Pope Benedict, the new God is Gaia

Pope Benedict is visiting Australia in an attempt to shore up declining membership in the Catholic Church. The Pope recently made a trip to the U.S. for the same promotion. In both visits the Pope apologized for the recent sex scandals that hurt church attendances and hurt enrollment in the private Catholic schools.

In Australia the Pope lashed out at today's "cult of material possessions." The Pope seems to be saying that greed is a sin.

In a speech in Sydney in front of a gathering of young people, Pope Benedict said, "Reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our earth, erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world's mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption."

He told the young people, some of whom had come from island nations threatened by rising sea levels, that protecting the environment was "of vital importance to humanity." Who paid for their visit from these other island nations? It was the Catholic Church in cahoots with World Youth Day. http://www.wyd2008.org/ Imagine that! The Catholic Church paying the expenses to gather an audience for the Pope's speech.

In a welcoming speech to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Thursday morning, the pope said: "It is appropriate to reflect upon the kind of world we are handing on to future generations."

The Catholic church will evolve over the next thousand years. Look for them to place God in the background and discover a more important god, and a more popular god because this god is a female. The new God will be Gaia, Mother Earth. Gaia is based on Greek mythology. What's one more myth in worship?

The Pope is joining his church to the current popular environmental belief in order to keep its membership strong. Whatever dogma changes are necessary, churches that have gone with the politically correct dogmas have survived and prospered. During slavery church pastors would tell the congregations that slavery was approved by God. This assuaged the plantation owners who heard these words and relieved them of their guilt. In return they would make a contribution to the church when the plate was passed around. When slavery was no longer politically correct, the pastors stopped condoning it.

Now that global warming and the threat to the environment has become the new religion that has captured the souls of people in the west, it is only proper for the public relations department of the churches and religions to jump on board.

Technology and science plays a role in changing church dogmas. Galileo's telescope made the church stop advocating that the earth is the center of the universe.

Islam's dogmas have been slow to change because science and technology has arrived late to Islam. The Internet, cell phones, and feminism will change Islam. As membership in the Muslim churches start to decline, look for the Islamic clerics to also find new dogmas to promote.

Charles Tolleson, the happy skeptic