@Bob

Your assertion is false.

Bob - I agree with Clem the Gem with regards the specious belief that left-wingers are somehow complicit with Islamic extremism.  Maybe this fallacy arrives from the fact that the right-wing media has pretty much got this ground covered - Islamophobia is very much 'their' cause célèbre.

Not that I believe we should oversimplify it as the Left chastising Christians and the Right reproaching Muslims, because when egregious conduct happens nearer to home, neither side can claim ownership.  

The protest by Muslim extremists at the soldiers' homecoming parade in Luton, for example, invoked widespread condemnation from every hue of the political spectrum last year.  It also indirectly led to the formation of the EDL - but then again, that's another story.

THe Vatican has suppressed the Enlightenment and Scientific Learning for centuries. They knew Galileo was right but refused to allow his ideas light. They knew Darwin's Theory on Evolution was correct but refused to admit it in public. The Vatican has hidden away in its vaults all the records that it suppressed. We have had very few apologies from them.

If people with the kind of mental health disorder that makes them think that their invisible imaginary friend wants them to give lots of money to their secretive, hate-mongering, science-opposing, backwards-looking organisation... then let the fools.

But if this was a truly progressive country, that money ought to be being taxed rather than absurdly treating them as "charities" (if they can't afford rennovation work on their beautiful medieval buildings then I'm sure they can be nationalised and become beautiful museums and art galleries instead); similarly there would be no such thing as a "Church school" or an "Islamic school", all role for religion in education would be removed (and religious indoctrination against evolution or condoms would be vigorously opposed as part of the national curriculum); and on no account should somebody as controversial and dangerous as this man be in the country on a "diplomatic" visit being paid for by the state.

Let him come if he wants to (and let him be arrested and sent to the Hague if that is what the law requires), but let his supporters pay for it, not us, and for goodness sake let them pay VAT on their expensive tickets (and there I was, thinking that salvation was free!) and their churches pay council tax and corporation tax like any other money-thieving organisation.

The Englightenment opposes religion intellectually, that's just a fact and the religious know it (which is partly why they spew out such nonsense to counteract it). This article completely misplaces its attention on "how will the Pope choose to direct the Church's policy towards the Englightenment". That's an irrelevant question - I don't care what the sinister and delusional think is their best strategy, that's for them to decide. For more interesting is the question "What should we, the enlightened and progressive, do about the Church?" Just because the Englightenment is intellectually opposed to superstition doesn't mean we need to be proactively physically and politically opposed to it (just treat it like the nonsense it is), but several factors militate against that: the spread of religion, as a mind-virus, to our young; the fact that this is being state-sponsored in church schools; the danger that this poses to things like basic scientific research (not just anti-evolution but anti-stem cells) and women's rights (anti-contraception, anti-choice). Failing to oppose those thing means that we progressives have actually become entirely complicit in the wrongdoings of religion, because for 13 years a Labour government allowed this state-funded indoctrination to go on unhampered. We need to consider both how quickly we can destroy the forces of ignorance and superstition, and what are the best tools to finish the job that the Enligtenment started... not waste time wondering what one irrelevant religious group thinks about another.