In Defense of the Holy Father

I generally shun celebrities, generally turn my nose up at them and generally care little about what they have to say. Most of them are highly uneducated in the ways of faith and spew out a whole lot of nonsense. But there are a couple that I follow on Twitter, and one of them is Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller. Even though he is an atheist, he is a smart and funny atheist who knows the government's place, and I admire that. But today he posted these Tweets about the Holy Father (my comments about the exchange in italics).
 

pennjillette - I guess the pope believes - the best defense is a good offense. This sure is offensive, wrong, and very desperate http://tinyurl.com/2uzfly7

pennjillette - The pope compares atheists to Nazis? Lucy, you gotta lot of 'splaining to do! http://bit.ly/aQv2QY 

To which I had to respond and defend our Holy Father! If you read the article attached to his link, you can see what the real message is. So I said:

TheLasVegasMama-@pennjillette I thought u were a critical thinker, but u r deliberately misunderstanding. He said atheist EXTREMISM. That's not u, so chill 

And to my great surprise, he actually responded. Here is the exchange that followed.

pennjillette - @TheLasVegasMama - I have no problem with extremism, it's the ideas and actions that matter. 

TheLasVegasMama - @pennjillette Rite. Idea of no God=xtrme action of genocide. 1 DOES NOT always follow the other, but it CAN-thats the point the pope made. 

pennjillette - @TheLasVegasMama - he could have used some communists as examples, they really were atheists. 

(Let me point out here that I thought it was interesting that he was not disagreeing with what I said but that he actually brought up yet another example of how evil atheists can be, so I thought it would be ironic to point out how often atheists perform evil deeds. So tongue in cheek, I responded with the following)

TheLasVegasMama - @pennjillette Agreed, history does give us numerous athiest examples to choose from. :)       

But he totally missed it, and who knows what he thought about what the smiley face meant. 


pennjillette  - @TheLasVegasMama - why would you smile after that? Atheism without freedom has been terrible, but why the emoticon? That sums it up 

TheLasVegasMama - @pennjillette b/c though its true, I was conveying a tongue in cheek tone. Why does the emoticon bother you? 

TheLasVegasMama  - @pennjillette BTW its probably too hard to explain here why tongue in cheek at that moment, but it was based on your previous response.    

TheLasVegasMama -  @pennjillette I should have added an "ohhh snap!" instead of the :) which would have better conveyed the point. Or not.  

It all ended there because he didn't answer after that. Who knows what he thought, maybe that I was a just another member of the hoi polloi. I kind of wished that he understood what I said, but then the other part of me took over - the part of me that is just plain sad for him that he has not opened himself up to God yet. And I say "yet", because through Him all things are possible - even the conversion of confirmed atheists. I skimmed through some of his other Tweet responses to other followers and realized that he has a very uninformed notion of what "religious" means, and what "religious people" are. 

We should all be praying for him to open himself up, and for the Lord to soften his heart.