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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.'"
If an intelligent being embrace religion (or politics for that matter), would it still be considered as "Intelligent"???
the traditional definition of a soul was to have [...] freedom to love and freedom to make decisions
Thus, gay people have no soul.
'Any entity — no matter how many tentacles it has — has a soul.'
Fhtagn! Iaeeh! XD
Would he baptize an alien? 'Only if they asked.'
O rly? That means he agrees with me that to indoctrinate and baptize children should be illegal and prosecuted. Yay!
Even a reasonable Atheist should allow such a creature the freedom to do so, despite disagreeing with it.
I must have skipped the part of my Atheist handbook that explained how we must suppress choice. I only found the chapter where it's perfectly alright for both sides to pitch their sales. There is this chapter on how it's not cool to force everyone in a nation to speak of that which they do not believe during a pledge, swearing in, or simply using money. (Maybe you got confused by that last chapter?)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
The Catholic rape jokes got a lot less funny for me this weekend. I met a group of women who'd been raped by priests as children.
A more accurate headline might be "Pope's astronomer tries to divert attention from the paedophilia/homophobic/anti-woman/anti-contraception/nazi-atheist/third-world-Britain scandal during visit to UK".
Actually the idea of baptizing an alien brings up some interesting theological questions. You have to remember why Christians get baptized in the first place: to remove original sin. You know, the sin of Adam and Eve eating the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. If you stop and think about that assuming that aliens can be baptized has a few problems to it.
You expect us to abandon our religion just because you trot out one logical inconsistency? Some of us true believers have actually read the Bible (including it's many, many contradictions and logical fallacies) and still choose to believe, you insensitive clod!
As much as I dislike religion. I've come to accept that probably for a long time to come, we are going to be stuck with it. Because no matter how much we discover and can explain of the universe, no matter how many other worlds and civilizations we discover. There will always be something that can be explained at the time, and people will fear and respect it and even worship it. Probably every generation has had its share of people that thought that they were going to see the downfall of religion in their time.
I share your fear. People, in general, are not predisposed to rational thought when it comes to big questions like those religion puports to answer, but one can hope. I can envision a day when enough of the so-called revelations have been shown to be the rantings of lunatics or, more commonly, carefully crafted stories, designed to manipulate fearful and gullible people. Wouldn't it be wonderful if, the next time someone stepped up and said, "The Great Invisible Man in the Sky has commanded that you should stone to death anyone who eats shellfish or is gay," was met with a collective, "What? That's bullshit..." from the rest of us?