Next: Pope George Ringo

It's been hard to avoid mention of Pope John Paul II in the last few days, especially if you live here in Ireland, for which the Pope had a special place in his heart, having spent a week here in 1979.

We gave him quite a welcome here, it seems, with about 40% of our population coming out to see him when he appeared in Dublin, Drogheda and Limerick. When I found out that he never came to Cork that was probably the moment that started me on the path to athieism.

I joke, of course, though I wish some of the people writing encomia to him were as well, though it's obvious that they're serious. The funny thing is that when many famous figures die unexpectedly newspapers rush out obituaries that might be way out of date, but the Pope's death was a foretold one but they could have used some old ones anyway as the Pontiffs pontifications have been pretty much the same for the last twenty years.

One pundit claimed that JP2 was totally ill at ease in the modern world, as if he was living in a monastery in the side of a rock living on wild berries and not someone who travelled round to almost every country in the world and then get carted around in a state-of-the-art popemobile.

Another told us what a great man he was to kiss the ground in Scotland thus acknowledging that it was a different country to England. I think it was really because he was told that the dust on the airport pavement was the most nutricious food he could get in that country, and if he'd eaten one of their deep-fried Mars bars people would have been wheeling out those obits a long while back.

Others give him credit for ending communism by giving financial and moral support to Solidarity and by refusing to apease communism the same way previous popes had appeased Nazism.They're the people with the sort of simplistic notion of history that probably expected the problems of Poland and other Eastern European countries to be magicked away when they became good capitalists like ourselves. Instead, many of them come here seeking a better life, and it's the same people that welcomed John Paul to Ireland that voted against European expansion, often because of their oppostion to abortion.

Being educated in a Convent school, you get an impression of what it's like when a group of elderly men in Rome decide how you lead your life. One of the nuns who taught me showed us some pictures of a Polish dude at various stages of his life. It obviuosly turned out to be JP, though it wasn't obvious to most of us until we saw snaps of him in his 40's, though the Sister claimed she knew him from the pic of 14-year-old Karol. That seemed freaky to me but then she's a bride of Christ and JP was Jesus' point man down here on the Earth that the pontiff kissed so extensively, so it all made some sort of sense to her.

Then there was my religion teacher who wouldn't decide on any moral issue until she read the Vatican's opinion. It's true that there are a lot of complex moral issues out there but I don't know if some aging clerics are the right people to delegate the job of deciding what's wrong and what's right, particularly when the book they base their judgments on was written between two and three thousand years ago. (For a left winger like me it's a bit easier: I find out what George Bush or the Daily Telegraph thinks and think the opposite.)

When the Bible was written, the Jews were hunter-gatherers being chased round the desert by various pastoralists like the Babylonians, Egyptians and Romans and were always just on the edge of extinction, which is why they had to develop such strict laws encouraging early marraige. The contrast with Buddhism, for example is striking, as the countries that practiced it never faced the threat of extinction, so, for example, they have no proscription against masturbation as it doesn't really hurt anyone.

Times change, though, and whereas the Jews have come perilously close to extinction more than once, the same can't be said of Catholics, who number around 1.2 billion at the moment, and are growing fast. Most of this growth is in places where people most need spiritual sustinence, like Africa, but the Catholic Church thanks Africans for their often zealous support by refusing to allow them to use contraception. As a result the population of Africa is projected to rise to 2.3 Billion in 2100, a 23-fold increase since 1870. The only thing that's keeping it in check is AIDS, which will continue to cause misery for millions as long as the Church opposes condoms.

Unless you take Genesis 1:28 seriously, this can't be a good thing, but the problem is that many Vatican clerics do, that they genuinely think that we can keep using up the Earth's resources indefinately and that God will provide for us. Others believe that the end of the world is actually a good thing, as then they'll all be beamed up to heaven in the Rapture. I've got news for them: The book of Revelations, from which this theory was culled, was written under the influence of hallucinigenic drugs.

Those of us who believe that the Earth is a complicated and interdependent system and recognise that our lifestyle isn't sustainable can only hope that the people of Africa realise that their own belief systems pre-date Christianity by thousands of years and that Religion is merely another form of imperialism.

If, like me, you don't want Africa or Asia to become unsustainably over-populated there are some positive things you can do, like donating money to the international planned parenthood federation. Or you could just buy a big box of condoms and send them to a village in Africa.

I'm hopeful that the modern world will reciprocate the Vatican's contempt for it, particularly as the new Pope is almost certain to be a conservative, but the signs aren't that good. It may seem to us here in Western Europe, even in a largely religous country like Ireland that the influence of the church is on the wane, that shopping or football might be the new religions, but elsewhere religous fundamentalists are outbreeding the rest of us as they get married earlier and don't use contraception.

This is Pope John Paul's legacy. The papacy used to be a great world power, but now their influence is limited to woman's wombs. Unfortunately this is where babies come from who grow up to be adults who use up a share of the Earth's dwindling resoursces.

Some things do get better though: During the investiture controversy a "Holy" "Roman" "Emperor" was forced to kneel naked in the snow to beg for the pope's forgivness, but now I'm able to criticise him to my heart's content.
Along with the rise of the Evangelical Right in the US and militant Islam, he's helped to bring about the end of humanity from chronic overpopulation.

Yet I doubt anyone mentioned this in the hours and hours of coverage the Pope's death recieved on RTE, which shows we've got a long way to go before we become a truly secular nation.