Should Pope Francis sell the family jewels?

eehhhhh Islam is not like Catholicism in some really basic and obvious ways

i mean most major religions are strongly political in that fashion, i guess.... the sharp distinction between secular and ecclesiastical authority is a pretty recent development in human history.

well islam isn't (now) centralized in the same fashion obviously

yeah that's the biggie. also the shi'a/sunni split (I guess the eastern orthodox church split is kinda analogous, except the EO church is tiny by comparison)

it wasn't when the split happened!

i don't even think the sunni/shia split is analagous; both trace their origin to an event that happened within the founding generation of islam but a separate shia consciousness only emerged as part of the islamicization of persia a few centuries later (look i'm no islamic historian tho obv!), it's a different kind of difference.

the great schism has, like, a date on it.

i mean most major religions are strongly political in that fashion, i guess.... the sharp distinction between secular and ecclesiastical authority is a pretty recent development in human history.

― wizzz! (amateurist), Thursday, October 1, 2015 3:07 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm it's kind of in their blood. Main difference maybe being a thousand years ago we couldn't conceive of a ruling class that did not invoke ecclesiastical authority. Now we can imagine it even if it's still not come true.

I guess being rich or on TV is the new form of Indulgences.

but charles pierce speculates that the ratzingerites set him up:

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a38440/pope-francis-swindled-kim-davis-meeting/

― goole, Thursday, October 1, 2015 3:16 PM (7 hours ago)

yeah this seems pretty plausible to me

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3728-the-pope-s-movie-picks

no bunuel though

lotta splainin itt

Vatican denies meeting was an endorsement. "We like to keep it surprising. We're not your father's Vatican."

just to clarify there are significantly more eastern orthodox christians that shia muslims, maybe twice as many

*than shia

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/world/europe/pope-francis-kim-davis-meeting.html?_r=0

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis’ encounter with Kim Davis last week in Washington, which was interpreted by many as a subtle intervention in the United States’ same-sex marriage debate, was part of a series of meetings with dozens of guests and did not amount to an endorsement of her views, the Vatican said on Friday.

Ms. Davis — the Rowan County, Ky., clerk who defied a judge’s order and refused to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples — was among the guests ushered into the Vatican’s embassy for a brief meeting with him, the Vatican said.

“The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis, and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said in a statement released on Friday morning.

Ms. Davis’s case has become a focal point in the debate over the tensions between religious liberty and marriage equality in the United States. Her lawyer said in a telephone interview on Friday morning that a church official had initiated the meeting and that he had been told it was at the request of Pope Francis.

Father Lombardi, in his statement, played down the meeting and said it had been arranged by the Nunciature, the Vatican Embassy, in Washington.

“Pope Francis met with several dozen persons who had been invited by the Nunciature to greet him as he prepared to leave Washington for New York City,” Father Lombardi said.

lmao this is so great. "persons."

whoah really ogmor? I had no idea. where are the big population centers that outdo Iran?

cool pope - "the bitch set me up"

really really cannot work out why so many otherwise normal-thinking ppl seem so invested in the idea of ~cool pope just bc he seems incrementally more progressive on select issues than the usual pathologic evil of the institution he heads (and on many other ways perpetuates that evil just fine)

and then, they run hospitals and feed the poor sometimes too

wow so life is complicated eh?

yeah, about 3% of contemporary pop music isn't utter shit, too

next time Barack Obama makes incremental changes to immigration or prison reform, I'll be sure to blast The Weeknd in your face.

heheh

that's uncalled for

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SND3v0i9uhE

You cut the concealer of pedophiles more slack for his good work than the sociopathic president. I always have fun pointing it out.

and then, they run hospitals

Yes, quite.

http://thehumanist.com/commentary/catholic-hospitals-and-the-denial-of-care

Oh, wait, you said "run," not "ruin."

there's a spectrum of shitty-to-admirable deeds in all kinds of institutions

don't let me ruin your hard-on, though

"really really cannot work out why so many otherwise normal-thinking ppl seem so invested in the idea of ~cool pope just bc he seems incrementally more progressive on select issues than the usual pathologic evil of the institution he heads (and on many other ways perpetuates that evil just fine)"

i'm with the lex, fuck the pope. a billion dollar industry built on blood is never cool no matter how many italian prog rockers you hang out with.

built on blood

starts as wine though, it's a hell of a trick

the idea that catholicism as an institution is "evil," end of story, is some embarrassingly sophomoric dawkins level shit imo

idk hundreds of years of genocide, racism, antisemitism, mind-boggling corruption, pedophilia ... the list is pretty long

I mean I'm kind of at a loss for a worse institution, just in terms of scope and scale

i think institutions can grow + evolve but there's a strong case that the church has not been a force of good in history

^^^

the USA? xxp

oh come on the Catholic Church is over a thousand years old. The US is barely over 200 years old and even there the best comparison case is the British Empire, and their collective evils eclipse ours by a considerable margin imo.

Church was good/critical for preserving various Greek/Roman writings, that's kind of the best thing I can credit them with.

Easy to blame it all on Catholic Church but you have to remember there was no separation of church and state. You could blame it on feudalistic society, mass illiteracy, mass malnutrition, or the time honored tradition of the rich plundering natural resources and funding wars but no easy to just blame it all on the church.

yeah you could blame the church inquisition for murdering all those people because they wouldn't worship jesus but doesn't it make more sense to blame the rich?

you're compressing an awful lot there

xxp

like where things were guided by theology it seems pretty clear the church was to blame

Intimidation tactics, xenophobia, state murder, etc. church inquisition still going on in the name of fighting Terror, an emotion, in our secular wonderland.

the catholic church has historically done some pretty awful things, but tbh the world in general was a pretty horrific, brutal, amoral place during the era of e.g. the crusades, the inquisition, et al, and i doubt any church or institution given that level of power would have been "a force of good." i think it's possible to separate the modern church from the church of the 12th century.

No theology in witch hunting, just extremist identity politics. Stamping out the gay, minority, and disabled. Even the official guides and manuals produced by inquisitors failed to connect most of the stories or folk tales to anything written in the Bible.

There might be something to that. The Inquisition was really kind of a proto-nationalist thing.

You're throwing out a lot of disconnected stuff Adam so idk where to start - maybe with the simplest, most straightforward one: the Catholic Church blamed the Jews for murdering Jesus based on the story of the crucifixion as it was laid down in the Gospels (which were explicitly written as a political repudiation of the Jewish authorities of the time). There's a very clear line between that theological justification for antisemitism and the Inquisition.

xp

Our notions of what is "good" and what we expect from churches and governments are pretty new, people.