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Pope Says Technology Causes Confusion Between Reality and Fiction
Pope Benedict XVI has warned that people are in danger of being unable to discern reality from fiction because of new technologies, and not old books. "New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality. The image can also become independent from reality, it can give birth to a virtual world, with various consequences -- above all the risk of indifference towards real life," he said.
"New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality. The image can also become independent from reality, it can give birth to a virtual world, with various consequences -- above all the risk of indifference towards real life."
That's funny. It's arguable that the same could be said about the Bible. How many thousands of pages have been written about the workings of the Divine, or of the afterlife, when no one has truly seen either?
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
The church is struggling for relevance in the modern world. This does not help.
Sounds to me like the Catholic Church wants to go back to the old days of an illiterate flock lead in a latin mass.
Because then people had a more "realistic" connection to things that were important like tithing or the consequences of no doing so.
I mean, the whole monotheism thing strongly suggests we ourselves are in a layer of simulation. So how real is virtual reality under those circumstances?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
But where would the church be without magic?
look at the rise of right wing blogs, and the people who would trust it more than they trust mass media
a media channel loses its credibility, its audience, and its advertisers when it lies. so it has to fact check. additionally, it must remain neutral and moderate, and not espouse an agenda, or it turns people off, which means less advertising revenue. moderation and neutrality is of paramount importance to mass media
when bush was in office the far left complained about the right wing mass media supporting the phony march of war on iraq, etc. well, there is no right wing mass media, and there is no left wing mass media, there is only mass media. the real problem is that the far right thinks it is liberal, and the far left think it is conservative, only because their own perspective is so far right (or left). move far right enough, and you can't tell the difference any more between moderate and lefty. move far left enough, and you can't tell the difference any more between moderate and right-wing
so now, with the internet, we see the rise of far right wing people and far left wing people walled off in their own media universe. their own little walled garden of self-reinforcing lies. obama is a "secret muslim". obama is not an american citizen. this is obviously insanity. but walled off on their own, in their own ideological echo chamber of lies, people begin to believe these obvious smears and lies rather than reality
so the pope is 100% correct: the internet has allowed reality and illusion to become inseparable for people. it takes energy to change your beliefs to align with reality. so why change your beliefs? just change your reality instead, by choosing your partisan blogs over mass media
there are a class of people now who distrust mass media, yet, exasperatingly, trust partisan blogs which lie all the time in support of an agenda, and openly do not care about the truth or fact checking or credibility, as long as they advance a cause
this is genuinely dangerous and scary. the internet is enabling the fractionating of society into walled fiefdoms of ideologues, and no real truth, or at least even common mythology. people pick and choose what they want to believe, regardless of reality. at least mass media made for a true commons of the people. now we only have open warfare amongst entrenched ideological gangs. and the internet makes that possible
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Religions are supposed to be rigid; they're not social structures, they're ethics frameworks that fall into divine belief systems. If you want something flexible, look into a system of philosophy.
John Paul II had the balls to come out and tell priests to stop being fuck-ups. He came out and said Jews weren't evil, gays should seek God's forgiveness but it's the church's job to offer guidance not judgment, etc. He stuck to the rules but kept trying to remind people that Catholicism was supposed to be a religion of tolerance and we're not supposed to take pitchforks and torches to peoples' houses for doing shit we don't like.
Benedict doesn't seem to focus much on orthodoxy so much as he's a lunatic and babbles about random shit. He hasn't come out to chastise the churches burning Qu'ran and swearing that all Muslims are going to hell (wasn't there something in the bible about NOT doing shit like this?). He hasn't put in his opinion about any churches trying to leverage religion as a political fulcrum to push bullshit at all, really. That's what we need out of a pope: Someone to keep the church in the exact order it's meant to be in.
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