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Catholic Bishops Support Net Neutrality
An anonymous reader writes "This week, in their annual 'State of the Union' address, the President of the US Catholic Bishops Conference spoke on a number of issues, in particular a surprisingly strong statement in favor on Net Neutrality. 'As the Internet continues to grow in its influence and prominence in Americans' lives, we support legislation and federal regulations that ensure equal access to the Internet for all, including religious and non-profit agencies, as well as those in more sparsely populated or economically distressed areas. True net neutrality is necessary for people to flourish in a democratic society,' said Archbishop Timothy Dolan. It's always interesting to see the Catholic Church joining in a crusade that means so much to so many Slashdotters!"
No, Intelligent design is a radical Protestant scam. It is an attempt to save the Genesis account of creation at any cost, because if they don't, there's no original sin for Jesus to be sacrificed for rendering the whole of Christianity meaningless.
Honestly? It's not about WHO supports net neutrality, it's that its idea isn't hijacked, bastardized, and killed by politicians and lobbyists. Spread the information, defeat misinformation. I couldn't care less that a religious organization approves or agrees.
Religious groups have long been in favor of Net Neutrality; they need to get their message out to the masses just like individuals. Many of them fear not being heard if censorship is allowed. In addition, many would not like paying exorbitant fees like the access fees that network providers want to to charge to carry their traffic.
It is the mass media and the corporate executives that want to drown out any voice but their own. They want to drive up the price of access to for their own greed and to avoid having to compete on a level playing field. How can anyone afford Netflix if Comcast forces their bandwidth costs to skyrocket. The same goes for VOIP services or any future idea that may compete with their monopoly (or duopoly as is the case.)
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On the other hand, the progressive Catholic church has moved on from the myth of original sin and has accepted that he died for Net Neutrality.
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I think Catholicisms objection to I.D is a matter of doctrine, that it actually limits the possibilities of the universe (which is described as the glory of God in the bible). Anything that limits the glory of God is blasphemous, therefore Intelligent Design is blasphemous.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Actually the official position of the Catholic Church is that the Big Bang and evolution are the best models currently available to describe the universe that God created, and the process of how we came into being. There is no conflict between evolution and Catholic teaching, and the Big Bang was originally put forward by a priest, but dismissed by much of the rest of the scientific community as being too much like a "God did it" theory.
ID isn't blasphemous to Catholics because it's limiting God. ID is just wrong because A) it isn't science. B) it assumes taking the BIble literally. Catholics theologians are fully aware of how the Bible has changed, is sometimes self-contradictory, and has been reinterpreted over the centuries, and so taking a specific translation and treating it as word-for-word literal truth is a simplistic and juvenile approach.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I'd say that official stances from an organization that has approximately 1/5th of the world's population as members certainly matters. Just because you are dismissive of the organization or disagree with their message them doesn't change that. Pretending otherwise is the exact same failed juvenile mentality that led America to ignore Communist China up until Nixon.
The difference in the Council of Bishops vs. some random person, is that Bishops are an established position of leadership and authority within the organization. You may not care of the random guy from the shopping mall has to say about an issue, but you might care more about what the general manager of the mall might say, and you certainly would care what the Board of Directors of Westfield Shopping Centers Inc. might say, because it reflects where the organization as a whole might be headed or might be directing their efforts.
Dismissively ignoring their statements simply because you don't like who they are and what you think they stand for is short-sided and naieve.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Sad, very sad and ironic. In this day and age, having to defend Technology with the help of Religion.
Even sadder that this story suggests the Church is actually FOR net neutrality as we understand it today.
They are pontificating (sorry) about net ACCESS.
They totally miss the main points of net neutrality such as traffic shaping, throttling, or prioritizing your own traffic over competitive traffic.
I don't see this as a strong statement at all, simply lip service leaving me wondering if they truly understand the issue.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Indeed. They're the ones who originally promoted the whole idea of copyright. They wanted to keep control of the Bible, stop people from making unauthorized copies.
[citation needed]
I always understood the Statute of Anne to be about protecting the vested interests of publishers sympathetic to the crown. And anyway, Queen Anne was a protestant, not a Catholic, so Catholic lobbying is unlikely to have been effective.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
A large amount of Christians worldwide disagree. The Orthodox Church uses the Septuagint because it is believed that the pointing in the Masoretic Text was altered in order to suppress Christian interpretations. As far as they are concerned, a reliable Hebrew text is no longer available.
I'm sorry, but that's just bollocks. The only attestations of the Hebrew language we have from that period are epigraphical. Biblical texts date from centuries later.
"Trashy"? The Vulgate was actually a polished, literary translation that was meant to supersede the amateur translations that Latin-speaking Christians had used to date. The Protestant reformers and the Eastern Orthodox Church had a great deal of respect for Jerome's work (they simply didn't think it intelligible to their modern audiences).
The Bible sitting on my shelf is about as accurate of a translation as you can get from what Paul and Luke actually wrote in Koine Greek and Aramaic.
An Aramaic ur-text is a controversial theory, and usually only ascribed to the Gospel of Matthew. Paul and Luke were Hellenized and spoke Greek as their mother tongue. They likely wrote nothing in Aramaic, and even if they did, there's no manuscript of it to translate from.
A knowledge of the Bible is essential to understanding Western literature. If you want to shun the Bible, then much of our civilization's canon of poetry and prose becomes unintelligible. You don't have to actually believe in the contents of the book to make use of it.
Religion and science shouldn't mix. And science should not meddle with politics. Religion is politics, unfortunately. It never had any other purpose.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I suspect that those bishops who understand the issue are in favour of network neutrality.
The USCCB's 2006 expression of support for net neutrality rules being incorporated into federal law would certainly provide a fairly strong basis for the conclusion that the conference does, indeed, support net neutrality as well as expanded consumer access, rather than conflating the two issues as some Slashdotters have suggested is the reason for the two sentences (one on access and on one neutrality) in the current statement.