"Deep Esteem"

Oh those crazy Catholics and their inability to feel the slightest bit of cognitive dissonance. It takes a special kind of mind to continue spouting this kind of nonsense.

Yes, this is about the "news" that Britain's top Catholic, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, has called on religious believers to be more tolerant of atheists and other non-believers. Here's the BBC article. I agree with him on a couple of points - that "proper talk about God is always difficult", and that "God is not a 'fact in the world'". It's an issue of faith, not of reason.

This, to me, is the desperate act of someone who realises that reason is winning. The only way religion can survive is by retreating to its last stronghold where nobody can touch them - faith. It denies any kind of logic, proof, or sense - in fact, anything we routinely use to gather information about the world in which we live.

The real cognitive dissonance, however, comes when you come back from examining the implications of what he said to the words themselves. The first phrase of the BBC article:

The Archbishop of Westminster has urged Christians to treat atheists and agnostics with "deep esteem".

Right.

Anyone else recalling the special places in their crazy Catholic afterlife reserved for unbelievers, particularly those who are outspoken as such? Lakes of fire wasn't it? Something like that anyway. Not exactly places in which one might comfortably feel accepted and treated with anything remotely resembling "deep esteem".

The Daily Mash says it better than I.