officio member of the board.  In short, it completely  reverses the roles of the pastor and congregation with regard to matters of finance, administration, and even “outreach programs and other services to be provided to the community.”  

The bill claims not to interfere with the “power, right, authority, duty or responsibility of the bishop or pastor in matters pertaining exclusively to religious tenets and practices,” (my emphasis), but that is a rather obviously bogus fig leaf.  It is an indicator that the bill’s author belongs to the school of thought that a person’s religion may not influence his public behavior.  Keep it in church, bub.  Your religions is protected by the First Amendment only in that we can’t dictate what you pray or how you worship in church.  Once you’re outside the sanctuary, all bets are off.

It also ignores that faith is interwoven in all of a church’s activities, not just its worship services.  Community outreach, charity . . . these are religious practices because they are undertaken in accord with the church’s teachings.  Who the hell (excuse me, heck) is going to draw the line between outreach and religious practice?

UPDATE: More at American Papist.

UPDATE #2: The Anchoress looks at the issue from a wider perspective, including religious/demographic trends in the U.S. and a philosophical discussion on church governance/doctrine.

The latest comes from Chris LaTondresse, the founder of the “Recovering Evangelical” website.  Now, I’m sure LaTondresse is a nice guy, and a true Christian believer, and very sincere in what he says.  I don’t think he’s being dishonest, just intellectually lazy.  His points don’t stand up to even mild scrutiny.  Which is as rigorous as he needs to be, really, because, as he wends his way through talk show appearances in a media hungry for lefty evangelicals, his ideas won’t have to face even mild scrutiny.

Here’s the video, with my comments following.

OK, first let’s take his point that there are 2000 references in the Bible to God’s concern for the poor and less than two dozen on homosexuality and even fewer that address abortion. First, no government can be a Christian, only individuals can. I’m not saying we all have to be Mother Teresa because the government should do nothing. But I have little patience for a two Range Rover family bitching and moaning that nobody is helping those poor starving people, while millions of Christians and others actually do things on a personal level — donating time, money, or both — to help people.  And LaTondresse should realize this, as he points out that young Christians have forged personal relationships with some of the poorest on the planet and he is the child of two evangelical missionaries.

Second, LaTondresse does not seem to understand why Evangelicals stress homosexuality and abortion in the political arena. This is not what he calls “the political agenda of the far right” because, out of all the values driven by their faith, these are the most important ones. It is that these issues have been heavily pushed by the left, and the righty evangelicals are pushing back. As I have written before, when the left starts pushing for other evils, they will see pushback from the righty evangelicals.  But until then, the work against the other evils will largely be done on a personal level, while the right’s political forces array themselves against their lefty counterparts.

To be fair, some of the worthy items on his agenda are more appropriately addressed by government: genocide and human trafficking, especially.  But again, you don’t see a big political movement in the United States in support of human trafficking or genocide, so Christian political leaders — high-profile ones, at least — will tend to devote their resources to the issues on which they have to push back.

As for the 30,000 kids dying around the world every day, the lefties are against doing anything about, and often even celebrate, the major cause of those deaths.  The unclean drinking water, hunger, and preventable diseases he notes kill those children are all too often the result of tyrants who bring on or maintain these conditions through mismanagement and corruption or even actively cultivate them as a means of controlling the populace.  I’m not saying we should do nothing to help these people until we can change their governments (and again, million of Christians and others are doing just that).  I’m saying that for a group fond of blaming the West for the “root causes” of Islamism and other forms of thuggery, lefties seem strangely uninterested in even recognizing, let alone doing anything about, the root causes of a daily juvenile death toll of 30,000.  (About LaTondresse’s personal views on this, of course, I know nothing — I am speaking now of the people he seems ready to ally himself with.)

He keeps mischaracterizing, by the way, the right’s agenda as “simply gay marriages and abortion.”  Has no one told him that George W. Bush has done more for fighting AIDS in Africa than any other president?  My word, even The Guardian can admit it.

La Tondresse keeps referring to “his” generation of evangelicals, calling them the most “interconnected” generation in history, but he seems to have bought the lefty stereotype of right wing evangelicals hook, line and sinker.  With all of the alternative media and “interconnectedness” at his disposal, he should know better.

And for crying out loud, did he have to mention fighting global climate change as a faith-based value?  I agree it is faith based, but he’s talking about faith in God, and I’m talking about faith in the greatest hoax in history.

Finally, let’s not forget that the media won’t be at all upset with these evangelicals pushing their values on others . . .as long as they’re lefties.

H/T: HotAir.

UPDATE: Here’s a nugget from The Guardian article I linked above, regarding the impetus for W’s AIDS initiative in Africa (emphasis mine):

Bush was also lobbied by American Christian evangelicals with strong and expanding ties to Africa, and conservative Republican senators usually instinctively hostile to foreign aid.

Funny, I didn’t see the lefties complaining about this program as government money being spent on religious priorities.

Public Domain Image via Wikipedia

Most recently, I saw this type of criticism at the blog Crime & Federalism in a post by blogger Mike titled “Pope to Jesus: Kiss Off!

There are millions of orphans currently suffering. Many of them will suffer horrible abuse at the hands of foster parents. In other countries, they will be sold into slavery. These children exist, and if someone doesn’t help them, they will suffer. That much is a constant.

Yet, according to the Catholic Church, only marriage between a man and woman is moral because it leads to a married couple having children.

Has Christianity become so perverted that not adopting (having children rather than adopting them is an conscious act) children is more moral than ending human suffering?

What has happened to the teachings of Christ?

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Children are great. And children suffering is a horrible injustice. A church that truly taught Christ’s message would encourage adoption over procreation.

Yet the Pope is more concerned with adults entering into consensual sexual relations than he is with children being sold into sexual slavery. Yes, when you choose not to adopt, you make it more likely that a child will suffer. You are culpable.

It’s a strange world we live in, when even the Pope has missed the basic message of the New Testament. He’s more worried about gay adults than he is with suffering children.

(The omitted portion in the middle contended that having children is a selfish thing to do.)

I think that people who tend to criticize Catholics and other Christians for concentrating on abortion and same sex marriage while supposedly “ignoring” other problems fail to recognize why it appears that the Church is “preoccupied.” There are strong movements to legitimize both practices (and in the case of abortion, an already successful movement). It is natural for the Church to assemble its forces to counterattack. And given that both sides have mobilized in political and legal circles, it is natural that you would hear the most about these issues.

I suspect that for most such critics, this type of argument is not made to actually further the fight against poverty, or slavery, or whatever other “ignored” issue is pointed out, but to try to shame the Church into abandoning the battlefield on the high-profile issues so the “progressives” can proceed unopposed (good luck with that).

And just who is consumed with these issues, anyway? Stop pushing abortion and gay marriage from the left, and the Christian right will have nothing to push back against. In other words, Christian activism on these issues is largely reactive, not proactive.

Why on earth someone like blogger Mike would assume that because the Church actively fights vociferous proponents of legalizing and legitimizing practices that are immoral in the eyes of the Church, it “doesn’t care” about other injustices? Because he doesn’t see it on the news? There are millions of Christians in this country alone that give their time and money to fight poverty, homelessness, addiction, domestic violence, etc., and more overseas that fight violence, slavery, forced prostitution, and other evils.

A similar, but more thoughtful and less insulting version of the point was made by CNN’s Roland S. Martin (right). Apparently a professing Christian, he posted a column to his website last year titled “Christians: It’s time to take back the faith”:

If abortion and gay marriage are a part of the Christian agenda, I have no issue with that. Those are moral issues that should be of importance to people of the faith, but the agenda should be much, much broader.

Okay, so far, so good.

I’m looking for the day when Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Joyce Meyer, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Dr. James Kennedy, Rod Parsley, President Bush’s “Patriot Pastors,” and Rick Warren will sit at the same table as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Cynthia Hale, Eddie L. Long, James Meek, Fred Price, Emmanuel Cleaver, and Floyd Flake to establish a call to arms on racism, AIDS, police brutality, a national health care policy and our sorry education system.

Putting aside the question of what the hell Jackson and Sharpton would do if they couldn’t cry racism all the time — and questioning Martin’s placement of Rick Warren with more conservative figures — I’m trying to imagine the common ground Martin thinks these folks might come to.

Which brings me to the disparate treatment of the Religious Left and Religious Right. But that post is for another day.

[T]he divorce rate for Christians is about the same as for other people. These things are a total disgrace, and a clear indication that our society has abandoned marriage. Now that somebody else wants it, we grab the toy and scream, “Mine!” People rightly call us out as hypocrites for this behavior. We can’t unring this bell. It’s over. As Ed Morrissey points out, “Government stopped being in the sacrament business at the moment it offered no-fault divorces.” Whether California successfully passes legislation to undo the Court’s decision is a moot point. Same sex marriage is going to be a reality in this country in our lifetimes. And polygamous marriage will inevitably follow.

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The rallying cry in response to this verdict will be to “Save marriage!” but we need to begin with our own. Pastors need to stop renting out churches to brides who simply want a beautiful set for their big wedding productions and reserve church weddings for Christians who have undergone counseling and understand the ramifications of what they’re doing. As Christians we need to make sure our own marriages are solid and we need to stand up with our friends whose marriages are in trouble and help fight to preserve their marriages.

Hat tip: The Anchoress.