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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.'"
People study reason at Universities.
Catholicism is a fundamental opponent of reason.
He's a theologian.
... just like Lot and his daughters. Or Noah who expels one of his sons who's seen him drunk. Two of the most evident... Our morals come from our evolved urge to cooperate with other humans. It's a group-survival trait, only preempted by other evolved traits such as "war behaviour".
This means he's spent most of his life poring over empty crap that has no use.
It's really sad that even I, loser, am so fucking superior to that monkey with his belief that the sky could fall on his head "if God wills it so". Not even beginning to think of the countless hordes of lobotomized morons who listen to what he says. It's a sad, sad world, where over one half of all people still believe in those disproven delusions.
Yeah, disproven. There is no God. Religion is full of shit. It only survives by vertical spread, even though any kid not blindingly stupid will, some day, see right through the lies and develop a profound hate for the elders who tried to inculcate him with a clear handicap for problem-solving, which is all that life's about. The paradigm of life as evolving replicates of genetic material is a problem-solving algorithm. Life is itself a problem-solving system, you'd think that we'd have abandoned a tool that's become as useless as religion, using Science instead! But the inertia of stupidity is infinite.
Oh, I see an argument coming... "Religion says why, science says how" Fuck That. Religion says "Because God Willed It So" and has nothing, NOTHING else to say.
"Teaches us great MORALS..."
Or Allah uh-akbar, let's go kill them all, God's with us, Blut und Ehre, and shit. Religion includes memes of the sort that gets the warriors jumping up and down, screaming "KILL! KILL!", when resources go down and people need to die to make room in the ecological niche. Not that we REALLY need that since we invented agriculture, but as we evolved in constantly warring small tribes for 6000000 years, we haven't lost the habit of killing the neighbours, take their land and capture their women, yet, because that's been one thousand times longer than we've been in towns fed by high-yield crops, instead of in small villages with scarce game and small berries.
The solution to all wars, and to religion to a large extent, is EDUCATION to teach Science to everyone, and RESOURCES so that they never get the perception that those will lack.
Add to the above the fact that religion is generally useful to control people and that explains why we haven't waked up yet. Causal loop : people in power use religion to keep religion in place.
Oh well. If someone repiles with an argument I haven't adressed yet, I'll destroy it then... So, creation of the world - check. The origin of war and the link to religion - check. Destroy the "Religion gives us Morals" argument - check. Destroy "Why vs How" - check.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
they still mess around with our italian stuff...
But, do they mess around with the UNDERAGE Italian stuff. The priests over here just can't get enough of the young boy cock. Seriously, priests are sick fucks.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Ex Hitler Youth Pope disagrees with the exoneration of the Jews!
In other news, bears shit in the woods, and the Pope wears a dress!
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Just as The Church was guilty of censorship when it was in power, now we having these scientists refusing to listen to another side of the issue.
I agree with whomever it is that said "The answer to bad speech is more speech, not censorship".
If these scientists had asked for the right to speak in answer to the Pope, I would have been all for it. Demanding that the Pope not speak, on the other hand just smacks of censorship. It's not just the pope who might be . "accusing us of refusing dialog." -- It's just about anybody who believes in free speech and open dialog.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Religion brings war.
War brings rape.
Rape brings genetic diversity.
Genetic diversity is good for natural selection.
Hey, he's right!
If you really can't see the difference between coming to a logical conclusion about something based on history and evidence and taking something "on faith", then either your personal definition of "faith" is so wide as to be completely useless, or you truly are the obtuse idiot you're making yourself out to seem.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Says you, the person who has introduced numerous -- and oft-repeated -- fallacies into this discussion.
...and you have often unattainable, ever changing standards of proof. No one could ever prove anything to you because if they do you bring up some childish metaphysical argument.
What fallacies? The ones I see are the ones you've introduced by putting words in my mouth.
Shall I act like you and run around chanting liar repeatedly. Child.
And you are just admitting that you are inconsistent. You say -- again, as you have said many times -- that you should have to be able to prove everything you say and believe, or else you are being illogical/irrational. Yet you cannot prove MANY of the things you say and believe.
You say I can't prove anything but they aren't my standards of proof. By my standards I can prove plenty. You don't understand what a standard of proof is and keep changing the goal posts. Is it fun? Does it feel like musical chairs infant?
If you can live with being that irrational, that's your cross to bear.
Oh _I'm_ being irrational, says the man who claims to be tolerant but hurls abuse and accusation. Says the man who believes nothing can be proved if it can't be expressed mathematically. As if that would bother me. You wouldn't know a logical argument if it bit you on the backside.
False. Indeed, I love science at least as much as you. And I almost surely know more of science than you do, too.
Gimme a break. I'm not sure whether to laugh or vomit. You don't love science. You love twisting the truth and redefining it to be whatever suits you then claiming your opponent can't prove otherwise due to some metaphysical gibberish. You refuse to acknowledge the damage religion has done to scientific endevour but instead choose to focus on occassions where science was fostered by religion. Science had to breeak away to get away from false logic like yours.
Almost all of it cannot be proven.
Again if it can't be proven why do you feel so strongly about it? If neither of us can prove our arguments according to your own babble, then why is the unprovable thing I say a lie, whereas the unprovable thing you say is true and golden? I'll tell you why. Because your mind is feeble and your understanding of logic is weak.
False on both counts. What I say is absolutely, 100 percent consistent, and you have shown yourself incapable of demonstrating otherwise.
I have shown myself incapable of convincing an irrational twit that what he's saying doesn't make sense. You remind me of a man I met on a train last year that insisted I put away my laptop because the Internet is all lies and all the knowledge you need is in your own head. Oh and he wore a UFO hat and t-shirt and was stark raving mad. He had about the same grasp of Relativity that you had.
Nor is it in the least bit impractical. You haven't even TRIED to show it is impractical, except by irrationally arguing against straw men you've created.
How am I suppose to show it impractical if I can't prove anything? It therefore doesn't make sense for you to criticize me for failing to do something you consider impossible. I've created no straw men. Your head is full of straw.
That's a shame, since there is far more to truth than science. This is self-evident truth, since the scientific method ITSELF is a metaphysical, not scientific, idea. Without having truth greater than science, science wouldn't, itself, be capable of existing.
Yes we need metaphysics to explain a method that basically says go out, observe, experiment and generate formal rules that cover all the things you see. You have no concept. Your Metaphysics is impractical and unprovable, so you insist science must be this way too. The fact is mankind hasn't observed laws of physics changing or bending. What we work out holds true in all observered instances. Your metaphysical arguments are nothing more than childish rants. You have
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