For what it’s worth, the Muslims follow roughly the same line as the Catholic Church on the condoms vs abstinence thing AFAICT which might not be very far.

b) One clearly *can* pick and choose which rules one will obey and then blame the Catholic Church when one isn’t not happy (‘not happy’ here means ‘dying of AIDS’, of course); the question is whether it is reasonable to do so.

c) No, because antisemitism isn’t a matter of religion. If someone were to criticise Orthodox Jewish doctrine, this would be entirely fine. By the same token, if anyone here were saying that stinking greasy Wops and stupid thuggish Polacks were evil, or whatever other Catholic-ethnic group association you’d care to make, this wouldn’t be accepted.

You’ve no facts or stats, yet you make outrageous statements about the pope being a mass murderer.

The point about AIDS is:
"If catholics listen to the church about sex before marriage and fidelity then the point for using condoms is mute."

Whether the best strategy for human population maximisation involves dying of AIDS before your children grow up, however, is a different call – hence the way I hedged my suggestion of ‘things the Pope could plausibly have said without the cardinals assassinating/deposing him’.

And lying that HIV gets through holes in condoms is equivalent, in my view, to lying that tobacco is good for you.

Very nicely put, sir.

> it’s a bit more complicated than that!

Certainly is. There’s doctrine and there’s doctrine. Taking John’s example of the vernacular mass, at no point did God tell humanity that we had to speak in Latin. Multiplying to populate the Earth, on the other hand, is a command from God.

John,

Tobacco is bad for everyone who uses it. Sex without condoms is not inherently dangerous.

I hold no brief for the bead-ticklers, but it’s a bit more complicated than that!

In fact I believe that he’s responsible for millions of deaths, but showing this would involve getting in a never-ending war of statistics with you, which I don’t have the time for

Well, you believe this in the face of the evidence then. Might I respectfully suggest that if you don’t have time to look up the statistics, there is always the option of saving time by cutting down on the number of accusations of responsibility for millions of deaths that you make?

On "talking about a few individuals", I wish to demonstrate that the Pope’s condom edict is responsible for some people, who wouldn’t otherwise have done, dying of AIDS in Africa. In fact I believe that he’s responsible for millions of deaths, but showing this would involve getting in a never-ending war of statistics with you, which I don’t have the time for. However I can easily show that he is responsible for at least a few deaths: almost everyone involved accepts this, (i)-(iv) above give a plausible explanation for how it might happen, and anyway it’s obviously true. Being responsible for a few unnecessary AIDS related deaths is already enough for me to conclude that in this instance, the Pope was a bad man.

Yes people who die of AIDS in Africa have to accept some measure of responsibility for their fate. But this is lessened given that: they were surrounded by other HIV+ people (and therefore can count themselves unlucky); their sex-education-classes were pretty piss-poor so they didn’t fully know the consequences of their actions (again Squander 2 notice that this is because they’re poor, not because they’re black); people they respected (Catholic priests and other ideological types) told them that using condoms was bad, and again due to poor education they were unable to tell fact from fiction.