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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.
The real Templars were disbanded in the early 14th century. These claimants are nothing more than another bunch of modern wannabes (founded in 1804). They have no legal standing to sue. And since the only immortal survivor of the templar persecution died in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," I somehow doubt they're going to be able to find anyone who was an actual victim to join their lawsuit.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I wonder what a holy grail goes for with 700 years of compound interest.
I'm much more interested in how you make up for the lives & civilizations your organization destroyed.
I'm not saying this is true but Newsweek/MSNBC ran a story on pagan relics stored beneath the Vatican. I've also read and heard that many Native American (both North & South) relics and documents were shipped back to the Vatican to be stored under it so they could study heathenism and combat it. This was after their owners were either converted or burned/shot.
I would think that the Catholic church could at least (as a sign of good faith) return these to their descendants or at the very least release them to a museum with all the information they have on it so that the rest of us can gain insight to their culture & religion. Of course, if this were true, I don't think the museum donations would be worth the black eye.
"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..."
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. The same Jesus who said in Matthew 19:21
Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."
Or what Luke said (12:23)
Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.
Or John 3:17
If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?
The funny thing is I could go on all day finding quotes from most major religions ... Like Buddha or Gandhi, I'm a huge fan of this Jesus guy. It's 99% of the people who purport to follow him that manage to genuinely fuck up the world.
My work here is dung.
They'll have enough trouble trying to prove that they are the rightful heirs of the Knights Templar...Trying to get money from the church on top of that? And why not sue France? They got a huge chunk of change as well.
Not even close to being the first time someone has tried this, and it never goes anywhere. The dream of the Templars wealth keeps it going, but in reality there is no wealth to claim, no one with the right to claim it, and no one to claim it from.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Except that the Templars ran into trouble with the French, not the Spanish. Their real problem was that King Philip IV owed them a huge pile of cash that he didn't have.
Of course, that would have made Jacques de Molay even more surprised and fearful if the Spanish Inquisition showed up on his doorstep.
I am officially gone from
The Pantheon, in Rome, was built as a temple to the Roman gods, but was taken over by the Catholic church in 609 AD. It's time to return it to its original purpose, and restore the statutes of Mars, Venus, Apollo, Jupiter, and Diana.
I mean, if europe hadn't sent over all those rejects, the native americans would rule the (un)known world...
Might be time to go down to the local community college and take a history class bud.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
As standing with The Register's excellent reputation these days, the article is short on details and what exactly "restoring their good name" means. Here's something that might make more sense:
http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=8360
What the Templars want is the lifting of the ban on the order itself by the catholic church. Follow the money on this one. The templars appear to be a charitable organization now, but even 700 years later, c'mon, if you said you were a templar, the first two stupid questions you'd expect from an ignorant person are "weren't they all burned at the stake for crimes a long time ago", and "so where's the grail?"
Obviously the Templars want some legitimacy, and this is the first step. If the church basically lifts the ban, they can also probably get financial and political support from the Vatican, which is huge. By getting legitimacy, they stop having to answer the same stupid questions and can go back to doing good works "in the name of God and with the pope's blessing," if that's the type of thing that floats your boat, and people will start taking them more seriously. Right now I bet no one in the world takes them seriously, but if they win this, since this will be a pretty visible thing if the Pope does what he asks, it will catapult the group into the world spotlight.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Their leadership came from a religious congregation who had fled a volatile political environment in the East Midlands of England for the relative calm of the Netherlands to preserve their religion. Concerned with losing their cultural identity, the group later arranged with English investors to establish a new colony in North America.
From Wikipedia, Or perhaps even more insightful...
In 1617, discouraged by economic difficulties, the pervasive Dutch influence on their children, and their inability to secure civil autonomy, the congregation voted to emigrate to America. Through the Brewster family's friendship with Sir Edwin Sandys, treasurer of the London Company, the congregation secured two patents authorizing them to settle in the northern part of the company's jurisdiction. Unable to finance the costs of the emigration with their own meager resources, they negotiated a financial agreement with Thomas Weston, a prominent London iron merchant. Fewer than half of the group's members elected to leave Leiden. A small ship, the Speedwell, carried them to Southampton, England, where they were to join another group of Separatists and pick up a second ship. After some delays and disputes, the voyagers regrouped at Plymouth aboard the 180-ton Mayflower. It began its historic voyage on Sept. 16, 1620, with about 102 passengers--fewer than half of them from Leiden.
From mayflowerfamilies.com
I still stand by my statement, go take a history class.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Ouch! It almost sounds like there are no consequences for perpetrating a successful genocide.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
If you cant prove you are 50% or greater american indian I think you have no case. Only american indians would be able to sue for the illegal dumping.
Any remote descendant of a native American still has a far better case than any Knights Templar descendant.
The Knights Templar, as parent and GP mentioned, are very unlikely to be making any material claims.
Ouch! It almost sounds like there are no consequences for perpetrating a successful genocide.
Well Duh!
I'm reminded of a quote from the mini-series " Shogun":
Toronaga asked Pilot to name any excuse that justified making war on your Lord, the Pilot responded "Winning"
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Doubtful, Saint Augustine was a Berber and the likelihood he would have been the only black Berber seems remote.
There are indeed black Berbers. But okay, I must concede that since the only thing we know about Augustine was that he was a Berber, we cannot be sure of which group he came. In any case, non-black ethnic Berbers still have darker skin than ethnic Italians, so the point remains.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Can someone sue them for genocide in the African continent too? Seeing how they must know that AIDS is common there and that it's deadly they still keep insisting that condoms are forbidden. The only thing that can save lives is forbidden.
Yeah, they keep preaching abstinence but that's like trying to forbid good food. It's possible to get by without it but most people wont.
Not that I think that it will ever happen. And now I'm probably on the vaticans "going to hell"-list too.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Case in point: the most important Catholic theologian for the first 1200 years of Western Church history, Saint Augustine, was black.
St Augustine was not black, at least certainly not in the sense one thinks of today. He was a Berber.
He was African, yes, but African != Black, especially North African.
http://clightnirish.wordpress.com/
I call bullshit. The Vatican gets at least 0.5% of Italy's tax revenue through the Otto per mille, a way to publicly finance religion in Italy. Through that channel alone, the Vatican got one billion euros (not dollars) last year. That's one tax, for each year, in one country, and that's even a legitimate channel; illegal channels include tax breaks on commercial activities operated by the church, which are granted by my country's government, headed by a "legitimate businessman", in spite of European rules, and financing of religious private schools, forbidden as explicitly as possible by the Constitution of Italy, article 33, which however politicians use as toilet paper; In case you did not know how schools work in Italy, private schools are basically diploma mills for stupid or lazy sons of rich people who can't handle public school, where your professor can flunk you without fear of making the school lose its money.
Read on about cardinal Marcinkus and the IOR to know more about the greed of the Vatican.
... and, by the way, Harvard university's budget is in the range of billions of dollars [pdf], 2.6 in 2005 to be precise.
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If I'm perfectly pleasant and do proselytize--that is, discuss questions of religion with people who disagree seeking to persuade them--can I still avoid the nutjob label?
I think that would depend on whether you're bothering them about it. If you're friends who are talking about it because it interests both of you, or they came up and tried to sell you on their views, I don't think many people have a problem with that (if it's private -- I've gotten into trouble with that myself on message boards). If you approach strangers and ask if they've heard the good news about Ceiling Cat, that another matter.
If not, do I get to call atheists who argue for atheism "nutjobs"?... do I get to call an unpleasant atheist a nutjob?
If they're approaching people in church parking lots on Sunday morning telling them the good news about being able to sleep in, sure. And I assume you mean they're unpleasant about being an atheist (the guy in the next cubicle is unpleasant and a conservative Christian, but those have nothing to do with each other, so I wouldn't call him a religious nutjob) -- if so, I'd call that fair. We do tend to grow out of it after a couple years of not convincing anyone, though.
On my book, (unsolicited) proselytizing would disqualify you from being perfectly pleasant. You can hold any religious belief you want, but I sure don't want to hear about them.