You must earn respect

Dear Pope,

Whilst I expect you won't ever read this, I want to say my piece. In your recent visit to my country, you said in your opening address "In this challenging enterprise, may it [the UK] always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate." Too right we no longer value or tolerate it.

Today, your Pontificia Academia Pro Vita came out against the awarding of the Nobel prize saying the award ignored the ethical questions raised by the fertility treatment and that IVF had led to the destruction of large numbers of human embryos. Please, can you stop this talking of respect for life, for two reasons. Firstly, a ball of cells is not a person, in the same way that you don't build ships out of acorns. Secondly, it's immensely hypocritical.

Where is your respect for the life of the two million people who die of AIDS every year? When you stop people using contraception by saying that AIDS is "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems”, you are sabotaging an effective intervention which prevents a disease that kills 2 million people a year. Where is your respect for those people that died because, from your pronouncements, they did not wear a condom?

Whilst we're on the subject of sex, where is your, when you deny people who love each other, that love? Saying stuff like this: “Above all, we must have great respect for these people [homosexuals] who also suffer and who want to find their own way of correct living. On the other hand, to create a legal form of a kind of homosexual marriage, in reality, does not help these people.” is not evidence of respect for homosexuals. Saying the word "respect" doesn't mean anything if you don't mean it. Indeed, children of lesbian parents do better than their peers, yet your lack of respect leads to an adoption agency going to court for the right to be bigotted. Thankfully, it lost.

Also, respect for children? You can guess where this is going. If you value the life of the child so much, exactly where was that value and respect when you (yes, actually you) repeatedly moved peadophiles around, instead of bringing them to justice. In Belgium, not one single parish has avoided sexual abuse. Everywhere you look seems to have the problem. That it's been going on a very long time is no excuse. I would have had respect for you if you'd sorted things out then. Not now though, with some lame, meaningless apologies, after countless children have been raped.

When you had a nun excomunicated for having an abortion that saved the mother (whose child would have died any way), exactly where was your respect? Would you have had mother and child die? Surely respect for life is having one life live longer? Why are her actions worse than the priests who sexually abused minors? None of them have been excommunicated.

The Nobel Prize is a celebration of the science that helps move us forward. I have no respect for your Church, it holds us back. Whilst you acknowledge that Galileo was correct in saying that the Earth moves around the Sun, saying that the Church's actions were "rational and just" is yet more evidence of how backwards you and your Church are, and how the world has no need of you.

I hope my country does not always maintain its respect, for when it finally lets it go, if not the rest of the world, then at least we will be free of the shakles that you would put everyone in to stiffle, suffocate and destroy all that does not match your bigoted, out of date, dogmatic, rancid and utterly repulsive world view.

Yours disrespectfully,

EnglishAtheist