Andrew Sullivan, gay activist, staunch Catholic, and blogger, has a pretty incendiary post up at The Dish. I reproduce part of it without comment, except to say that someone who is gay is more likely to be an accurate detector of gay behavior:
But this is what really made me sit up straight, so to speak:
Benedict’s trusted secretary, Monsignor Georg Gänswein, will be serving both pontiffs — living with Benedict at the monastery inside the Vatican and keeping his day job as prefect of the new pope’s household. Asked about the potential conflicts, Lombardi was defensive, saying the decisions had been clearly reasoned and were likely chosen for the sake of simplicity. “I believe it was well thought out,” he said.
So Benedict’s handsome male companion will continue to live with him, while working for the other Pope during the day. Are we supposed to think that’s, well, a normal arrangement? I wrote a while back about Gänswein’s intense relationship with Ratzinger, while noting Colm Toibin’s review of Angelo Quattrochi’s exploration of Benedict, “Is The Pope Gay?”. Here’s Toibin getting to some interesting stuff:
Gänswein is remarkably handsome, a cross between George Clooney and Hugh Grant, but, in a way, more beautiful than either. In a radio interview Gänswein described a day in his life and the life of Ratzinger, now that he is pope:
The pope’s day begins with the seven o’clock Mass, then he says prayers with his breviary, followed by a period of silent contemplation before our Lord. Then we have breakfast together, and so I begin the day’s work by going through the correspondence. Then I exchange ideas with the Holy Father, then I accompany him to the ‘Second Loggia’ for the private midday audiences. Then we have lunch together; after the meal we go for a little walk before taking a nap. In the afternoon I again take care of the correspondence. I take the most important stuff which needs his signature to the Holy Father.
When asked if he felt nervous in the presence of the Holy Father, Gänswein replied that he sometimes did and added: ‘But it is also true that the fact of meeting each other and being together on a daily basis creates a sense of “familiarity”, which makes you feel less nervous. But obviously I know who the Holy Father is and so I know how to behave appropriately. There are always some situations, however, when the heart beats a little stronger than usual.’
This man – clearly in some kind of love with Ratzinger (and vice-versa) will now be working for the new Pope as secretary in the day and spending the nights with the Pope Emeritus. This is not the Vatican. It’s Melrose Place.
I have no idea whether Sullivan’s suspicions are correct, and, of course, there’s nothing wrong with being gay. But there is something wrong— something deeply hypocritical—about being gay and, at the same time, helping lead an institution that condemns gays and sees gay behavior as sinful acts of “grave depravity” and as “intrinsically disordered.” We already know that many members of the Catholic hierarchy who condemn gays nevertheless engage in that behavior (or in child rape) themselves.
At any rate, Benedict will be Pope Emeritus as of this evening.
_______
p.s. In today’s New York Times, theologian and author Hans Küng outlines what kind of Pope the Catholic Church needs. Hint: one who does not espouse medieval theology like Benedict did.
Reblogged this on Deluded Students.
This is kinda interesting by the day. Now only if Ratzinger could tell us the truth about his beliefs and sexual orientation he would help in a great way clearing matters
He probably hasn’t told himself the truth yet.
You think he hasnt told the truth b’se he has not said what you want to hear.
sub
lol.
Does the finale mean someone blows up the Vatican?
We are talking about a secretary/personal assistant here, right? No real skills other than some basic organizational skills, perhaps a nice presentation (i.e. pretty), and a modicum of people skills — and a willingness to take a low wage while putting up with some self-important arse who thinks they are entitled to a personal assistant/slave?
If there exists a (legitimate) job that is better designed for a beautiful young man (or woman) to do, I can’t think of it. Personally, I would be far more suspicious of sexual activity if Ratzi had, say, someone like Andrew Sullivan as his personal secretary. What self-respecting middle-aged human could put up with such a menial job unless they were secretly being paid a whore’s salary?
Except that Ganswein is 56, so he is a middle-aged man.
Whoa.
The average male life expectancy in the vatican is 112 years?
lol.
If you are joking, then good one.
If you are demonstrating genuine confusion over the term “middle aged”, then I am using it according to this common definition:
“Middle age is the period of age beyond young adulthood but before the onset of old age.”
So Ganswein is clearly middle age assuming he has a normal life span.
Then again, all of the gus living at the Vatican are living in the middle ages.
Beautiful people are too stupid for real jobs? A personal secretary/assistant is unnecessary and requires no real skills to do well? I could give both general and specific examples of how those views are inaccurate, but it is so obvious that they are that it seems pointless to try if you really do feel that way.
sub
“Are we supposed to think that’s, well, a normal arrangement?”
Normal? Normal!? This is the friggin Vatican. Since when has ‘normal’ had anything to do with anything there?
The ex-pope might be gay! You forgot to add “Not that there is anything wrong with that.”
Ooops. You did.
Sorry, but if Gänswein is a cross between Clooney and Grant, what the hell is he doing with the creepy, decrepit Ratzi?
The same thing all of Hugh Heffner’s recent “girlfriends” were doing with him.
The gay part doesn’t bother me, or surprise me. (I’m gay and Ratzi doesn’t ping my ‘dar, but who knows?)
Monsigneurdom is a well-established siding into which gay priests are often shunted to avoid making them Bishops. A gay Monsigneur told me he was one of six inducted or whatever it is at the same time, three of them gay.
But for Monsignor Georg Gänswein to serve (in whatever sense) both Pope and ex-Pope seems like a serious risk of conflict of interest. If Ratzi hates some policy of Pope Proximus, how can Gänswein not be caught in the middle?
Since January “Gorgeous Georg” has been an Archbishop. I guess he did an extra good job lifting Ratzi’s luggage or something. But it’s interesting that GG will be secretary to the new pope but will continue to live with the Rattenfuehrer – who it seems will not be going into a monastery after all…..or at least not a strict one
wait.
Female or male, doesn’t it mean that if you get it on with Ratzi, you’re getting it on with Jesus?
Isn’t Ratzi Jesus’ incarnation on Earth?
lol.
He is said to represent Jesus, but is not the incarnation of him.
Monsignor Gänswein as Truffaldino, Servant of Two Masters? Goldoni would be happy!
Of course, I couldn’t care less whether Ratzinger is gay, bi, tri, zero, or whatever. But, to complement Hans Küng’s NYT piece, I’d like to point out, for German readers, a remarkable feature article in yesterday’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung:
Fear of an Evil Tide.
This is, to my knowledge, the first in-depth analysis in a mainstream German-language medium of Ratzinger’s deeply troubled relation to science and rationality. Nothing new to WEIT readers, to be sure. But exceptional in mainstream media. The general tone hitherto was to hail Ratzinger as a rational if conservative scholar seeking to accommodate science and theology. In “Fear of an Evil Tide”, the author shows how closely Ratzinger’s positions espouse creationism and Intelligent Design. In pretending to acknowledge modern science, only to reject its basic inferences whenever they seem to threaten faith, Ratzinger becomes the modern proponent of a particularly pessimistic brand of obscurantism. True, and trite, and quite inédit.
If an English translation becomes available let me know; I’d dearlky like to read it. I can read some German, but would have to struggle through four pages.
jac
If you give me a couple of days, I’ll provide one.
Please do!
There’s always Google translate; the result isn’t as smooth as a human translation, and there’s one or two technical terms you’d have to lump through on your own, but the result is pretty readable.
There’s not much that’s news hereabouts, though.
To those who can read German I recommend the following short book by Hans Albert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Albert):
“Joseph Ratzinger’s Rescue of Christianity: Restrictions of the Use of Reason in the Service of Faith”
* Albert, Hans. Joseph Ratzingers Rettung des Christentums: Beschränkungen des Vernunftgebrauchs im Dienste des Glaubens. Aschaffenburg: Alibri, 2008.
I also recommend this book by Albert:
“The Misery of Theology: Critical Engagement with Hans Küng”
* Albert, Hans. Das Elend der Theologie: Kritische Auseinandersetzung mit Hans Küng. 3rd ed. [1st ed.: 1979]. Aschaffenburg: Alibri, 2012.
“Already at the beginning of the 20th century the physicist Pierre Duhem had applied a method which seems apt to put a stop to the critique of religion. For he had proposed a positivistic interpretation of physics that was supposed to render natural science compatible with his spiritualistic metaphysics and thereby with Catholic faith. For him physics was an artifact designed for a special purpose, whereas Catholic metaphysics could provide true explanations and discover the nature of objective reality. … Ratzinger presents us an interpretation of Christian faith on biblical basis and sketches a spiritualistic metaphysics that is supposed to make this interpretation plausible. In this context, he offers us a positivistic interpretation of natural science, and so, as already mentioned, he goes in the same direction as Pierre Duhem, but without dealing with this predecessor. … The alleged renunciation of truth in the sciences, so that the ‘truth of being in itself’ has been replaced with the ‘utility of things for us’, is owing to a positivistic misinterpretation of scientific inquiry, which we already find in Duhem and are used to with respect to the hermeneutical orientations of German philosophy. Scientific knowledge is construed here by Ratzinger as being necessarily ‘positivistic’, as being confined to the ‘visible’, the ‘appearing’, the ‘given’, the ‘measurable’. A realistic interpretation that doesn’t suffer from these restrictions doesn’t seem to be taken into consideration by him.”
[my ad-hoc translation from German]
(Albert, Hans. Joseph Ratzingers Rettung des Christentums: Beschränkungen des Vernunftgebrauchs im Dienste des Glaubens. Aschaffenburg: Alibri, 2008. S. 25-30)
So, one common theistic strategy is to interpret science antirealistically, purely instrumentally, and then to claim that science thus interpreted and religious (Catholic) faith are perfectly compatible, since there is no “clash of truths”.
“Instrumentalism: View about science according to which theories should be seen as (useful) instruments for the organisation, classification and prediction of observable phenomena. The ‘cash value’ of scientific theories is fully captured by what theories say about the observable world. Instrumentalism comes in different forms: syntactic and semantic: Syntatic instrumentalism treats the theoretical claims of theories as syntactic-mathematical constructs which lack truth-conditions, and hence any assertoric content. It comes in two varieties: eliminative and non-eliminative. The non-eliminative variety (associated with Duhem) takes it that one need not assume the existence of an unobservable reality behind the phenomena, nor that science aims to describe it, in order to do science and to do it successfully. Eliminative instrumentalism takes a stronger view: theories should not aim to represent anything ‘deeper’ than experience, because, ultimately, there is nothing deeper than experience (an unobservable reality) for the theories to represent. Faced with the challenge that theoretical assertions seem meaningful and aim to describe an unobservable reality, eliminative instrumentalists have appealed to Craig’s theorem to defend the view that the theoretical vocabulary is eliminable en masse and hence that the question of whether they can refer to unobservable entities is not even raised. Semantic instrumentalism takes theoretical statements to be meaningful but only in so far as (and because) they are fully translatable into assertions involving only observational terms. If theoretical statements are fully translatable, they end up being nothing but disguised talk about observables, and hence they are ontologically innocuous: they should not be taken to refer to unobservable entities, and hence they license no commitments to them. The prime problem of syntactic instrumentalism is that it fails to explain how scientific theories can be empirically successful, especially when it comes to novel predictions. If theories fail to describe (even approximately) an unobservable reality, it is hard to explain why theories can be, as Duhem put it, ‘prophets for us’. The prime problem with semantic instrumentalism is that theories have excess content over their observational consequences in that what they assert cannot be fully captured by what theories say about the observable phenomena. It is noteworthy that attempts to translate theoretical terms into observational ones have all patently failed.”
(Psillos, Stathis. Philosophy of Science A–Z. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. pp. 123-24)
Background information on scientific realism vs. scientific antirealism:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/scientific-realism/
I should mention that Albert’s critical comments refer to Ratzinger’s statements in his book Introduction to Christianity.
Philosophic notions about realism and anti-realism in the context of science, more like.
Also instrumentalism has another meaning within science, to “shut up” and calculate with the current theory when it is insufficiently constrained or tested to choose between well motivated extensions. (Famously in quantum mechanics, where decoherence, say, is insufficiently tested and the area is in a state of flux.)
The point is that scientists and philosophers of science needn’t be (and many of them in fact aren’t) positivists/instrumentalists/phenomenalists/antirealists about science. According to scientific realism, science does deal with the “deep truths”, with the “invisible” and the “unobservable”. It doesn’t claim that there is no hidden reality or that reality is exhausted by or reducible to what is given to our senses. So from the scientific-realist point of view, there is a clash between scientific knowledge and theistic “knowledge”.
“Characteristic of our contemporary scientific attitude, which molds, whether we like it or not, every single individual’s feeling for life and shows us our place in reality, is the limitation to ‘phenomena’, to what is evident and can be grasped. We have given up seeking the hidden ‘initselfness’ of things and sounding the nature of being itself; such activities seem to us to be a fruitless enterprise; we have come to regard the depths of being as, in the last analysis, unfathomable. We have limited ourselves to our own perspective, to the visible in the widest sense, to what can be seized in our measuring grasp. The methodology of science is based on this restriction to phenomena. It suffices us. We can deal with it and thus create for ourselves a world in which we can live as man.”
(p. 58)
“Christian belief—as we have already said—means opting for the view that what cannot be seen is more real than what can be seen. It is an avowal of the primacy of the invisible as the truly real, which upholds us and hence enables us to face the visible with calm composure—knowing that we are responsible before the invisible as the true ground of all things. To that extent it is undeniable that Christian belief is a double affront to the attitude that the present world situation seems to force us to adopt. In the shape of positivism and phenomenalism it invites us to confine ourselves to the ‘visible’, the ‘apparent’, in the widest sense of the terms; to extend the basic methodology to which natural science is indebted for its successes to the totality of our relationship with reality. Again, in the shape of techne it calls upon us to rely on the ‘makable’ and to expect to find in this the ground that upholds us. The primacy of the invisible over the visible and that of receiving over making run directly counter to this basic situation. No doubt that is why it is so difficult for us today to make the leap of entrusting ourselves to what cannot be seen. Yet the freedom of making, like that of enlisting the visible in our service by means of methodical inves- tigation, is in the last analysis only made possible by the provisional character that Christian belief assigns to both and by the superiority it has thus revealed.”
(p. 74)
(Ratzinger, Joseph. Introduction to Christianity. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004.)
I would add that this is actually a very ancient move, not just going back to the (Catholic) Duhem, but is also arguably the stance taken by Bellarmine in the Galileo tragedy,
It is also inconsistent, in some ways, since Thomism, for example, is not antirealist; it is just not naturalistic, never mind science-oriented. If only in that sense, the pomo style antirealists are on better ground – but only for a moment, so to speak.
I also get the impression, but cannot know for sure, that there is higher religiousity amongst contemporary antirealist philosophers of science, too. But I have I never seen it seriously studied. The “sociology of philosophy” is a barely studied field, and some of what has been done is dubious.
The Pope
It has been estimated by some insiders that 80% of Catholic clergy are gay (reported by Rabbi Abraham Feinberg in his book “Sex and the Pulpit”- he’s citing a Catholic friend). Most must be self-hating gays or at least using it as a closet from which you can never escape and might suffocate inside of. The dichotomy between the often homoerotic imagery in Catholicism and its publicly homophobic stance has been discussed in many books by (gay Catholic) writer Mark Jordan.
http://rap.wustl.edu/people/faculty/mark-jordan/
It seems this is one of many unresolved tensions that is causing the Catholic Church to implode from within (along with its contradictory attempts to both denigrate women while elevating the Virgin Mary, its attempts to both modernize and squelch modernity, etc.)
Not surprising. If you are religious, but your religion holds that your sexual preference is an abomination, how can you reconcile the two except by attempting celibacy? Not a very good recipe for a healthy psyche.
Comic relief: Buzzfeed’s 25 gayest pictures of the Pope. Don’t miss the video of him with the muscular dancers.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-25-gayest-pictures-of-the-pope
Comic relief: Buzzfeed’s 25 gayest pictures of the Pope. Don’t miss the videos of him with the muscular dancers.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-25-gayest-pictures-of-the-pope
Hilarious!
If I had actually seen Star Wars volumes 34 through 98, I’d think that he was channelling the Evil Emperor dude, particularly while staring at the muscular young men. But I don’t know if “Empy” is noticeably gay in the other 235 of the movies.
The plot thickens. So where does Ratzinger places his accessorized staff after hours?
Oh, if that was a double entendre, then…well. done. sir.
Has “gaydar” ever been investigated in a scientific sense?
Is it true that gays have a heightened gaydar as is popularly supposed?
Anecdotally I note that my female friends detect male gays sooner than I do usually
But my female friends do not detect female gays any quicker
My working assumption is that women provisionally place men who don’t “hit on them” in the might-be-gay category
I’m not sure that it has, but that’s a very social science type question, which I really don’t follow.
Anecdotally, I don’t think that’s established. I’m not gay, but I have a pretty good gaydar (according to my various gay friends).
I would find this worrying. I like to know when I’m being considered “on the menu” (by humans, sharks, or aggressive arthropods).
QUOTE: They don’t have a “this guy isn’t interested in *me*” category? How self-centred!
Yes! Or perhaps realistic given the lack of restraint observed among British male public figures recently [& the old boys network which routinely turns a blind eye]
A quick whack turns up (doi:10.1300/J082v44n01_01). There’s several other hits on “Gaydar” at Google Scholar, including some irrelevant false positives.
Yes, there is a study about gaydar:
http://www.academia.edu/980105/Dissecting_gaydar_Accuracy_and_the_role_of_masculinity-femininity
“81% of all targets were accurately judged based on only a few seconds of observation of each. The raters’ own sex and sexual orientation had only minor influences on the accuracy of their assessments.”
—-
That suggests that the supposedly more sensitive, gossip based female gaydar really produces lots of false positives in the real world and is therefore no good at all.
And I don’t have much confidence in Andrew Sullivan’s musings either.
Another reason to consult The Dish daily.
Anybody who missed this video of the Pope being entertained by male acrobats might want to take a look. It definitely makes one wonder at what kinds of leisure activities for the Pope are hidden from public view.
His Popiness lapped it up. Looks like the nuns at the end of video really dug it too!
Readers may be interested in “Zero Hour at the Vatican: A Bitter Struggle for Control of the Catholic Church” published in Der Spiegel and made available on WorldWide Religious News in English. Best of all the article begins by quoting from Dante’s “Inferno” and refers to Benedict as “The pope from Bavaria.”
http://wwrn.org/articles/39133/?place=vatican
This is a really cheap shot by Sullivan, far beneath someone who wants to be taken as a serious intellectual.
He presents no evidence whatsoever, except that two men are close friends and one is said to be good looking.
We’re supposed to believe that, because he is gay, Sullivan has some special power to discern when others are gay even if they hide it.
I don’t buy this at all. It’s cheap sensationalism.
Sullivan has a new blog that is attempting to raise money on its own. I’m much more likely to think he is digging for traffic than that his claims make any sense.
Sadly, this is the age we live in — throw out accusations, rely on others to link to them, and soak up the resulting income.
It makes me sick.
I think this differs from a cheap shot because Sullivan is not homophobic or anti-gay in the least. To think this is an attack you would have to think that somehow calling the Pope gay would smear his character. If Rush Limbaugh said it, it would be an attack because he thinks being gay is something bad, and his audience thinks being gay is bad.
This is not an attack because so what if the Pope is gay? Would Sullivan think that means the Pope is bad or evil? No. Rather than an attack, at worst it is idle wishful thinking on Sullivan’s part.
Sullivan thinks the Pope is bad because he actively sought to cover up facts and obstruct justice world wide in the cases of priests who sexually molested children. He ordered bishops around the world to not provide information to or cooperate with law enforcement trying to seek justice for thousands of victims. I think this is a pretty non-controversial standard for what constitutes extremely bad behavior, and it is far from infallibility or holiness. Being gay should be the least of the Pope’s worries.
Well, if the Pope is celibate as he is supposed to be, then surely whether he is ‘gay’ or not is purely academic? (A bit like the distinction between a Catholic atheist and a Protestant atheist…)
Okay, so maybe he has… tendencies 😉
I am confused.
Sullivan is a Roman Catholic, ergo slamming the pope is slamming his spiritual guru. Is his local priest bound to deny him absolution & participation in mass until he repents, or is it as ad hoc as the Church of England, where essentially you forgive yourself, not having a confessional…?
Sullivan is a catholic who places the teachings of Jesus over the earthbound institutional authority of the church.
The Pope ordered church officials to cover up information that would have helped investigators seek justice in an international plague of priests sexually molesting children. For Sullivan, that, among other things, disqualifies the Pope as a spiritual leader. There isn’t much mystery and no cause for confusion here, unless you think Catholics ought to meekly place the Pope above Christian teachings.
I take your point, but there are two issues here. One is that some of the teachings of Jesus are odious – I hope that Sullivan does not believe that eternal punishment awaits those who do not accept the divinity of Jesus. Two is that the RCC, per its official doctrine, is not just some earthbound institution. It is a conduit of grace from God (mainly in the form of the sacraments), and it has access to exclusive knowledge of reality in matters concerning morality and spirituality. No other institution in the Universe has these powers. Of course, neither of these claims can be supported by any evidence that would be convincing to a non-Catholic – they are faith-based premises.
So Catholics, even progressive ones like Sullivan,cannot deny that some of their beliefs about reality (such as the Resurrection or transubstantiation) are based on nothing more than faith, and they will play that card if challenged on the truth of these propositions.
But when it comes to faith-based doctrines or positions of the Church that they don’t like, they will reject those, citing either lack of evidence/reasonableness or a belief that their own sense of faith is a better guide to reality than the Church’s.
People like Sullivan are thus quite conflicted and often hypocritical. I just don’t see why someone like him doesn’t just get off the fence and leave the RCC entirely.
“I just don’t see why someone like him doesn’t just get off the fence and leave the RCC entirely.”
Neither do I really. I wasn’t exactly defending Sullivan’s beliefs, merely explaining them based on what I’ve read on his blog. I certainly respect Catholics who can criticize the Pope more than Catholics who slavishly defend every fart and defecation issuing from the holy pontifical orifice.
I think many Catholics like Sullivan are in a similar boat as any person with say a national loyalty who has many beefs with their own government, or perhaps children who think their parents are annoying and wrong about everything but love them nonetheless.
Who can say exactly why loyalty can trump reason, or why one person likes chili, ginger, and garlic, and another person does not?
“Who can say exactly why loyalty can trump reason, or why one person likes chili, ginger, and garlic, and another person does not?”
But we are not talking about a foolish or simple man here, nor is this a benign matter.
And we are also talking about matters of objective fact. The assertion that a virgin gave actually gave birth to God-man is entirely different than the question of food or music tastes, to which there is no right or wrong answer. Unless you think the Beatles are better than the Stones – in that case you are dead wrong! : )
I was thinking of his decision to remain Catholic as opposed to some other kind of Christian.
Why isn’t Sullivan an atheist is a different question. He accepts evolution and the big bang, accepts Adam and Eve and biblical creation as metaphorical myths. He’s not at all a fundamentalist.
His idea of faith based on mystery and doubt seems to approach quite near to deism, which in my book, together with pantheism, is about as close as you can get to atheism without quite letting go of the last shred of faith (or doubt). But Sullivan is no deist; he insists on the divinity of Jesus (which I find annoying, but I was once long ago in that boat myself).
Why are smart people unable to let go of unsupported beliefs? This remains one of life’s great mysteries. I attribute it to the ability of emotion and attachment to overrule reason. We can say it’s just the way his brain works. It’s similar to asking why he is gay. That makes it at some level not so very different than a food preference. It just takes more intellectual work to justify faith than food preferences, even if the attempted justification is only a cover story for an inexplicable pre-rational gut level feeling. At some level people are addicted to faith as they get addicted to food or drugs. It triggers the release of neurotransmitters that stimulate pleasure centers.
Of course, he wouldn’t accept this reduction of his faith to a consequence of how his brain is wired. But I think it’s the explanation for the persistence of the faith illusion. If we can argue that we don’t have free will, and that this relieves us of moral responsibility for crimes, we have to apply the same logic to the stubbornly religious as well. They just can’t do differently until their brain gets rewired by some set of experiences that teaches them differently.
“I was thinking of his decision to remain Catholic as opposed to some other kind of Christian.”
Given his belief that his faith-based truth detector is often better than the RCC’s, I would think that it would make even less sense for him to remain Catholic as opposed to some other flavor of Christianity. He could reduce his dissonance by joining some liberal Protestant branch that emphasizes a more personal relationship with God and has no doctrines that declare that a formal institution is a necessary conduit of God’s grace and salvific power.
Everything else that you say is right on point. I wonder what set of experiences or new knowledge would cause Sullivan to finally reject his religious beliefs.
Perhaps someday we will understand the brain well enough to have “religion therapy”. People can have the experience of being connected to electrodes that reproduce their most profound and ecstatic perceptions of God’s presence. By turning the switch on and off they could learn that these feelings are a brain state, not a spiritual connection to some deity. Maybe this would convince lots of people that what they are feeling and believing isn’t “real” in the way they think it is.
OT and perhaps already written about, but readers may be interested in this, that just broke the news:
Mother Teresa: Anything but a saint…:
“The myth of altruism and generosity surrounding Mother Teresa is dispelled in a paper by Serge Larivée and Genevieve Chenard of University of Montreal’s Department of Psychoeducation and Carole Sénéchal of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Education. The paper will be published in the March issue of the journal Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses and is an analysis of the published writings about Mother Teresa.”
50 shades of Hitchens: ” Like the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who is amply quoted in their analysis, the researchers conclude that her hallowed image—which does not stand up to analysis of the facts—was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media relations campaign.”
“In their article, Serge Larivée and his colleagues also cite a number of problems not take into account by the Vatican in Mother Teresa’s beatification process, such as “her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce.””
It is not all about the evil of catholicism and its saints of course, because like the usual solution to the problem of evil, the authors conclude it is for the good of the public:
“The missions have been described as “homes for the dying” by doctors visiting several of these establishments in Calcutta. Two-thirds of the people coming to these missions hoped to a find a doctor to treat them, while the other third lay dying without receiving appropriate care. The doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions, as well as a shortage of actual care, inadequate food, and no painkillers. The problem is not a lack of money—the Foundation created by Mother Teresa has raised hundreds of millions of dollars—but rather a particular conception of suffering and death: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering,” was her reply to criticism, cites the journalist Christopher Hitchens. ”
“Despite Mother Teresa’s dubious way of caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it, Serge Larivée and his colleagues point out the positive effect of the Mother Teresa myth: “If the extraordinary image of Mother Teresa conveyed in the collective imagination has encouraged humanitarian initiatives that are genuinely engaged with those crushed by poverty, we can only rejoice. …”
Hitch really got stuck into Teresa in The Missionary Position. One of his best.
LMAO
You didn’t mean that literally, did you? I just had a vision of – what you said, and my brain cells will never be the same again.
“If the extraordinary image of Mother Teresa conveyed in the collective imagination has encouraged humanitarian initiatives that are genuinely engaged with those crushed by poverty, we can only rejoice. …”
Right. Fricken unbelievable. So now can we please stop going on about all Adolf’s little foibles and instead focus on the fact that he was fond of animals, in the hope that this will inspire humanitarian animal welfare efforts?
In other words, Bah humbug. Did the authors feel they had to put that in to deflect criticism when they punctured the image of Saint Motherf.. Teresa?
“her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce.”
I thought that she was pretty much in keeping with the mother church’s views on these things so I wouldn’t call it as a negative from their point of view.
However I agree with the authors’ sentiments myself!
Meh – gaydar doesn’t work – not even gay gaydar. Sullivan is as credible as usual.
Since the next pope is elected by the same group who elected the previous pope plus some extra cardinals also appointed by the previous pope why anyone would expect significant change is quite beyond me.
In fact the papal election process seems purposely designed to ensure as little change as possible.
Mike.
Of course, that’s what conservative and authoritarian systems do – practically by definition.
Or maybe their relationship is more like this.