I haven’t read the Torah or Talmud (somewhat surprising, I know) but I’ve read the old testament in quite a few different versions. In all of the versions I have read, Moses and Aaron did have a magic wand, and most definitely did do magic, and the source of the magic powers was Yahweh, the Judeo-Christian deity, channeled through the agency of Aaron’s wand. See Exodus 7 for details.
To say the ancient Rabbis taught that God doesn’t use magic wands seems a bit revisionist, to me at least!
8And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, 9When Pharaoh shall speak unto you, saying, Shew a miracle for you: then thou shalt say unto Aaron, Take thy rod, and cast it before Pharaoh, and it shall become a serpent. 10And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the LORD had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent. 11Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments. 12For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods.
I think this whole thing’s a little more complicated and nuanced than “the Pope’s bowing to atheists” or “the Jews knew it first”… regardless of how true either of those statements might be.
Almost any other modern Pope, you might be able to make this crack and no one could speak against it. But the current Pope? Not quite accurate.
This is the pope who said, “A golden throne? That’s absurd. I demand to sit on a normal chair, like a goddamn human being.” This is the pope who has made countless gestures of humility and decency in the few years he’s been in place.
This is the pope who isn’t business as usual - he’s the first ever Jesuit Pope, the first ever Pope from the Americas, the first ever Pope from the Southern Hemisphere, and the first non-European Pope in over a millenia.
This is the pope who is helping drag the Catholic Church out of the past kicking and screaming into the present and the future. This is the pope who is making huge progress in bridging the gap between Christians and Science. This is the pope who is working to end his religion’s discrimination of homosexuals.
You can fault the Catholic Church for a lot of things - and believe me, I certainly do - but I have a very hard time faulting Francis, and that’s despite my being a staunch agnostic with no positive ties to the church whatsoever.
Francis is the best thing to happen to the Catholic Church in a very long time, and he’s doing so much good by pushing to modernize, and to humble, the Church as a whole.
Yes, he’s far from poor - but he’s actively rejected the traditional opulence of his station and is pushing to bring the Vatican down out of their ivory tower of wealth and status, returning them to a more distinctly human and reasonable level. That gets a thumbs up in my book.
I believe that’s consistent with both the pope’s quote and Israel_B’s statements; to wit: there is more to religious knowledge and teachings than what is written in the Old Testament/Torah.
“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,”
Thus, the bible may say so, but it is organized religious bodies which interpret and discern religious meaning, cf. Talmud and Papal decrees et al.
I went to a Catholic high school too. Our senior-level religion class was taught by the principal (a priest). We went through most of the Old Testament with Fr. Larkin emphasizing the fairy-tale aspect of the stories ("after 80 years in the desert, Sarah must have been quite a babe, huh? "). He was very clear about his view that the bible is a set of folk tales about religious truth, and shouldn’t be read as a literal history. He wanted us to think like adults.
I’m also a lapsed Catholic. But I met plenty of clergy who were really excellent people. A lot of jerks too, but mostly good people.
Why would a god come up with a system as devoid of a need for direct divine intervention as evolution? Why not just make humans they way he wanted to start with? What was the first 13.8 billion years about?
Are we a science experiment?
Why did this god choose to make his influence on the universe indistinguishable from what it would be if he didn’t exist? What’s he doing now if he isn’t directly playing with us?
Did god evolve too, or did god-god make him complete?
Hoohah over Francis’ statements seems to be rooted in assumptions about Catholic thought that are either plain-old-uninformed or colored by the reactionary politico-theological positions of the pro-life/authoritarian wing of the American Church. Snotty comments from the village-atheist community notwithstanding*, and despite the inevitable contamination of doctrine by politics and various pathologies (see Sexuality, Mistrust of), Catholic thought has a long history of trying to make sense of the world’s complexity in the light of a set of givens that cannot be given up on without winding up somewhere like the space I occupy now. (See note* below.)
Francis is the second most interesting Pope of my lifetime (after John XXIII), a Jesuit with a big dose of (surprise!) Franciscan. An important part of my education was overseen by guys a lot like him, left-leaning Jebbies (some trained at the Louvain, where Lemaître worked) of remarkable intellectual sophistication and humanity. What Francis said is old news to anybody with a decent Catholic education. Or maybe a decent education, period.
*I grew up outside a village and am a hardshell-materialist apostate Catholic, but these guys give me the toothache.
This problem arises with any omniscient god, not just a watchmaker god. As you say, if God already knows what you’ll do in the future, in what sense is meaningful choice possible? And, of course, the problem also arises in a godless but still deterministic world.
Proposed philosophical solutions to this problem are broadly known as compatibilism. St. Augustine is probably the most famous exponent of compatibilist theory, so it’s not as if the Church is unfamiliar with this objection.
I dunno, a time-transcendent being allows for both free will and predestination. Unfortunately, it would be impossible to explain to someone who is not time-transcendent.
The Catholic god is not only omni-potent/present/prescient, he’s also omni-time? Is there a cool word for this? Omnitemporal? God is a being that necessarily existed before time existed.
Aaaaand, this is why I became a Daoist agnostic, because if there is such a being then any attempt to define or guess the attitude of it must be seen through human eyes, and therefore be wrong. (Yes yes, sometimes he sends emisarries, but even then how do you describe something to things that cannot share your frame of reference (nor you theirs)?
Ex catholic here, its a good idea to interject that christianity is divided along major philosophical lines as Catholicism and Protestant(ism?) (and yes, I know its not that simple)
Catholicism does not generally hold the view that the bible is meant to be taken literally, rather it is meant to be interpreted, some of those interpretations are pretty literal of course but I’m not here to defend them (As I said. I’m an EX catholic)
Its only some protestant denominations (Which insist on a much more literal interpretation of the book) that have made the claim that evolution and the big bang are heretical and false because “the bible says so”.
TL;DR
This is not news.
It is a bit cynical though, after all, what else can they hope but to convert more people to their faith?
So they advertise one of the things they believe in hopes to garner some good will and maybe converts, but I’d like them to try and advertise based on their stance on condoms.
She’s not a magician in the sense that she makes the impossible happen, the claim that god created life out of nothing is a claim that god is a magician. The claim that god is able to do anything, while pretty far out, is not meant to say that she needs to violate the laws of physics as we understand them to do it. that is, the pope is not claiming to know how she works, he’s just saying she can.
Yes, its a god of the gaps type of argument, but I think understanding what people mean doesn’t mean we have to agree with them, it can only allow us to actually talk, instead of mock. Or at least, it allows us to mock and make it sting.
I think it can be used both ways.
The idea that god needs explaining is a good argument for people who reject the big bang.
For people who believe in god and actually believe what science has uncovered about the workings of our universe, the idea that god needs an explanation is not crazy since they aren’t actually trying to prove what god is.
So to use this argument to debunk a position someone doesn’t hold, is to swing and miss and spin around in to your own argument.
It makes perfect sense to say, that if you believe someone who does believe in the big bang doesn’t believe in the big bang then your argument can be taken to mean you don’t believe in the big bang either!
Edit:
At least if the rule of funny still holds in the first few picoseconds of the universe.
It depends whether there’s really one thing that will happen, or there’s really many things which could happen, each of which is equally real until you decide. Trinitarian theologies, including Catholic theology, put the divine Wisdom outside time so they can’t allow this partticular interpretation of free will, but some earlier non-trinitarian theologies put the divine Wisdom within time.
In any case, if this applies to our decisions, than this should apply to any previous decisions which affected which life forms survived and which did not.
I’m with @Glitch here. I can’t say with absolute certainty why Francis got into the clergy but it’s pretty clear he’s not doing it for the trappings of material wealth. Remember that he’s got this gig for life no matter how much or how little he chooses to pamper himself, and yet
He sits on a regular wooden chair instead of a golden throne
He eats simple meals, and until recently cooked for himself
He got rid of all the fancy vestments and jewelry and wears a plain white cotton outfit
He shunned the luxurious papal apartments to live in a much more modest space built as guest accommodations for visiting clergy and laypeople
He drives himself around vatican city in a crappy used car. Even during a state visit to South Korea he was driven around in a rented Kia compact.
I am not familiar with all the details of the various heretics, (you could add Orthodox Christians too) but I was thinking more in the lines of televangelists.
