Catholic Church made two critical errors with me. I never felt guilty but I was very fearful of this all powerful thing they said I needed to obey. Fear is powerful as a controlling mechanism. BUT when I was in second grade they talked about how their God was "good" and if I prayed to Mary every day for 30 days, my wish would be granted. I wanted this toy dump truck so I went up in the attic and showed god where he could put it after 30 days IF he was really good as they say. I faithfully prayed and alas no dump truck appeared. I concluded IF there was a god, I couldn't count on it. BUT I still needed to fear him. Then the church later offered a deal if I took communion for 9 consecutive first Friday's of the month , I would have the chance to repent just before I died and avoid hell. I did it, and then I felt relief from the wrath of God. Then there was college and atlas shrugged and the end of their God in my life. It was a long journey to escape the church.

term, similar background here. Difference for me was when I was told, at an early age, not to question what the priests and nuns told us. That was the beginning of the end of my "faith". Never thought of going back, and the visit of the pope just illustrates to me why. Blatant lefty crap being spouted by this pope.

Very interesting article in the link you provide, Dr. The power of the brain is incredible and may be used to mankind's good as illustrated by the linked article.
Then there is the pope. Never mind.

What is particularly damning about that event was that it was all choreographed and then carried out as it if were spontaneous. The whole incident had been planned out ahead of time.

I agree with you. I was raised Catholic until I went to college and started to actually understand what they were saying. It's a psychological cult based on fear and guilt. Looked at from the outside, it's completely stupid, but when you are in it, it's hard to escape from the idea of going to hell...

term that is all true, but don't underestimate the significance of the fact that he believes it down to his bones. Those beliefs have had an enormous philosophical influence for millennia. Your observation focuses mostly on the psychological aspects. We can't ignore the philosophical content of the ideology. Philosophical content can't be refuted by identifying psychological motives. We can ignore his pompous babblings on a PR tour, but not the destructive consequences of the principles that have been spread and believed by so many.

The pope is the ceo of a very big corporation based on fear of death, mind control , and socialism based on guilt. He has to keep this in mind when he speaks and acts. It's orchestrated manipulation. I ignore whatever he says

It is absolutely true that is not new. It is just the brazen and absurd audacity that he is getting away with currently. The religious conservatives will not challenge his position because of this fealty, and yet are supposedly in direct opposition to his stated positions on a number of prominent issues. This is an interesting analysis that - of course - is not out there in the MSM.

Thank you! That helped a lot! Really!

This is not new. Add to it the ostentatious public pandering to him as a spokesman for a moral ideal, including by religious conservatives who say they don't like his politics and won't challenge the moral code he's getting them from. That's not new either.

It's not very clearly written, but it seems to mean the pope's dogma in his latest Encyclical (though not original with him) that all man's successes are due to God giving him the capacity as part of "Creation". He's been saying that on his PR tour, too. It's the original, thousands of years old, "you didn't build that".

The "insurance" line seems to refer to the sophistry that even if you are not a "Believer" you should do what you're told "just in case" -- with no guidance on how to buy such "insurance" for the infinity of conflicting imaginable "possibilities".

Religion once had a useful purpose - in the absence of civilization and the rule of law, religion was there to scare people into behaving themselves. Somewhere in the last century, we shed our need of religion. Now, the purveyors of religion act much like the union bosses and environmentalists: they're keenly aware that they are no longer necessary (at best - dangerous to society at worst), and preach ever more fervently that we need them.

DrZ... just like taxing away ALL the wealth of the 1%... or the 0.1%... to pay for libtard programs, think what would happen to the pope's 'wealth' if the Church "sold it all and gave to the poor"...

They would be giving away their wealth and have no way of replacing it other than donations from their member/followers.

So it would be a one-shot deal with no staying power. If they thought they could replenish that wealth with donations from their followers, they'd be able to give most of their cash flow TO the 'poor' Today... but they don't.

So, it's kind of logical to say that the Catholic Church, the pope and all the rest of that 'system' is operating an organization with excessive overhead and other internal costs.

Which, after a few thousand years of operation, is pretty sad, isn't it, from a libertarian/capitalist's point of view.... isn't it?

Huh?

This is a really good article. It draws out the absurd contradictions plaguing human existence. And right now, the visit of the Poop raises this awareness. I am stunned that there is this human dude donning fancy shawls casting airs of some divine superiority and daring to lecture the world with admonishments based upon on anything but reason. This is charlatanism of the highest order!

The wasted money is the least of it. They kept the western world in backward misery for a millennium and are still trying. The source of that is the corrupt philosophical view of man and his relation to the world. Most public commentary today still panders to it as an ideal.

I like that in-universe explanation.

From a real-world point of view, it shows how bad we are at predicting technologies just 25 years in the future. We now imagine computers becoming self-aware in our life time but other things like drastically slowing aging or establishing a large colony in space as being in the distant future. New technologies will surprise us and make our modern notions of the future look silly.

If I recall correctly, the future history of STNG has a vast war occurring after present time that wrecks our terran technology. So that 'historical' technology may not be common knowledge in the 24th century.

When I was a kid, I never imagined a PC where I can look up stuff without flipping back and forth through pages.
That also goes for cell phones inspired by hand held Star Trek communicators. Ha! Read that factoid some place wherever.

The true miracle would be if the little girl were to obtain the finances needed for her to avail herself of the latest scientific innovations, rather than to hope the Pope's touch will miraculously cure her. Such a false hope to instill in her is truly an evil act. This is where religion shows its true face -- and its fangs.

In the first season of Star Trek The Next Generation, a show made in 1987 set in the year 2363, a character remembers some factoid from a book he read long ago, but he can't remember any more. Everyone is surprised when one of the characters manages to find the book it came from in a computer search. The episode wasn't the best, but I love watching that scene. They are the flagship traveling across the galaxy. Technology has cured most human problem. But looking up some random factoid in a computer search is treated as amazing technology. It's something my five year old does today without a second thought.

The Vatican sits on the world's largest gold reserves, and the world's most valuable collection of art. However, rather than emulate the fictional Pope Kiril from "Shoes of the Fisherman" and give some of that wealth to the poor, Pope Francis would rather hypocritically lecture the rest of us that we should give more of our personal wealth.

Americans give more of their personal wealth to charity than all of the other developed nations combined. However, the MSM conveniently ignore that fact, and instead count only the contributions by governments, chastising us that we're too greedy.

While not disagreeing, faith and hope are often all the suffering people have while waiting for our politically impeded systems to work.
Government needs to get out of the way. It takes about 400 days to get a new medicine or technique tested and approved in Europe, here it is more than 2500 days.

Here's another piece on making the lame walk, published the day the Pope arrived in NY. How many of you saw the coast-to-coast 24/7 coverage of this science breakthrough? That's my point. Progress is in labs like these. http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-...

The nostalgic last page of the latest Popular Science to come to my mailbox shows an illustrated colony on Mars from its 1953 edition.
Old dino would be age 6 and I was reminded that, as a kid, I fully expected mankind to be expanded across the solar system by now.
During the 60s a book and a movie predicted we could at least have human beings reaching Jupiter by 2001.