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Originally posted by Aban Rune:
On the surface, I agree with what he's saying about the maintaining of adherence to beliefs despite the fact that society's views change. Simply because an idea is no longer popular doesn't mean it's bad. It all depends on where the idea originated and how badly it's been perverted.

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In the case of leviticus, it's the original ideas that's badly perverted.

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Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering.
-Aeschylus, Agamemnon

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Your headlines stink of the devil, Fleet Street told
By Kate Connolly
(Filed: 22/04/2005)

Germany's newspapers rounded on their British counterparts yesterday, accusing Fleet Street of slurring the new pope simply because he is German.

"Hitler Youth - English insult German Pope", complained Bild, the country's best-selling tabloid, upset at British papers' sensationalised excitement at Pope Benedict XVI's past membership of the Nazi-era organisation. "The world is celebrating the new Pope - while the English bitch!" Bild protested.

The paper singled out for special opprobrium the Sun for its headline "From Hitler Youth to Papa Ratzi", and the Daily Mirror for its jibe at the "Panzer Cardinal".

One Bild commentator even suggested that British editors had let the devil "slip into the newsroom".

Addressing the Sun and the Daily Mirror Franz Josef Wagner wrote that the day after the pope's appointment readers of British tabloids "must have thought Hitler had been elected Pope".

"Your headlines stink of the devil, of sulphur and rotten eggs," he raged.

"Obviously, you complex English consider every Kraut to be a Nazi, even if he's Pope".

The Berlin tabloid BZ argued that even the Arab world had given the German pope a better reception than the British.

It turned for an explanation for the "envy and poison" to Professor Manfred Pfister, an expert on Britain at Berlin's Free University. He argued that the new pope embodied two of Britain's great hates: Germans and Catholics.

"Lots of the media still equate the Germans with belligerent fascists," the academic said.

"Then there's the Catholic church, the hate towards which is so great that every year on November 5 the British burn the effigy of a Catholic would-be assassin."

The weekly Spiegel accused the British press of showing "stunning meanness and unabashed mockery" at a time when a recession-hit and usually staid Germany was celebrating the election of the new pope so enthusiastically that even the markets rallied.

Pope Benedict XVI has never denied that he was a member of the Hitler Youth, stating that like all German boys apart from Jews and those with disabilities he was forced to join it, in his case at the age of 14.

Die Welt reminded the British press that the young Joseph Ratzinger was born to parents who suffered because of their anti-Nazi principles.

In 1937, the newspaper wrote, his policeman father decided to resign from his job because he did not want to serve under the Nazis and "accepted that the family would face financial difficulties as a result".

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