Dear Pope Ratz:

Since you seem to feel it is your position and right to complain incessantly about the very world that you have chosen to hold yourself aloof from, allow me to take you to task on a few points.

A few days ago, you were busily berating Canada for its laws, especially on marriage and reproductive rights.

Today, I read that you are complaining about Germany's "science and reason make it “deaf” to God".

“Put simply, we are no longer able to hear God ­ there are too many frequencies filling our ears,” he told the crowd, at a former airport on the outskirts of this city where he once served as archbishop. “What is said about God strikes us as pre-scientific, no longer suited for our age.”

You're close Pope, but not quite close enough. It is the words of people like you that render the "word of God" irrelevant. It is ironic to me that a man who has spent most of his life in contemplation argues against "reason". In effect, your own arguments further expand the rift between rationalists who have turned away from theistic belief and followers of theism. Science is not inherently anti-religion, in fact many scientists are religious.

The problem is that while our rational knowledge of the world we live in has blossomed in a variety of fronts, your interpretation of scripture has become ever narrower. Instead of embracing knowledge, and using the interpretation of scripture to guide people, you fight the knowledge itself.

On social issues, you continue to make absolute pronouncements that might have fit in the early 20th Century, but your positions fail to acknowledge that women are people, not objects; that gays and lesbians are contributing members of society, not pariahs.

You continue to argue that "family values" mean that women should never have abortions, that contraception is evil and so on. The argument about contraception might have made sense a century and a half in the past when a sizable percentage of babies didn't survive to adulthood, and we lost a lot more people to "accidents".

Instead of incorporating new knowledge into your interpretation of scripture, you have attempted to hold scripture apart from the world and context in which it must live. The factual discrepancies between what we can rationally know and what scripture claims is enough to tell me that scripture can only be interpreted as "metaphor", not literal fact. Until you and your church learn this reality, you can expect the educated world to turn its back on you.