Pope Francis: he’s far from perfect, but he is changing things for the better

http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2015/jun/28/pope-francis-far-from-perfect-but-changing-things

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I am certainly not a Catholic apologist in any regard and I agree with many of Nick Cohen’s points but, as an avowed atheist, he’s working from a different paradigm to people of faith. He is therefore ill-equipped to make sense of absolutely real convictions that are built on something other than deductive reasoning (“A liberal, free-thinking pope? Don’t kid yourself”, Comment.

In contrast, my terms of reference are as a Bible-believing follower of Jesus Christ who, in his life, death and resurrection provided us with all the instruction and example we need to live a life of radical love within the enveloping perfection of God’s will and purpose. A cracking example of this dogma-free, open-hearted faith is in Tobias Jones’s book extract in the same edition of the paper (New Review).

Whether or not Catholicism’s stance on birth control is wholly or partially founded on divine displeasure incurred by the Old Testament character Onan I neither know nor particularly care; it prefers human-generated dogma over the love and compassion exemplified by Jesus and is therefore, in my view, A Very Bad Thing.

If that is the policy’s origin, it seems to me that those who designed it assumed, for whatever reason, that Onan’s transgression lay in his use of rudimentary birth control. I think it much more likely that the problem was his disobedience in refusing to provide an heir to his dead brother.

The pope may be imperfect – who isn’t? – but credit where it’s due. In eschewing many of the excessive trappings of office and in initiating reforms and accepting corporate responsibility for wicked abuses that first happened and then went unpunished, Francis has boldly gone where lesser men have quailed so to do. The mere fact that he has ruffled so many feathers within the Catholic church is a sure sign that this pope is doing many things right and deserves the encouragement of us all, believers or not.

Peter Stevens

Newton Abbot, Devon

Nick Cohen’s article on Catholic dogma and the environment had me drooling. And yet… In making a huge point, I wonder whether he has missed a massive one.

As I understand it, the bondage that religious people of all types voluntarily place themselves in is that God made everything and ultimately decides everything, and even wars and natural disasters must happen for a good reason, so who are we to protest? This especially applies to people such as the pope, whose job is to remind us to bow to the almighty. So, when he starts to pronounce on the need to protect the environment, even from a dogma-based perspective,surely he is questioning whether God really knows what he is doing?

If the pope really believes in what he is saying, he must be arguing for the non-existence of God, or at least suggesting that the divinity only occupies a partnership role in the universe.

Colin Padgett

Gestingthorpe, Essex

Nick Cohen seems to have tired of praising the pope a little too soon. Francis made the valid point that each rich person bears a greater responsibility for global warming than a poor person (the scientific jargon is “has a larger carbon footprint”), but that’s where Cohen lost him. The conclusion Francis draws is that the rich should reduce their carbon footprint, not that the poor should be shut out of Europe. After all, this is the pope who visited Lampedusa to give what help and comfort he could to boat people.

Cohen seems to treat the average western European’s carbon footprint as a constant that cannot be challenged. The pope challenges it because he starts from a more reliable constant, the carrying capacity of the Earth and Gandhi’s dictum that “the Earth has enough to satisfy man’s need, but not his greed”. So, he argues, it is more important and more effective to reduce the carbon footprint of rich Europeans than that of poor Africans.

Brian MacGarry

Thriplow, Herts