Pope dies...next up?

Connect the dots - from A to … Lenin?

This is hilarious beyond words.

[quote=“Tim Elhajj”]

He was the Pope. What did you think he spoke out against as he toured the world? It’s his job.[/quote]

Lots of things, but I suspect only a few of them were popular. “Contraception for married couples is bad” is one hell of an unpopular position, for example.

Completely wrong, of course. Morality is not dictated by which magical being you believe in unless you’re a very weak-willed person who must believe in a greater power imposing his/her/its will upon you to keep you “good.” Even if atheists actually did dictate their morals in the manner you describe, I’d still take that method over what some ancient primitives scribbled down in a book to keep the rabble in line because “God said it.”

Religion does not have to be a blinding, intellectually crippling means to divisive and hateful ends. It tends to be that in large part due to the fact that large-scale centralized religion (such as Catholicism, in which I was born and raised) resembles a multinational company more than anything else. The Catholic Church became a business rather than God’s house on Earth long, long ago. You claim to fear the decline of its powers and the dawning of an age of impotence, but I fail to see where that isn’t already true. What little power the Church maintains is due entirely to monetary means, not any real vestige of faith in its partyline to the Big Guy.

The state becoming religion is definitely something to avoid, but when religion becomes the state…you get the Dark Ages. It’s about balance, not crushing the opposition.

It was only a week or so ago I was wondering where the Gideon-bot had gone to. Bravo on the re-entry.
Tim, your swipe at Extarbags wouldn’t have anything to do with your Catholicism rather than any desire for maturity on this forum, would it?
Like many here, I’m sick to death of the eulogising already but I can’t help but feel that there is a cubic shitload of people who genuinely care about his passing. Which makes me think that articles like this http://www.nypress.com/18/9/news&columns/taibbi.cfm are really playing with fire.
As for the successor, it’ll be the usual faceless bureaucrat in the Vatican who’ll continue to centralise power and promote a conservative posture. There aren’t many potential JFKs at the Vatican…

Is the NYPress article supposed to be a parody of a funny edgy piece?

I predict a huge backlash against nypress from the humor-liking population for trying to pass off something that unfunny as humor.

Peter, thanks but I’ll just let the penis threads stand as a sign of my sudden interest in a mature forum.

The river of penis jokes just never stops flowing with you, does it?

The amazing memory of JOHN MANY JARS recalls a timely verse:

Is there hope
that the Pope
will elope?
Nope.

The river of penis jokes just never stops flowing with you, does it?[/quote]

I dare not post anything critical for fear someone will ask me to justify my motives. I will say this, however: in the US some folks use the word Peter as a substitue for pecker as in, Get your peter out of my face, I’m trying to watch the movie! Which keeps the penis jokes rolling along, so I am happy.

Hopefully this posts raises the maturity level a notch in this thread. :)

A) Liberalism.
B) Lenin
C) ???
D) PROFIT!!!

Jesus that’s horrible. I mean just bad, like, “haha i raped your dead wife” bad.

He was perhaps a more conservative Pope than was hoped for after Vatican 2, and his stands on modern progressive issues seems at odds with secular society - but then, i think, he was just doing his job and working with what he had, because The Bible is itself only with great difficulty brought in line with modern values, such as Women’s Rights, following a great deal of hammering square pegs into round holes.

But overall his stature, leadership, intellectual scope and dignity lent his papacy an aura that probably few have ever had; he was in some way a “perfect” Pope, like there just couldn’t be a better representation of what a Pope could and should be. He wasn’t the sort of man that you would expect to hear involved in some scandal involving Italian Nuns or something.

I think however that to some extent, despite his litany of historic acts (like trying to heal the schism with the Eastern Orthodox Church), he deferred confronting an increasingly secular Europe for another day, which might have been his biggest mistake, and the legacy that he leaves his successor to reap.

I was going to say “West”, but the US seems in the throws of its own religious revival, and American Catholicism is somewhat askew from the mainstream Catholic world.

Hmmm, what are youo basing that on? I can’t really present any evidence to disagree with your statement, but my feeling is that America is still in its’ steady slide towards secularism. We just started later than Europe.

The recent agitation we’ve seen from the hardcore rightwing christians is, in my estimation, a lashing out at the looming possibility that their views will be marginilized soon. In effect, the hardcore christian right is making itself seem larger by being louder, because they see themselves shrinking.

Are they right, though? It doesn’t seem like it.

Very few of them seem to be Catholic, anyway. Catholicism is a far more down-to-earth version of Christianity than the usual Protestant sects. Growing up Catholic was the epitome of that “do whatever you want all week, go to church on Sunday” syndrome. Fuck up as bad as you like, but you’ll have to pay the Faith Tax in Confession and Hail Marys later. It was always really weird to see the guys who went around beating up kids two years younger than them show up every Sunday in suits acting like civilized human beings.

I don’t think that it’s unheard of to think that the Catholic Church will change it’s coloring of certain beliefs with the new pope. As far as I know, the church has a long history of changing it’s mind on things and then acting as if it’s always thought that. A lot of commentators have talked about JPII’s conservativism, which means that his views on things such as the ordination of women, and the above mentioned things was not written in unchangable stone for ever and ever amen.

Maybe it’s too much to expect the church to embrace gay marriage and rejoice in abortions, but I don’t think it’s out of place to hope for the election of someone who can soften the rhetoric against.

brian

I don’t think that it’s unheard of to think that the Catholic Church will change it’s coloring of certain beliefs with the new pope. As far as I know, the church has a long history of changing it’s mind on things and then acting as if it’s always thought that. A lot of commentators have talked about JPII’s conservativism, which means that his views on things such as the ordination of women, and the above mentioned things was not written in unchangable stone for ever and ever amen.

Maybe it’s too much to expect the church to embrace gay marriage and rejoice in abortions, but I don’t think it’s out of place to hope for the election of someone who can soften the rhetoric against.

brian

I’m sure that’s possible. Given that most of the cardinals were appointed by JPII and presumably shared his views to a significant degree, I suspect that any change will be gradual.

Speaking as an outside observer (many of my in-laws are Catholic, but I’m not), I think the Church has a number of interesting challenges facing it. There is a huge priest shortage world-wide, and particularly in western countries. In the U.S., 25% of the remaining priests are over 75, and 40% of them will be in 5 years. Combined with the scandals involving the sexual abuse of children, I think there is a lot of pressure on the church in the west toward allowing priests to marry and/or ordaining women. I’m not saying this will happen, but if it doesn’t it’s going to get even more difficult to do basic things like hold Mass.

I also wonder about the financing. As the Church becomes less and less relevant in the west, will this affect fund-raising? Are its more successful operations in latin America and Africa cash-positive?

Anyhow, interesting to an ex-anthropologist…

By the way, there is a list of the Cardinal electors at http://www.ca-catholics.net/hierarchy/cardinals-country.htm

Almost 2/3’s come from Europe, USA, and Canada. So I would expect those areas to continue to have a major influence.

The last stats I read said that the rural religious right is outbreeding the modernistic liberal city dwellers at the rate of something like 5 to 1.
American secularism seems frightfully far of.

Cities have been a demographic dry hole for centuries. Used to be cholera and industrial accidents, now it’s cultural. They don’t disappear, and society gets ever-more-liberal, because those rural kids grow up and run screaming to the big city. :D