Pope's Astronomer Would Love To Baptize an Alien

Posted by samzenpus on Monday September 20, 2010 @04:12AM from the where-do-you-keep-the-head-on-this-thing? dept.

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.'"

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Re:Forever may be right by alvinrod · 2010-09-20 04:45 · Score: 0, Redundant

Call me more skeptical, but religion will always be around because a lot of people are really stupid and it's easiest to keep them in line with religion or something similar. Really, anything that pits them against some other group and creates and us vs. them mentality. Religion is just one convenient way to do this.

If religion ever does get stamped out it will just be replaced by something else that is virtually indistinguishable from it.
Re:In The Name of The Father, The Son, & Teh F by aaandre · 2010-09-20 07:26 · Score: 0, Redundant

Understand? If you are talking of the details of a specific religion... Too many imaginary friends, too little time.
If you are talking of the essence of "religion," it's easy: Evil old men drunk on power burning everyone and everything in their way, getting off on raping children, corrupting as many innocent souls as possible.
Where would the devil hide if not in church. What would the devil have you believe about god if not that it's separate from you?? What would the devil have you believe about yourself if not that there's something wrong with you?
Anyone who tries to stand between you and your divinity is selling you shit.