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Knights Templar Sue the Pope
pdragon04 writes "According to The Register, "the Knights Templar are demanding that the Vatican give them back their good name and, possibly, billions in assets into the bargain, 700 years after the order was brutally suppressed by a joint venture between the Pope and the King of France..."." I wonder what a holy grail goes for with 700 years of compound interest.
So now you don't have to.
I fail to see how this is nerdy, but I do appreciate the humor of someone suing the pope.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I believe your last two citations are incorrect. The last should be 1 John, and was not uttered by Jesus. The middle one is Luke 12:33.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
True, but the murder charges would be against individuals in France (not Spain) who are dead. Anyhow, that is criminal, and I was thinking this was a civil suit.
The funny thing is that the Vatican probably has billions in capital at its disposal. I always got a kick out of the pope ruling a small nation-state in Europe (with its own currency, mind you) telling me to be more like Jesus.
Actually, the Vatican made a loss last tax year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7501486.stm
And this would be the same Jesus who said:
For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always. Sounds like a charitable guy.
Well, the jews got their country back after almost two thousand years.
I believe the name of the organization is "Knights Templar". And, if the organization as a whole is suing (rather than each member suing in a class-action), then the correct sentance is "Knights Templar sues the Pope"
As informative as your post is, I think it qualifies for a "Whoosh".
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gldlyTjXk9A
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
The Knights Templar were merged with the Knights Hospitaller who still exist as The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem - they are recognised as a sovereign state (with no territory) and are based in Rome
They are trying to claim they are an organisation which still exists and is recognised in international law .... !
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
They did, and the Pope & the king of France conspired to kill them all & seize their lands on the charges of heresy, satanism, and a few other rather unpleasant things. Betrayals don't foster respect. If the record is to be believed, it was a raw money/power grab.
If the Bible (or at least, the Gospels) are the word of Jesus, and it's his word that good Christians are supposed to be following, then the fact that he says "pray in private" would seem to suggest that Jesus doesn't want you to get together in a big building once a week to say your prayers in front of everybody else. Seems pretty straightforward to me...
http://zzpat.tripod.com/cvb/oct_2006/pagan_graves_in_vatican_basement.html
To be fair, you completely misrepresent this article that you linked. The aforementioned "pagan relics stored beneath the Vatican" is nothing more than a new archeological site. It's not some cache of pagan artifacts gathered from past crusades/missions or some such.
If you read the article you'll see that it is a ancient Roman necropolis that was discovered recently, quite by accident*, during the construction of a new parking garage for the Vatican. It even has the rather tongue-in-cheek name "Necropolis of the Parking Garage" ("Necropoli dell'Autoparco").
The fact the burial customs used were clearly non-christian/Catholic, is the only reason why the site is labeled as a Pagan site. Also, it is dated to around 23 B.C.-14 A.D, which dates it just before Christianity as a whole.
The Vatican even plans to open the site to the public. This quote best sums up how the Vatican feels on the matter:
(* This kind of stuff happens all the time in Rome. It just so happens that the Vatican isn't in the habit of digging so deep.)
Then they have a legitimate claim to calling themselves Templars.
There is an order within the Free Masons who call themselves Knights Templar, but it is symbolic. It is a Christian-only order within the York Rite.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Y'know... I've never really liked it when people use the word "ye" to mean "you"... it means "the". And it's actually supposed to be pronounced that way, too... The letter 'y' in that place replaces a thorn, and started doing so with the introduction of moving type. It does so because the French-made printing presses didn't have that letter in their character set, because it's of Anglo-Saxon origin, not Latin, and so the letter Y was used in its place. Over time, the letter simply fell out of use in the English alphabet, and was replaced with the combonation "th", which had started appearing about 100 years earlier.
Off topic, I know. But *shrugs*
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
As a Protesant, I can't recall ever having read anything about Rome doing *any* of that. From the papal bull Sublimus Dei of 1537:
If this lawsuit succeeds the native americans could only sue the catholic church for slander and defamation eg: saying they had no souls and could be slaughtered like animals or however manifest destiny is justified.
Except the Catholic Church never did either of those things. They're urban legends.
About your first allegation, it suffices to say that there's no point in converting something that has no soul. Besides, the Catholic Catechism teaches that everything that self-moves possesses a soul, and among those, everything that moves by virtue of reason to be human, body shape or color not being requirements. (Yes, Catholicism is "aliens ready" since the Middle Ages.) Case in point: the most important Catholic theologian for the first 1200 years of Western Church history, Saint Augustine, was black.
As for your second point, back in the beginning of the discoveries, you already had important Catholic theologians, such as Francisco de Vitoria, one of the creators of modern international law, writing extensively against the European subjugation of the New World. European crowned princes, of course, did it anyway. Politicians are the same, no matter whether they're in a monarchy or in a democracy.
Good reasons to criticize the Church do exists, but these two surely aren't listed among them.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
You seem to have missed the part in the Bible where Jesus prayed, in front of everybody, as an example of how to pray. He also prayed in the garden of Gethsemane in front of his apostles.
Prayer in front of others is only wrong if you're doing it so other people see you praying - similarly, Christ said that those who fast and act like they're fasting so others know they're fasting already have their reward. Praying in front of others is fine if your only intention is to pray, that is, if you do not do it for the praise of man.
My memory's not that great either. From papal bull Romanus Pontifax, 1455 :
...We, weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid [King] -- to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit...
No, it could be either, depending on context. Use as a pronoun was far more common. Don't let the overuse in fantasy novels and faux-archaic bar signs fool you.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ye
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_(pronoun)
Well, if Jesus is God, then he owns the whole Universe and beyond. Can't be richer than that, can he?
Anyway, if you go beyond the Gospels into Acts, you'll see the apostles made such a money-less community. The problem is, it didn't last. At the end, they had to ask Paul to go around get donations from the churches abroad, what he did. Morals: being poor is good and all, provided you have someone from whom to ask money once poorness' ugly side shows up.
Oh, and by the way: the land the Church owned in Europe up to the 18th century were usually reserved for usage by the landless or anyone under persecution of angry Feudal lords. When those Church lands were appropriated by the many greed governments around, they got distributed among nobles, bourgeois and other close friends of said governments. That's when being a poor European landless peasant really became a problem (for the peasant).
In short: actual History is more complicated than our cherished oversimplifications would prefer it to be.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
If the Bible (or at least, the Gospels) are the word of Jesus, and it's his word that good Christians are supposed to be following, then the fact that he says "pray in private" would seem to suggest that Jesus doesn't want you to get together in a big building once a week to say your prayers in front of everybody else. Seems pretty straightforward to me...
He said not to pray out loud on the street corners to show everybody how devout you are. He never seemed to have any serious problems with group prayer.
The funny thing is that the Vatican probably has billions in capital at its disposal.
The Vatican's finances are a matter of public record, so you don't have to guess about its financial resources. You can look it up. The short answer is: no, they don't have billions in capital at their disposal. Their annual budget is less than that of Harvard University.
Case in point: the most important Catholic theologian for the first 1200 years of Western Church history, Saint Augustine, was black. Doubtful, Saint Augustine was a Berber and the likelihood he would have been the only black Berber seems remote.
Yeah, excommunicating a guy who protested an immoral church-supported activity (selling indulgences) doesn't interfere with a guy's life at all. How dare people accuse the Catholic Church of doing something wrong!
I suggest you read the book "The Great Apostasy" by James E. Talmage (available for free here: http://books.google.com/books?id=yJn69K_Q0y0C). It details not just the fall of the Church headed by Peter in Christ's time, but how various doctrines were corrupted and shows how corrupt the Catholic Church was. Talmage provides many, many sources for his material.
See especially footnote three of chapter nine (page 144).
Yes and no. "Ye" was a second person pronoun for quite a long time in English besides being sloppy typography for "the". The King James Bible seems to use "ye" in both ways.
As long as we're quoting from the Bible, why not disband the whole church system using Matthew 6?
For one thing, because Christ himself established the church system. (Matthew 16:18)
In Matthew 5, he says this:
You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.
The obvious reconciliation of these two passages is that of INTENT. You are ignoring the second half of the sentence. "Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to be seen by them." He's not telling people to avoid doing acts of righteousness, he's telling them to avoid doing them solely for the sake of being seen (i.e. for the purpose of glorifying themselves).
There is a legend that, as the Guillotine blade descended on the neck of Louis XVI the last Borbon King, and a direct descendent of Philip IV, an old man in the crowd yelled out: " Jacques de Molay THOU ART AVENGED!" THUNK!
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
The often quoted (out of context mind you) Jesus' words:
Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. 24 And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God"
do NOT mean that it is wrong to be rich nor that rich people can not go to heaven. If you read a few passages before the quote you will see that a rich man rejected the offer to follow Jesus because he could not part with the money (that was the condition Jesus requested of him: sell all you have and follow me).
The question any "rich" man or anybody who holds something really dear to their heart is always "is this more important to me than God. Am I serving that something and not God and people around me, failing to see them as my brothers".
If the honest answer is no, then you are in the exact same danger as the rich man in the Bible.
Note that money is just a tool, so is knowledge, reason or any talent. People often forget that.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Quakers != Baptists. Different breed of nut job.
I think that was more about the Puritans than the Quakers. And while the Quakers I know tend to be on the flakey side (much like the Wiccans), they're perfectly pleasant and don't proselytize; I think that would disqualify them from the "nutjob" label.
Try 1788 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_fleet/). What year did Georgia gain independence?
Hmm, I beg to differ. While certainly the initial population of the American colonies was voluntary, convicts were indeed sent in later years. From NPR:
"In 1718, the British Parliament passed the Transportation Act, under which England began sending its imprisoned convicts to be sold as indentured servants in the American colonies. While the law provoked outrage among many colonists -- Benjamin Franklin equated it to packing up North American rattlesnakes and sending them all to England -- the influx of ex-convicts provided cheap and immediate labor for many planters and merchants. After 1718, approximately 60,000 convicts, dubbed "the King's passengers," were sent from England to America. Ninety percent of them stayed in Maryland and Virginia. Although some returned to England once their servitude was over, many remained and began their new lives in the colonies."
This data also appears in the excellent, "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" by Walter Isaacson.
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
The Crown financed a lot of expeditions to the Americas. We're not sure of the motivations of all settlers, but it is known that many settlers chose to come to the Americas instead of a deadly prison sentence.
Whether you want to consider press-ganged individuals and criminals fleeing certain death in floating prisons on the Thames "volunteers", that's your choice. Religious pilgrims were a minority of American settlers -- they get a lot of attention in history classes due to the "justness" of their cause.
Perhaps instead of taking a high-school or community-college level history class, you should take some real history classes, or read some real history books. What you were taught in public school (especially regarding history) is often a lot of propaganda... and is almost always incomplete.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What year did Georgia gain independence?
Is that rhetorical?
If you were serious, their declared independence (along with the rest of the rebelling American colonies) was 1776 and recognized was 1783.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Er, that's a Mormon tract. I'd read it with a big grain of salt, seeing as one of the fundamentals of Mormonism is "All other, older churches are corrupt and failed and we're the only ones who have it right, so you should listen to us". The author might have been a tad biased in his arguments.
I have read Martin Luther's essays, however, and he had a lot to say about the corruption of the medieval Roman church of his day. Some of those abuses were corrected by the mid-20th century as fallout from the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, but some of the doctrine is still screwy to this day.
---dragoness
From Wikipedia, Or perhaps even more insightful...
In 1578 Sir Humphrey Gilbert was granted a patent by Queen Elizabeth I for discovery and overseas exploration, and set sail for the West Indies with the intention of first engaging in piracy and on the return voyage, establishing a colony in North America.
Eventually, you get Jamestown.
Where do you get the idea that Native Americans had no concept of land ownership? You do know they fought amongst themselves over territory before we ever got here, right? If they had no concept of land ownership, why did they kill each other and take each other's land? They may not have completely understood the European concept of land ownership, but you can be damn sure that they, as well as every other indigenous population throughout history, has understood the concept that 'This is our land, to use as we see fit, and we can exclude you from it if we feel like it.'
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
That's "offhand".
You are either incorrect,
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
A) The Templars were a military-religious organization, not an ethnic or racial group, and as such destroying them wasn't genocide any more than destroying the Ku Klux Klan or Skull and Bones society would be.
B) The pogrom was localized in France, and the Pope only went along with it reluctantly, mostly because King Philip threatened war if he didn't. Templars in other parts of Europe escaped alive, and were even allowed to join rival organizations.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Wasn't Columbus looking for the East Indies though? He was looking to find the East Indies for a shorter trading route but ended up in the Carribean instead. He thought he had found it, so he named the natives "Indians."
It's the seed of a global manipulation which has resulted in more dead/dying/suffering people than any other con I can think of off the top of my head.
Communism? I guess you could say it's not a con but it's killed more people in the last 100 years than christianity in 2000.
He's not "insightful" just because he conforms to your prejudices. He's also wrong, as a number of other people have stated. More than 50,000 convicts were sent from Britain to America; far, far, more than went over on the Mayflower.
Celibacy refers to being unmarried or abstaining from sexual intercourse (i.e., chastity). A vow of celibacy is a promise not to enter into marriage or engage in sexual intercourse. The term involuntary celibacy has recently appeared to describe a chronic, unwilling state of celibacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celibate
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: celibacy The deliberate abstinence from sexual activity, usually in connection with a religious role or practice. It has existed in some form in most world religions
Dictionary: (fr Answers.com) chaste
1. Morally pure in thought or conduct; decent and modest.
2.
a. Not having experienced sexual intercourse; virginal.
b. Abstaining from unlawful sexual intercourse.
c. Abstaining from all sexual intercourse; celibate.
3. Pure or simple in design or style; austere.
Summary: (for /. purposes)
Celibacy refers to being unmarried or abstaining from sexual intercourse
chastity Abstaining from unlawful sexual intercourse.
A chaste person can marry and enjoy "lawful" sex, a celibate "can't" do either.
My second paragraph should make it clear that I understood the reference precisely.
I am officially gone from