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Dear Mr Pope

By Siddharthya Swapan Roy

24 April, 2011
Countercurrents.org

I woke up today morning to a newspaper that carried an item about you (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/17/us-pope-idUSTRE73G0FA20110417). It reported that at a public gathering outside your lavish palace in Rome on the 17th of April, you spoke of the supremacy of God over science and technology. As a true leader of a band of religious zealots, you led from the front and over zealously stated that all the science and technology in the world will not replace the necessity of God in our lives. May I ask of you, sir Pope, will all the God in the world replace even a single aspirin pill, let alone the vast ocean of good science and technology has given to humankind? Will all the God in the world heal a child from polio should he not be given a few drops of its vaccine? A disaster is unfolding in one part of the world as we speak – the broken reactors of Japan . Will all the prayer in the world vanish the killer radiation that is oozing out from it or will that be accomplished by engineers and men of science sweating it out there and who will do at least something concrete to cure the situation? http://siddharthya.info/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif

The religious man may argue at this point that the bad things in Japan are the result of science and technology after all so isn't science to be blamed? True the tragedy is in part a progeny of scientific advancement. But just as you, and many other religious heads around the world, disown ill-doers saying “they act of their free will and not under our direction”, so do we, people of science, disown such vile people from the great traditions of progressive and humanitarian science. And in fact we do so with more legitimacy than can your Church given its history of legislated, warranted and propagated hellish cruelty against humanity. When Oppenhiemer made the Bomb, scores and scores of scientists castigated him and called him a scar on the face of science. Of course he was safe and sound thanks to the benevolence of a series of pro-Christianity American presidents! But at least the overwhelming majority of the men of science wished him ill and named him an exception. But your Church till this date hails sadistic invaders who branded, burnt and pillaged people as true men of religion and integrity and have your prayer halls adorned with their murals.

The report also said that you warned your flock that they will be a damned lot should they think of abandoning God and moving to science. But sir, have you also told your flock about the state of humanity and how damned they actually were when the Church ruled supreme and science was outlawed? Do they know that the earth's population diminished by two hundred million because of a now curable disease called the bubonic plague? Did you also tell them that it is science, hard science and no God, that can now save the lives of such people while the best the Church could do was call it the devil's handiwork and whip and burn alive the people who fell ill? Do they know that had it not been for science they could die of infection while so much as even a cut in the finger while cutting nails or shaving their face, save for the discovery of disinfectants, while all the prayer would be of no use?

In all likelihood you did not tell them any of these since you would rather have them continue as a flock of timid sheep and not thinking humans. The entire idea behind you and your minions asking people to close their eyes and pray is actually to keep the eyes closed and distract their minds with prayer while you go about your affairs with impunity.

It's cruelly funny, sir Pope, that science is something you, the zealots, use every single moment of your lives and even thrive on it and yet never fail to bad mouth. Your institutions burnt and tortured men who said the earth was round and now your minions use geo-synchronous TV satellites to spread the glory of God and the Church every single day. You killed those who made machines that moved as agents of the devil raising the dead and now you travel on jet planes to fly across oceans and hold sermons. You speak of heaven being up there and hell being down inside the ground but governments that swear by you prove beyond doubt that the sky is merely empty space from which their planes can bomb other nations while what's down inside is the oil which runs your empire. Of course as a corollary, that makes both the sky and the nether hell in equal proportions!

But jokes apart, the irony is, with your riches and level of influence, you enjoy the fruits of science far more than the majority of the people on earth who are still wallowing in poverty. Every time you fall ill you have a team of highly qualified doctors and surgeons, people the Church would have once killed as heretics and devil worshippers, to attend to you using medicines and surgical processes all made possible by advanced scientific and technological knowhow. But the moment you are up, you will thank God almighty! A simple question that comes to mind is for all your claims of healing through prayer, why will you not simply rely on prayer and stay away from any science?

I think we both know the answer to that sir Pope. But since the flock of timid sheep with their eyes closed is still large enough, thanks in part to the absence of affordable useful science, God is still selling well in the market!

Myself Siddharthya Swapan Roy am an engineer by profession and spend my time working for a living. And if there's time left I read, travel and take photographs. I also blog at siddharthya.info

 

 




 


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