The reality of all of this is that, regardless of where one stands on the insult match between the rationalist atheist crowd and those few folks of religion that even bother to engage them anyone, every time a new technology is introduced there are those who are bound to say something like this about it.

Cast your minds back to the printing press which was such a threat that monarchs all over Europe sought to control it. In the end they couldn’t. That certainly didn’t stop the attempt.

Fast forward to things like the telephone and telegraph both of which alarmed some in authority. People could plan things like stealing someone else’s azaleas on the phone!

Movies could take pictures of naked people doing things naked adult humans often do, say sex, and that wouldn’t be good for anyone so we got censorship. Not official censorship mind you but some MPAA version to avoid legal prescriptions. Que steam train flying into tunnel.

Go back far enough and the post was, no doubt, considered dangerous. People in remote areas could drift off into some sort of virtual reality and become anti-social while exchanging letters!

Radio, television! It doesn’t even take a change in technology just how it’s used. For example comic books! Oh the horror! Rock’n’Roll! Terrible! Rap and hip hop worse!

Now comes the Internet and the Web. Oh my!

We’re social creatures. We’ll use any excuse to talk with one another, write to one another, make pictures for each other and on and on and on. So if a new technology comes along that makes talking to each other easier humans will jump on it.

Another group of humans will jump right back on it to declare how terrible it all is and how it needs to be controlled or how careful we need to be in how we use it.

It can be a religious leader, psychologist, philosopher, cabinet minister, talk radio host, or just someone looking to fill 10 minutes of a newscast on the latest danger to us all.

Then again, because I’m here, I’m obviously an anti-social guy stuck in a virtual world because I can’t handle the real one and fantasy is so much more comforting (boring as all hell after a while, mind you).

Yeah, Benedict is an easy target. Too easy, in fact. That doesn’t make Mike’s point any the less valid. As I pointed out there are many, many others doing and saying exactly the same things.

So carry on arguing about religion and the current holder of the Papacy, if it makes you happy.

Mike’s point is still the same so why are you engaging in a mere sidebar rather than the story itself which is not Benedict but that he’s only saying what so many others are who have as much, if not more, influence on our lives?