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.'"

Comments

Re:So, that's what they call it these days.

[xaxa]

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".