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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'm thinking that 700 years might be a bit past the statute of limitations...
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.
I think the traffic to the register is being redirected to the onion!
So, assuming this suceeds ... can the native americans sue europe for defiling their land, and ruining their culture? I mean, if europe hadn't sent over all those rejects, the native americans would rule the (un)known world...
Or, maybe they could just sue the USA for making them look silly - I mean, those native headdresses don't look silly to people who are native - just everyone else.
They go back and *actually* liberate the Holy Land, and *then* the Pope has to pay them all the golden doubloons in Christendom.
10% bonus doubloons for finding the True Cross. On second thoughts, 10% bonus for each True Cross found.
Heck, I'll even chip in a squadron of Turcopoles and some Genoese arbalesters.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
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
Liar!! I've seen national treasure 1 AND 2. C'mon, you're just part of the order, trying to keep all of the other rightful heirs from becoming really rich and buying nice cars.
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.
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.
Ni!
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"
Ever since Indy has found the holy grail, the guy has nothing better to do.
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"
...and I want to sue the whole of Europe for damages.
No sig today...
How about Sir Roger Moore? He's a Knight, and is famous for playing Simon Templar.
Congratulations! You have discovered the secret of Instant +5 Insightful here in our happy community:
"Blah blah [vapid knee-jerk complaining about vapid knee-jerk complaining and slashdot groupthink] blah blah," followed by a suggestion of patenting it.
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.
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.)
Most suits for medieval atrocities would face a number of hurdles, e.g.:
These 'Templars' seem to be able to overcome 1 because, according to Catholic doctrine, the current Pope is the direct successor of an unbroken line going back to St. Peter. They seem able to overcome 2 because the Pope is not sovereign in Spain. Overcoming 3 and 4, though, seems unlikely.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
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
Let's go further than that! Join the Gondwanaland Reunification Movement!
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
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)
are the true Knights Templar, and that we have hidden the treasures of the world beneath a highly recognizable public building (no, not that one).
Claims about us secretly directing the destiny of nations and peoples are greatly exaggerated, though. I've been in fifteen years and still only get to oversee Botswana.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
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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