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Pope Cancels Speech After Scientists Protest
Reservoir Hill writes "Pope Benedict XVI canceled a speech at Rome's La Sapienza university in the face of protests led by scientists opposed to a high-profile visit to a secular setting by the head of the Catholic Church. Sixty-seven professors and researchers of the university's physics department joined in the call for the pope to stay away protesting the planned visit recalled a 1990 speech in which the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, seemed to justify the Inquisition's verdict against Galileo in 1633. In the speech, Ratzinger quoted an Austrian philosopher who said the ruling was 'rational and just' and concluded with the remark: 'The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental affirmation, and from being rooted in a still greater form of reason.' The protest against the visit was spearheaded by physicist Marcello Cini who wrote the rector complaining of an 'incredible violation" of the university's autonomy. Cini said of Benedict's cancellation: 'By canceling, he is playing the victim, which is very intelligent. It will be a pretext for accusing us of refusing dialogue.'"
You don't need dialogue with irrational nutcases. If you could have rational dialogue with them you'd already have shown that their beliefs are irrational. It's sad really...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Brilliant, a classic example of someone who just don't get irony! I bet you're American : )
Let's shift the goal posts back then. You want to know how religion in itself contributes to bloodshed and torture? Very simple, by keeping people stupid.
How do they achieve this? By indoctrinating people. Look at Christianity, you are considered to be 'religious' if you go to some building to listen to some dude talk about his interpretation of some ancient moral codex which was designed for the retards of 2000 years ago. Christianity is all about dogma and other pointless BS that has no relation to the modern world.
Just look at Christianity's suppression of sexuality and sex. These kind of policies made sense for the retards of 2000 year ago, but now we have cheap and easy contraception, childbirth is a pretty safe process and in general, people tend to be less fucked up and prone to violence. Why can't the church just fucking admit that the anti-sexuality motifs are redundant and everyone should fuck (using contraception of course) as much as they like.
Same thing can be applied to marriage. Back in the day, dupping people into believing that marriage was holly and something more than a social contact would be a useful for society. Keep families stable, increase chances of survival and all that stuff. But this is 2008. Marriage is no more than glorified name for a social contract that makes it easier for people to live together on a long term basis. There is nothing 'special' about it. It's a fucking contract. Would you care any less about your loved one if you were engaged in a civil union as opposed to official marriage? The special nature of marriage is purely symbolic. But no, Christians have to continue shitting all this bullshit out of their dirty mouths about how marriage is a special bond signed by Jesus H. Christ in person... Furthermore, they also like to enforce their BS on people who having nothing to do with Christianity.
And this is just the surface of the iceberg of Christian bullshit. If you analyze the actually theology behind Christianity, it fails miserably. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost? WTF? What kind of bullshit is that? What the hell does some ancient populist dude's death have to do with spirituality? How does the whole Jesus story provide insights into the fundamental questions about our existence? If anything it has more to do with economic issues...
Spirituality should involve searching for questions that do not necessarily have any 'easy' or 'meaningful' answers. Things like the nature of reality, existence, love (is it simply biology/cultural evolution?) and time... Why not incorporate new developments such as genetics, astro-physics, brain related research into Christianity? What's wrong with admitting that the Bible is a pile of bullshit and that modern technology has made it redundant? It might have had good qualities back in the day - but now it's useless. Spirituality should be mind-bending, it should be scary as fuck. It should make you think hard about the fundamental questions of existence. It should scare the fuck out of you by pointing out how our whole conception of existence is largely based on some random rules that govern our world. The way we define the world is literally a product of some bunch chemicals doing some bullshit, isn't that crazy? Why do electrons exist? Why the fuck are there number like pi and e? WTF?
Christianity doesn't even approach these kinds of questions. All it has is bullshit and more bullshit. Do you realize how fucked up it is to reduce religion to a bunch of statements: "God hates fags, taxes and baby-killers. God loves America!" What is god? What is love? Why the fuck would an omnipotent (what are the implication of being omnipotent?) being even care about a bunch of random bag of cells, living on a random piece of land, on random planet, on random galaxy. Oh wait, these bags of cells has some level of consciousnesses, so that that must make them special... Yeah right. Christianity doesn't make any sense even in term of its own rules...
Christianity contributes to stupidity and conformism
Why would anybody want to have a "dialog" with the pope? Dialog presupposes that both sides participate honestly and with an open mind, and the Catholic church has demonstrated over two thousand years that it is incapable of doing that, and instead uses intimidation, violence, and murder to get its way. I hope many more institutions will follow and declare the pope and any other high Catholic dignitary "persona non grata".
The Catholic church is an evil institution. It is sad that so many well-meaning Catholic believers, good people at heart, don't realize that.