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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.'"
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.
In a local article about this, I read that a former Pope FOUNDED the school, which I find quite ironic.
No he doesn't have any expertise, no he doesn't have any degrees in sciences - yet millions of people still think he knows more about science than the greatest experts in the various fields of science
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
He's a German theologian.
I think that says it all.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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__()
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.
Not that this is unique to Christians, of course: most people are like that. Well, most people I know, anyway.
"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.
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.
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?
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
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