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Pope's Astronomer Would Love To Baptize an Alien
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The Guardian reports that Guy Consolmagno, curator of the pope's meteorite collection and a trained astronomer and planetary scientist, says he would be 'delighted' if intelligent life was found among the stars. 'But the odds of us finding it, of it being intelligent and us being able to communicate with it — when you add them up it's probably not a practical question.' Consolmagno adds that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. 'Any entity — no matter how many tentacles it has — has a soul.' Would he baptize an alien? 'Only if they asked.' Consolmagno dismisses the ideas of intelligent design as a pseudo-scientific version of creationism. 'The word has been hijacked by a narrow group of creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn't originally mean at all. It's another form of the God of the gaps. It's bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning.'"
Even reading just the summary, the title does no justice to Consolmagno's response.
This seems very appropriate.
It shows that the stereotype of the church is against is untrue. It has some interesting observations on the Catholic church and its views on things.
It should be pointed out that he is no ordinary priest (actually, he's a monk). He is a Jesuit. An order organized during the renaissance to preach to the more educated people of the time.
Today they are known for administrating most of the church's universities. One of the requirements is to have a minimum of a bachelor's degree.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Dr. Consolmagno spoke at our decidedly non-religious institute (The Scripps Research Institute) back in February. He often represents Europe in international astronomy meetings, including when they were deciding whether to demote Pluto. In his seminar, he gave us a preview of his book, The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican. It was mostly showing us pretty pictures in the book and telling us all sorts of interesting anecdotes from his experiences. He also covered a multitude of other topics, ranging from those of purely scientific concern (e.g. figuring out a way to determine the density of a meteorite) to historical controversies (e.g. the church and Galileo). It was one of the most interesting seminars I've attended this year. If given another chance to attend a seminar of his, I would gladly do so. In fact, if I were to know about it in advance, I might even buy a copy of his book for him to sign.
Absolutely. Several years ago, I heard him talk on the prospects for finding more exoplanets in the future. He's a serious and highly competent scientist.
He also is a Jesuit monk. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
(And, he seemed like a heck of a nice Guy. Forgive the pun. :)
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno
He is a Catholic so he can baptize in an emergency. And he is a priest so he can baptize in all cases.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu