Wednesday, January 4, 2017

If Trump won't lead, there's always Pope Francis


  


     If you visit the University of Notre Dame, located near but not actually in South Bend, Indiana, as I did a few years ago, scouting colleges with my boys, you might be surprised, as I was, by the Jordan Hall of Science.   
     Though opened in the relative yesterday of 2006, Jordan Hall is a gorgeous brick edifice with crenelated ramparts, Gothic tracery windows and arched doorways festooned with carved stone statues. Not statues of Catholic religious saints either, but the Catholic saints of science: Louis Pasteur, Madame Curie, and, I noted with amusement, Galileo.
     Galileo Galilei, you may recall, ran afoul of the church by claiming the Earth revolves around the sun; heresy because it implied that little old us are not the center of the universe, the hub of God's creation.     
      The church has come around since then, and admitted the Earth does indeed revolve around the sun whether the pope says it does or not, just as — and you saw this coming, didn't you? — the Earth's climate is heating up because of the carbon emissions humanity has been spewing into the atmosphere for the past 200 years whether Republicans acknowledge it or not.
     Most of the world accepts this, but the GOP — in the lazy denialism that also elects a Donald Trump to the presidency — are loath to recognize this ...

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5 comments:

  1. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/cause-ice-age.html we will never really know

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  2. The Church does get it right every once in a while.

    Next are women. And then the scurrilous references to "Jews" in the Gospels. I'm afraid Pope Francis isn't up for either of these issues. And I suppose we can expect a Pope Donald after Francis dies. But in God's eyes a century is just a flick of his eyelash. Just got to wait a few hundred years. We'll get it right sooner or later.

    john

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  3. You might have told your cynical kid about him muttering "E pur se muove" (And yet it moves)after the recantation. No need to mention that it is only a legend. And as a practical matter, his somewhat ambiguous recantation seems a not unreasonable way to avoid threatened torture and imprisonment.

    The Church's resistance to fact has always been somewhat of a leaky boat. An interesting irony, I've always thought, is that a major brick in the edifice of evolutionary theory is an understanding of the mechanism for how natural selection works gained from the rediscovered experiments of an Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel.

    Tom Evans

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