It’s amazing how these secular free-speech haters don’t seem to understand that trying to shut down someone else’s free speech really does make them the bad guy:
“Pope Benedict XVI canceled a speech at Rome’s La Sapienza university in the face of protests led by scientists opposed to a high-profile visit to a secular setting by the head of the Catholic Church. Sixty-seven professors and researchers of the university’s physics department joined in the call for the pope to stay away protesting the planned visit recalled a 1990 speech in which the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, seemed to justify the Inquisition’s verdict against Galileo in 1633…. The protest against the visit was spearheaded by physicist Marcello Cini who wrote the rector complaining of an ‘incredible violation” of the university’s autonomy. Cini said of Benedict’s cancellation: ‘By canceling, he is playing the victim, which is very intelligent. It will be a pretext for accusing us of refusing dialogue.'”
Let’s break down the logic here:
1. Pope scheduled to speak.
2. Secular bigots protest scheduled speech and demand its cancellation.
3. Pope cancels speech, as per demand.
4. Secular bigots whine that they’ll be blamed for refusing dialogue. Gee, how could anyone possibly reach that conclusion?
It seems to me that this moronic minority is either being amazingly disingenuous here or truly doesn’t understand the meaning of the term “dialogue”. After all, they have made it very clear that they are not only wholly uninterested in a back-and-forth dialogue, they actually wish to prevent anyone from being permitted to hear a view that might oppose their own. This is a very good example of the authoritarian impulse intrinsic to atheism that I described in the post entitled “Daily TIA talk” earlier today.