Religious affiliation declines

I found this interesting.
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/this-i-believe/

which led me to this.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/192583/page/1

Pope sentencing people to die ?

A friend of mine, a good Catholic (well, maybe not according to the pope....) had this to say after the Pope's recent comments on NOT distributing condoms. The Pope is still anti-birth control, not to mention disease control.

Hello, Pope Benedict. Remember me? I’m the cradle-to-tithing Catholic who frequently offers you advice not heeded. Gee whiz, now there you go again doing the flat earth thing with condoms. In Africa of all places! I thought you would welcome the Godly logic our good Lord gave us. Heck, Germans’ gave us the reformation and the Mercedes, for Pete’s sake!. But no, you rejected science and the efficacious prevention of HIV all in one breath amidst corpses from AIDS stacked like firewood. No wonder you embrace priests who believe the holocaust never happened and that Hurricane Katrina was God’s wrath. You cloak the face of Jesus in a world desperate to see Him when you condemn millions to hideous preventable deaths because of your intransience on human sexuality, the same condition Jesus enjoyed. I love you, Joseph Alois Ratzinger. But I reject your position, i.e., condoms won’t help the problem of HIV, as one of many positions you take that shroud Jesus; misogyny, homophobia and exclusivity to name a few. Yet the body count for earlier flat earth encyclicals pales compared to the number of God’s children extinguished by your comments in Cameroon. Like the previous Joe, Karol Józef Wojtyła, whom I also loved, you’ll have to answer more than the average Joe for the misery of the Corpus Christi. Did you hear the cock crowing for the third time in Africa? The rest of us did. Loudly.

MJC

"Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" "Who are you, Lord?" Saul asked. "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," he replied. "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do." Acts of the Apostles

Religulous

Finally saw Bill Maher's film (DVD) and it is good. Nothing new if you have thought about this stuff before, but entertaining. Not likely to change anyone's mind unless you are on the bubble already. Worth the rental fee, tho.