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.'"

Comments

Re:Violation of autonomy? Dialog? WTH?

[BitZtream]

He probably doesn't like the pope using GUIs, atleast, thats the only reason he'd care about his dialogs. Of course, if he wants to speak to him or not, thats a matter of dialogue. dialog = computer terminology for a window or something of that sort dialogue = a conversational act Now, no one point out what I fucked up in this post, I've never got to be a grammar/spelling Nazi before!

Re:The Galileo Myth

[goofyspouse]

From your link:

Galileo's James Carville was no preacher, but a scientist named Schreiner (it helps if you say his name the way Seinfeld says "Neumann"). If this guy has difficulty getting facts straight about modern references (It was "Newman", not "Neumann"), how can we trust his accounting of details from the distant past? Just a thought.

That, and the word "meme" just annoys the crap out of me. Everybody...stop using it. Yuck.

Typical double standard

[unassimilatible]

"Conservatives are evil, so they have no right to speak. We're liberals, we're good, so we get to play by different rules."

You have thus summed up the hypocrisy of many liberals. They will defend to the death your right to agree with them. Just don't dissent.

Intelligent, secure liberals are supposed to defend free speech, the idea being that more speech is better than less speech, and that "bad" ideas should be vetted publicly and debated. That's what we try to do in America, although our college campuses are just as bad, where Mahmud Ahmadinejad is treated like royalty, but Ann Coulter and other conservatives are assaulted and shouted down.

Re:Assinine complaint

[Dog-Cow]

Copy and Paste is far easier in Windows, than it is in say, X Window. And that operation is probably done more than any other.

Re:Dialoge?

[McGiraf]

"If you actually knew religion well, you would know that its positive effects far outweigh its negative ones."

LOL

Re:Dialoge?

[jtn]

I wonder who is the idiot who modded you "Insightful". It should be noted that "pudge" works as a Slashdot "editor" and therefore any moderation given to him is likely to be suspect, as been suggested in the past with some rather rapid instantly appearing moderation points given to certain posts.