If I had to write an article every time the pontiff opens his mouth and says something stupid, I would honestly never get any rest. Aside from the fact this man considers himself the holy avatar between humanity and God, the institution maintains all popes are immune from error. Catholic dogma states that because they are under the influence of the Holy Spirit, all Popes are immune from even the possibility of error. They call this stupid and obviously wrong assertion: “papal infallibility“.

I can appreciate the efforts made by the Catholic church these days concerning the environment. It’s nice to see they recognize that Jesus isn’t coming down to fix our problems anytime soon (even though that won’t stop them from praying for it), since the alternative is frightening to say the least.

Experiencing the shared responsibility for creation (Cf. 51), the Church is not only committed to the promotion of the defense of the earth, of water and of air, given by the Creator to everyone, but above all is committed to protect man from the destruction of himself. In fact, “when ‘human ecology’ is respected in society, environmental ecology also benefits” (ibid).

We should keep in mind this environmental “revelation” is a fairly recent phenomenon. The Catholic Church, for the most part, has always maintained that Earth and every creature on it was the property of man, put there by God for us to enjoy. Now that global warming is such a huge issue, the Pope is quick to put the blame for our environmental problems on his favorite scapegoats: atheists.

Is it not true that inconsiderate use of creation begins where God is marginalized or also where is existence is denied? If the human creature’s relationship with the Creator weakens, matter is reduced to egoistic possession, man becomes the “final authority,” and the objective of existence is reduced to a feverish race to possess the most possible.

Actually, I would venture to guess that the percentage of atheists who care about the environment is probably much higher than our religious counterparts. We also don’t pray for some magical sky-man to solve our problems for us, so I would say we actually have the advantage there as well.

The Pope can deny reality if he chooses to, but I’m annoyed every time this asshole tries to blame the world’s problem on non-believers. Last time I checked, we weren’t telling people dying of AIDS to avoid using condoms, but hey, I’m sure they could make us look like that bad guys on that one too.

(NOTE: The church has since taken down the article)