Pope Francis: “Being Homosexual Isn’t a Crime.”
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker
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I'm perfectly willing to accept your premises in order to understand your position-- and have done so. If those premises then result in discriminatory practices or lead you to defend hateful tracts, then the premises themselves are ripe for criticism.
But the issue here isn't your premises or my supposed unwillingness to play by your absurd rules. It's the fact that I've asked you to address the contents of the letter and you haven't actually done so. You've shifted it in such a way as to ignore the obvious substance of the letter, and talk about other guff that's not related to homosexuality. The letter was very clearly, very directly talking about homosexuality as an "intrinsic moral evil" but you haven't addressed that.
No, humans didn't know. They believed, with competing theories.
Also, do bear in mind that when records show people saying the world was "round", in many cases they meant a disc, not a sphere. These theories fluctuate and last a long time, and the reason for this back and forth was that nobody knew. Plus, incidentally, many other non-European cultures (e.g. China) that believed in a flat earth.
Of course, the fundamental problem as far as the Church was concerned was not flat eartherism, but heliocentrism, because heliocentrism threatened the integrity of some Biblical text.
Well, as far as the Catholic Church is concerned, it is. The Catholic Church is entitled to its have that moral opinion, regrettable as it is.
The RCs are also entitled to want that moral opinion reflected in temporal law, and create arguments to that effect - such is democracy. We can however absolutely hold it against the Catholic Church for supporting a despicable load of discriminatory guff.
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So that's how your sect rationalizes it ? That's how you cope with the existence of satellites ? Cherry picking the actors from a time where religion was a somewhat undisputed background and the people with the time and resources to do research were necessarily religious ? Despite how often they ended up in conflict with the clergy and the hierarchy, despite the fact that resistance to science was driven by religious dogma, despite how often these people got tortured or murdered for blasphemy, despite the fact that all lost knowledge that had to be rediscovered again was lost due to incompatibility with religious fundamentalism ?You know the Catholic Church didn't invent eating bread either? You might happen to find looking into history that both the word "marriage" and many of the specific traditions we still follow come from Europe in the Middle Ages. I wonder what religion those things may have come out of...
The problem with the things you are saying is that it's all based in false histories. We didn't "progress beyond" flat-earth and young earth nonsense, those are new ideas. People have known for millennia that the earth is round. The idea that we didn't know that has been specifically propagated by conflict thesis atheists to paint the religious as stupid.
Young earth creationism is an equally recent myth. Sure, people didn't have a good idea of the age of the earth for a long time, which is perfectly reasonable. Some thought the earth was eternal, some thought it only as old as written history. But the people who developed modern understandings of the age of the earth are people like Robert Hooke, son of a minister and sponsored by a church. Or Nicolas Steno, a Catholic bishop.
Myth of the flat Earth - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Nicolaus Copernicus had a doctorate in Catholic canon. Galileo was directly sponsored by the Vatican. The history you believe in, where scientific knowledge overwrites religion, is entirely fabricated. The Big Bang theory was formulated by a priest. The Jesuit order is all over the place in the history of both geology and astronomy, and Jesuit missions are responsible for spreading the ideas you think the Catholic Church wanted to suppress.
I say again, the conflict thesis is garbage. As dumb as it may sound, the actual timeline is that we knew the earth was old and round and not the center of the universe long before atheists had any prominence, atheists invented fake histories to make the case that religion is opposed to science, and then certain specific sects of people went with the position "ok, if science and religion are incompatible, we just won't believe in science." But that's not a long standing thing, that is the last century, as a consequence of the conflict thesis. The people who believe those things aren't even going backwards, they are inventing new stupidity than any of what previously existed. Like, religion didn't pick the fight here. The Catholic Church never opposed the theory of evolution. Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, was an Augustinian friar. It was not "our religion says your science is wrong". The opposite is the case. People like Thomas Huxley, who actively wanted religion removed from the sciences, made evolution into a fight between science and religion. The conflict between religion and science was invented to try to discredit religion. And people like you fell for it.
I see the same thing everywhere where conservatives nationalists suddenly pride themselves on their countries cultural influence and most renowned artists (from the greek rebetes to the french anarchist poets à la Brassens or humanitarian figures like Coluche), "forgetting" that these very artists were denouncing nationalism and conservatives and were detested by them when they were alive. And then suddenly it's "hey look, they're from our country, don't we produce great minds ?". Like tennismen or footballers who become "foreigners" or "locals" in the eyes of the medias depending on whether they win or lose. You're quick to re-own the very people you used to exclude and destroy. And to tell the half of the story that is convenient to you. Implying what, that the outrage against geneticians and astronomers was secular ? Oh let's not talk about that part. Let's praise the genetic awesomeness of the aryans who defeated the nazis.
I'm generally not the last, in front of militant atheists who, like you, present believers or catholics as a homogeneous whole, to point out how all religious currents are made of ideologically conflicting subcurrents, and how for all the obstacles to science that religion has raised, science has also been dependant on the religious people who were in the position to do research, and who were honest and courageous enough to question dogmas (or at least their interpretations) in front of new objective data. And in no scientific field I expect less, by default, from a believer than from an atheist. Also, I'm quite probably faster than you to point out what science and modernity owes to islam (that is, to philosophers and scientist belonging to the islam medieval world), which is not incompatible with denouncing their opposites within their own religions, from the talibans to people like you.
But the thing is, while you navigata as you can with the history of your own sub-type of religiosity (by broadening your identity to include your former enemies), it will take 500 years for the likes of you to do the same about current science. Right now, you're still in Valladolid mode about gender studies, while so many other believers and catholics face the complex realities of gender and love without struggling like you. And in the future, you will be disowned and forgotten, while today's more progressive catholics will be used, just as hypocritically as you do, to prove that "catholics" as a whole never were against science and mankind. And others will have to respond by pointing out that you existed.
In any of the epochs you refer to, you would have been solely on the side of the clergy's conservative ideology and narrow anti-scientific reading of your sacred scriptures. You would have had the same contempt for heretic cosmogony as you show for gender studies today. Because that's what your references are. Conformity with the current official discourses of your religious authority. The people you praise and whose value you try to hijack are those who functioned the opposite way. Now I don't blame you for your hindsight. Congratulations. But maybe you should have learnt a lesson from it. And approach your own time's science from a less dogmatic, literalist, and clergy-conformist viewpoint.
Because what you illustrate in this thread, by you being you, is exactly what is reproached to the medieval churches and anti-scientific jesus freaks of all eras (and, indeed wrongly, to believers and catholics as a whole).
I have given the full rundown on sin, lust, and the human condition. You rejected my explanation. I'm not giving it over again.
Heliocentrism, the theory that was largely formulated and propagated by hyper-devout Catholics?
No, heliocentrism did not threaten the integrity of some biblical text. The Catholic Church was off biblical literalism before the current Bible even existed. All the way back to St Augustine, Church scholars were not claiming every world of the Bible to be literal physical truth. They put two semi-contradictory versions of the creation story in the Bible, it takes no science at all to notice it's not all literal fact. The most you could argue is controversy on who gets to be interpreter, as Galileo was punished for two things: insulting the Pope and talking about his biblical interpretation superseding the Vatican.
All of this is imaginary. You believe lies. There were no Dark Ages. And while you look back at people punished for blasphemy as though they were murdered for their scientific endeavors, that was never the case. I forget the guys name, but there was a guy who promoted heliocentrism that was put to death, but it wasn't the heliocentrism that was the problem, he was actively trying to convert the Church into a pantheistic entity. It was never their science that was the blasphemy.
You talk of progress but you don't know what it even means. Modern gender and sexuality nonsense isn't progressive, it's not building on anything, it's not a deliberate effort to improve the human experience even by the description of its proponents. I'm sure you think all the gender and sex stuff is natural, and people are accepting reality that already existed, and from that interpretation, the word progress still doesn't begin to apply. You just don't understand what progressive means, and apply the word to things that are actually transgressive.
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From the mere wiki, an example of the church embracing heliocentrism with open arms :
Sounds like tstorm talking about gender studies. Can't be true : "transgression" of the dogma and that's it.
Oh don't try to gild the lily with such rot.
Firstly, heliocentrism in various forms long predates Christianity, and a huge amount of key work was done outside the Christian, never mind Catholic, world. Mostly, it wasn't a big deal because (like the shape of the Earth) it was so theoretical it didn't really matter... until Copernicus. At this point its development obviously involves Catholicism to some degree, because at the time of Copernicus, basically everyone in Europe outside the Ottoman Empire and Russia was Catholic (although Protestantism was in its origins), and the Church still had a firm lock over most educational and intellectual institutions. The relationship between the Church and intellectual output is therefore necessarily involved and complex, but the Church actually merits no particular congratulations whatsoever.
Anyway, the post-Copernican history is well enough known. Copernicus's work was mostly ignored and buried by the Church, Tycho Brahe's was rejected, Kepler's book was banned, and we all know what happened to Galilleo and the lasting resistance beyond.
Sure, there was a general intellectual convention in the Catholic and Orthodox churches that much of the Bible was symbolic. However, there were also limits to this, and variance between different indivuduals. When Martin Luther preached Biblical literalism, he didn't do it out of nowhere: he was representing a very real thread of thought throughout the entire history of the Church, even if not the dominant. It is beyond question that plenty of Catholics viewed heliocentrism as somewhere on the spectrum of troubling, through an affront, to outright heresy. You cannot simply wash over that reality with some vague appeal to the fact that Catholic Church generally acceped some degree of textual symbolism.
Because it didn't address the core issue or the content of the letter, but rather sidestepped it by talking about something else.
The problem with Galilei was not heliocentrism being against scripture. And it was way more complex.
In the 1616 case the inquisition did decide that heliocentrism was wrong and foolish. But that was not really done based on scripture, the inquisition did consult various experts and mostly made its decision based of mathematical and astronomical arguments against it. Most of that can be traced to Tycho Brahes work. And yes, it is important to note that in 1616 science did not favor heliocentrism clearly yet because Kepplers observations hadn't happened/weren't published/weren't really incorporated. The Kopernican model just didn't give the right answers. The most popular version at the time might have been the one favored by Brahe himself, with Moon and Sun orbiting Earth but all other planets orbitting the sun.
But the reason the inquisition had had this case in the first place was because Galileo had also made theological arguments in an earlier dispute about geocentrism and someone had complained that he had no right to interpret the bible. That was a hot topic because laypeople interpreting the bible was big in Protestantism.
But that didn't end here. Despite what the Inquisition said, the debate went on, even inside the church where many people felt that the Inquisition had made a decision outside of their area.
So the newly elected pope Urban VIII did personally ask Galileo to write a book that presented both theories fairly and equally. Which happened as Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems coming out in 1632 with the formal authorisation of the inquisaition and permission of the pope.
And it is here that the problems start. Galileo used a format of 3 people argueing about the two theories. One each pro one view, one neutral. But Galilei didn't let the arguments speak for themself. He had the heliocentrist guy be called "Academician" hinting pretty clearly at him being the smart one. The pro geocentrism guy had literally the name " Simplicio" which is close enough to "idiot". Furthermore Simplicio always made stupid mistakes.
It was also missing the more persuasive arguments for geocentrism and any mention of the hybrid theory mentioned above that was at the time the dominant idea. Galilei at the time also still believed in circular orbits, thus neglecting Kepplers insights and not actually having good math for the orbits. Which meant he could not actually beat or even reach the hybrid model in accuracy for planetary motion. He had to rely on other arguments like Venus phases, sunspots or a (rather incomplete and wrong) theory of tides.
That was certainly not what the pope had commissioned. And then people got the idea that "Simplicio" was meant to be the pope who, while generally quite supportive towards science, was not exactly known to be particularly learned himself.
And what does happen when a late rennaissance artist disses his very own patron in a commissioned work ? Well, the pope took it personal and the inquisition became serious.
There are arguments that Galilei only insulted the pope by accident and actually meant Cesare Cremonini from Padua or that Pope Urban had political problems and needed to be seen as strong in the face of insult but that is mostly speculation.
I get that you're a Houseman style contrarian. Otherwise you wouldn't have stormed into a thread promoting hate speech.
It's an excellent button.
I'm aware of all that Gallileo potentially insulting the Pope stuff, but that's really not the problem.
Galileo promoted the Copernican system, and when this was brought to the attention of the Catholic Church, it was formally condemned as heresy by a commission and the Pope of the time ordered Galileo not to promote it by any means. That pope died, and the new one was a bit more relaxed, which allowed Galileo to publish... only on the grounds that heliocentrism was treated as a theory and not favoured over geocentrism. Galileo did not do that, so he was punished accordingly.
The point being that the Catholic Church was against heliocentrism long before Galileo pissed off the Pope. And the reason for that was that it was viewed as heretical because it contradicted The Bible in ways many important Catholics did not like.
I've used it when my continued interaction with certain people would consist at me screaming and swearing at them out of frustration.
Or it's clear certain people aren't interested in good faith arguments. Often these are related.
I think only a handful of people on this forum have made my ignore list and only like three of those are still on the forums anymore. I don't need to mention their names because everyone is probably aware of who I'm talking about.
I think I've only used it when people are all like <MrBlobbyVoice>Child abuse in the church is overstated, the abusers feel bad enough about it already</MrBlobbyVoice>. Like, okay mate, I think that's enough public speaking for one day.
I look forward to a reborn civilization excavating us millenna after The End Times and looking puzzled at the size of our feet, given all the clown shoes their data says we wore. "It just doesn't make sense!" screams a future Tony Robinson as he digs up my cheeky remains.
Man I wish I could hope to be excavated by someone as cool as Tony Robinson.
I saw that, went "Wait, Baldrick from Blackadder?" and then realized he has a history show or two. Which I feel like I need to watch now.
Future Tony Robinson I'm afraid. He blows all his street cred by wearing the wrong jumper to The Last Battle.