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6 April 2005

Reformation Testimony Garnet Milne

www.reformationtestimony.org.nz

The pope and contradictions people live with.

The death of the pope has thrown up many contradictions – especially the revelation that atheists like Helen Clark and Don Brash have been closet admirers of the pope all along. One of the reasons for the favourable comments from politicians is because they want to make sure that they bond with their Roman catholic constituency through this opportunity afforded by the pope’s death.

Helen Clark moved the motion in parliament today beginning with: “Madam Speaker, I move, that this House express its deep sadness on the recent
death of His Holiness Pope John Paul”.

One has to wonder why the PM and the “House” are feeling a “deep sadness”. One assumes that there are some protestants in the “House” and since the time of the Reformation there has been a strong strand of Protestantism which sees the pope and the papal system as the antichrist referred to in Scripture.

It is true that well-known religious figures who claim to be evangelical and protestant such as Billy Graham and his son Franklin have praised the pope as a great Christian and not the antichrist, and so the chances are that any protestants in parliament have forgotten the heresies promoted by Rome and upheld by the pope. However, while a lack of theological consistency has meant that Protestantism has lost its cutting edge, it is somewhat bemusing why atheists like Helen Clark and Don Brash are “deeply saddened”.

For one thing, since they believe that human beings are just evolved from an amoebic state in the distant past, the death of a pope or anyone else can be of little moment. After all, man is just a collection of atoms and merely becomes compost when he is buried according to the views of today’s atheists.

Equally since there is no God, the pope has obviously spent his life wasting his time and arguing for something which Helen and Don believe is nonsense. Then there are the fifteen thousand babies killed each year in our hospital abortiories - not one old pope who had 84 years to enjoy life, but 15,000 little infants who never saw the light of day.

Where is the motion in the house for those 57 New Zealand infants who were killed on the same day the house applauded the pope? These poor souls remain nameless. There is almost a gruesome element to this expression of sadness over the pope’s death. He spent much of his life railing against the Helen Clarks and other supporters of abortion and would no doubt think very little of their “sadness” when they rejected his pleas for the safety of the unborn, his opposition to contraception, his denunciation of euthanasia, homosexual marriage/civil unions and the use of human embryos for research.

Why then are these politicians sad? After all the pope was their enemy. Most of the things he stood for are matters denounced and legislated against by these “saddened” politicians.

If they were honest, they would say “we are happy this pope is dead” and hopefully the next one will be pro-abortion, pro-contraception, pro-euthanasia, pro-homosexual (admittedly the dead pope may have been with all those paedophile priests), and anti-marriage. Though they say with their lips they are sad, with their hearts they are either totally indifferent or quite happy about the death of this man.

ENDS

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