The Next Big Science Authority

Posted by $ Abaco 8 years, 8 months ago to Science
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I just learned of this. So far, I'm speechless. What are your thoughts?...
SOURCE URL: http://www.casinapioiv.va/content/accademia/en.html


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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 8 months ago
    Galileo must be rolling around in his grave.
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    • Posted by $ jlc 8 years, 8 months ago
      Actually, he is grinning from bony ear-hole-to ear-hole: This is his victory. The Catholic Church now not only enthusiastically endorses a heliocentric solar system, but deeply regrets its tarnishing of its own reputation by the persecution of Galileo.

      I applaud the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. This is a wonderful thing to have on 'our side'. I do not know of any group of Protestant born-again scholars who would be able to out-bible a bunch of argumentative and picky Jesuits on religiously intrinsic defense of science.

      What this boils down to is that we who appreciate science for its own sake can now say, "Go argue with PAS." (Either because we do not give a rap about what the bible says or because we think that the bible is a vague allegory provided to Mesolithic goat-herders by a wise deity.)

      Jan
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      • Posted by johnpe1 8 years, 8 months ago
        because the pope endorses global warming? . or because he's
        endorsing scientific ANYthing? . just because he's wrong about
        which scientific theory to back, backing one is a virtue? -- j
        .
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        • Posted by $ jlc 8 years, 8 months ago
          The pope is wrong about a lot of things (so much for infallibility...) but what is good about the PAS has nothing to do with the pope, but with the stance and religious expertise of the massive Catholic Church.

          For example, the CC has formally endorsed evolution since...I think around the 1960's. One of my responses to religious arguments against evolution is to say, "Well, the Catholic Church endorses it. I think they read the bible - go argue with them."

          I do not personally care if the bible agrees with science, since the bible is a origin fable of a nomadic population, who were trying to hold their culture intact in spite of being surrounded by a lot of much more advanced civilizations. So what if it disagrees with science? That is not its purpose. It has done a good job of holding the Judaeo-Christian religion together and THAT was its purpose.

          But there are a lot of people for whom these things matter, and I would rather have them argue with each other than with me. If the PAS wants to take them on (as in Massive and Catholic and Experts), that is great; one less thing for me to do.

          Jan
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          • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
            You don't have to argue with those who don't respect reason, and whether or not you do the Church clinging to the reputation of "science" as it promotes the opposite doesn't help.

            The Catholic Church has not endorsed scientific evolution. It has distorted it into another authoritarian dogma. As the Church retreats before advances in scientific discovery it has found it necessary to acknowledge that life evolves, but it turned that into another "God did it" dogma. There were many hypotheses for evolution before Darwin. The religious version of teleogical evolution directly contradicts the Darwinian theory, which explicitly rejects teleology as the mechanism of evolution.
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            • Posted by $ jlc 8 years, 8 months ago
              There are over a billion Catholics in the world, and many more (non-Catholic) people who are influenced by the opinions of the Catholic Church. I would much rather begin conversations with these people from the basis of, "OK. We all agree with evolution. Now: Do you think this gene for red hair was inherited from Neanderthals or was it a spontaneous mutation in the contemporary H. sapiens population?"

              I do not have a religious view of the universe, but if the Catholic Church is willing to come up to the plate to endorse the physics and evolution, then they are welcome allies. From my brief perusal of the site that starts this thread, the PAS is inviting new ideas and discussions on things like dark matter, string theory, and evolution - which is not a authoritarian or teleological approach.

              (You get a point for teleological, though. One of my favorite words/concepts...though I can never remember how to spell it.)

              Jan
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              • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
                The Catholic Church has not endorsed science, it has grudgingly acknowledged it's success. It still treats it as a competing authority, with no recognition of a superior way of thinking and pursuing knowledge. Those with a religious mentality are not capable of discussing science in scientific terms; they still endlessly rationalize in speculation, like the medieval scholastics, in the name of "discussion" and always retreat to "God did it" at the first sign of the unknown. Their retreat before the advance of science can only be a good thing, but their mere acknowledgement of science does not make them an ally.
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  • Posted by ProfChuck 8 years, 8 months ago
    This illustrates the fundamental difference between belief and understanding. If science is vulnerable to political or theological acceptance then it has lost all of its value.
    Belief drives both politics and religion and belief is a fundamentally irrational act.
    I was once asked if I believed anything. My answer was "No!" My appreciation of the world is based on understanding not belief. I was asked if I believed that two plus two makes four. Again my answer was "No!". but because I understand the principals of mathematics I understand WHY two plus two makes four.
    That is the difference between belief and understanding.
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    • Posted by $ 8 years, 8 months ago
      I remember hearing that if a scientific stance was not allowed to be challenged scientifically then you no longer have science. You have religion. That explains a great deal in the world today.

      Science has been pretty dead for quite some time. Oh, it pops up occasionally in environments trying to generate new product. But, for the most part, the gov/grant/university/health arena is polluted to the point of being an entirely different animal.
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      • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
        There is a lot more to do it than the freedom to question. The method of scientific thinking and observation is fundamentally different than belief from faith, authority, and rationalizing. If you happened, at least for a short while, to be allowed to challenge a dogma based on a competing dogma it still wouldn't be science. Rational, independent thought based on your own perception of reality and reasoning is what gives rise to the right of the freedom to challenge or question. It also means that those who argue from dogma don't have to be taken seriously in either their decrees or their "challenges".
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      • Posted by ProfChuck 8 years, 8 months ago
        Correct. A "real" scientist welcomes a challenge to ideas and concepts because he (/she) recognizes that understanding is a process of growth and assimilation. Just as there is no such thing as "absolute truth" there is no such thing as "settled science", if there was the Earth would still be flat. That is a political concept not a scientific one.
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        • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
          The basis of science is "settled". Science is not a sequence of exploded fallacies. Expanding knowledge is based on what one already knows. Aside from correcting occasional errors, such as the phlogiston or caloric theories, existing theory remains "settled" based on known evidence and explanation, but better qualified by its range and context of validity as more is learned about it.
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          • Posted by ProfChuck 8 years, 8 months ago
            The whole concept of "settled science" is unscientific hogwash. Newtonian dynamics and both special and general relativity have survived countless experimental validations but no physicist would ever consider them to be "settled science". There are simply too many instances where they don't work. However, politicians and theologians will insist that a scientific "finding" that supports their views is "settled" thus cutting off any counter argument. Science doesn't work that way.
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            • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
              The experiments verifying classical physics are well understood and don't change with time to suddenly become invalid. It continues to be true in the same context it was always true and is a necessary basis for what has subsequently been discovered in modern physics. Established science does not become false when new phenomena are discovered which it does not account for. New discoveries do not mean that what we knew previously 'stopped working'. Scientific knowledge expands, it is not a sequence of exploded fallacies. Skepticism, not established science, is hogwash.

              General relativity has been spectacularly successful to great precision but only has a couple of realms of experiments to distinguish it and no underlying explanation integrating it with other knowledge.

              This has nothing to do with politicians and theologians acting as authoritarian demagogues. They are not scientists and do not represent science.
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              • Posted by ProfChuck 8 years, 8 months ago
                I am going to make a flat statement here. All scientific theories are models that are less complex than the thing being modeled. As such they are incomplete. It is not possible for an incomplete theory to be "settled".
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                • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
                  Scientific theories are not "models" in parallel with objects. Knowledge is a grasp of reality not a collection of things in parallel with it. See Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology for the nature of concepts in particular.
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                • Posted by $ Thoritsu 8 years, 8 months ago
                  A smart guy described science as looking at the world through a knothole and trying to figure out what the whole thing was.

                  A good example of this is the difference between Newtonian physical transformations (e.g. throwing a rock from a train), versus Relativistic versions of the same. There is a difference, that is larger as the speed get higher. The simpler Newtonian version can be used for about everything in the range of human sense, but not so for very fast things like space communications.
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                  • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
                    The size of a "knothole" does not change the nature of conceptual knowledge. With much larger sense perception capability we would still have to conceptualize and infer principles. Conceptualization is our form of awareness: The knowledge in the form of general principles is not intrinsic to external reality waiting to be discovered. Only the facts are there. We have to identify and classify them in accordance with essentials, all based on our 5 senses and power to reason regardless of the scope of those senses.
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                    • Posted by $ Thoritsu 8 years, 8 months ago
                      I think I agree. My point there was that for most of what we are trying to discover next, the ability to sense the facts is very limited, making the conclusions more and more analytical and difficult for non-scientists to get their head around.

                      The recent Higgs-boson discovery was like determining the winner of a car race using only 37 photons of information at the finish line spread over 30 seconds.

                      But to the "model" point, the data was correlated to a model, and in the Higgs case, the data matched to support a 99% confidence that that model predicted the results.

                      It is interesting that this model-prediction concept is lost on the climatologists. I have a friend (actually a guy that works for me), whose wife is a climatologist. I've been trying to get the real technical basis for the human-based global warming. The arguments on the side of the issue are "appeal to the expert", which I find wholly inadequate. The arguments against are honestly more complete. It is amazing to me how many examples of the arguments-for models "backing into" the present data there are. I asked my friend, when someone was going to predict the next 10-20 year temperatures, and lock the model and result down, so it can truly be tested against an experiment. It was amazing that he actually had not considered testing a model against a future (unknown) result as a measure of its accuracy. He agreed, no one would accept models matching known results in our business, because the model would be considered corrupt by known results.
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                      • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
                        The knowledge becomes more difficult as it becomes more abstract. Beyond the level of direct perception new discoveries and their validation are based on indirect measurement, inference and previous knowledge in ever wider abstractions. The "knothole" analogy pertains to identifying and performing the indirect measurements, but there is much more.

                        The increasing base of technical knowledge makes it harder for a non-scientist to understand it in anything but the crudest terms that would not have been sufficient for the science. That is in addition to the difficulty of the analysis itself -- even if a non-scientist is intelligent enough to follow a difficult analysis, he can't do it if he doesn't have the base of knowledge to understand what is being analyzed. The nature and role of abstractions based on abstractions is a crucial part of Ayn Rand's epistemology.
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          • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 8 years, 8 months ago
            I will have to tell you that it's amazing how much of the 'settled' science of my youth is no longer accepted.

            My wife says that "everything is phlogiston" but I think she exaggerates.
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            • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
              What science that you learned is no longer true?
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              • Posted by $ 8 years, 8 months ago
                As our knowledge evolves we change our actions. Remember the xray machines in shoe stores? They are before my time but are a good example. Then, nowadays we allow ourselves to be taken advantage of by interests that play on the public's poor knowledge of science. This is where we get into the Objectivist area of "rational self interest". That's good enough for its own thread...
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                • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
                  Xray machines in shoe stores are not a case of science not being true. They would still work. If you mean that they weren't initially known to be unsafe, that was an additional discovery, not a refutation of xray science.
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    • Posted by $ Thoritsu 8 years, 8 months ago
      "Believe" in all its forms is something I'm regularly striking from technical documents. "We believe this is the right safety factor for this capacitor". Terrible! It is amazing how colloquial technical communication has become.
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  • Posted by $ Thoritsu 8 years, 8 months ago
    I had a monster argument with an apologist on Quora regarding the church's persecution of Galileo regarding heliocentricism. His position was that the church was enlightened and ready to support heliocentricism, but Galileo was too aggressive and pugilistic. Of course driving a spike through Bruno's tongue and pallate and burning him at the stake some couple of years before Galileo was "asked" by the church to write a version of this finding suitable to them had no bearing on the church's real position or Galileo's response.

    This is the same nonsense as the 1600's!
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    • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
      The Inquisition persecuted Galileo for defying church dogma and authority -- its claimed intellectual authority and the authority to decree what could be published. To this day the Catholic Church has not admitted to naturalistic explanation in science. Apologists for the Inquisition have a lot of nerve claiming it was all Galileo's fault for not pandering more. It was bad enough that he pandered as much as he did as he politely tried to convince them. He even tried to provide them with rationalistic loopholes they could use to re-interpret dogma, to give them a way out. Their reaction to his polite intellectual independence was a frenzy; that was the central issue even beyond defying a specific doctrine. If he had more openly defied them in a more personal way, telling them they had no right to interfere, they would have burned him at the stake.
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      • Posted by $ Thoritsu 8 years, 8 months ago
        Yep, and if the church could get away with burning people at the stake for power now, they'd do it again. And power is given to them for a pile of BS that if someone spouted today, they'd be committed.
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        • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
          It wasn't that long ago that the church was fighting to stop repeal of the laws banning contraceptives. Now they are whining about 'religious freedom'.
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  • Posted by $ 8 years, 8 months ago
    Communism. Funny how it's packaged. Honestly, based on what I see, I don't think for a second that they are serious about stopping slavery and human trafficking. They have the resources to do something. As my dad used to say, "Show me, don't tell me."
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    • Posted by $ jlc 8 years, 8 months ago
      Many of the religious orders are voluntarily communist. This cannot help but slant the view of religious people towards how well communism works. They see successful microcosms (many of which are supported by commercial enterprise outside of their communes) and conclude that the major Communist experiments 'must not have been implemented properly' when they are disastrous.

      No, the default is that 'communism does not work for the human species per se'...but I observe that it can work for selected subsets of humanity. I am all in favor of having Communists form their own communes within a matrix of a Capitalistic society.

      Jan
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  • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
    This has nothing to do with science. It is an alliance between the Catholic Church and the viro "sustainability" "ecology" movement demanding de-industrialization. Both parties latch on to the word "science" as a term of authority, cashing in on the prestige of science by hijacking the name to try to shut down debate.

    It also isn't new. If you look into the web site you see that they promote "events" going back to 1998, beginning with "Changing Concepts of Nature at the Turn of the Millennium". It's a fusing of nature worshiping nihilistic viros and equally nihilistic Church dogma demanding groveling before "God's Creation" in the manner of the early church.

    If you read the recent Encyclical On Care for Our Common Home http://w2.vatican.va/content/dam/fran... you see this spelled out in all its agony. If you want to experience being "speechless" read that.

    The staggering intensity, scope and open admissions in Common Home make the "Agenda 21" "sustainability" conspiracy theories sound feeble and unambitious in comparison. The Church has a lot more practice, for thousands of years.

    As you read it you will see an obvious clash in style, with modern lingo mixed with the stock chanting of a priest, as well as contradictions in emphasis, showing that Pops Francis did not write it all himself (if any of it) and that modern viros had a big hand in it. But this isn't new to the Catholic Church -- the text frequently quotes and footnotes previous popes and bishop conferences as well as the likes of Earth Charters and Rio Declarations going back well before 1998. This line of fundamental nihilistic thought has been going on for a very long time merging viros and traditional religionists in a common medieval sense of life.

    Some conservatives have decried Common Home as the "Global Warming" activists co-opting a gullible but otherwise innocent Pope as they refuse to criticize the Church for anything other than a single individual going astray. But if you read the document you will see that it is much more fundamental in a way the religious conservatives cannot acknowledge. The political implications spelled out are not restricted to "global warming" of the climate hysteria movement. That is a minor part. They emphatically denounce the last two hundred years of the entire industrial revolution in the name of a grovelling, ascetic, minimalist human existence as the Christian ideal. The Pope, who when he became a bishop years ago adopted the name "Francis" from the ascetic Francis of Assisi, wasn't "co-opted"; modern viros co-opted themselves in a regression to a Dark and Middle Ages primitivist philosophy. Their ideology fits like a hand in a glove.
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  • Posted by $ jdg 8 years, 8 months ago
    The Vatican has always published beliefs about science, and even done a certain amount of investigation (much of which involves things the rest of us probably don't believe in at all -- for example, they have a committee that rules on whether alleged "miracles" by saints are genuine or not).

    Of course, their judgment about these questions is mostly going to be guided by whether they believe the resulting publicity will be helpful or harmful to the church. But then, I've seen plenty of similarly self-serving judgments (about questions like climate change) by "real" scientific bodies all over the world. It just goes to show that for most people, selfishness wins, even against reason and honor.
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    • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
      Ayn Rand's concept of selfishness rejects hedonism, including all forms of power seeking and scams. Promoting religion isn't in one's self interest.
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      • Posted by $ jdg 8 years, 8 months ago
        Agreed (as far as AR; I use the definition in Ringer's "Looking Out For #1" which does not reject hedonism). But the people doing it use their own shallow definitions of their self-interest.
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        • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
          It's worse than than. They promote self-destruction in the name of self interest. That is how they promote it "against reason and honor".
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  • Posted by Zero 8 years, 8 months ago
    Wiki says the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has been around since 1936.
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    • Posted by $ Thoritsu 8 years, 8 months ago
      Just 11 years before they published the last edition of the "banned book list" (Index Librorum Prohibitorum). This list includes works by:
      Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Montaigne, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Emanuel Swedenborg, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, John Milton, John Locke, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, and Hugo Grotius. In 1966 it was concluded that with contemporary literature's scope, it was no longer tractable to maintain the list!
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  • Posted by scojohnson 8 years, 8 months ago
    I guess I'm wondering what the bewilderment is about. I'm Catholic, the church has had a very large science wing for a very long time, the Vatican even has a very large observatory that is used in collaboration with NASA, the European Space Agency, etc.. The Catholic Church has an "insignificant" Medical system in the US (Mercy Healthcare)... now called Dignity Health... (one of the largest in the Western US).

    There are many orders of clerics in the Catholic Church, the Jesuits for example do not take a vow of poverty and are very pro-scientific advancement. (Think Notre Dame University, Benedictine, Boston College, De Paul, Xavier, University of San Francisco... and maybe 300 others). http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teac...

    The Vatican Library is probably the largest on Earth...

    The Swiss Guard is better trained and equipped than the US Secret Service Protective Services and has a massive armory under the Vatican.... (Haven't had any jumpers at the Vatican walls...) (The Swiss Guard is entrusted to guard their faith and the symbol of their faith... the US Secret Service has to make a conscious decision if protecting Obama is worth taking a bullet...)

    The church has changed quite a bit since the Middle Ages... one of the things about an organization with about 1900 years of history and about 1/5 of the world's population as membership (at least), you will have to take the good with the bad.
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    • Posted by $ Thoritsu 8 years, 8 months ago
      You can take the good with the bad. I think the whole seeks to back into a foolish conclusion using selected facts. Not one bit different than 1600, except for a far more limited power...due to the shoulders of giants that stood up to them for the last 500 years.
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    • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
      Catholic dogma is the opposite of science in method and content. That some who call themselves Catholics manage to occasionally understand something about science in spite of religious belief does not mean the religion is in anyway scientific.

      The Catholic Church's acknowledgement of the scientific advances of others who are more rational is a constant retreat before the advance of science, not embracement of science.
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      • Posted by scojohnson 8 years, 8 months ago
        That sounds like hate-mongering against a specific institution. 91% of the US is a member of an organized religion, the vast majority being Christian in some capacity. Is that saying that 91% of the populace does not embrace science?

        There are many things about the physical world that cannot be easily explained with science... what was before the Big Bang? The likelihood that we are only one of many universes, the fact that many incorrect beliefs about Earth being the center of the universe or whatever was assumption and not in scripture, or maybe the transition from ape to intelligent human may take a spark of divine intervention. Whatever it is, there is a lot of room for faith and science and not everything in scripture has to be taken literally. It doesn't diminish either.
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        • Posted by $ 8 years, 8 months ago
          About 85% does not embrace science, actually.

          I'm being an ass...kind of. Science has been rejected by the average person in our society. To understand science one must make some effort. Instead, people are happy to be told what to believe. "Astroturfing" is a new name for this. People like being told what to know, what to believe. It's easy. Many times in my life I've been told what a study concluded, only to read it myself and find that the study found the opposite. Pretty neat.
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          • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
            Most people in this country have no special education or expertise in science but do still respect it as non-controversial and valuable. They have some idea of the experimental method and at least a general outlook of problem solving for living on earth. That is the opposite of the long history of hostility of the church towards reason as the means of human knowledge and purpose as religion constantly recedes before scientific advance.

            Without much direct knowledge of science, most people can only read what they are told about science. It isn't their fault that it is so badly taught and reported as all kinds of rationalistic and arbitrary claims posture as "science". (including this latest PR stunt from the Catholic Church).

            The growing "pragmatism" and irrationality has caused people to be more susceptible to fraud and scams in a culture that no longer reveres reason. Cynicism and skepticism towards scientific claims grow as the name "science" is hijacked by all kinds of ideology and posturing elitists tossing out "official reports' on whatever they are promoting. One of the losses in contemporary culture is the loss of general excitement and interest in genuine new science -- even with the overwhelming acceptance and valuing of new technology improving lives that is taken for granted while its foundations are underminded.
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            • Posted by scojohnson 8 years, 8 months ago
              Keep in mind, teachings of the church tend to be very geographical in nature. I haven't ever heard anything 'anti-science' in mass... but if you go to Africa or South America, the teachings may be a little different, but geared toward reducing crime / birth rates / poverty / etc. At the Vatican and in America, the church has been front & center in the search for exoplanets (for example)... ("Go forth and multiply")..

              I don't think I'm that different in saying that my faith has always served more as a moral compass, than as a black & white sign post.

              Don't steal, don't bang your neighbor's wife, don't kill people, don't falsely testify against someone else, etc... these are all things that greatly enhance the operation of society....

              It's also important to recognize that with a billion members, there are going to be some bad apples that don't represent doctrine, the faith, teachings, or interpret things for their own gain.

              The only exception to my faith has been the poor handling of the sex abuse scandals. I think the church very wrongly acted in its own self-interests, rather than in the teachings it wants its membership to profess.
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              • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
                The Catholic Church has a long history of anti science and anti technology, right down to opposing anesthesia because God wills pain.

                The essence of Christian morality is groveling duty to the supernatural for life in another world, not common sense principles against murder. And it isn't "guideposts"; it's outright duty.

                Your experiences of a secularized, watered down version are a consequence of the decline of the influence of the church and its fundamental theology, especially since the Enlightenment. That also accounts for differences in "geography": the more intellectually backwards society in Africa and South America did not experience the benefits of the Enlightenment the way America did.
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                • Posted by scojohnson 8 years, 8 months ago
                  We are making the same argument, I'm arguing what the church is today, (this started with the church's academy of science posting), and you are arguing church doctrine and positions from the 1300's... How is that relevant? I'd prefer a computer designed by Steve Jobs over one designed by Da Vinci... not saying one is wrong or right, but you're talking 600 years of progress.
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                  • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
                    The Papal Encyclicals are still medieval in outlook, and so is much of Catholic indoctrination in this country. Catholicism has traditionally been more intellectual and philosophical than the other sects that split from it, and tends to explicitly follow the original premises closer, though some of the more "holy roller" types are more openly irrational.

                    The followers in America mostly tend to be better than that, including apparently you, but there is no reason to follow it all. It has nothing to offer. The essence is still rotten to the core and is only destructive, and so is the latest "ecology" nonsense promoted in the name of acknowledging "science", which it is not http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts...

                    The Catholic Church was and is no Da Vinci, and Steve Jobs was not a follow up to Augustine, he was the opposite.

                    If you attracted to the sense of life in Atlas Shrugged you should learn the philosophy that makes it possible. We are not making the same argument for it.
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        • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
          This is a forum for reason and science. The Catholic Church has a very long history of being the opposite. Rejecting its wallowing in faith in the supernatural and religious dogma in its opposition to science is not "hate mongering". To defend reason and science is to defend human values. That cannot be done by pandering to its opposite.

          Most people in this country who consider themselves religious pay lip service to it because they don't know any better, but are so secularized as to have virtually nothing in common with the original Christianity of the Dark and Middle Ages and before.
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          • Posted by scojohnson 8 years, 8 months ago
            Very incorrect. I would argue that the American spirit, our tendency to shed blood for the freedom of others, and the core of our battle with the Muslim world (now 1000 years old) is very much rooted in the Knights Templar, and Judeo-Christian Values.

            I'm assuming you haven't travelled much... try visiting places in the world without those values, and see how far the economic and other freedoms survive... I spent time in Africa, Thailand, Bosnia during the ethnic cleansing, Rwanda, and Cairo... all during times of conflict, that absence of those key values can make for a pretty horrific status of life.
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            • Posted by ewv 8 years, 8 months ago
              This country is a product of the Enlightenment emphasizing reason and individualism as it overthrow the death grip of religious mysticism on the west.
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    • Posted by scojohnson 8 years, 8 months ago
      As with the Clinton/Gore years... protecting the President requires the Secret Service to also look at the immediate replacement... so they have to hold their nose and choke back the gag-reflex I'm sure with Obama.
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  • Posted by $ blarman 8 years, 8 months ago
    ROFL.

    Mr. Pope (not really sure how to address him) - if you're really interested in true science, I'd advocate that you start with classic Economics (Adam Smith, etc.). Let's see how long your economists last before their Keynesian heads explode.
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  • Posted by $ 8 years, 8 months ago
    I predict that Obozo will be fully involved in this, via the UN most likely, after this term. You heard it from me first...
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