Will the atheist reign of terror never end?!

[4thofeleven]

Cardinal George Pell decided to take some time in his Christmas message to attack the non-religious. Because that's what Christmas is all about, isn't it? It's about complaining about poor, needlessly picked on Christians, and how it's atheists who are responsible for all the ills in the world.

"...God has been attacked angrily here and there in the English-speaking world and believers have been accused of causing most of the wars and crimes in history," Cardinal Pell has said.

"This is an exaggeration as the moral monsters of the twentieth century Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were atheists and Hitler bitterly hated Jews and Christians."

Ah, yes, Hitler and his well-known hatred of christianity and Christians. Stalin, who was educated at an Orthodox Seminary*. Hey, Pell, where's Franco or the KKK or Mussolini on your list of monsters? What's that? Even you couldn't mangle history enough to try and claim they were anything other than staunch Christians? Just sticking to Australia, was it atheists who were running the missions that were responsible for the Stolen Generation? Atheists who wiped out the Tasmanian Aborigines? Boy, we atheists must be more numerous than I thought - I bet it was an atheist who shot Bambi's mother too!

Now, to be fair, Pell does go on to say that "But all believers have to acknowledge the downside of their long story, while asking that their positive contributions are also recorded.", and that's nice. But this sort of token "Oh, I guess Christians may have sometimes done some (unspecified) bad things" doesn't really cancel out "HITLER WAS AN ATHEIST!" - especially when, you know, it's not actually, strictly speaking, true. Even idiots debating on the internet know not to pull out the Hitler card immediatly, yet here's a bloody Catholic Archbishop thinking a good way to spread the festive spirit is to imply that people who don't share his beliefs are the sort of people who are responsible for industrialised genocide.

Damnit, couldn't he have come up with some positive examples of Christians, rather than leaping immediatly towards attacking others? He talks a lot about hope in his speech, but never actually offers any examples that would give his audience hope, instead deciding to spew hate about people like me and my family.

* Granted, Stalin pretty clearly was an atheist - but he also came very close to qualifying as a priest. I don't think lack of exposure to Christianity was the cause of his atrocities.