The Politically Incorrect Show - 06/09/2000

[Music - Die Fledermaus]

Good afternoon, KAYA ORAAAA & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Wednesday September 6, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd, the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit & excellence against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.

[Music up, music down]

We've all had a good laugh at Tariana & the ghosts with whom she converses. Now comes a timely reminder that primitive superstition is alive & well in Western culture also, notwithstanding the awesome conquests by the human mind over nature that western values have spawned - the very technology by which I'm broadcasting to you now being a case in point. The reminder comes in the form of Declaration Dominus Jesus, to be published by the Vatican this week. In it, the Catholic Church reiterates that it's the one true church, that protestant churches are not "proper" because they suffer from "defects," while non-Christian religions are "gravely deficient" & their rituals constitute "an obstacle to salvation." Now I don't propose for a second to adjudicate on the doctrinal differences among the Christian churches or among the various religions; as far as I'm concerned they're all wrong & man will not make moral progress until he's no longer in thrall to them. But I would add to that that if the Catholic Church WERE in some sense the one true church, I still wouldn't want a bar of it, or of its god.

The Vatican body that is publishing this claim is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It used to be called the Inquisition. The suffering inflicted by this institution & other arms of the church in the name of doctrinal "propriety" cannot be accurately conveyed in words, though that astounding freethinker Robert G. Ingersoll came close in his essay, Rome or Reason?:

"We remember the millions in the dungeons of darkness, the millions who perished by the sword, the vast multitudes destroyed in flames, those who were flayed alive, those whose tongues were cut out, those who were blinded, those into whose ears was poured molten lead, those whose eyes were deprived of their lids, those who were tortured & tormented in every way by which pain could be inflicted & human nature overcome. And we remember too the exultant cry of the Church over the bodies of her victims: 'Their bodies were burned here, but their souls are now tortured in hell ... We know too that the Catholic Church was, during all the years of its power, the enemy of every science. It preferred magic to medicine, relics to remedies, priests to physicians. It thought more of astrologers than of astronomers. It hated geologists, it persecuted the chemist & imprisoned the naturalist, & opposed every discovery calculated to improve the condition of mankind."

As I said, if that be the one true church, then the hell with it.

The twentieth century has taught us that replacing supernatural-based religions with secularised versions of them, such as communism & fascism, is no answer to mankind's woes either. We must repair to the power of reason, & respect for its repository, the human individual. We must allow debate, dissension & heresy, & renounce the use of force as a polemical weapon. We must acknowledge that reality is the ultimate arbiter, & that the glory of man is the mind, however fallible, with which he grasps it.

Somehow I suspect that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith will contribute little to this process.

---

If you enjoyed this, why not subscribe?