Since i check the news basically every hour wherever i am (thank you GPRS) i tend to look at the headlines quickly and see what catches my attention.
The first time my eye hits "Pope reaffirms ban on condoms" and i thought, ok, valid, expected, known, nothing especially noteworthy about that.
The second time i read it well, and that's when i decided to read the article. Apparently, on his first trip to Africa which took place earlier this week, he took the opportunity to reaffirm where the Catholic Church stands on condoms. He does that in a continent that has lost 1.5 million people to HIV/AIDS just this past year alone. This left me a little troubled.
From a religious perspective, i understand, you can't promote sex outside of wedlock and the use of condoms - let's face it - lies at the heart of that. But from a humanitarian perspective, this condom will save more than one life possibly. I don't expect him to stand up and root for durex but toning down the messages might be an idea. But then again, if people decide to disobey the church by having sex outside of wedlock, i doubt they'll care much for how it feels about the use of condoms.
So i guess we could be talking about married couples then? As i read on the Pope also set a committee to see whether the church could allow the use of condoms by a couple where one of which is HIV positive. My first reaction was, and you really need a committee to decide? Isn't it obvious? Is the church expecting married couple to abstain? Or to infect one another and bing yet another HIV infected child into this world?
While i could see a round table argument about the first point (the ban) with arguments both for and against, it's the second one i struggle with a lot....
It's things like that, that turn so many people off organized religion, and religion all together, and that's a sad thing.
What is interesting is that the Pope's position on all of this is not unique to the Catholic Church, i can see it happening in other religions too which explains why the world gets less and less religious.
Now i know that it's not a popularity contest, and religion doesn't aim to please, but when you fail to appeal to people's common sense then you're left with blind followers, and is that really what God wants? Blind - not enlightened - followers? I think not
3 comments:
does sound a little old fashioned doesn't it... what I love more than the decision to ban condems is the response: "God made diseases to punish bad people".
I think Catholic priests sometimes have to publicly go with church doctrine, but who knows what they really feel behind closed doors. That goes with your previous post as well.
I had a priest once who said about marriage "Sometimes it just doesn't work out"
isn't this a pretty typical problem of monotheism - how can the word of God change over time? If God said you should only have sex to make babies, how can you reinterpret that to mean something else?
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