Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Does a Christian owe their first loyalty to the Pope, or to God? If your conscience tells you one thing, and the Pope tells you another, which path should you follow?
Galileo followed his conscience. Even when given a direct order by the highest authority in Christendom, to recant his opinion that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, he chose conscience over obedience, divinity over temporal authority – until he was threatened with unspeakable pain.
I am not saying the church is always wrong. Most of the time, the church is a force for good. The moral authority which is the Christian church helped to create the modern world. The concept of a single god, a god of love rather than hate, a universe of order, in which the forces of chaos were chained in the abyss, gave the philosopher monks the peace to pursue their research into the innermost workings of creation – and the faith to believe that creation was orderly enough to be explored.
However, a papal encyclical which demands action on climate change would be tantamount to an accusation that people who doubt the urgency of addressing climate change are evil – are cynically exploiting the doubts of others, for their own selfish ends. Yet surely true evil is condemning millions to live their lives in endless drudgery, by denying them the opportunities inexpensive energy and affordable food might bring, on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence – defective models and failed predictions.
I do not doubt the sincerity of the Pope. I don’t even doubt the sincerity of most alarmist climate scientists. But sometimes scientists get it wrong. There was once another group of people who thought they were right – that the world was on the brink of a catastrophe which only their statistical models could foresee, that mass cruelty was the only path to salvation. Their sincere blindness almost plunged the entire world into darkness. The one regime which embraced this dark vision, even after others finally rejected it, is now a byword for evil. Yet arguably, those who believed were simply accepting the scientific consensus of the day.
The lesson is, or should be, that if you demand the infliction of unspeakable cruelty on a vast number of people, as many climate scientists, green politicians and activists in my opinion demand, with their vehement opposition to affordable energy, you had better be sure of your facts. You better have more evidence that such an abomination is an inescapable necessity, than a set of models which fail, again and again, to demonstrate plausible predictive skill.
If you believe in a creator, one day you will face, not the pope, but your creator. On the day of judgement, the opinion of the pope will count for nothing. All that will matter is whether you lived a principled life, and stood up for what mattered. Even if this sometimes means disobeying the instructions of the Pope, just as Galileo once did.
i don’t think spiritual people owe their loyalty to any human being. i could be wrong
Probably what surprises me most about the comments in this thread is the really militant, intolerant hatred shown by the hard-core atheists for anyone who doesn’t accept the Purity and Righteousness of their own beliefs. It suggests that their hatred of those with dogmatic religious beliefs has more to do with “projection” than it has to do with anything else.
Tolerance is a Christian virtue, but clearly not an atheist one.
I’ve met a few tolerant atheists. Unfortunately it’s the intolerant ones who feel the need to prove themselves at every opportunity.
In my opinion, such irrational outbursts are evidence of their inner insecurities. Those who are confident in what they believe do not feel the need to lecture others at every opportunity.
> Tolerance is a Christian virtue, but clearly not an atheist one.
Yeah!
Christians were so tolerant of one another that there never were problems with — ahh — I dunno —
Ireland.
nope – all tolerant Christians there.
Or
Well — I dunno — like slavery… Lots of tolerance and charity and brotherly love and all that morality…
Or
Well — I dunno — like …. yada yada…
Read some history! Or maybe just a newspaper or two… you really don’t have to go too far to find extremely violent and horribly intolerant Christians killing, raping, and stealing land – money – wealth – etc from others [other Christians or anyone else too]
In your opinion, the fact that some Christians don’t live up to the values set for them by the Bible proves Christians don’t have these values?
It was the Christians that ended slavery.
As to reading, I suggest that you do some as well.
@MarkW:
Slavery, of the mid 19th century variety, was not only accepted by the Catholic church – but officially condoned by the pope at the time. The article above is about the Catholic church – and its soon to be officially condoned enslavement of humans to inefficient energy sources. So, the ‘Church’ hasn’t really changed much — it’s still one of the largest centers of non-science babble and totalitarianism on the planet.
And how about some questions:
Is morality only a Christian value?
Shouldn’t all humans strive to live together without killing one another?
Did morality simply suddenly ‘start’ at BCE zero?
Isn’t it odd that somehow Christians view morality different than Muslims or Buddhists or atheists or humanists?
Isn’t it arrogant to simply state that morality flows *from* Christianity and *not from* other religions or, better, from a general human [and life form] morality?
unknown: Slavery had existed since the beginning of time.
It was the Christians who caused it to be outlawed.
That’s basic history.
You really don’t know what you are talking about, do you.
Morality is nothing more than a system to determine right and wrong. Everyone has one.
Wow, way to make a self-inconsistent statement! Atheistic tolerance is agreeing that you have the right to believe anything you like no matter how absurd. It means that you have the right to stand up in public and try to convince people that the world is 6000 years old, that a talking snake is the excuse for the existence of evil in the world even though it was created by a loving god, that the second law of thermodynamics isn’t really a law, it is more like a pirate’s code “suggestion” that can and is often violated provided that you pray to an invisible being just right. It does not mean that I cannot stand up in the same public forums and make fun of this and laugh at this out loud.
The fundamental question is: What is it best to believe? In order to answer this, one has to establish a criterion for making some beliefs better than others. In order for the result to even possibly be true and correct, it has to be internally consistent, because contradictions must contain falsehood somewhere. If one accepts the scientific worldview, with the criterion for sorting out better and worse beliefs being a mix of agreement with direct, reproducible evidence plus consistency with the entire set of interconnected evidence-backed beliefs, there is quite literally no room left for religion. There might be if there were evidence, but there isn’t anything remotely like believable evidence, and arguments for why we cannot perform simple experiments to accumulate direct evidence now are pure irrational apologia, not things to be taken seriously (imagine how science would look if we admitted this sort of thing).
So my lack of “tolerance” for your belief set has a very simple basis. You believe things that violate mere common sense. You believe in an invisible world that we cannot measure or obtain the slightest shred of objective evidence for. You believe in invisible entities that do things like “create Universes” without themselves being in an uncreated Universe (that is, beliefs that aren’t even consistent). You believe in overt violations of thermodynamics and physics, such as “resurrection from being dead” which is demonstrably impossible and which you know perfectly well is impossible, know it well enough that if I told you that I died truly dead and rotted for three days but that then I sat up and was alive again with all the cellular damage done repaired you too would laugh hysterically at the claim. Take off the blinders, man! Use the same sort of common sense to examine religious claims that you would use to examine any other sort of claim, the same common sense you use to reject the claims of all of the other religions, the ones you aren’t “tolerant” of in the sense that you probably don’t think that Krishna is an avatar of pandeistic Mahavishnu as was revealed on the fields of Kurukeshetra to his good buddy Arjuna, or the assertions that the world is the hatching of a world-egg created by the mating of Cronos and Ananke.
rgb
Way to go, rgb. Loved it.
RGB & Ghost
For the record, I (and many other Christians) don’t believe in talking snakes or that the Earth is 6000 years old. I don’t know why it’s so hard to understand that Genesis is not literal. Think of it like the book “Animal Farm”, pigs don’t really talk as everyone knows but the book communicates a truth through figurative illustration. The first part of Genesis describes creation as a process that created lower forms of life first and preceded up to Man being last, the exact same message science tells us. Next comes the figurative illustration of our journey from animal to human, not that a snake actually talked to a single person named Eve. I’ve actually researched and addressed to my satisfaction all of these kind of objections to the existence of God decades ago and I don’t exactly consider myself easy to convince of anything which explains why I’m a preterist as opposed to a rapture awaiting Bible thumper. Of course there are several nuanced options and opinions but fundamentally it all boils down to either all this happened by accident or it was in some manner designed or planned. There is insufficient evidence either way but the exact nature of the universe and the existence of natural Laws such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics is evidence of God. I find your belief in abiogenesis and unwillingness to either acknowledge this belief or attempt to defend it hilarious. Belief in a Creator is indeed more evidenced than abiogenesis and you’d know that if you’d actually put in the research time and you’d also know that you haven’t actually come up with an original objection to the existence of God that hasn’t been answered time and time again. The ignorance on display would be embarrassing if y’all actually had a clue. BTW, I’ve read “Axioms” and I think its hypothetical scenario for the formation of Religion is as good as any I’ve come across but even if its 100% correct it’s hardly reason to believe that God doesn’t exist.
Usually your stuff is reasoned rgb, but “You believe in invisible entities that do things like “create Universes” without themselves being in an uncreated Universe”
The belief is that the universe(which is the extent of what we can observe and know) exists, and apparently had a finite beginning. There is no possible explanation for that in the universe.
Which is a good place to throw out the question- The astronomy observations and theory we can see a universe ~28billion light years across, flat, and hence infinite and expanding. Do the folks around planet Zed some 10 billion light years away see the same universe we see? Or can we never get close enough to find out?
Just hilarious:
CFN Conference on the Apocalypse 10th Speaker Announced. Sign Up Now!
See Catholic Family News http://www.cfnews.org
Whatever conclusions you may draw from that web site do not necessarily apply to the Roman Catholic Church. CFN is an organ of a splinter sect, the Society of Saint Pius X, founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. He was excommunicated for his troubles in 1988, along with four bishops he had consecrated. The ban was lifted in 2009. At this point, both parties seem content with the status quo.
By Coincidence or Providence, Catholics today commemorate the feast of St. Catherine of Siena. She’s famous for, by the end of the Middle Ages, and being a young and unlearned woman, having rebuked more than one Pope.
https://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/CATSIENA.HTM
EXCERPT: “She was grieved by any sort of scandal in the Church, especially that of the Great Schism[4] which followed the death of Gregory XI. Urban VI was elected as his successor by the cardinals of Rome and Clement VII by the rebellious cardinals of Avignon. Western Christendom was divided; Clement was recognized by France, Spain, Scotland, and Naples; Urban by most of North Italy, England, Flanders, and Hungary. Catherine wore herself out trying to heal this terrible breach in Christian unity and to obtain for Urban the obedience due to the legitimate head. Letter after letter was dispatched to the princes and leaders of Europe. To Urban himself she wrote to warn him to control his harsh and arrogant temper. This was the second pope she had counseled, chided, even commanded. Far from resenting reproof, Urban summoned her to Rome that he might profit by her advice. [my emphasis].
By the way, she is one of the patron saints of Europe.
Non-Catholics are frequently unaware that the loyalty required from us to the Pope is that of a son to his father. You should love and respect your father, and obey him when he commands something reasonable and within his authority. That’s the same thing with the Pope.
Many Popes said and did many stupid, and sometimes awful, things throughout history. Any literate Catholic knows that very well. Contrary to what many people think, papal infallibility is a very restricted thing. It has been invoked only twice in the last two centuries.
So, no, blind obedience to the Pope is not required from Catholics. Loyalty is not blind obedience, as any dictionary will tell you. Loyalty requires correcting, as we should do to our own parents when they go astray.
St. Catherine shows that Catholics are not only not required to obey the pope in everything, but even have the duty to rebuke and correct him when he is wrong. And Catherine was not condemned for it. She was canonized!
Pope Francis and the One World Religion
http://www.cfnews.org/page88/files/53206c160fbe7bd0f732258be75cb976-296.html
Looks like our Catholic friends can take care of their own business and know exactly what’s going on.
Despite the stellar history of the Catholic Church & science (check with Bruno), it should not be hard to get the pope on board with the global warming crowd. After all, anyone that can believe that they are monotheists while worshipping the Father, Son and Holy ghost can be convinced of anything.
Birth control and now Climate change-I trust in Good!
Organized Religion is to God as Organized Crime is to Law. Each is a Law unto themselves.
Actually it’s more like what the American Bar Association is to Law.
oh wait, I see your point. never mind.
There are a significant number of errors in the opening statement by Eric Worrall. Galileo was not “threatened with unspeakable pain”; he was shown the instruments of torture. There is a very large difference. The possibility of Galileo being tortured was essentially zero. The man was a celebrity in the 17th century, far more prominent and well known than the modern pop star. Moreover, much of his work had been encouraged by the Papacy. His 1632 “Dialogue of the Two Chief World Systems” had been encouraged by Pope Urban VIII to outline dispassionately the differences between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. Urban wanted the science clearly laid out to understand the important differences between the two.
And that’s typical of why Galileo got into trouble. Not content with doing just that, he wrote it as a dramatic dialogue that was anything but dispassionate. All the stupid statements were put into the mouth of a character Simplicio, a not even thinly disguised portrait of Pope Urban VIII, Galileo’s own sponsor.
Because you see, the man was also well known at the time for being the worst sort of intellectual bully. Not content with demonstrating other views to be wrong, he also portrayed those who differed with him as morons. His statements at the time about Kepler were truly heinous. Remember that Kepler had done much of his work a decade before Galileo. His slanders against a large number of rather good Jesuit astronomers were equally atrocious. Think of a 17th century version of Michael Mann. And like Mann, Galileo had quarrels with just about everyone in the scientific community. In short, he was an intellectual bully.
As for his science, much of his astronomy was either wrong (particularly about comets) or stolen (from Kepler among others) without attribution. His truly great work that is usually overlooked was his work on the laws of motion. His work was crucial to the giant that came after him, Isaac Newton. But what needs to be remembered is that Galileo was a great publisher. He solicited money and clout to get his works published and spread throughout Europe.
Alas, like all bullies, Galileo was also a coward. Having enraged just about everyone in Europe’s intellectual community, he had no friends and supporters. When the Church caught him on defying a Papal order to which he had previously agreed, all his dirty birds came home to roost. His prominence meant that the possibility of his being seriously punished was zilch. Despite that, he still caved in and submitted to a publication ban that he had in large part brought on himself. So much for “following his conscience”.
Make no mistake, Galileo is one of the great scientists of history, and some of his work was truly ground-breaking. He was also one of the most disagreeable individuals ever in Europe’s scientific community.
As a Catholic, I find the historical rewrites in defense of hte Church / Galileo events to be shameful.
The Church was wrong. Period.
The Church is wrong now to embrace the climate consensus, which is nothing more than the modern incarnation of eugenics/Malthusian thinkg. Period.
Correcting misinformation with facts is wrong?
Interesting position to take.
I disagree, Galileo was wrong to claim that the Book of Joshua was in error. He should have kept his mouth out of the religion debate and stuck to his crappy science. (he was wrong most of the time) He was right about the pendulum, and acceleration due to gravity and empirics. He was wrong about the tides, copied Lippershay’s Telescope, He was wrong about a fixed sun and circular orbits (Copernican model) and could not prove it when asked to do so. Galileo was an arrogant self-promoting BS-er.
It is possible to be wrong in more than one way. People do actually go and read the actual documentation of what happened instead of warmed over 10th hand accounts and when they do so, they generally find that black and white caricatures are completely inaccurate. Galileo was wronged by the Church tribunal because it did not treat him even handedly but let the emotions felt by those Galileo insulted improperly enter into their judgment.
On that matter, the Church was wrong, period.
Do you think that the Church was wrong when it insisted that heliocentrism had not overcome all the objections to it? I hope not because the last one finally fell centuries later in the 1800s.
Galileo was wrong to insist that the Church was engaging in theological error when it maintained neutrality between heliocentrists and geocentrists at a time when not all the evidence was in.
Don’t forget Animism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism
but in a modern version, The One World Religion, paying tribute to Gaia and hugging trees.
No Catholic will swap the Catholic religion for a bunch of crap like that…
Oh, the Pope just did.
Never mind, here is how the Vatican explains the fundamental mechanism of Climate Change:
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/vatican-scientists-explain-the-fundamental-mechanism-of-climate/
Tell that to Giordano Bruno (burned alive in 1900). Tell that to Rene Descartes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_%28Descartes%29. Tell that to the victims of the Spanish Inquisition. Tell that to Jean d’Arc. Tell that to the many victims of the Burning Times. Tell that to the New World natives who resisted being “converted” to Catholicism and were again burned alive or just plain slaughtered. The possibility of Galileo being tortured was absolutely real. The possibility of him being executed, should he not have recanted, was a near certainty. The Church was in a fight for its very life, a fight which it systematically lost over much of the next five centuries because Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Galileo, Bruno and many others were right, and the Bible turned out to be diametrically wrong, so wrong that it was never again possible for rational humans to view it as being infallible no matter how much you torture the language with hermeneutics.
Finally, being disagreeable is neither a mortal sin nor a crime. What was then, and is now, at stake is the freedom of thought. The Church of the day sought to control human thought and dictate what humans could, in good conscience or bad, think or believe. It was then, and is today, all about power, not about God, because the application of the scientific worldview and way of determining truth quickly leaves one with nothing worthy of belief in any religion, which at the very least means that those that are religious should be extremely humble as they ask you to believe absurdities without evidence or with highly questionable and irreproducible evidence, anecdotal (at best) evidence. It is not what it is defensibly best to believe, it is in fact defensibly not the best thing to believe.
This is not, actually, a bad discussion to hold on WUWT because it is extremely interesting to see the number of people who are “skeptical” about climate science — which at the very least is backed up by physical science and a wide range of observations, whether or not you think that the arguments and inferences made on the basis of that science and those observations are sound — but who believe ten impossible things before breakfast as long as they are things that pertain to an imaginary invisible world without any evidence at all. The application of rational skepticism to religion leaves one areligious.
It really is useful to study the history of Europe across the middle ages. This was a time when continent spanning wars were being fought over religion. Religious dissent was political dissent, treason as well as heresy. To assert that anybody who rejected any part of the pronouncements of the Church in any sort of public arena was not at mortal risk of dismemberment and death is directly contradicted by the fact that humans were routinely drawn and quartered and broken on the wheel and flayed alive and burned and hung and castrated and carded with a comb just because they were Jewish, or Muslim, or Protestant, or an old woman, or a native american, or in possession of a piece of land coveted by a powerful member of the church, or a political threat, all either by the church itself or with its passive blessing.
It was (attempted) thought control, pure and simple. And it failed. It continues to fail (and to create suffering and strife) today.
rgb
I almost always enjoy your posts as I usually find them well-reasoned and informative. Here, you disappoint. Before you insert the other one on the topic of Galileo, I heartily suggest you visit the following:
http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html
which I’ve copied from up-post. Your reply is visceral and very nearly unhinged. Galileo was never, by any stretch of the imagination, in peril of his life. The Inquisition he was called before was nothing like that which developed in Spain and I have never seen the claim that he was “shown the instruments of his torture” made anywhere but here. An affirmation you seem eager to accept. Confirmation bias, much? In the end, the “prosecutor” practically begged Galileo to take a plea bargain. That apparently blew up when some of the Roman members of the Congregation decided to teach the Tuscan a lesson and sabotaged it. The Spanish cardinals may have had a hand in it as well. Basically they did that IPCC Summary for Policy Makers thing where the Conclusion went against the Science.
In the end Galileo got smacked because he gravely insulted his friend and patron, Pope Urban, who was a) in no mood to intervene as a result and b) couldn’t do much about it if he had wanted to because of political reverses related to the 30 Years War and c) had made a lot of personal enemies, particularly among the Jesuits, who basically sat on their hands through the whole thing.
Galileo also didn’t actually advance the science to any large degree; contemporaries did more and better work on sun spots and actually advanced the art of telescope making. The Copernican theory was wrong, which we know only in hindsight, but it also couldn’t account for the stellar parallax and Coriolis effects which should have been apparent under the theory but could not be observed at the time the theory was advanced. In his “On the Two Chief Systems” his central arguments about the origin of tides are “not even wrong”. Separately, his explanation for the origin of comets, is, well, comical.
Your exaggerations extend to the Spanish Inquisition. As an instrument of death, it was amazingly ineffective. If Wikipedia is to be believed, about 5,000 persons were executed over the course of about 350 years. Probably about the same total you might expect, all things being equal, if Texas is around 350 years from now.
The horrors you lay to the Church (people always know whom you mean when it’s a capital “C”) were by no means singular to it, and far more common amongst secular polities. People always forget that fact. Next time you might want to wipe the spittle off your keyboard before you post.
RGB>>>
Usually you are a great source of clear thinking but on this subject I take exception not as believer but an agnostic (although I was brought up a Catholic).
Without going into much detail I suggest you are trying to analyse or construct religion on the same basis as science. Whilst the two must co-exist, neither is subject to the other.
To ask whether Christ could possibly rise from the dead is no more than asking whether God exists in Christian Theology. The two are the same in Catholic doctrine except for the bodily form. God can indeed be a tree; if it is impossible then God does not exist.
Take the lead from Aquinas; despite his brilliant work he ultimately came to the conclusion that faith alone was sufficient.
You could not, with all science in the world, come to the conclusion there is no God. Equally religion does not ask science to show there is one.
Contrary to your vehemence that the Church was against science that is not how I read it. Why would Copernicus dedicate his work to the Pope Paul III? Why was he encouraged by a Cardinal and a Bishop to publish. It is so stated in his preface “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies (1543).”
He says ‘…I have preferred dedicating my studies to Your Holiness rather than to anyone else. For even in this very remote corner of the earth where I live you are considered the highest authority by virtue of the loftiness of your office and your love for all literature and astronomy too. “
He was actually getting Papal protection for his views which were surely controversial and going to be attacked.
Pope Urban considered that Galileo had been badly treated by the tribunal. Read the details of the characters in play. Simplicio made it too simple for his enemies to turn the Pope against Galileo; he had also broken his undertaking.
Copernicus’ work had not been banned as it remained a “hypothesis.” It was attacked by Protestants rather than the Catholics.
You have me on Joan of Arc; I thought the English burned her as a witch.
James 1st also had special techniques for detecting witches much like Salem I guess. I mean modern day science enlightened civilizations would not embark on Eugenics, Holocaust, Stalinism, Vietnam, Iraq, Guantanamo and all the prior conflicts would they?
Each era should be judged by standards and norms of the times, otherwise we really are holier than the Romans because they allowed gladiator combat but disdained circumcision as being barbaric.
“Galileo was not “threatened with unspeakable pain”; he was shown the instruments of torture. There is a very large difference.”
That is the stupidest thing I’ve seen in this thread, which is saying a lot. There is no difference whatsoever. If someone waves a gun in your face, he is clearly threatening to kill you. They were showing Galileo what they were going to do to him if he didn’t cooperate. He cooperated.
This is a religious post by Worral; arguably more religion focused that the other one by Ronan the other day. It is a myopically Christian religion focused post and seems only centered on just one sect of Christianity.
Some people will support the climate change movement on a purely religious basis without any consideration of science. We already knew that.
John
+1
I’ve been reading this blog for many years. Lately it’s become quite laden with Christian religious undertones. I would go elsewhere — but there are still a large number of excellent science articles.
As far as religious support of CAGW is concerned… I imagine most religions would support the [wrong] ideas that humans are the center of all things of Earth – and that humans are born into ‘original sin’ [CAGW -> CO2 emitters] – and that indulgences must be paid to atone for our sins.
The religiousness is distracting from the actual science.
The title of each article makes it clear what the subject of the article is.
It’s a trivial matter to ignore the ones you aren’t interested in.
If articles such as this are of so little interest to you, why did you read it, and even more, why did you read the discussion that followed?
@MarkW:
Why do people stop to look at a car accident?
Why did people gather to cheer and jeer at public hangings?
I stopped and looked – because I’m human.
However, the religious argument should be left for religious web sites. Of course… IMO.
Fascinating how you defend reading articles that you claim you have no interest in.
If you want to justify your hypocrisy, be my guest.
unknown502756 on April 29, 2015 at 7:48 am
– – – – – – – – –
unknown502756,
Your outline of “religious support of CAGW” is consistent with some of the great work on comparative studies of mythologies. One my favorites is work by Joseph Campbell.
He pursued the idea that religions rely on certain myths. He thought those myths had story telling value for mankind. I will agree with him if they are considered only as stories.
John
John Whitman on April 29, 2015 at 7:16 am
– – – – – – – – – –
Eric Worrall,
Sorry I misspelled your name in the above comment.
John
It is time to stop beating this horse. The horse has already drank the purple coolade. GK
Perhaps we should examine the differences between belief and faith.
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/06/27/alan-watts-belief-vs-faith/
I would also ask, is our first responsibility to the environment, or to each other’s well-being?
If we have faith that our world is in God’s hands, we can focus on the biblical message that we are here to love and support one another in our daily struggles with sin, Satan and all that he has tempted humanity with.
IMHO, one of the major reasons that capitalist democracy has been successful in the past, is that it’s been largely tempered by Christianity. Without it, ‘temptation of the flesh’ has and will induce chaos.
I can remember my clergyman dad often saying that saving folks can only be accomplished by serving them.
Would those be the “hands” that just shook a mountain to crush the life out of innocent children? Really?
It is rather easy to believe that there is no God, because that explains why natural evil happens all of the time. It happens because the Universe is utterly indifferent to suffering. Cancer isn’t “God’s will” or a punishment for sin, it is the result of indifferent accidents at the genetic cellular level. In that sense nature is as “just” as game of russian roulette that we have no choice but to play and that can at any moment spin one of its manifold loaded cylinders into the firing position and screw up or end our lives. Cancer and natural disasters as God’s will is mere proof of an evil God, or at best an equally indifferent God.
Why not focus on the human message that since there is no (evidence for) heaven, no evidence for hell, no evidence for God, absolutely no evidence for Satan, no reason to think that anything like a “temptation” ever took place and excellent reasons to think that humans evolved over several million years in a cosmos roughly 14 billion years after a large scale expansion from a high-energy-density state, that whatever exists of “heaven” or “hell” is precisely what we construct here on Earth using our wits and our will. We have nothing to look forward to or fear after death, but we very much have plenty to fear and enjoy in life. We can choose to work towards a world that minimizes human suffering and maximizes love and joy, or we can engage in religious thinking that actively prevents the entire human species from assuming its direct responsibility for making it happen and creates world-spanning conflicts over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or whether or not the mantel of Muhammed passes by inheritance or election. We can waste time and money building churches and attending them and donating substantial sums to people whose “job” in life is to convince us (and especially our children) of the utterly improbable or we could devote both the time and the money to actually trying to improve the world by fighting ignorance.
Ethics are rational. They do not need to be backed up by imaginary beings and threats and promises of postmortem supernatural punishments and rewards. They can be openly discussed and reasoned about, and we can collectively choose how we should act without a set of inviolable “divinely inspired” rules being imposed on us by fiat, even when they make no sense at all or are backed up by absurdly improbable stories unsupported by a shred of evidence.
rgb
Unless the world is perfect, there can be no God.
The Bible already has an answer to your question. Read Job.
I’m inclined to agree with you rgb, in the light of where humanity stands, we have intellectually outgrown the capacity of religion and it’s explanations of how things came to be. That is why someone like myself becomes a skeptic of what was presented to me as a child, and I was told to accept on faith and trust. I often wonder if biblical ‘hell’ is hot, just because the people who wrote it had never experienced folks dying from the cold, and could only relate to the opposite?
Interesting to me though, is that most people always seem to be searching for new or more satisfying religion (or some substitute) in their lives, so they have a path laid out to follow. Those who penned the scriptures repeatedly refer to humankind as sheep. I find that ironic when I think about the press nowdays.
And thank you, mark. that is exactly what my dad would have directed me to read, had I asked rgb’s question.
It’s funny how ethics seems to depend on ideas that can’t be proven. Ideas like “for the greater(or common) good. Who gets to decide, and on what grounds? Much of the moral catastrophe brewing in the IPCC, the UN, Agenda 21, etc. are based on being for the common good. Some better-than-anyone-else person or “elite” group always makes that argument.
A common sense, religious, mostly Christian idea such as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” wouldn’t come up with carbon quotas, carbon taxes, forcibly raising energy prices, and refusing useful ideas like nuclear energy instead of burning wood.
Ethics are entirely rational. I have a gun, you have the money. Give it to me or I’ll kill you and take it.
That is rational ethics that works for quite a few folks.
So is: there are six of just walking along here and see you’re trying to take that guy’s money. Why don’t you just drop the gun and get outta’ dodge before we shoot you.
Might makes right? Another rational ethic.
Why can’t we all just get along? Whoops, that’s another religious idea.
In regards to this topic, there are many ironies;
+ Galileo had rejected Kepler’s elliptical paths, in favor of Copernicus’ perfect circles.
+ Galileo’s tide theory never held water.
+ Copernicus’ system was less accurate at predicting the motions of the planets, than the system of crystal spheres created by the pagan Ptolemy.
+ Copernicus was driven by faith, saying “We have a supremely orderly creator; therefore the heavens ought to behave in an orderly manner.”
+ Even, with its inaccuracies, Copernicus’ book was permitted to be kept in the Roman Catholic library for a few centuries.
+ Over the Galileo issue, the Pope was not going with what the Bible said. Rather, he was going with the evidence that was in favor of the system of crystal spheres. Academia also strongly supported the work of Ptolemy, including his cosmology.
Galileo’s book, that mocked the pope, didn’t help matters. I think the main issue was not the specifics of the science, but in who held the authority to declare truth.
But in the end, the point was that it was an observational truth that the Sun did not go “around” the Earth, but that the Earth went “around” the Sun. This was what the fuss was all about, because the Bible explicitly says otherwise! Hence circles, ellipses, closed curves, open curves (ellipses are only an approximation as well in a many-body solar system) that wasn’t important, and Galileo wasn’t the mathematician that Kepler (or for that matter, his secretary Toricelli) was — if he was, he would have been Newton and finished inventing calculus and physics itself. And who knows, if he hadn’t been broken and confined to house arrest, unable to publish anything at all for the last years of his life, he might have.
But Bellarmine’s observations in his letter to Galileo proved to be utterly “prophetic”. In the end, Galileo’s correct assertion that the Earth goes around the Sun, not as Copernicus or Bruno or Galileo or Kepler asserted, but rather as Newton eventually derived while inventing a system of the world capable of iterative refinement and precise prediction and description was direct proof that the Bible is not and never has been “infallible”, and that in fact it is filled with nonsense and not a reliable factual, ethical, or spiritual guide.
rgb
rgbatduke says “This was what the fuss was all about, because the Bible explicitly says otherwise! ”
No.
Read Cardinal Barberini’s letter to Fouscini. He said if [Copernicus was right] then they would have to reassess their interpretation of the Book of Joshua. Joshua was the only scriptural reference that discusses the mechanics of the sun’s pathway. It says it goes across the sky. Which is true. Now Galileo, a secret Copernican, as he admitted in his letter to Kepler, refuted Joshua, publicly. That is what the fuss was about. It was about Galileo foray into the theology.
Here is the translated quote from Cardinal Bellarmine to Foscarini.
“I say that if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not revolve round the earth, but the earth round the sun, then it will be necessary, very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and we should rather say that we have misunderstood these than pronounce that to be false which is demonstrated.”
The fuss was that Galileo spoke about about the theology, when he said that he would not.
Re: “the Bible explicitly says otherwise!” rgb
No, it does not. It no more says that the Sun orbits the earth than you do when you say:
“The sun is rising.”
rgbatduke – you overstate Galileo’s punishment (he continued to write) and do not recognize the secret Aristotelian Liga that undertook to destroy Galileo. See my post below. as documented by Physicist Roy E. Peacock, in A Brief History of Eternity
STOPPING THE SUN
I should tell you that the laws and pronouncements of the old Mesopotamian kings who were thought divine — could not be changed. The laws and pronouncements were written down on clay tablets and later kings were bound by them. (Egypt had a similar problem.) Well, you can imagine this put a new king in a tough spot. He could not deny the older laws and pronouncements without diluting his own authority. Well, they found a simple means around the old laws. The clay tablets on which they were written were covered over with new clay and fired. They were then stored. Thus the old laws continued to exist but were hidden from human eyes. Thus they could not be “seen” to contradict the new kings new laws.
Such divine kings could also set time limits which they might come to regret. But what could they do? After all their pronouncements could not be altered. Well, they could stop counting the passage of days or as it might have been said since they were considered gods — stop the sun in the sky.
Joshua — It would be interesting to know if this fight took place on the day before the Sabbath. At nightfall the Sabbath would begin and the Hebrews would have been forced to stop fighting or break religious law. If they had stopped fighting they very well might have been routed and even slaughtered. We can assume that because the Hebrews won that they kept fighting. So it is possible that this whole story about Joshua stopping the sun in the sky was about creating an excuse for fighting on the Sabbath. He “stopped the sun in the sky” therefore the Sabbath did not arrive — therefore no religious laws were broken. Joshua did not break God’s law.
I think I am giving a very reasonable explanation for something mistakenly called a miracle.
Just speculating here.
Eugene WR Gallun
Joe,
Unfortunately Eric did not read the trials of Galileo. Everything you said is correct. What got Galileo in trouble was his refuting of the Book of Joshua. Galileo came out against scripture in the vernacular. What was he doing involving himself in religious matters? So the Church , rightfully rebuked him for pretending to be a theologian. The church never condemned Copernicanism, ie, Galileo’s science. They just asked him to PROVE it and he could not. Why did they ask him to prove it? They needed to know if they got the interpretation of Joshua wrong or not. Since Galileo could not prove anything, they let the status quo stand. I have all the quotes an letters from the trials. People blurt out Galileo like they actually know what happened. 99% of the time, they don’t.
Does a Christian owe their first loyalty to the pope? Only if they’re a papist.
I’m not going to address the intelligence or lack thereof of believers, because one can be reasonably intelligent and be mistaught and indoctrinated at an age where you are still incapable of critical thinking, one can be misled, one can experience cognitive dissonance and behave irrationally, or one can just plain make mistakes. I do it all the time, in the case of objective problems where my errors eventually surface and all I can say is “oops”.
However, I will point out the following. The evidence that supports the entire Judeo-Christian-Moslem-Mormon-JW Abrahamic religion complex is incredibly weak, and relies on the hearsay reporting of miracles that, on the face of it, are absurd. The religious dogma is transmitted in the form of scriptures that contain literally mountains of nonsense contradicted by science and historians over and over again. It is internally inconsistent to the point where it is almost a joke — you can justify almost anything using the scriptures, and can equally well justify its opposite, also using the scriptures. Its communication of ethics are, with few exceptions, pitiful and inadequate where they aren’t overtly evil (it’s alright to beat your slaves almost to death, marriage by rape, speaking in parables to ensure that there will be plenty of the damned, and don’t get me started on the Quran with its graphically described systematic torture of unbelievers for eternity or the Book of Mormon with its steel swords and old-world plants and animals in the new world, read from vanishing gold tablets unearthed in upstate New York. Yet by at least one the arguments for the “evidence” for Christianity above, “there must be something to” Mormonism, because look, lots of people believe in it now, let alone Islam with its visiting angels and taking of dictation.
Those who wish to pretend that Galileo was not at mortal risk at the hands of the church might look up the case of Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake on February 17, 1600, after a trial where his inquisitor was the religious murderer, Cardinal Saint Bellarmine, who through no coincidence was enormously involved in the entire scandalous attempt by the church to suppress Copernicanism, including Galileo’s work. Bruno no doubt was indeed a “heretic”. He asserted (gasp!) that the stars were distant suns, and that not only does the Earth circle the sun, but distant suns were no doubt circled by distant Earths. Wow, did he turn out to be right, using only reason as his guide, in the sixteenth century.
This same Bellarmine a few years later wrote his famous letter to Galileo explaining correctly why the Copernican assertion that the Sun was orbited by the Earth instead of the other way around all by itself was sufficient reason to cast the entire Bible into doubt, as it would be irrefutable proof that the holy fathers, saints, and prophets of the church were not divinely inspired even in simple matters of overwhelmingly important everyday fact, and so rather obviously could not be trusted to be “divinely inspired” on matters as subtle as believing reports of impossible and absurd miracles and matters of religious doctrine. It is freely available online, and IMO should be required reading for people seeking to defend religious thinking. It concludes with Bellarmine, possibly haunted by the fact that Galileo’s observations were compelling (that which we can see with our own eyes often is), preparing to launch five centuries of exegesis, hermeneutics, and apologia, backfilling and constraining the “official” domain of the prophets and saints to an ever shrinking base as science ripped most of the Bible apart and showed it to be arrant, arrogant, nonsense. The Catholic church has indeed been dragged, kicking and screaming, over centuries, into alignment with science but still insists on its tiny domain of magic involving “souls” and what happens to them after death in an extradimensional view of reality, something safely out of reach of the rational empirical worldview. Its ethical standards are evident in its continuing opposition to the mere use of condoms to spread disease in AIDS-ridden, overpopulated Africa, in its enormous wealth (it is something like 19th on the list of wealthy countries), and the inexplicable fact that 100% of its officers and leadership are male, with women systematically excluded. Seriously? If they were a corporation, they would have been sued into bankruptcy long ago, after being excoriated and publicly humiliated for treating slightly over one half of the world’s population as second class citizens as a matter of religious dogma quite literally forever. But then, the Abrahamic faiths all hate women, who are (as we all know) “unclean”. Jesus thought so, and can be quoted as such.
In the end, religion and mythical thinking and the religious worldview are in direct opposition to rational thought and the scientific worldview. It’s just the way it is. The two cannot ever be reconciled unless and until there is direct, double blind placebo controlled reproducible pure quill evidence to support the most outrageous of the assertions that form the foundation of the religion because that is the standard for probable truth in science! One cannot say that the two need not be in conflict — they are in conflict, they are in conflict every day. People make conflicted decisions, decisions filled with indefensible cognitive dissonance, insane decisions, because they are based on religious principles that cannot be defended except by means of quoting a religious text written by superstitious, ignorant men back in a past so distant that they thought madness was demonic possession and that disease was a punishment of God for sin and that the world was flat and surmounted by a solid bowl lit with a few thousand lights by night and by a sun that dipped underneath the pillars that held it up on top of a flat ocean once a day. Those decisions are just as indefensible as the decision of the Catholic Church to prosecute Galileo lest his views prove true and weaken the political hold of the church on the entire world, which is, surprise surprise, precisely what happened and what continues to happen today! People are educated, people wake up, and people leave the churches as they realize that they are not only nonsense, they are expensive nonsense that the founding fathers were trying to protect us from politically.
Christianity, fortunately, can easily be empirically tested, as any Christian who actually has studied the Bible should well know (in my own experience as an ex-Christian, nobody actually studies the Bible, they only study carefully selected tracts that make up a story that the reader or their teachers happen to “like”, leaving out all the bits that make no sense or openly contradict their own favorite conclusions). Jesus clearly and unambiguously promises to do pretty much anything anyone asks of him — heal the sick, move mountains, just about any supernatural miracle. All you have to do is ask nicely. He also promises elsewhere to return to usher in the kingdom of God in the lifetime of his own followers (major fail) and a bunch of other stuff that never happened, but lets stick with the simple stuff. It is also routinely asserted that Jesus loves everybody, and I’m going to go with that as a working hypothesis too, since if Jesus only loves some people and hates others, he isn’t a deity or son-o-deity worthy of worship. Finally, I’m going to just toss out there the idea that Hell is bad, very painful, and that one would never want to see somebody that one loved in Hell because they have to do stuff like stand in lakes of boiling blood having their skin burned off and magically regrown to burn off again, all maximally painfully, for eternity and that sounds like it would really hurt, and our natural compassion for even most of our enemies would make us hesitate to inflict that sort of punishment on them, let alone on loved ones.
Well, here I am, clearly damned by the standards of the Christian church. Damned in the very best of faith, of course — I’m not rejecting a God I believe in, I just think it is silly to believe in God without evidence, and even sillier in a quantitatively comparative sense to believe in some specific God or religious sub-practice, that is to believe in Yahweh versus Krishna versus Allah versus Jesus versus Odin versus Zeus etc, or to be Methodist instead of Presbyterian — again without any better, or different, evidence for any of them. We are all atheists, even Catholics. I’m just atheistic about N religions, and a Catholic is atheistic about N-1 religions but doesn’t see the absurdity of accepting as “evidence” in the one case that which he rejects derisively in N-1 cases.
So here’s the experiment. Jesus loves me. Jesus doesn’t want me to be damned, because being damned is not something we wish for those that we love unless those words have no meaning whatsoever. I am (currently) damned because I will not believe without evidence, because I think that it is morally wrong to believe things without evidence, that it is a sort of willful ignorance that leads inevitably to bad ends, given that good ends are difficult enough to arrange with our eyes wide open and using the best possible information and intentions. Jesus is perfectly capable of providing me with evidence. He walked around reportedly providing evidence to a whole lot of people who required pretty much the same standard I do — something that they could see with their own two eyes, overt miracles that couldn’t possibly have been stagecraft or charlatanry such as is routinely practiced to this very day by street “magicians” and confidence men with shills in the crowd. According to Saul/Paul, Paul himself was in precisely my circumstance — not believing in Jesus because he thought the whole thing was absurd until Jesus appeared to Paul in person and changed his mind. Paul reports that Jesus did this with “hundreds of others” after the resurrection, so there is clearly no heavenly rule against Jesus coming back to appear to unbelievers and do a few miracles so that they can believe and thereby not be damned. It obviously didn’t remove their free will — how could it? It just provided them with the only sound basis for belief in anything, direct evidence!
I therefore invite Jesus — again, as I have performed this experiment many times — to appear in my den right now. We can sit and have a chat about ethics, and I can ask him what God intends to do about the thousands of children suffering and dying or crushed and dead in Nepal and what the real resolution of the problem of theodicy is, he can drink some of the water I’ve turned into beer (with science) and I can drink some water he’s changed into wine (with magic), I can ask him to miraculously restore my health and physical age to that of a twenty year old (ask and it shall be granted, right) and I promise, for the rest of my life I will believe, and thereby not be damned and have to stand around in a lake of fire being periodically gang-raped by demons or whatever else one fantasizes happens to unbelievers when they die.
Oops, once again he failed to take me up on my offer. I persist, sadly, in my damned state because of a lack of the evidence that would cause me to believe. This, I hold, is direct proof that either: a) The Bible is wrong when it asserts that unbelievers are damned, and damnation in fact has nothing to do with belief or forgiveness or any of that stuff — of course this makes the Bible even more (if possible) unreliable, and does not encourage belief in cherrypicked assertions mixed in with the absurdities and moral evil; b) Jesus does not, in fact, love me, and since I’m not a bad fellow and even my dogs love me, this suggests that Jesus is not, actually worthy of universal love or worship; or c) Jesus is a myth, or possibly a mix of myth and legend, and if he existed at all is long since dead and utterly incapable of “coming back” or affecting the world in the slightest magical way.
Personally I’m going with c), but of course if a) or b) are correct, Jesus can at any time demonstrate his worthiness for worship by manifesting himself directly and unambiguously in my presence, just like he supposedly did for Paul, when Paul was in more or less identical circumstances. I mean, this is the guy who in his trinitarian unity created the entire Universe in a few days and odd order — surely he can manage the multitasking required to pop in for a beer and a chat.
rgb
Who says you’re damned? That’s clearly your religious belief, not mine.
kind of amazing that you spent so much time and energy on writing such a long post. Who were you trying to convince? Readers? Or Yourself?
(hint: very few readers will last past the first paragraph, and even fewer past the second. That’s how it goes with rants)
@rgb: Well said! and I agree, but most religious people will discard the well reasoned argument — just as most CAGW believers discard skeptical well reasoned argument.
Now let’s all get back to science.
Dear rgb,
Jesus has never come into my den (i.e., appeared to me tangibly anywhere), either. But, He did come into my heart when I asked Him sincerely.
Come now, rgb, your emotions temporarily disabled that sharp intelligence you so often display on WUWT: if Jesus is a being capable of doing what you ask, physically entering your den *POOF*!…
…. then, He can discern disingenousness.
Oh, yes, your disingenuousness (about what he said and did) is clear from your blatant mischaracterizing of the historical record among other things.
And, really, do you WANT a god who is a mere genii, jumping at your beck and call? That would make YOU the actual god in that scenario.
You will find this disgusting, I realize, but I AM SMILING (very gently) at all your enthusiastic writing above. Essentially you are saying: I DON’T WANT THIS TO BE TRUE BUT I’M AFRAID IT IS SO I’M GOING TO YELL LOUDLY (AND SNARL) TO SCARE IT AWAY!!! You would not care so much if the Hound of Heaven were not hot on your trail. You won’t escape. And someday you will be so glad that you did not!
Yes, it does mean that you will have to meet me, someday (bwah, ha, ha, ha, haaaaaa), but, then, you won’t mind!
#(:))
With agape and PRAYERS (for over a year, now! — and for the rest of my life, if need be),
Janice
P.S. Jesus might just meet you via one of His followers, though… . An intelligent believer in Jeshua (as Messiah) may just walk into your den and have a beer!
re: Janice Moore April 29, 2015 at 11:35 am
Janice,
I always read and enjoy your comments. You seem to be a very nice person and I do not want to offend you but my comments may sound harsher than they are meant to be.
It is the condescending nature of the comment that you will pray for me. Do you even realize how that comes across? It says that because you are so enlightened and I am not that I need your help to see the truth. Of course it is the truth in your mind not mine. Now I do not personally care what you do to make yourself feel better about things but this is exactly how oppression begins. Subtle insinuations of help for those that are not good enough. As those insinuations become acceptable as mainstream further alienation of non conformists follows. Soon you end up with those in power wanting to penalize and even abolish all others. All in the name of righteous religion.
Thankfully our Founding Fathers gave us the First Amendment to prevent this.
Dear Tom,
Thank you.
And, no, I did not realize that what I considered to be a generous gift was seen as condescending. I’m glad you told me. I can’t remove that impression from you, but, at least I can tell you that I had, indeed, no idea… . In case you’d like to understand the state of my mind and heart as I pray for someone (and it is the same when I tell them that I will do that for them, too), it is the same feeling I would have (although, admittedly, much less urgent, even though, given that one’s final hour can come at any moment, I SHOULD feel that urgency) if I saw rgb or you or anyone without a life preserver on, struggling on the high seas, help at least an hour away, and I could see a life raft in the trough just beyond you, out of your vision.
“Go over there! I can see what you cannot! There is a means of saving your life just over there!!”
That is my prayer.
My feeling toward you as I offer to pray and pray is what I would feel then.
I actually care (no, no, not perfectly, lol, Christians are not perfect, just forgiven)! And I’m a true believer. My “condescending” tone is not what is in my heart for you.
When someone offers to pray for me (for whatever peril or problem I am facing) I am GRATEFUL.
Hoping that you can believe me (and Jesus!),
Janice
re: Janice Moore April 29, 2015 at 4:34 pm
Once again you take the righteous position over me. You say a condescending tone is not in your heart, and I believe you however you continue on with it. You have a tone of superiority when you believe that your prays will save someone. Have you ever even considered that it is YOU who is wrong? Of course not. Yet you invoke the name of Jesus as your lord and savior in clear violation of the First Commandment. The Ten Commandments are Hebrew law issued by Yahweh to Moses long before Jesus walked the Earth. The first thing you are told is not to place other gods before him (Yahweh). Yet each day you worship Jesus you condemn yourself for doing so. Perhaps you were directed to this site in order to meet me and be shown the true error of your ways. So it is now I that feel sorrow for you for being blind to the truth.
Dear Tom,
I believe in the doctrine of the trinity, i.e., Jesus is God. It is a concept that we cannot get our minds around, like infinity, it is a mystery that we simply accept: three = one. Thus, to worship Jesus = to worship God. If you really, genuinely, want to ask me questions about my faith, I would be HAPPY to answer (or try to!) — hopefully, without my “tone.” Sorry about that. That’s just me. I don’t FEEL condescending.
Well. Many Jews have a hard time with Christianity because of the doctrine of the Trinity. Also, many Jews use that as an excuse not to closely examine the prophecies (e.g., Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 among many others) that were fulfilled in Yeshua.
Ask a mod to give me your e mail and I will write back — ON THIS TOPIC. If you are interested, and I hope you are!
Take care, down, there,
Your Gentile friend,
Janice
Janice,
No I do not wish to get into a personal discussion of religion. Been there, done that. I do not have the time nor the desire to do it again. We all have our beliefs that help us get through life and I am fine with that, as long as I am not forced to believe something different. It’s been a good thread, much more civil than I anticipated, but it is time to get back to science.
“one can be reasonably intelligent and be mistaught and indoctrinated at an age where you are still incapable of critical thinking”
Dr Brown,
This statement hit home very personally for me. I was brought up in a Roman Catholic home, attended the required catechism classes while young and was even an altar boy. Around the age of 12 I started asking questions because some things didn’t make sense to me, even at my early age. You see, my dad was a football coach and we watched the New York Giants every Sunday. I was puzzled by the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy by not working on Sunday, (not knowing that the holy day was really Saturday instead of Sunday). The question I asked of a nun was why some were allowed to work on Sunday, i.e. football players, officials, television crews etc. Her response was football was entertainment and not work. I knew better than that so I started to ask other questions. But because I was so indoctrinated as a young child, I found it very disturbing to think about these things, to even consider questioning my religious upbringing. This mental conflict continued well into my teens. I wanted answers but was afraid to ask because I feared condemnation. Until one day I came to the realization that those who profess honesty and truth would never condemn someone who asks a legitimate question while in search of the truth. And while it still took more time to free myself from this mental abuse foisted upon me at a young age, I was finally able to break free. It was my growing interest and study of astronomy that was the catalyst. And then I learned of a distant relative, Giordano Bruno.
Tom Bruno
Dear Tom,
Please forgive my interjecting this (you were addressing rgb only, I think), but good for you to ask questions! And you aren’t through, yet! Keep on asking…. keep seeking truth. You will find it!
Yes, indeed, love is the key. If anyone will not accept you and your questions with love, run the other way — no matter who they are.
I may be “sad” in your eyes, too, but I am praying for you!
With agape,
Janice
Rgb; Just as I tried to explain Janice, you separate faith from religion. Religions are only a way of life, it’s arbitrair in nature. Faith represents the assumption of the existence of God, so it’s true or false., 1 or 0.
We will never know, this means it’s not so important as it seems. And just as you said under b “”I’m not a bad fellow”” this is what counts , nothing else.
All religions overestimate their importance.
The God of the Bible offers proof that he exists by way of prophesy. No other religious book contains so many predictions that have come true.
There is no proof what so ever, it’s an assumption and nothing else.
Everything written is done by normal people as is valid for all religions.
This is the best thing I’ve read in a while, just beautiful.
Shamefully, the better historical go-by that the current group of Papal advisers are ignoring is that of Eugenics.
Eric,
I really like you posting on science stuff. You know, because I have said so. This posting is a bit toxic, and full of errors. Not up to your standards.
Amongst the left and the natural enemies of the Church, there is celebration today. They are not making erroneous allusions to Galileo. They are saying the opposite. They are saying the Church got it right. They are saying that the Church is following science and the majority scientific view. How is that similar to the Galileo issue?
We here at WUWT do not like what the IPPC says. By association, we will not like what the Vatican says when they agree with the IPCC. That doesn’t make the Vatican bad, it makes them slothful and inept wrt understanding their enemies. Tim Ball raised this issue 2 weeks ago.
There are many good catholics who frequent this site and disagree with the IPCC and now disagree with the PAS’s statement. I imagine that that is an uncomfortable position to be in. They have my sympathy.
We obviously failed in making our scientific case for the fraud of CAGW, and worse, we failed to make the political case, despite climategate, copenhahen, bali etc. We are getting mowed down by the IPCC and now their befriending of the Vatican.
We have to understand the problem to effectively keep combat this offensive We have to ourselves together and refrain from creating division where there aren’t any. Why alienate run of the mill catholics? Because the Vatican is parroting the IPCC that does not give you license to run down 1.2 billion people and create a fracture amongst the many here at WUWT etc who disagree with the IPCC and the Vatican’s ditto-ing of the IPCC.
My advice is to keep cool heads and continue to confront the principle problem, the IPCC, Obama, the EPA, the MSM. It was very worthwhile for Lord Monckton etc to go to the Vatican to express disagreement about this. But we need to keep our eye on the prize. The facts are in our favor.
When the facts come out, popularly, and they will, the Vatican will abandon their reliance on the IPCC. There are many within the Vatican who absolutely hate the earth-worship meme.
The earth has not warmed in 18 years. That is a fact.
Your knee-jerk attack on the church -a la Galileo was non-seqitur and wrong. The Church is AGREEING with science wrt AGW. How is that anything like Galileo? Secondly, you got the facts around the trials of Galileo wrong. So you were wrong squared this time.
Please continue to post, but this religion vs science pseudo battle is an unnecessary red herring and gets us off the point.
To your final point, see my post below @ur momisugly 8:20.
Oh yeah… A house divided will not stand. Cheers Max.
The article misstates the facts of the Galileo case. It is not, properly speaking the heliocentric opinion that was the problem. It was the assertion that heliocentrism is proven fact and that the Church theologically errs in that day by maintaining a theological neutrality between heliocentrism and geocentrism. The evidence in Galileo’s time favored heliocentrism but measuring stellar parallax was beyond the instruments of his day and would be for centuries. It is Galileo’s sidestep into theological instruction of churchmen that got him in trouble with Rome. Would anybody care to defend that?
The idea that Rome should keep doors open to new scientific evidence until final proofs are in is a fine principle in my opinion. Who opposes it?
God’s promise to the Church is that Popes shall not err in matters of promulgating the truth of faith and morals. It is a promised miracle that Catholics believe in. Outside of matters of teaching faith and morals, the promise does not hold and Popes are able to and definitively have made mistakes. In fact, there’s widespread opinion in the Church that there are popes in hell.
Trusting in God vs trusting in the Pope is a false conflict the way most Catholics view the question.
An encyclical would be welcome on the matter of climate change, if it were well informed on the state of science and properly modest about taking sides on matters that are not fully settled. A papal mention of model/reality divergence would be a global earthquake that no amount of peer review corruption would be able to counter. Properly focusing attention to climate as a matter of stewardship of resources in the planet’s service to mankind as our home would also do much to settle Gaia lunacy. There are opportunities as well as perils and it would be unwise to only focus on one or the other.
There’s no need for anti-Catholic battlespace prep and it’s frankly distasteful to see.
As with all things Climate Change, Follow the money. This is doubly true unfortunately with the Holy Roman Catholic Church.
The atrocities inflicted on new world natives by Various orders of the Catholic Church in pursuit of gold, silver, and gems for return to Spain and the Vatican in the 16th- 19th Century are well documented. Follow the money.
Recent notable examples of the Catholic Church and money perversion is seen in the sordid story of The Legion of Christ, founded by disgraced leader Fr. Marcial Maceil Degollado. Founded in the 1941, LOC by the 50’s was sending large amounts of money to papal coffers in Rome which bought decades of silence and coverup to the ongoing pedophilia that was rampart in the priest ranks of the order, including Maciel himself. Even with the pedophilia-abuse well known, in 2004 the Legion had a $650 million budget, and fewer than 650 priests. This continued to buy Papal protection for the priest abuses that had occurred in the order.
So back to the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the IPCC, and the upcoming Paris climate convention. There are promises of hundreds of billions in USD$, and Euros to be put forth by developed nations to pay developing nations. Somewhere, make no doubt, in this promised wealth flow is undoubtedly a “piece of the action” for the Vatican in return for this Encyclical cooperation. Of that fact, that money talks with the Vatican, we can be sure.
I think the following is relevant to Worral’s religion post today. Here is an excerpt from a comment I made yesterday on Ronan’s Roman Catholic Church centric post. It was addressed to a commenter who was discussing Galileo’s treatment with what appeared to me to be the Roman Catholic Church centered perspective only. It is edited slightly from previous posting.
John
= = = = = = = =
Some are naïve in thinking that the Roman Catholic Church’s (RCC) account of the treatment of Galileo can be accepted without at least two other non-RCC sourced corroborations of what happened; one being Galileo’s account and one being a third party’s account. Galileo’s account was intimidated under duress and restricted less he be further subject to the Inquisition. There is a limited third party’s account.
Here is a passage regarding assessment of Galileo’s treatment by the RCC from one of the best and more objective histories of Christianity (Paul Johnson’s ‘A History of Christianity’ (1976). Be patient in reading the assessment because the story of Galileo’s treatment by the RCC is, according to the research of Paul Johnson, related to and influenced by the RCC’s judgement and treatment of the Hermetic philosopher Girodano Bruno.
Galileo was brutally treated for his scientific ideas and scientific work, it should not be pretended that he wasn’t out of desire to protect the image of the RCC.
John
No. Galileo was fairly treated for his erroneous foray into theology. The Church never condemned the science. They asked him to prove his theory, and he admitted that he could not. Galileo was put on trial for BREACH of CONTRACT fo publicly saying that the book of Joshua was wrong. He was kept under house arrest in a Papal apartment and given a pension for life by Pope Urban the VIII, his friend.
Paul Westhaver on April 29, 2015 at 8:04 am ,
– – – – – – – –
Paul Weshaver,
Two things.
First, your response has confirmed RCC’s coercion; coercion as presented by Galileo’s point in his quote “And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will?”. It has also confirmed my observation that the Roman Catholic Church’s account of the matter cannot be accepted because of lack of corroboration with other non-RCC accounts; the accounts diverge.
Second, the Church was by fiat and force demarcating what was science / reality and what wasn’t in the realm of reality. That demarcation is a formal scientific area that science must address as science; outside force in the demarcation by science intimidates all science. You are saying that it was valid during the Inquisition that only the Roman Catholic Church had the right to coercively enforce that demarcation which logically should be in science’s realm; that is logically inane and it was quite an evil act of the RCC. Finally, the RCC Inquisition period actually runs counter to the valued tradition of scientific demarcation by science; a tradition that is prevalent in the History of Western Civilization which arguably started with the Greeks circa ~500 bc; the Inquisition was a hiatus from honored demarcation of what is science by science itself.
John
rgbatduke on April 29, 2015 at 8:58 am
– – – – – – – – – –
rgbatduke,
I agree with the fundamental aspects of your comments here.
Hey, maybe we could drink alcoholic non-libations while discussing the philosophy of science as well as the science of philosophy and the history of science. We could even venture into the history of philosophy given sufficient consumption of alcoholic non-libations. Seriously.
Personal Note: I do not deserve your compliments, I am pleased though.
John
Science was invented by clerics the Catholic Church you ignoramus.
So the Roman Church with its Roman monastics would have history re-written.
But we should grant them this: It was a Jesuit priest who developed the Big Bang. This paradigm was later “confirmed” by “evidence,” and now taken as an unquestionable doctrine and taught in schools. And of course, used as an academic bludgeon and shibboleth, for those who will not kiss the golden calf or sacred scientific cow.
Remember: credit where credit is due!
– – – – – – – – – –
Paul Westhaver,
Two more things.
– You seem unresponsive on science.
– Your initiation of name calling ends the civil discourse.
John
John, It is not name calling to name you as ignorant. How about malicious too?
Roger Bacon, a catholic monk, is given credit for having started modern science in ~1200 AD.
Did you know that, or are you ignorant of that fact?
George Henri LeMaitre PhD, a priest and scientist invented the Big Bang, or are you ignorant of that?
Gregor Mendel, a catholic monk, invented genetics, or are you ignorant of that?
Nicolas Copernicus, a catholic cleric, first documented the heliocentric cosmos, or are you ignorant of that?
Even Galileo was a devote catholic, or are you also ignorant of that too.
The list is long…
You seem to have a lot to say for somebody who is ignorant on so many relevant matters. You are so ignorant on these matters you may be described as invincibly ignorant. Are you invincibly ignorant John?
Your insinuation of malice by people is much worse than name calling. That make you also a hypocrite. An ignorant hypocrite. Not only do you not know the subject matter, but you are also motivated by malice.
Paul Westhaver on April 29, 2015 at 1:13 pm
– – – – – – – – –
Paul Westhaver,
Yet two more things.
– You have now amplified and increased your name calling instead of just simply stopping at your initial uncivil initiation of name calling.
– You said (Paul Westhaver on April 29, 2015 at 11:34 am) “Science was invented by clerics the Catholic Church you ignoramus.” That is not historically correct.
John
Well said, and defended, John. But it won’t matter. It took almost 400 years for the Church to actually publicly apologize for mistreating Galileo. I was teaching physics at the time, and announced the fact to my class.
Bellarmine’s Letter to Galileo (openly available online) is equally revealing. It leaves absolutely zero doubt as to what the motivations and fears of the Church were. The Church asserted that the words of the saints and holy fathers in the Bible were true ad litteram — this is almost a direct quote of Saint Bellarmine’s letter. This was the source of their authority. At the end of the letter Bellarmine takes off the mask and worries out loud about what would happen if Galileo’s (and Copernicus’ and Bruno’s and Kepler’s, and many others going back almost 2500 years) assertions of heliocentricity were proven even approximately correct (all that mattered was contradicting geocentricity as officially and clearly stated in the Bible itself in numerous places). In that case, he continues, we would have to completely alter the way we interpret the Bible because rewriting the Bible so that it remains true was preferable to the horror of having it revealed as being precisely what it is: An unbelievable collection of myths, stories, legends, and even snippets of history with no more claim to being perfect truth or even probable truth than any other, equally absurd, religious scriptural dogma competing with it.
rgb
rgbatduke on April 29, 2015 at 8:58 am
– – – – – – –
rgbatduke,
My response to you is above at John Whitman on April 29, 2015 at 9:39 am .
John
You very subtly twist Bellarmine’s comment. It was NOT about rewriting the Bible. The early Church Fathers in their commentaries that informed the then-current exegesis of the Bible, grounded their writings on the best available scientific evidence and theory; to wit, the Ptolemaic explanation of the Cosmos. Bellarmine was concerned that any re-analysis not be taken to say that the Bible was wrong, but that fallible human beings, in trying to understand God’s message would be liable to err and that in the light of new knowledge new understanding would come about. Apart from any objective Truth the Bible may or may not contain, Bellarmine saw you coming a mile away.
D.J. Hawkins & rgbatduke,
I agree with largely with rgbatduke and not so much with D.J. Hawkins. Below is my analysis.
Cardinal (then, but now Saint) Robert Bellarmine wrote a letter On April 12, 1615 to Foscarini. Bellarmine outlined a case for adopting positions that were against supporting Foscarini’s and Galileo’s sun-centered arguments.
I read the Bellarmine letter ( one online location of the letter is here http://www.cathinfo.com/catholic.php/St-Robert-Bellarmines-letter-to-Fr-Foscarini )
Bellarmine has three main messages made in three paragraphs starting with the words “First”, “Second” and “Third”.
Bellarmine’s “First” message is a reminder to Foscarini and Galileo that they should keep being “prudent” publically about their heliocentric ideas so that the ideas can only being taken “suppositionally and not absolutely”, because otherwise their ideas would “harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false”.
Bellarmine’s “Second” message is the reason Foscarini and Galileo must be very “prudent” as stated in the “First” paragraph; namely, the Church “prohibits interpreting Scripture against the common consensus of the Holy Fathers”. Bellarmine states that “common consensus” is “all agreeing in the literal interpretation that the sun is in heaven and turns around the earth with great speed, and that the earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the center of the world”. Heresy then is addressed by Bellarmine when he says that consensus is such that “[n]or can one answer that this is not a matter of faith ” and in two analogies discussed by him in the context of the heliocentric view he says “and so it would be heretical to say that Abraham did not have two children and Jacob twelve, as well as to say that Christ was not born of a virgin, because both are said by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of the prophets and the apostles.” That means Bellarmine’s parting message in this paragraph is that it is unambiguously a case of heresy if they go beyond their current publically known position of the “suppositionally” of their heliocentric ideas.
Bellarmine’s “Third” message is twofold. First-fold, Bellarmine starts out with saying the scriptures cannot be considered in error even if heliocentricity is found ultimately to be true, in that instance it would be human error in incorrectly interpreting the words of the scripture as meaning earth-centricity; Bellarmine’s words “I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false.” Bellarmine is saying that if heliocentric was ultimately found true, then he would have the Church reassign the meaning of the words in the scripture to support heliocentricity and not change the actual scripture words. Second-fold, Bellarmine disagrees, based on his interpretations of his observations of nature, with there being a sufficient level of conclusiveness of the case made by Foscarini and Galileo for heliocentricity. In other words Bellarmine is making a case that the Church’s earth-centric position is more scientifically plausible than the heliocentric case made by Foscarini and Galileo. Bellarmine is making a scientific case for earth-centricity not based on his previous claim (in his “Second” parapraph) which was “[n]or can one answer that this [consensus view of earth-centricity] is not a matter of faith”. The twofolds in his message, taken together, means Bellarmine see no valid basis for the Church to even consider heliocentricity, but if there was a reason to consider heliocentricity he thinks the Church can perform a process of reassigning the meaning of the words in the scripture to support heliocentricity while not changing the actual scriptural words. Maintaining scriptural wording integrity as all costs is the goal expressed by Bellarmine.
So the letter, taken as a whole, is Bellarmine formally telling Foscarini and Galileo, under pain of heresy, to limit themselves to what they have already publically said “suppositionally and not absolutely” on heliocentricity. Bellarmine also outlines damage control plans; plans to maintain scriptural wording integrity by suggesting it would be the right thing to do to keep the current actual words in the scripture while adjusting their meanings as needed to fit any possibility of a new consensus on heliocentric scientific knowledge.
John
Loyalty to God. The Pope is just a man.
The ‘climate change’ psyop is designed to split personalities, families, nations, religions, science …
Its very function is to induce turbulence.
And it seems to be working perfectly.
There are more forces in nature than the ones we measure in present day science.
I have never seen an intelligent explanation of how the very first living cell came into
existence.
The folks spreading the idea that throwing organic chemicals in a mix long enough will eventually
produce a cell do not understand the first principles of chemistry and cell biology.
The more we know the less certain we are. The reverse is also true.
Why would I doubt something if I have no way to prove it untrue.
I would have to say ” Well, I think it is unlikely there is a God who made everything”.
I don’t know which is worse; the virgin birth or the 72 virgins ( grapes).
I am more inclined to Sitchen’s arguments that we are the result of DNA experiments a few thousand years ago.
Please, don’t let’s get into discussions about religion. You find almost as much intolerance and stupidity there as you find in a bunch of AGW supporters! Almost.
I absolutely agree. However. I did not post the article. And the Vatican’s actions wrt Global Warming does merit thoughtful discussion.