My roommated turned on the TV yesterday and there was all this reporting going on about the Pope offending Muslims or something. It showed a whole bunch of pissed off people marching in the streets and firebombing churches in the Middle East. I wondered what the Pope could have said to make people so mad, but no one was reporting on that at all. It actually seemed to me that the news reporters were taking it as a given that what the Pope said was offensive.

Luckily I stumbled upon this post by Tim Cavanaugh over at Hit & Run where he gives the entire context of what the Pope actually said. He also concudes:

The content is really unimportant. You can be sure none of the lunatics torching churches or burning the pope in effigy have any idea what he actually said. People who are more interested in this stuff than I am can debate whether Islam actually added anything to religion that wasn’t already in Judaism and/or Christianity—beyond teetotaling, which is undoubtedly evil and inhuman.

I recommend reading the whole thing.

technorati tags:pope, islam, christianity, violence

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