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HAVE I HELPED? |
The Pope Chimes in...
I find I must chime in here. I find the blog
(cosmicvariance.com) quite interesting in
keeping up with matters of modern physics. Thank you for that! But “you”
scientists are really quite full of it you know. Many of your good
friends around you are Christians, or Jews, or whatever. You demean them
by denying their world view has any validity. Practicing a strict
scientific viewpoint such as you do, has obvious benefits. But evolution
has not necessitated any one worldview, at least to date. One has only
needed to find food, kill his enemies before they kill him, and
procreate to succeed. In some sense, that is still true today, in spite
of our liberal worldviews. Would it were not.
While I often bemoan my very good Christian friends’ outlook on life, I
do not demean them. I look at my scientist friends’ theories and, yes
faiths, and I wonder how they can be so full of it. In explaining the
ultimate scheme of things, they are as clueless as their religious
friends. They just have fancier theories and faiths, expressed in exact
language, and, to be sure, practices that bring about technological
marvels, to the benefit of the rest of us. But there is no ultimate
“understanding” at the end of all their explaining.
So the point is that we have to accept all these alternative ways to
live and believe. There are no solutions, there are only choices, an old
truth... That is surely a liberal viewpoint, I would propose. And a
liberal viewpoint I agree with.
What is running amok these days is that one of the alternative beliefs,
at least in its radical interpretation definitely does NOT have a
liberal mindset. It has a medieval mindset. It will have to be
eliminated if the rest of us are to survive in a (liberal) connected,
pluralist world. It is that simple! Our liberal friends find it hard to
revert to the definitely non liberal practice of survival of the
fittest. Appeasers are everywhere among us. It is 1938 all over again.
We are making apologies for people who want to kill us.
I think this is what Pope Benedict sees, but not how to see it thru. I
see him as suggesting the point that God and violence do not go
together. Which is where I think most of the world’s religions have
evolved to. They certainly didn’t start out that way!
A radical minority of the Islam religion certainly believe that (their)
God and violence go hand in hand, and that their viewpoint is the
“endpoint” of spiritual evolution, to be imposed on the rest of us. And
this viewpoint is tolerated by much of their majority. Definitely not
good for the future of our liberal, pluralistic world.
Good for the Pope for (delicately) trying to inject this into the debate.