Benedict's Christmas Message

After my last post, I was excited to read Pope Benedict XVI's Christmas message, including the thought that "the men and women in our technological age risk becoming victims of their own intellectual and technical achievements, ending up in spiritual barrenness and emptiness of heart."

Of course, not everyone else seems to share my excitement. I try my best to avoid the Huffington Post at all costs, but I linked there via Southern Appeal. The comments that follow this post are not unexpected, though they are unintelligent, and do not deserve to be repeated. I have to share one, though. My favorite comment was among the ad hominem attacks on the Pope, and seemed to fly in the face of free speech, which I assume these same readers would champion above most values (but far behind the right of privacy):

To the Huffington Post administrators I have a suggestion. Ban the conservative trolls who are trying to make a career out of interupting our discussion of right wing madness. They only serve to redirect energy from the tasks at hand to responding to their lunacy. Ban them! I avoid them by checking the username before reading the post but I'd rather they just went away.

Posted by: truthmatters on December 26, 2005 at 11:28am

Its a shame that these people had to "redirect energy from the tasks at hand." I wonder what these tasks are -- the person seems to say the function of the blog is a "discussion of right wing madness" but this person is clearly opposed to open debate or defending what their beliefs against other arguments, so "discussion" is probably used very loosely. Based on his idea of a proper discussion, I wonder if this blog can claim that it has any value at all. Of course, I didn't see any intellegent posts from the crazy right wingers either, but I suppose that is why I don't waste my time with Huffington.