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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.'"
That its only Christians and conservatives who are intolerant... Its not like a rational scientist or tolerant liberal would shout down someone they disagree with... /sarc
Let's see. He asks that the visit be canceled. The visit gets canceled. Then he complains about the visit having been canceled.
This sounds like the guy's ready to complain no matter what happens.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Talking to scientists is can be ever so tiring. Some days you are just too pooped to Pope.....
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Why the hell should any science department give a rat's ass what any religious leader has to say? Does the Pope have any degrees in any sciences? Does he have any expertise, academic or otherwise that would apply in any way, shape or form, to the sciences?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
with almost no relevance to Slashdot as there isn't even a specific technology in question here.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The funny thing about rationality is that it's entirely subjective (however irrational that rationality may be, and vice versa, ipso-facto, falcon punch, etc... now I'm just confusing myself).
He's a German theologian.
I think that says it all.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
he is the catholic pope. the 17 century would be an improvement. Pope John Paul at least publicly forgave Galileo though. Benndict seems to be on a mission from god to undo everything that Pope John paul did.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
So it's perfectly okay for a Creationist to demand that he be allowed to give a speech at a biology department? It's perfectly alright for a Holocaust Denier to give a speech at memorial to Nazi genocide victims?
No one is censoring the Pope. Quite the opposite, the man gets far more attention than I think he deserves. That he isn't showing up at a university for some sort of glorified photo op where he gets to pretend he's cozy with science is hardly some vast attempt to silence him.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWU5ZDk3NGY3OGI4NDY1OTdmNzc2NmEzYjUzZWQxNWE=
The story of Galileo is a tad more complicated than the simplistic version we're used to. I'm no Roman Catholic, but this meme needs to be corrected.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Ratzinger was elected for two very specific reasons. First, he is already old so he won't spend 30 years on the throne. That's important to the church hierarchy because they don't want another John Paul II setting policy for that long and progressively going soft on them. The second is that he's essentially a hardcore, old-school catholic. You'll see a lot more of this crap in the next few years, along with a resurgence of the more traditional major and minor orders within the church organization, slowly displacing the more enlightened groups that gained a lot of power during John Paul's tenure.
We'll have to wait about a decade or so to see if this new angle will work for them. Personally I don't think it will. The world has largely moved on. But so much power (most of it very subtle) concentrated in the hands of a group of people who think it wasn't so bad to punish people for claiming that earth is not the center of the universe cannot be good. To paraphrase someone, it's not God I dislike - it's his fan club that scares the crap out of me.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
In any case, there is currently no unified theory that explains the connection of the spiritual realm ("soul") and physical world.
Here, let me fix that for you: In any case, there is currently no evidence of the spiritual realm ("soul")...
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
You can't take the sky from me...
Have you READ his remarks?
But why talk about anything "rational", when such an "irrational" reaction like yours is acceptable? After all, EVERY day is bash-a-christian day.
More than refusing dialogue it looks to many of us as the Pope was forced not to be present under the menace of riots: One of the students stated "THERE IS NO DIALOGUE WITH THAT INDIVIDUAL" and the leader in his speech claimed the presence of many other collective outsiders to participate in the event to make it as much inhospitable as possible to the Pope. Last image is the invasion of the rectorate and a meal served outside the premises.
I am disgusted to be italian in the same university as those.
I'm disgusted as well to be forced to post as AC because they are VIOLENT-RED-FASCISTS supported by squatters in the SanLorenzo suburb next to the university.
I would hope that people see that this University is not representative of the broader intellectual community.
Going out and putting a gag on him, or making it illegal for him to speak. Other than that, it's a group of scientists who find his position on Galileo, and how that speaks to his views on science, troubling, and feeling that he really has no place speaking at an institution. The Pope has plenty of places he can say his spiel.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You're right, of course. Protests and letter writing will silence the Pope, who has no other forum for airing his views.
If only there was some place he could speak from, that others could hear. Some sort of... what's the word... pulpit or even a balcony above a crowd.
I guess that'll always be the dream for the Pope though, since we all know he can only speak at universities.
Freedom of religion does not prevent my right to mock it.
No, they are not, except when explicitly claiming that particular power. And this has apparently been done exactly once since that particular dogma was instated in 1870.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_infallibility
Has anybody else noticed that Catholicism is quickly becoming the more "accepting/open-minded" branch of Christianity, especially compared to "mainstream Christianity" in the US? Discuss.
Current Pope aside (who, from what I can tell, isn't even well-liked by most Catholics), the Catholic church has more or less apologized for most of its past crimes, and John Paul II even made a case for evolution. Likewise, the Church has definitely placed a huge emphasis on charitable works, and focused very little on evangelism (which, is effectively very much in line with the text of the New Testament).
Although I could be completely wrong, Catholicism seems to be one of the more progressive mainstream branches of Christianity, whereas the bible-belt Christians seem to be moving in the other direction. (This is rather significant, given the Church's history)
Personally, I'm a bit upset at these scientists for protesting a speech from the Pope, which is -- dare I say -- rather dogmatic of them. No scientist should be afraid of ideas, even if they contradict his own.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
You do know that the Catholic Church, including Benedict XVI, supports the theory of evolution, with only a few caveats that it's part of God's plan?
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
1. The establishment clause only applies in the USA.
2. The establishment clause only prohibits the government from opposing religion. As long as their actions are otherwise legal, people can criticize the Church all they want.
3. If someone says grass is blue, it is within societal norms to laugh at them. But mysteriously it's not okay to do so if they say the world is 6000 years old.
Saying "Black people are inferior" is bigoted. Saying "Statistically, black people in the USA are more likely to commit robbery" isn't, since it's a statement of fact.
Saying that the Bible is two-thousand year old fiction produced by goat herders is a statement of fact. It is verifiably not true.
This is extremely misunderstood. Gallileo was told not to teach his theories as fact until they could be proven, and to not contradict the church in theological matters, not matters of science.
One also forgets that the Church was Gallileo's employer (he taught at a Catholic university.)
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
"Irrationality" is any thought that defies the predetermined narrative (as defined by the mainstream). In the 17th-century, it was any man of science. Today, it's any man of faith. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Sorry but your are wrong: no one has "shout down" the Pope. He owns a newspaper and a radio, and he's the politician that we see more than anyone else in TV here in Italy, even more than Silvio Berlusconi that owns half of the Italians TV stations.
Yes the Pope acts exactly like a politician in Italy: he tell which laws should be passed or not, or changed, for whom to vote and sometimes even tell people not to go voting, like in a recent referendum. And it's far from nice and good: the Vatican opposes (successfully, thanks to corrupt politician) the right of women, gays and lesbians, is opposing right now an anti-racism law (you read it right: they aren't opposing racism, they are trying to shout down an anti-racism law) and they even opposed a donation from Italy to a children hospital (they didn't oppose the use of the same budget money for the war in Iraq a few years ago), because they want to have the exclusive of charity in the minds of the Italians (the stupid ones, at least) so they get more donations.
And we already know exactly what he was going to say: that abortion is murder, even if it's a simple embryo one day from the fertilisation. And abortion must be completely illegal (in Italy we have a very sensible and balanced abortion law, that has reduced to less than half the number of abortions from when it was completely illegal and all abortions were clandestine, and saved countless women). I know this because I see him every day on every television news always saying the same things, and insulting women, gays, scientists and atheists.
Well he's free to says what the hell he wants, but scientists are also free to not invite him to say those things in a university. He can say the same thing but not in my home. This isn't censorship!
And the Earth is not flat. It's approximately spherical! And it goes around the Sun, not vice versa. I don't care what the Pope says about it: Galileo Galilei was right and the Bible is wrong!
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
For those of you that don't know, The National Review is a conservative magazine that publishes political opinion pieces. It's not exactly a scholarly journal of well researched historical fact.
AccountKiller
Because the negative side of religion is death and persecution, and those are pretty consistently applied by theocracies.
I'm not saying you're just bidding your time to start raping and pillaging, but I think religion is a wolf in sheep's clothing, and you seem really focused on the softness of its hide.
You can't take the sky from me...
I don't think anyone fits all their beliefs together into a coherent picture of the world.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
You know you have won the argument when your adversaries denigrate you by claiming you are just like them.
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Start with science. Science as we know it today was brought into existence by religious people who -- unlike their atheist contemporaries -- believed that, because God exists, the universe must have order, and rules, and that those rules are discoverable. It is because of Isaac Newton's religious beliefs that he brought so much knowledge to our world.
Justice. It is from religion that we get the idea that all men are created equal, that equality before the law, equality of rights, equality of worth are good and right and true.
I could go on but dinner is approaching. Now, to turn things around, all the things mentioned to me -- the crusades and so on -- don't appear to me to be related to religion at all. Religion was no more inherent to the Crusades than Nationalism was to the Holocaust. Those were both just tools used to promote other fascistic ideas about conquering and destruction. You could make the case that unthinking religion or nationalism is bad, but that's nothing new, and not unique to any particular idea. For example, courage is not bad, but courage without wisdom is bad, and so on. There's nothing bad inherent in religion.
Now, maybe there's bad things inherent in a particular religion, such as Scientology. But that's a separate discussion.
He was drafted into the army by a fascist state. Not something he had any choice over or should be blamed for.
his previous employment was as head of the Inquisition (which did in fact kill a few people in its heyday)In 1981, Ratzinger was named Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Inquisition, although the activities we now associate with "the Inquisition" ended centuries before Ratzinger's birth.
forbids the use of condoms and family planning resulting in disease and famineHe holds no legal authority outside a few blocks in Rome. He is the head of a faith that teaches chastity outside of marriage, but so is the Dalai Lama.
goes around dressed in goldYes, the Pope does wear papal vestments, although "dressed in gold" is another exaggeration. You might have also noticed that the Pope is indeed Catholic. Look, if you have a bone to pick with the Pope, at least be honest about it. Don't go around misleading people.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Y'know, it's strange that your self-evident moral and intellectual superiority have somehow failed to make you less of an asshole.
Actually, I feel that one should mock everything and everyone. People who are serious and things that `are to be taken seriously' are the only things and people that make me really scared.
Not that this is unique to Christians, of course: most people are like that. Well, most people I know, anyway.
Sure the tone is a little abrasive.. But doesn't this situation warrant some passion? Indoctrination of un-thinking is a very serious issue.
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic
is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man
is happier than a sober one"
-George Bernard Shaw
-amen
the pontiff looks at questions that have no place in reality or in rational discussion.
I'm sorry, but questions like "where did we come from," "why are we here," and "what is my moral duty to others" are important questions that have been part of rational discussion for literally thousands of years. Most of the great Western philosophers--people who perhaps define "rational"--have spent time thinking about those questions. For example Plato, Descartes ("I think, therefore I am"), Epictetus, Nietzsche, just to name a few. Each of those philosophers has thought about why we are here and what duty we owe to others--questions that the Pope also seeks to answer. He uses a different method to reach his answers, but the question is shared between secular and religious philosophers.
You might agree with the Pope's answers, but the questions are certainly important and deserve rational treatment.
You have part of it.
What problem does religion (and belief in general) solve?
Bonus: Can you formulate an answer that does not make you inherently superior to religions people? See this as a challenge befitting your superior intellect. (Then once seen, unsee.)
I can't... I've just used my brain, seen that comparing religion to science rationally makes science stand out as the superior tool, and feel pity and contempt for the myriads of people who live their whole lives believing those delusions and living in accordance to them.
It is an waste of effort of apocalyptic proportions and infinite stupidity; I can't see it any other way. Even if I try to imagine "all the good religions have done", I view it as an oasis in the midst of the pile of all corpses, all the witches and the dead in the religious wars... Religions are only peaceful when the people are. If they need a reason for war, they'll listen to the priest telling them to go die for God.
All those conditions, environmental switches, species-specific behaviors, is a sort of social game that us primates play unconsciously and collectively.
Million of years of evolution can't be changed, but, just suppress the environmental conditions that flip the behavioral switch to "war mode", and the dire consequences of religions will all be avoided : they won't be the xenophobic meme that mediates the dehumanization of the people's perception of their neighbours, if the conditions in which xenophobic memes thrive (impending lack of resources) just never happens anymore.
See? No flames
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
You haven't invited me into your house or your workplace, either.
Is that also censorship?
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
Sure, but there are degrees of coherence here. Just because no one has a completely consistent and coherent set of beliefs does not mean all sets of personal beliefs are equally coherent. For example, someone who believes in a virgin birth and a resurrection, but who is also a engineer or scientist trained to look at evidence, probably has a lot more cognitive dissonance and partitioning going on in their brain than the typical person. Similarly, a scientist who at least attempts to adopt only beliefs which can be supported directly with physical evidence may not totally succeed because non-evidence-based beliefs are often required in daily life to simply function. Nevertheless, they probably have a reasonably consistent world view with a lot less superlative fluff to fill in their knowledge gaps.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
With that in mind, I personally have no sympathy for the "but it makes them happy" argument. There is much more at stake here than the happiness of a bunch of hoi polloi... especially when that (delusional) happiness can be more than replaced with (rational) wonder at the mystery and beauty of the natural world.
The first second and third commandments.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Some people, at the risk of their lives, defected. He stayed in the system. Many others did, like Nobel laureate Günther Grass, but Grass lived an entire life of anti-fascist political activity afterwards. Another Nobel laureate, Dario Fo, was drafted but defected at the first occasion to join the resistance. Note that Fo was born in 1927, less than one month before Benedict XVI, and Grass is only six months older.
And anyway, the point was to point the irony with the six-million figure indicated by the parent post, when Ratzinger was among those that helped establish that tally.
They are not allowed to torture people anymore with the comfy chair, but their main activity is still censorship and repression of free thought within the Church. He could have chosen to be a missionary like Mother Theresa, but preferred the activity of a censoring bureaucrat.
Man, I am Italian and I wish it were like that. He has far more authority in the country than politicians. He says what he wants, and politicians usually give it to him because too few dare to tell him to mind his business, even though the separation of state and church should be a principle in the agreements the Italian state has with the Vatican. Partly it's because being "catholic", over here, is like being "patriotic" in the US. He is currently attacking the Italian abortion law: instead of simply telling catholics not to have abortions, he wants to make it illegal for everybody. Some people still remember how it was before the abortion law: double as many abortions and all performed by untrained, shady figures, resulting in women dying every year.
I probably did not finish the thought in my original post. It is not just that the pope is actually dressed in clothes that would cover significant charity projects and probably save hundreds of lives from starvation, the Church as a whole is actually a quite greedy parasite. They get about 0.8% of the Italian income tax and all their activities (including the for-profit ones) are tax-exempt, which in the last 20 years has allowed them to amass a fortune. Weren't these the guys who should preach poverty?
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Some questions are simply wrong. Asking "why" presupposes a reason and in a lot of cases there isn't one (on the level people are looking for - people still don't seem to accept the possibility that humanity's whole existence did not serve a higher purpose).
Personally, I'm viewing philosophers as the stepping stone between religion and science. You see, at the dawn of human civilization humans started asking questions: the first (incredibly bad) way of answering them was religion. Some people were not satisfied with the way religion answers them, so they went into the direction of philosophy. Some people went into the direction of science to try to answer questions. Religion and philosophy are flawed ways of finding things out.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Man, just because you were born in a world where practically anyone claiming to have a science degree is considered infallible by the media doesn't make Galileo's imprisonment unforgivable.
...and so on...
Do you realize how stupid that sounds?
Man, just because you were born in a world where practically anyone can claim freedom from slavery doesn't make slavery unforgivable.
Man, just because you live in a world where rape and murder are illegal, doesn't make rape and murder unforgivable.
See I can justify any action with handwaving.
He wasn't imprisoned because of his scientific findings, but because of his behavior that implied an unacceptably belligerent stance against his intellectual opponents. He not only insulted his scholarly peers, but also certain religious authorities (e.g. the pope) who were the very people trying to defend him.
In some ways that is much WORSE. It means the very people who claim to be the protectors of mankind from all things evil were quite happy to trash scientific truth just to put down anyone that would question their authority.
I also hear this argument a lot and it simply doesn't hold true. You do realize that Copernicus held off publishing his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) until he was old and close to dying for fear of retribution from the church? He didn't go around insulting the pope now did he? His works were still banned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus
First of all, I doubt that the pope at the time ever threatened to order bodily harm against Galileo, but you're welcome to enlighten me on that point.
You DOUBT? You mean I'm having this argument with someone who doesn't even KNOW the history, but is happy to rabbit on about things he knows nothing about? If you're actually interested in what really happened I can recommend a couple of good books I studied as part of my History of Astronomy subject when I did my Astronomy Masters. Never mind...I'm wasting my breath, aren't I? You're prepared to repeat whatever you've heard without examining it at all.
I didn't say the pope threatened Galileo with anything. I said the current pope condoned the actions of the inquisition that did threaten. Go look up a biography some time.
Now, I wonder whether it's even worth while arguing about excommunication with you, given that apparently you do not accept it as anything other than a cruel expulsion.
Again you show your ignorance. It's more than just a "cruel expulsion". A man who is excommunicated became a pariah, often had his belongings stripped from him, and was threatened with the fires of hell for eternity. This was no mere slap on the wrist.
I wonder if you could at least accept that the a person whose actual beliefs do not jive with his professed belief system would be foolish to remain within that system, or that said belief-system would be quite self-destructive if it allowed dissenting members to continue on acting as members.
Ahhh so it's a form of control. A man's life, livelihood, and beliefs mean nothing because he dared to make fun of the holy church. This is no defence. You clearly have no conception whatsoever of what excommunication meant in the 1600s!
Yet we haven't addressed the central issue: was the former Cardinal defending the debilitating life-long house arrest of Galileo, or was he merely saying that the trial itself was a rational response (if harsh for our standards) against one accused of heresy under the authority of the Church, and that it wasn't an attack on Science at all?
The pope was condoning torture, forcing a person to recant deeply held beliefs, interference of the church with scientific freedom and publication.
But yes strictly speaking you're right. If you're running an evil and descructive totalitarian organisation it is rational to cond
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Ok, I'll answer and go for the bonus.
You see, not everybody in the world has the blazing logical clarity that Slashdotters typically have which enables them to see that mass murder is inherently illogical. When this happens, it is the function of the religious people to assert that there is a powerful (almighty) deity who does not approve of mass murder. If the illogical would-be mass murderers pay attention to the religious people, then they refrain from commiting mass-murder.
That's the way it's supposed to work. The system isn't perfect. Sometimes religious people forget that the deity is against mass-murder and when that happens you get abberations such as crusades, jihads, the Spanish Inquisition, and so forth. Sometimes the illogical would-be mass murderers reject the religious people and then you have mass-murdering athiests such as Stalin and Pol Pot.
As I said, the system isn't perfect, but it is one layer of protection for society. Think of computer security: your system is more secure with multiple layers (anti-virus plus firewall) because each layer is itself somewhat permeable. In this case, religion serves as a kind of firewall.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini