Pope Benedict XVI stated that one of today's biggest and greatest challenges was to steer global perception of relatavistic realities towards a more universally harmonious and fundamental reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI

Military service

In 1943, when he was 16, Ratzinger was drafted with many of his classmates into the FlaK (anti-aircraft artillery corps). They were posted first to Ludwigsfeld, north of Munich, as part of a detachment responsible for guarding a BMW aircraft engine plant from Allied bombers. Next they were sent to Unterf�hring, northwest of Munich, and briefly to Innsbruck. From Innsbruck their unit went to Gilching to protect the jet fighter base and to attack Allied bombers as they massed to begin their runs towards Munich. At Gilching, Ratzinger served in telephone communications.

On September 10, 1944, his class was released from the Corps. Returning home, Ratzinger had already received a new draft notice for the Reichsarbeitsdienst. He was posted to the Hungarian border area of Austria which had been annexed by Germany in the Anschluss of 1938. Here he was trained in the "cult of the spade" and upon the surrender of Hungary to Russia was put to work setting up anti-tank defences in preparation for the expected Red Army offensive. On November 20, 1944, his unit was released from service.

Ratzinger again returned home. After three weeks passed, he was drafted into the army at Munich and assigned to the infantry barracks in the center of Traunstein, the city near which his family lived. After basic infantry training, his unit was sent to various posts around the city. They were never sent to the front.

In late April or early May, days or weeks before the German surrender, Ratzinger deserted. Desertion was widespread during the last weeks of the war, even though punishable by death; executions, frequently extrajudicial, continued to the end. In the days preceding imminent German defeat, however, many soldiers deserted. Diminished morale and the greatly diminished risk of prosecution from a preoccupied and disorganized German military, also contributed to widespread desertion. Ratzinger left the city of Traunstein and returned to his nearby village. "I used a little-known back road hoping to get through unmolested. But, as I walked out of a railroad underpass, two soldiers were standing at their posts, and for a moment the situation was extremely critical for me. Thank God that they, too, had had their fill of war and did not want to become murderers." They used the excuse of his arm being in a sling to let him go home.

Soon after, two SS members were given shelter at the Ratzinger family's house, and they began to make enquiries about the presence there of a young man of military age. Ratzinger's father made clear to them his ire against Hitler, and the two disappeared the next day without taking any action. Cardinal Ratzinger later stated, "A special angel seemed to be guarding us." When the Americans arrived in the village, "I was identified as a soldier, had to put back on the uniform I had already abandoned, had to raise my hands and join the steadily growing throng of war prisoners whom they were lining up on our meadow. It especially cut my good mother's heart to see her boy and the rest of the defeated army standing there, exposed to an uncertain fate..."

Ratzinger was briefly interned in a prisoner of war camp near Ulm and was released on June 19, 1945. He and another young man began to walk the 120 km (75 miles) home but got a lift to Traunstein in a milk truck. The family was reunited when his brother, Georg, returned after being released from a prisoner of war camp in Italy.

Ratzinger maintains the Church's opposition to moral relativism, which he sees as producing views ranging "from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth." [9] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI#endnote_hughhewitt)

Ratzinger's theology places much emphasis on the role of the institutions of the Catholic Church as the instrument by which God's message manifests itself on Earth. As such, he does not view the search for moral truth as a dialectic and incremental process, and this view of the role of the Church is one that tends to resist external social trends rather than submitting to them.

I don't understand why there is any controversy in the Catholic Church about conservativism versus liberalism. The church is conservative by definition, and those who think the church should become more liberal are in the wrong church. It's not a democracy. Love it or leave it. There are plenty of churches with more rational or liberal views.

The Canadian Government, in the wake of the sponsorship scandel, the Domerey Inquiry, may be moving from a liberal government to a conservative government. Not Good!

you could say that non-believers are conservative and lacking in imagination. after all the god stories are coloufully entertaining and the entertainment industry is where we have always found the greatest imaginative talent. thinking more about it, i reckon that semi-conservative is a better description, as something of the past is always taken foward along with slight deviations from the standard policy. a bit like replication (molecular biologically speaking). trouble is, without external intervention (in DNA it is mutation) it's just like shuffling cards - a lot of diferent hands, but still statistically limited.

Non-believers are conservative? So where does that leave believers? I think it's more imaginative to generate one's own philosophy based on knowledge than to simply accept uncritically what is also uncritically offered.

It is more important to disbelieve false things than it is to believe true things.

So are you suggesting that the Pope needs to use his imagination as well as the knowledge of the Vatican and Cristianity in guiding his papacy?

Or should he stick with the churh doctrine of Pope John Paul II?

I don't care about the Pope. I'm not Catholic. Let the Catholics worry about that.

I wonder, do they influence you in any way, Rick?

All the wrong ideas in history were imaginative. Critical thinking is more important.

Imagination and the knowledge of what to do with it (wisdom) in equal abundance is the answer, I would imagine!

Equal? I think the self discipline of critical thinking is the more precious commodity. It's usually the one found to be lacking.

http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/4/21/201855/404

....The ascent of Benedict XVI to the Papacy has been notable for the incredible number of dumb things it has provoked the masses on the left into uttering. It was inevitable, perhaps, that the death of John Paul II would bring about such phenomena: beginning with Markos Moulitsas' profoundly stupid declaration that "Conservatives hated the pope"; to the advent of the detestable "Nazi pope" theme bandied about by his own whip-smart community; to the tedious shrieking of Andrew Sullivan; to the monologues of well-read bigots; to the pronouncements of left-wing public officials; what has become tremendously clear is that if, pace Frist, the left is not against people of faith, at the very least it barely grasps the nature of faith itself....

....the active role of God in the world changes throughout history. The break between the Old and New Testaments marks the definitive change in that role in that tradition. Perhaps the religious left is correct that a new change is upon us: that orthodoxy is now something different, and that they are furthermore reflective of that. The person concerned with Christian orthodoxy will be forgiven for noting that the previous meaningful shift in God's role in the world came with the birth of Christ....

http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?ID=19115


....Dembski to head seminary's new science & theology center....

....Dembski and other evangelical scholars such as Phillip E. Johnson have used arguments of intelligent design to loosen the stranglehold that Darwinian naturalism has held over contemporary science and academic thought....

Ideas are wonderful things but without evidence they are just for filing. Fossils could be fake (some have been over the years) and isolation assisting evolutionary divergence (nice work Mr Darwin - clever guy, you know) means a trip to Galapagos to see it for yourself, but at least we have something to work with here, rather than anecdotes and hearsay (and, in the past [actually still], the pressure used to misinform the poor and ignorant). I agree with you wholeheartedly Rick.