Now you’re being terribly unfair.
He happened to be German. He isn’t, and wasn’t a Nazi. I assume you know there’s a difference?
1 Like
Again, with the exegesising!
1 Like
Ah yes, Once again I find that I am unable to properly convey the thoughts swirling hopelessly around in my head!
I’m sorry.
I hoped to describe how unpopular Ratzinger was at large and how he was continually, (and unfairly) referred to as a Nazi. I was trying to infer that the Vatican may removed the pope because how he was associated with a lot of bad things and how that was bad PR for the catholic church.
Of course, I then went on to say that its not that plausible, but that in retrospect, the new pope seems like a reaction to the bad faith that Ratzinger engendered by being perceived as such a hardliner.
I agree. The problem with Christianity => Evolution and why they’ll never coalesce is Original Sin.
Christianity has to see humans as fundamentally different from all other lifeforms. In terms of Evolution, that means there was a single point in time/mutation where 2 lifeforms without souls conceived an offspring with a soul. What was the original sin committed by this being? And certainly this being did not look human… Genesis as metaphor doesn’t even fit this yet it is Evolution’s charge that we are all the same - when you boil down to the most basic, all life as we know it processes sugars the same exact way, even trees, so we all come from the same building blocks and therefore we are all just variations on a theme.
Even if you imagine that God planned for Evolution to eventually end up with humans, that single point in time where life goes from soulless to owning a soul is a pretty messy thing for non-science to untangle. But religion is not about untangling, it is about blissfully ignoring that tangle.
"If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche.
2 Likes
Ratzinger wasn’t a Nazi, he was a Hitlerjugend. Which is like a mini-Nazi. Motto, Blood and Honor.
At the time membership was compulsory, so you can’t draw any conclusions about his feelings toward Nazism from mere membership.
Similarly, you can’t draw conclusions about a former member of the Nazi SS from that membership, since many of them were also given little other choice.
1 Like
Ah, now I get it. Here in Austria, he was never referred to as a nazi, as people around here know for historical reasons what a nazi is and how to spot one. It was reported here that some low-quality British media made up the claim shortly after he took office. This was before it was known how conservative he would be as a pope. That caused a few raised eyebrows about how British media don’t seem to have gotten over the war, and how being openly “racist” against another European country is apparently perfectly acceptable in modern-day Britain. But it was quickly forgotten.
As for the content of your theory - if there are any people in the Vatican with the power to “replace” a pope, I assume they’d be far more likely to replace a Francis with a Benedict than the other way around. Those people really do care about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, so I don’t think they’d choose a reformer (or even a would-be-reformer) just to make the Church more popular.
I also think Benedict’s resignation was a genuine surprise to most - he announced it during a routine speech, in LATIN. It took a while until people figured it out (one reporter apparently understood it and scooped everyone else…).
It is, however, entirely plausible that the swing votes in the College of Cardinals found that Benedict was too conservative for their tastes, and erred on the side of reform this time around.
Minor quibble: He was a member of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), or, if you want to get fancy, a Hitlerjunge (literally Hitler-boy).
The word Hitlerjugend refers to the organisation only, not to it’s members. The English word “youth” has a dual meaning, being used to refer both to individual young people, and to the abstract concept of “youth” in general. The German word only has the abstract meaning.
1 Like
You are anthropomorphizing the concept of deity, but this need’t be contradictory. If we say that omnipotence means that this god has the full potential of all of the universes possibilities, and that omniscience means a complete awareness of everything - one can easily say that “god = the universe itself” and be perfectly accurate, with no superstition required. The real question then is: Why would it matter if you call it “god” or “the universe” if there’s no difference?
Also, it really bugs the shit out of me about how journalism approaches stories like this with a generic, nameless god - as if it’s going to make perfect sense that I should know WTF they are talking about. These are Catholics, can’t they just say that this is about Jehovah? Isn’t that their god’s name? The word god is pretty much a pronoun. I would feel daft to walk around talking about an unnamed Astarte, or Shiva, or whoever and just expecting that people would make any sense of it.
Because apart from a Midianite name (whose meaning is uncertain), the Jewish and Christian traditions use a Northwest Semetic word (meaning God), another Northwest Semetic word (meaning lord), a Greek word (meaning God), etc.
I know that they do. My point was that it’s clumsy for them to not specify which god they are referring to. It seems simultaneously both vague and imposing.
I’m sorry. Even though this Pope wasn’t a member of the Hitler Jugend, he is still pretty awful. No condoms for starters, No married priests for second (ever wonder why priests get so horny and feel the need to molest youths?) . Tim is a far better person, and worries about the real issue of life on earth rather than fictional lives elsewhere.
3 Likes
Not exactly true. Sulfur-reducing bacteria don’t really deal with sugars the same way most biological organisms do. But that’s a minor distinction really. And would only serve to bolster the side of independant and inevitable abiogenisis.
But really, the nail in the coffin for intelligent design is the fact that the genitals are combined with the urological tract and are damn close to the anus. As Neil deGrasse Tyson so eloquantly said:
“what comedian configured the region between our legs—an entertainment complex built around a sewage system?”
2 Likes
Francis still hasn’t allowed real, genuine nations to extradite all of the child-fucking-human-garbage who are still living happy and unquestioned within the vatican. I hope they all drown in their gold-plated bathtubs, and trip and fall off their umpteenth story mable balconies, and get their elderly testicles run over many times by cute, pastel-colored vespa scooters.
The vatican is an international crime syndicate operating under the protection of the imaginary power of a fake diety that amounts to a psychological virus. The vatican is quite frankly, evil. And the worst part is that the media fawns over these frauds and criminals and keeps giving Francis such lavish, yet hollow praise for things he says, but the church immediately counters. They’ve had the wool pully so far over their eyes, you have to speak with a live sheep in order to pass the message on to these guys.
The vatican disgusts me, and if it doesn’t disgust you, you haven’t been paying any attention to what it actually does, or paying too much attention to the empty platitudes of it’s bumbling figurehead.
1 Like
So why do people keep trying to keep it out of the public school system? Why, still, after 65 years? Why?
I don’t disagree with you here, but I extend this description to cover also so-called “real, genuine nations”.
1 Like
Sure. I’m just using the term as a means to separate pretty much a single, tiny, pseudo-nation founded on religious terrorism from larger nations founded on constitutions, geography, language, and other things that can be shown to exist, rather than hellfire and original sin, which is entirely theoretical and completely unfounded assertions. 
I hope we don’t have to get into the semantic, economic and political philosphy debate we seem to have. I think I have somewhat of a grasp on your point, and I respect it, and very much respect the intellectual effort you seem to have expended exploring your own personal philosophy. We just don’t seem to agree on it. But I think that has mostly to do with the fact that you’re you, and I’m me, and we haven’t had the same life experiences, education and that I haven’t put as much thought into the same avenues you have.
I hear you. I didn’t mean to detract from the point you were making. I can certainly respect constitutions and language, even if I suppose I get cynical about what is done with them.
1 Like
you’re right, I was being too reductive but I only mentioned it because Tyson did in Cosmos #fullcircle
[paraphrased] The genes for digesting sugars and other basic necessities for life evolved before we all branched off from each other.
1 Like
Hey man, (or woman, or some other option I haven’t thought of, perhaps I should just avoid gendered language.) I hear you there. I’m a pretty big cynic myself. I think we may just have our cynical velocity vectors pointing at the same negativity but from unusually different angles. Like two spaceships attempting to rendezvous at earth, but one coming from the oort cloud out of the solar system’s plane, and the other coming in from the major asteroid belt. To us it looks like we’re on completely different routes, but I think in the end we’re pretty much both arriving at the same, if not similar destinations. Or at least, using the same grid to mark our position.
Sorry, been playing a lot of Kerbal Space Program. I’ve never had a game engage my brain so much for the sake of planning before. Even stealth games are playable by the seat of my pants, but trying to put a little dood on another planet means I gotta slow down, and consider a lot more options and solve a lot more problems than I’m used to. It’s freaking addictive. I get some kind of frission playing that game.
