Religious Threadjacks

#451

Four life sentences? Is Petey being a drama queen?

#452

Anti-government. I seem to remember something about rendering to Caesar.

#453

I get so tired of the whining in the light of God.

Folks like Petey make Jesus long for the days of dealing with the Pharisees and ones like them.

#454

The replies...

Jesus Christ…

Resume18 · #455

poplove wrote: ↑Wed Nov 08, 2023 12:35 am The replies...
Jesus Christ…

Mike Johnson would very much like to draft this into law.

Suranis · #456

Uh, those are very selective quotations, so I'm wondering if this has been edited. In addition, there are words on the duties of a Husband in the Bible which everyone ignores for their own reasons. It was not one way, there was plenty of oppression to go around. Hell, biblically, in many ways the Husband walked into the woman's kingdom when he walked into his home.

#457

https://www.rawstory.com/jerry-falwell-jr-2666333522/

Jerry Falwell Jr., the disgraced former head of Liberty University, is launching a new set of attacks against the institution he once ran.

Axios reports that journalist Tim Alberta is coming out with a new book in which Falwell Jr. candidly admits that his late father, Jerry Falwell, Sr., founded the university solely to be an institutional arm of the Republican Party and not to be a Christian university aimed at spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In fact, Falwell Jr. is slamming his brother, current Liberty Chancellor Jonathan Falwell, for trying to actually run it like a legitimate Christian educational institution rather than a front for training hardcore culture warriors.

As if that weren't enough, Falwell Jr. said his brother was blowing it by surrounding himself with too many honest people.

#458

Sounds like some sour grapes. It is almost as if he is trying to risk LU's accreditation and ability to receive federal student assistance funding.

#459

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/d ... ocumentary

What if all the anti-gay, homophobic rhetoric that has come from the Christian right over these past few decades was rooted in a mistranslation of the Bible?

In the documentary, 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture, researchers and scholars delve into the 1946 mistranslation of 1 Corinthians 6:9 and explore how it fuelled the Christian anti-gay movement that still thrives today.

The film hinges its premise on the fact that the word “homosexual” appeared for the first time in the Bible in 1946, in an apparent mistranslation of the ancient Greek words malakoi – defined as someone effeminate who gives themselves up to a soft, decadent, lazy and indolent way of living – and arsenokoitai – a compound word that roughly translates to “male bed”. While people could take it to mean man bedding man, within the context of the time, scholars believed that arsenokoitai alluded more to abusive, predatory behavior and pederasty than it does homosexuality.

The director and producer Sharon “Rocky” Roggio documents the journey of the Christian author Kathy Baldock and Ed Oxford, an advocate and gay man who grew up Southern Baptist, as they dug through archives at the Yale Sterling Memorial Library. There, they discovered correspondence between the head of the translation committee and a gay seminary student in which the committee head conceded with the student’s point about the mistranslation. In the next translation in 1971, the committee changed the translation from homosexual to “sexual perverts” – but by then the damage was done. Hundreds of millions of Bibles with the wrong translation had been published, and conservative religion and conservative politics soon banded together to push an anti-gay agenda.

#460

: IMG_5393.jpeg (98.27 KiB) Viewed 14106 times

#461

Recordings show how Mormon church kept child sex abuse claims secret

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/rec ... ims-secret

RTH10260 · #462

RTH10260 · #463

#464

The Sentinel @RepubSentinel wrote: BREAKING: @RepubSentinel can reveal that Michael Cassidy, a Christian and former military officer, tore down and beheaded the Satan altar in the Iowa Capitol:
https://republicsentinel.com/articles/e ... wa-capitol

"The world may tell Christians to submissively accept the legitimization of Satan, but none of the founders would have considered government sanction of Satanic altars inside Capitol buildings as protected by the First Amendment," Cassidy told @RepubSentinel.

► Show Spoiler

Suranis · #465

Senior cardinal convicted in Vatican corruption trial
By Philip Pullella
December 16, 20235:59 PM GMTUpdated 7 min ago

VATICAN CITY, Dec 16 (Reuters) - Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the most senior Catholic Church official ever to stand trial before a Vatican criminal court, was convicted on Saturday of embezzlement and fraud and sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail.

The Italian prelate's lawyer, Fabio Viglione, told reporters in the courtroom he would appeal, saying his client was innocent. Becciu, who lives in the Vatican, was expected to remain free for the time being.

In all, 10 defendants were accused of crimes including fraud, abuse of office and money laundering. All denied wrongdoing.

It took Court President Giuseppe Pignatone 25 minutes to read all the verdicts and sentences.

Becciu, like most of the other defendants, was convicted on some counts and acquitted of others. Only one, Becciu's former secretary, Father Mauro Carlino, was acquitted of all charges.

The trial, which exposed infighting and intrigue in the highest echelons of the Vatican, lasted for 86 sessions over two-and-a-half years.

It revolved mostly around the messy purchase of a building in London by the Secretariat of State, the Vatican's key administrative and diplomatic department.

Becciu, then an archbishop, held the number two position there in 2013 when it began investing in a fund managed by Italian financier Raffaele Mincione, securing about 45% of the building at 60 Sloane Avenue, in an upmarket district of the city.

Mincione was found guilty of embezzlement and money laundering and given the same sentence as Becciu.
IRRESPONSIBLE INVESTMENT

The court said Becciu had been irresponsible and "highly speculative" to invest more than $200 million with Mincione's fund between 2013-2014, noting this was about a third of the holdings of the Secretariat of State at the time.

In 2018, with Becciu in another Vatican job, the Secretariat of State felt it was being deceived by Mincione and turned to another financier, Gianluigi Torzi, for help in squeezing Mincione out and buying the rest of the building.

Torzi also fleeced the Vatican, according to prosecutors. He was found guilty of fraud and extortion and sentenced to six years.

The Vatican sold the building last year, taking an estimated loss of about 140 million euros ($150 million).

Becciu, who was fired by Pope Francis from his next job in 2020 for alleged nepotism, but remains a cardinal, was also found guilty of embezzlement for funnelling money and contracts to companies or charities controlled by his brothers on their native island of Sardinia.

Another accusation involved his hiring of Cecilia Marogna, a self-styled security analyst, also from Sardinia, as part of a secret project to help win freedom for a nun who had been kidnapped in Mali.

Marogna, 46, received 575,000 euros from the Secretariat of State in 2018-2019. The money was sent to a company she had set up in Slovenia and she received some in cash, prosecutors told the court.

Italian police said Marogna had spent much of the money on luxury clothing and health spas. Both she and Becciu were found guilty of aggravated fraud related to the transfer of money and Marogna was ordered to return the money to the Vatican.

Enrico Crasso, a banker who managed funds for the Secretariat of State, was convicted of money laundering and sentenced to seven years. Fabrizio Tirabassi, who worked in the Secretariat, was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years.

The court ordered Becciu, Mincione, Tirabassi and Crasso to repay a total of more than 100 million euros to the Vatican.

Nicola Squillace, a lawyer who worked with both Crasso and Tirabassi, was given a suspended sentence of a year and 10 months.

Rene Bruelhart, a Swiss lawyer and former president of the Vatican's Financial Intelligence Unit, and its director, Italian Tommaso Di Ruzza, were convicted of administrative omission and ordered to pay small fines.

Suranis · #466

https://www.oursundayvisitor.com/can-bo ... -says-yes/

Can both science and faith go wrong?
by Charles Camosy
December 20, 2023

Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, is seen at the observatory in Albano, Italy, June 20, 2023. Asked by CNS about UFOs, he said that he doesn't believe the reports because despite the ubiquity of high-resolution cellphone cameras, there isn't any persuasive evidence for them available to the public.

Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno is the director of the Vatican Observatory. A native of Detroit, Michigan, he earned undergraduate and masters’ degrees from MIT and a Ph.D. in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard and MIT, served in the U.S. Peace Corps (Kenya), and taught university physics at Lafayette College before entering the Jesuits in 1989. Brother Guy’s research explores connections between meteorites, asteroids and the evolution of small solar system bodies. He has observed Kuiper Belt objects with the Vatican’s 1.8 meter telescope in Arizona and measured meteorite physical properties to understand asteroid origins and structure.

At the Vatican Observatory since 1993, Brother Consolmagno was appointed its director in 2015 by Pope Francis.

Charlie Camosy: You’ve written yet another great book! This one is titled “When Science Goes Wrong: Desire and the Search for Truth.” What led to your writing this topic?

Jesuit Brother Guy J. Consolmagno: Chris Graney and I both do a lot of public outreach where we talk about science, and address faith-science questions. Over the years, we’ve discovered that a lot of people have some fundamental misconceptions about what science actually is, and how it does what it does. How can you talk intelligently about science to someone whose idea of science is missing some important concepts?
The cover of “When Science Goes Wrong: The Desire and Search for Truth” by Guy Consolmagno, S.J. and Christopher M. Graney, published Sept., 2023 by Paulist Press. (OSV News photo/courtesy Paulist Press)

For example, most of us learn science in a classroom where we pass the course by being able to do problems and come up with the answers in the back of the book. But real science is not about facts that can be found in a book; it’s about all the stuff we don’t know yet, the stuff that will be in the backs of future textbooks! That’s where the fun lies. And inherently this means that a lot of what we think we know now isn’t quite right just yet. It’s wrong.

We’ve also learned that the best way to address these issues is by telling stories from the history of science that shows how science progresses precisely because it is not afraid to “go wrong”.

Camosy: I must ask about this in the context of the pandemic. This was obviously a foundational moment regarding several different issues, including the role and reputation of science and scientists. What do you think happened and/or is happening here? How does it overlap with the themes and goals of your book?

Brother Guy: The pandemic was a moment when we needed science the most. Science suddenly became an issue of life and death. To understand what a vaccine was and how much to trust it meant knowing what to expect from the science, and what not to expect. And that’s when it became so obvious to us that these misconceptions about science — both on the side of those who would deny the power of science, and those who gave it too much credence — got in the way of letting science grow and improve and help us out of the pandemic.

Camosy: Most of your book, unsurprisingly, has a focus on astronomy. Can you give us one brief story or anecdote that might suggest to possible future readers what else they will encounter when it comes to science going wrong?

Brother Guy: One of my favorite stories comes from the arguments against Copernicus’ idea of Earth spinning on its axis as it goes around the sun. It turns out, these challenges were mostly not based on the Bible at all; they were based on really good science that was only missing some subtle point no one at the time could have known about.

U.S. Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory is pictured at the observatory in Rome in this Dec. 12, 2007, file photo. When Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong gingerly stepped onto the surface of the moon July 20, 1969, Brother Consolmagno, then 16, had no idea that some day he would become the director of the Vatican Observatory. (CNS photo/Annette Schreyer)

For example, several scientists of the day pointed out an effect about motion on the surface of a spinning globe, turning towards the east (to make the sun appear to move from east to west, from sunrise to sunset). In such a case, the actual speed at which the surface of the earth moves eastward should get less and less as you move north — the surface moves fastest at the equator, while at the north pole it isn’t moving at all.

But if you shot a cannon due north, the cannonball would have an inherent speed to the east. So, the path of the cannonball would appear to bend towards the east once it was traveling over a surface that was moving less quickly towards the east.

That very subtle effect actually happens; it is now called the Coriolis Force and it is what makes hurricanes swirl around. But for a cannonball the effect is so tiny that in practice it’s all but impossible to measure. Since no one had ever seen such a deflection in the 16th century, they concluded that Copernicus was wrong, and the Earth did not spin!

As you note, the early chapters deal with astronomy, where in a certain sense the stakes are low. It doesn’t matter to most people if they know whether the earth is spinning! But the fifth chapter looks at a much more serious case, where scientists — and worse, science’s “fan club” — attempted to use a brand new insight of science as a way of ranking and controlling people who were different from them.

The people who followed the eugenics movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — when it was all the rage in the Sunday supplements — thought that they could “breed” superior human beings. Besides the obvious immorality of manipulating human beings that way, the science behind it was absurd from start to finish. For instance, what do you mean by “superior” and how could you rank it? You can breed cows to give more milk or German shepherds to have pointy ears, but there is no such simple algorithm to rank human beings.

Yet in America, immigration from supposedly “inferior” nations (like Italy!) was restricted, and thousands of women, usually minorities, were forcibly sterilized. And, of course, we saw the ultimate outcome of eugenics in the death camps of Nazi Germany.

Camosy: You have a provocatively titled conclusion: “When Faith Goes Wrong.” What are you trying to get across here?

Brother Guy: Both faith and science are ways that we human beings try to search for truth. In both cases, because we are human, we can get it wrong. In fact, because of our human nature, we’ll never get it completely right!

But rather than being afraid of being wrong, or despairing of ever finding the truth, we can use the lessons we learned when we looked at how science could go wrong, and then as it grows, corrects itself and comes closer to the truth. How can that teach us about where our understanding of our faith might go wrong, and where we can find opportunities for our faith to grow?

The key insight is that our experience of faith — like truth, like love — is not something in a fixed and static state but something that we forever grow into, come closer to, appreciate more deeply. We learn from the very love or truth that we have managed to experience, how rich that experience can be, and how important it is to never give up seeking ever deeper ways to believe, to love, and to know. That is where we find God: God who is love, and who is the way, the truth, and the life.

Along with more than 250 scientific publications, Brother Guy is the author of several popular books including “Turn Left at Orion” (with Dan Davis) and “Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?” (with Paul Mueller). In 2000, the International Astronomical Union named asteroid 4597 “Consolmagno” in recognition of his work. In 2014 he received the Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences for excellence in public communication in planetary sciences. Aside from his work at the Vatican Observatory, Brother Guy currently serves as chair of the IAU Mars Nomenclature Task Group and vice president of the Meteoritical Society.

Sam the Centipede · #467

Suranis wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 3:44 pm https://www.oursundayvisitor.com/can-bo ... -says-yes/

Can both science and faith go wrong?

Brother Guy: Both faith and science are ways that we human beings try to search for truth. In both cases, because we are human, we can get it wrong. In fact, because of our human nature, we’ll never get it completely right!

No. Faith is never a way of searching for truth. Faith very much is about avoiding the search for truth, by concocting a fog of superficially plausible nonsense that helps the faithful suppress their critical faculties.

It is often amusing to read or hear religious folk (like yer man here) who have understood the power and importance of science and its methods try to square that insight with their incoherent supernatural beliefs. Far better (I think) and more intellectually honestif they just say "yeah, it's difficult to marry the two, but I like the stories with angels, gods, demons and whatever, so I'm keeping them."

Suranis · #468

Um, using science to search is using faith, because you are using your faith in science to trust it will reveal the truth at some point. If you don't have faith you wont commence a search for anything.

Just like Thomas Aquinas had faith that you could reach got and the universe through Rational thought. If you think you are reaching the troth through rational thought, you are using Aquinas's philosophy, because that's where that idea came from. Before SAINT Thomas Aquinas the idea of Knowing the universe through rational thought really did not exist. It is though the Church teaching Aquinas that the idea became almost universally accepted all across Europe in particular, leading in part to the Scientific Method. Does that make you icky, Aquinast?

By contrast, Kant showed the flaw in Rational thought by logically and rationally arguing 8 propositions, four of which contradicted one of the other four.

And "your man" (ooh how sneery) probably knows more about Science than you do. You are just sneering at him because he wears a Priests collar, which lead you to look at that article looking for something to jump on and criticize so you can get a good smug feeling and show how superior you are atop your pedestal, while ignoring everything else he said. Attacking something because of who a person is rather than what he said is a logical fallacy. AND the book is a critique of Faith too.

In short, your statement really does not make you look very good, and does not affect how he looks at all. The view is better down here than way up there on that cold pedestal.

Oh, the Vatican had a conference on the possibility and implications of Extraterrestrial life in 2009, while the USA was failing to deal with Guns killing your Children and tearing itself apart with an attempt to pass a small reform to Health care. Faith manages.

RTH10260 · #469

Suranis wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 9:56 pm Um, using science to search is using faith, because you are using your faith in science to trust it will reveal the truth at some point. If you don't have faith you wont commence a search for anything.

... because you are using your faith in that the scientific method is getting a correct representation of aspects of nature, better than some two thousand year (and more in the OT) old fabulation.

Suranis · #470

RTH10260 wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 10:09 pm ... because you are using your faith in that the scientific method is getting a correct representation of aspects of nature, better than some two thousand year (and more in the OT) old fabulation.

No.

Do your *Pick one half sentence and ignore the rest* out of that.

#471

Sam the Centipede wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 9:02 pm Faith very much is about avoiding the search for truth, by concocting a fog of superficially plausible nonsense that helps the faithful suppress their critical faculties.

much ado · #472

This came up in my YouTube suggestions. I've been checking out too many right wing YT videos, I guess.

We are in End Times. I think we have been in End Times for a long time now, haven't we? But it never seems to end. I keep waiting.

Donald TRUMP Confirms: "The Rapture Is Going To Happen VERY Soon..."

I hope this means Trump will be gone VERY soon. Let the rapture begin!

RTH10260 · #473

Endtimes for Trumpism

#474

#475

Danny Masterson Accusers Allege Church of Scientology Is Mob-Like 'Criminal Enterprise'

Amended civil lawsuit characterizes church as a racketeering outfit led by boss David Miscavige, who "derives significant financial benefit from Scientology’s criminal and unlawful activity"

https://lamag.com/lawsuits/danny-master ... enterprise