Look - the Pope isn't evil!

[Tellos Athenaios]

I think it's pretty blisteringly obvious, this man has been a theologian for around 60 years. To suggest he would do something "revolutionary" by accident is to massively underestimate him.

No, he isn't evil, and everyone who used the condom-thing as a reason to call him evil can now hopefully see they were barking up the wrong tree there.

I believe the issue wasn't that the Pope was merely being evil, rather that a hard and fast ban on condoms is grossly irresponsible given the daily reality where condoms basically save lives (if not from acute threat of death then at least from a needless STD infection). Merely suggesting that using condoms might not be so bad when you are having sex knowing you are infected by some STD is not nearly good enough. What if you don't know? It's not like those diseases are one night you had sex the next night you feel ill. For the type of STD which is effectively prevented by condoms there is an incubation time which varies, and for quite a few of those diseases you do not even need to have sex to get them.

Theologically, they are correct - eternal damnation is worse than death, but the reasoning breaks down when you consider that they are also sinning by fornicating.

Realistically, he was simply wrong. He still is. Not just merely wrong as in “sorry guys, but I mistranslated the Scripture here”, but every bit as wrong as the Romans who condemned the early Christians for being a bunch of incestuous terrorist cannibals -- to translate the 3 common accusations leveled against the Christians back then to a more modern rhetoric. Now the Christians eventually were accepted, then gradually given more and more power to the point that we ought to have been given a few tasters of divine wrath from the Pantheon. Of course no such divine wrath occurred, nobody has yet had to go and create a whole new human population by throwing rocks over their shoulder so it might be reasonable to assume those early Romans got it quite wrong.

So to sum up, as long as the argument for using condoms is grounded in a practical reality, I'll go for a few more lives saved from needless STDs, and continue to ignore divine beings at my peril. It has worked a good 2000 years for the Christians after all. I also would encourage everybody else to do likewise, and until the Catholic Church cottons on I can only hope that the Church will fade into irrelevance like the Romans did to the betterment of mankind.