Thanks for expertly lining that up for me, you’re officially on my Christmas card list.
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That’s evolution for ya.
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Two points,
1, The circle is not large enough. Mecca is outside, So is Rome where Peter was crucified. Babylon is missing, where Daniel and the lion’s den takes place,
2. Even if the circle covered the entire earth, the Earth is a minuscule portion of the universe, or even the galaxy, so the point of the illustration is valid. Of course the same could be said of all of human history, not just the Bible.
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Glad we can agree. Religion is bullshit.
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Catholics do not insist on the literal truth of the Bible. Those are evangelicals. There are plenty of things to be critical about the Catholic church but Biblical literalism is not one of them.
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Maybe, maybe not, but if you criticize Star Trek because you don’t like Jedis I have to contradict you. Keep your fictional realities straight, whether it is Islam, Judaism or Christianity.
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But what if Dr Spock was my favourite Jedi master?
sometimes things are obvious bait, and it is best not to bite
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You might really benefit from a good talk with a Jesuit. The few I have met are among the smartest, most rational deeply religious people I have ever known. They were also deeply funny people.
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The Catholic Church is ancient enough to have centuries of historic ignorance and copious amounts of blood on their hands. They don’t want to go down in history looking like torturers and fools. They lost the battles on geocentrism and evolution and slavery; they want to get ahead of alien intelligence and (later) claim they knew about it all along.
Now they don’t, sure. As for evangelicals, they will require 1900 further years of being battered by reality and historical facts before they will have experienced what the Catholic Church has suffered.
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I find it a little sad, actually, that the initial motivation of the fundamentalists was actually very progressive but some branches have developed into what we see today in America. They originally wanted to Eliminate the hierarchy of the church and privileged classes. Don’t have middle men interpret the Bible. Encourage wide spread literacy so people can read the word directly. Remove layers of Greek and Roman philosophy, tradition, pomp and ceremony and get back to the basic message of a kind man who advised we treat all human beings men and women, sinners and saints equally.
Some took the message of learning and equality post reformation and built it into democracy and education. Others learned to read and decided to read nothing but the Bible. They threw away the elements of philosophy and logic as well as the incense and candles. They replaced the traditions of the church with traditions of male dominated patriarchy. They replaced the hierarchy of priests and bishops with hierarchy of race and ethnic classes.
Elements of both the Catholic Church and the Protestant reformation created many of the values of modern society. Slavery was first eliminated by the church in Europe before it was deemed ok again for non-Europeans. Equality of people was a theory, if not a practice of Christianity. Literacy was a core value of the Protestant reformation. And science came about as a study of God’s creation. There was religious law for humanity to follow and physical and natural laws for matter to follow. Both directed by the same God. The origin of science was in monotheism because there was not a multitude of gods and spirits to make the world run. There was only a distant god who designed the mechanism of the universe, wound it up and set it in motion. The prime mover. Science was the study of the mechanism, that ran independent of God, but was a reflection of God, so it was a holy pursuit to study it.
Now the fundamentalists think the study of nature is a sin. The official position of the Catholic Church is that science is not a sin. Some applications of science can be immoral, for example chemical and biological warfare.
Evolution is an accepted fact according to the Catholic Church. Social Darwinism, the belief that poor people suffer because they are unfit and rich people deserve their riches because they are more fit is rejected by the Catholic Church.
The idea that human people are descended from apes is a fact but the idea that since human beings are descended from apes it is ok for men to be act like alpha male apes and be aggressive towards women is wrong.
To return to the original topic, the idea of artificial intelligence and alien intelligence does bring philosophical questions for thoughtful religion. If an AI is created, should it be treated as equal to a human? In Christian terms, would it have a soul? I think Catholics could say yes, since the soul, in Catholic thought, does not pre-exist the body. It starts when life starts and develops from there. In Catholic thought , I believe, it could be argued, that an AI could develop a soul. Many Catholic theologians could disagree. In something like Hindu thought or some other religion which believes in reincarnation an AI would inherit a soul from a previous individual. I do not think that would be a revolutionary thought though since I could come back as an ant, so a hunk of silicon would not be much of a stretch. I think aliens would definitely be considered “persons” and I would believe they have souls. They would be due equal treatment, whether they believed they had souls or not.
Maybe the mutants here could prove their intellect by actually discussing philosophy, history, culture, and progress instead of trying to appear smart by just saying “religion bad” all the time.
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Yeah, no. That’s merely one, and bad, definition of faith, that only makes sense in the context of post-Enlightenment Protestantism.
You’re fully entitled to your own opinions on religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, but the fact remains that there are countless people, such as myself, who find no conflict between their faith and science; and that there are plenty of religious scientists.
Amen.
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religion is awesome, everybody should have one
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I think what you’re seeing here is how American evangelicalism has poisoned the well. It’s been such a loud and politically aggressive presence for the last 30 years that an entire generation identifies religion with vapid reactionary authoritarianism.
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By all means, please do make topics for those things. (The five-day limit on the “boing” threads does not exactly lend itself to such lofty topics.) I would be happy to discuss some of those things, though the existence of a soul would be a pretty tough sell, and I imagine that it would take some time to come up with a working definition of a soul to begin with.
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Arthur C Clarke’s The Star is probably the most famous.
Unfortunately, this article seems less passionate than one of its sources,
which argues that the trope sets up a dichotomy between science and religion without paying much attention to what the Jesuits specifically believe.
AFAIK, the jesuits are like male Bene Gesserit.
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I think the modern Catholic philosophical conception of the soul is founded mostly in Cartesian dualism and modern elaborations thereof. Leaving god out of it, if you can separate impulse, thought, emotion, intellect from the body, those things that you have separated out are the soul. Now pure materialists would say that such a separation is impossible, but AI and advanced computing might make the question experimentally accessible. Couldn’t you argue that if it were possible to represent the function of a human mind in a computer, or to “download” a functioning mental state from a person, that you have separated the mind from the body and demonstrated mind-body dualism? And isn’t “soul” then simply a matter of terminology?
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Perhaps SF authors thought someone modeled after Pierre Teilhard de Chardin might make for an interesting character.
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