Father Vsevolod doesn’t want people to die for living sinfully, but he believes that this is what will happen if they don’t shape up. In his mind, because illness is a result of sin, then wearing condoms will not prevent illness. They have to stop sinning to avoid illness, by his logic. The fundamental problem isn’t that the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox hierarchy are a bunch of sexually repressed jerks who want people to die. The fundamental problem is that they have their heads so far up their own read ends that they cannot see how wrong they are.

You’d think that so many years after the germ theory of disease was proven that we wouldn’t still be fighting this battle. But we are. Too many people still think disease is a result of sin (it’s not, and even Jesus didn’t think so), or a result of pH imbalance in the blood, or an undetectable liver fluke (cf. Hulda Clarke), or imperceptible kinks in a person’s spine, or “blocked qi”, or any of a huge number of other pseudoscientific things. What makes these major religious organizations more dangerous than the quacks is their wide reach and the level of respect they enjoy, so their quackery is more likely to be believed.

Indeed, it is important to know that these people have good intentions, because that makes them more dangerous. They honestly believe that condoms won’t prevent AIDS, but that living what they consider to be a godly life will. That is why they are so vocal. They believe they need to spread this message in order to save lives. They feel they need to spread their pseudoscientific rubbish in order to prevent massive death tolls. That is why they will not wait. They feel their mission is too urgent, because they don’t want people to die, and they believe people will die if they just do what science says they ought to. That irony is what makes it all so tragic.