Pain and Suffering

How can any rational person be religious, given the kind of thinking in the following article?

The style and content of thinking fully comply with "postmodernism," the current nihilistic philosophical and cultural fad that throws away reality, reason, freedom, and the magnificence of capitalism. This is the voice of the Dark Ages (or Medieval times, if you will).

We are castigated for sucking up scarce resources just to be well, prosperous, happy, and to advance. Well, shame on us. To those who think like this, wealth is always static, as is progress. To those of us liberated from this Augustinianism, we know that wealth must be created, and there is an unlimited potential for that, provided people are left free.

Postmodernists, whether disguised in raiments of some church or ranting in some liberal arts department at some university, hate capitalism. Theirs is power politics, to take over the sources of those resources, and create their nirvana, socialism.

Cox & Forkum Editorial Cartoons: "March 02, 2005, Pain and Suffering, From The Boston Globe (AP): Vatican decries 'religion of health'. (Hat tip Joe Wright via HBL email list)

Vatican officials on Thursday [Feb. 17] held out Pope John Paul II's stoic suffering with Parkinson's disease as an antidote to the mentality that modern medicine must cure all, calling this a 'religion of health' that is taking hold in affluent countries.

'While millions of people in the world struggle to survive hunger and disease, lacking even minimal health care, in rich countries the concept of health as well-being figures in creating unrealistic expectations about the possibility of medicine to respond to all needs and desires,' said the Rev. Maurizio Faggioni, a theologian and morality expert on the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life.

'The medicine of desires, egged on by the health care market, increases the request for pharmaceutical and medical-surgical services, soaks up public resources beyond all reasonableness,' Faggioni said. ...

Psychiatrist Manfred Lutz, a Vatican academic, hailed John Paul, who for years has struggled with Parkinson's, as 'the living alternative to the prevailing health-fiend madness.' ... 'Precisely in the handicap, in the disease, in the pain, in old age, in dying and death one can, instead, perceive the truth of life in a clearer way,' Lutz said. 'The pope's message is 'suffering is part of life and has meaning,' the doctor said.

The cure for the problems of these "millions of people in the world struggle to survive hunger and disease, lacking even minimal health care," comes in one word, one concept. If you understand that concept, you belong to the future. If you do not and will not learn it, you join the Pope's school of thought and revert to the dismal past. The concept is: CAPITALISM.