Pope Francis has died

Surprised noone here has mentioned yet that Pope Francis was only the second pope ever with a social-media strategy (Pope Benedict was the first, in 2012 [0][1], and didn't get as much traction as Pope Francis).

"The Most Followed World Leaders on Social Media 2022" [2] ranked Pope Francis 3rd in 2022 with 53m followers, which is/was still low compared to singers, sports stars, celebrities and tech figures. It would obviously be crass and reductive to try to estimate the Pope's impact this way (and not, say, country visits, appointments, encyclicals, other official statements, reaction/criticism by other religous/political figures, administrative and legal actions, measures of popularity by specific groups, by factions, by country, by politics or religion), but as traditional media channels become less relevant, the Vatican will presumably have to move with the times, as in many other ways.

Maybe the better question (as Dick Cheney would have put it) is which voices do/don't determine the media narrative on Pope Francis' papacy?

As to your take (that he was wasn't that far out of line with Catholic doctrine, but often portrayed as more liberal and constantly taken out of context), that's the debate we're largely about to see happen.

[0]: "Pope Joins Twitter: Benedict XVI's Screenname Will Be @Pontifex" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4897631

[1]: https://x.com/Pontifex

[2]: https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-most-followed-world...

Sorry I misinterpreted. Protestant denominations are convenient for politics, because there are so many of them and hey have so different positions.

> In this realm, there's no forgiveness unless you totally repent and accept the whole christian shebang. In extreme cases, it's not the the sin itself, but the rejection of god/jesus that's the worst you can do.

That’s fertile ground for extremism and reinforces the group dynamics, for sure.

> Taken to the extreme, you see this manifested very strangely, like Chick tracts where the secular lifetime do-gooder burns in hell, but the terrible multiple murdering rapist gets into heaven because they repent "in time".

I think Pascal wrote something about this behaviour. I won’t chase the source but IIRC the conclusion was that these people were hypocrites using religion to be terrible people and I tend to agree. Personally I find also weird to believe that God is so easily fooled, but that’s just me.

> But I've come to the conclusion that if said minister/church/religion gets involved in politics, there's a greater chance than not that it's being run by manipulative power-hungry people.

Definitely. It is too effective as a tool for control and coercion. At least the Catholic Church mostly retreated from this. They do some lobbying but nobody is asking for a Catholic theocracy anywhere that I know of.

> It's in some ways gotten worse, because they're now treating other people's refusals to follow (gay marriage, no prayer in schools, etc) as direct attacks on them.

Yes. It is the end of enlightenment and the end of liberal democracies if enough people behave that way. These people are functionally similar to the imams who keep babbling about the shariah, it’s time we see them that way.

The vast majority of abortions are performed because the pregnancy was unwanted, not because the mother’s life was in danger or what have you. But why was the pregnancy unwanted in the first place?

This is the question you must begin with, because the answer cuts to the psychological heart of the matter. The reason is that we have redefined sexual intercourse in terms of sexual pleasure first. We’ve demoted procreation to secondary status instead of recognizing it as the primary reason for sexual intercourse with pleasure characterizing it rather than defining its function. The absurdity of it is apparent given the anatomical, physiological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of sex. All of that for pleasure? This is like claiming the digestive system exists and the act of eating exist for pleasure. We would typically associate with such things gluttony, bulimia, and other eating disorders.

Historically, sexual self-restraint has always been a problem for some more than others, of course. Some have more trouble with restraint with respect to food or drink or whatever. Addictions have always existed. However, the cultural norms surrounding such questions have varied. Some cultures have been puritanical. Some have been depraved. Others have managed to channel sexual appetite in healthy ways that respect the dignity of those involved (which, given its nature, aims toward spousal love and the flourishing of the family, including the parents as parents). Ours is not the latter. In the 1930s, we saw the beginning of the normalization of contraception, and this normalization had the effect of splitting the pleasure of sex from the entirety of the act and promoted it to the status of primary end. This opened the door to the sexual revolution and the sexual exploitation of others, especially women. Abortion, paradoxically, only becomes relevant in this context, because only in a contraceptive context is pregnancy conceived as aberrant and contrary to the nature of the sexual act. So contrary to a successfully waged misinformation campaign by people like Margaret Sanger, abortion rates only rise in a society with a culture that normalizes contraception where it becomes a “solution” for the failure rate of contraception.

Is that what we want? Do we wish to continue to dehumanize ourselves by by outsourcing our humanity? Technology extends human ability or fixes broken human function. Do we want to put the cart before the horse and reinforce that error by building a culture and a technological ecosystem around error instead, and in doing so, entrench ourselves in that error? Instead of technology truly serving the human good, do we want instead to abolish the human in service to a dystopian ideology? This is what addicts do. They serve their addictions and build their lives around them.

I grew up unwanted, that shit stays with you forever. It's a lifetime of torture.

This comment is seriously disturbing, holy shit.