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Pope Francis has died

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Re: Pope Francis has died

#701
post #468
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangentially related: why do so many people call for a ceasefire, when a ceasefire is generally temporary. It wouldn't resolve any of the underlying reasons for the war. He should be calling for surrender.

Who should surrender, though? At this point in time, if Hamas were to surrender, the Israeli occupation of Gaza would just get worse. That wouldn't be peace, or justice, for people of Gaza. I certainly don't support what Hamas has done, but Israeli rule will probably be pretty brutal for Palestinians.

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Re: Pope Francis has died

#702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gonna disagree with you there. https://www.openbible.info/topics/hell

Did you read these? I think they actually go against what you argue. One of the passages about "hell" is John 3:16, which could not be less about hell if it tried (IMO). Also the passages that actually mention hell/hades are extremely sparse on details: it's separate from god, there will be fire and it will be unpleasant. Considering the length of the bible, I think this list shows that the bible has "very little" to…

Yes, the Bible is long, but it talks about many topics. The only thing that is mentioned a lot is Yahweh and Jesus. Beyond that you're not really gonna get a lot of consistency on topics.

This is a random Bible search website to show some verses about hell. I was not implying that all of these verses are definitive treatments of hell or anything similar.

However you will notice that what is said in these verses is generally not "hell is just emptiness". So even if very little is said about hell, to me the appropriate response to that is not "it doesn't say much so I'm just gonna believe whatever I want" (if you also claim the Bible is divinely inspired and the underpinning of your entire religion).

Re: Pope Francis has died

#704

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Who cares? He said it. The words are his responsibility. If his speech had advocated for grinding orphans into a nutritious paste, we wouldn’t be defending him on the basis that he didn’t write those words. He chose to read them and give them his official backing.

This is a perfect example of a motte and bailey. The "motte" is that people should be judged badly for parroting horrible ideas they heard (which makes sense) and the "bailey" is that people should be praised just for parroting nice things they heard (which doesn't make sense).

Upvote for practical and informative description of a logical fallacy, with extra love for motte and bailey.

Re: Pope Francis has died

#705

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> At some point you will understand that you will never have absolute and complete axioms from which to build everything on [1], and you have to work with what you have. To have hardware that displays blue, and code that manipulates blue, you must have a very clear and unambiguous definition of what blue means. Notice I did not say correct, only clear and unambiguous. Your whole point seems to be that words mean what…

I feel a little blue. Does your code understand that? Can the code function properly in civilization without that understanding?

Da ba di da ba dah, my friend.

Re: Pope Francis has died

#706

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> There is no “both sides” here If there's ever a disagreement or debate about anything , then there are literally always two sides. You might disagree that the thing that the other side is prioritizing is as important (e.g. the lives of fetuses vs. the right to bodily autonomy for women), or that the thing the other side believes is even right (e.g. people who believe in racial hierarchies and other literally racist…

That is not my understanding of what “both sides” refers to. Both sides is when both sides are doing bad things, such as lupusreal claiming both sides are being dishonest. > Shutting down the other side by saying their viewpoint is invalid has been productive for me literally zero times in my life. When the topic at hand is one group wanting to exercise power over another group, there can never be a resolution. The o…

Your other comment was flagged before I could submit my response, so here it is:

> or you think women should not be in control of their bodies in some situations.

In almost all countries where abortion is broadly legal there are still limitations. For elective abortions without committee approval or medical necessity there's a limit of 24 weeks in the UK, 12 in Germany and Italy, 14 in France, 20 in Sweden... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Europe#Grounds_for...

Opinion polling in the US mirrors this nuance:

> "The same poll found that support for abortion being generally legal was 60% during the first trimester of pregnancy, dropping to 28% in the second trimester, and 13% in the third trimester."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States#...

Clearly there is plenty of room to quibble over the details without being some sort of Victorian boogieman. Having no limitations at all is a fringe position which most pro-choice people don't agree with.

[End of pasted response.]

By the way, this ties in with what I'm saying about both sides presenting the worst possible arguments of their opponents. Extremists on one side say that the others all want to perform "partial birth abortions", killing babies mere seconds before it is fully born (this is a lie.) Extremists on the other side frame all of their opponents (including anybody who supports abortion in principle but not unrestricted) as being religious extremists who want to lock up women and turn them into breeding cows.

The reality is that most of the population is in between these two extremes, and if our democracy wasn't so dysfunctional, undermined by extremists on both sides we could compromise on abortion being legal for somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 24 weeks, as it is in most of Europe, and that would make most of the American public reasonably happy. But you wouldn't accept that, because any compromise is " controlling women", and antiabortion people wouldn't accept it because its "killing babies."

End result is we're doomed to have these fruitless arguments from now until a comet puts us all out of our misery.

Re: Pope Francis has died

#707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard descriptions of hell of everything from the classic "fire and torture" we all know, to it being a total and complete detachment from god (in a disappointed and kicked out of the house by your parents kind of way). It's similar to descriptions of Satin. Everything from the horns and pitchfork all the way down to a "beautiful fallen angel" that he technically was explained to be in the bible. I've always jus…

The modern concept of hell came from Dante's The Devine Comedy which was, ironically, a criticism of the contemporary church.

That's not exactly true. The main thing that is popularized by Dante is "demons are performing the punishment" (rather than being punished as in scripture ... but the general idea goes back to Gnosticism) ... and I guess "hell has circles" if we count those as significant.

"Hell is a place of fire and torment" is explicitly Biblical (Luke 16), even if there are also mentions of Hell without that (and some mentions of fire and torment without calling it "Hell").

Annihilationism vs Eternal Conscious Torment is the main point that isn't given a perfectly clear answer in scripture; there are verses that hint toward each.

Limbo and Purgatory are not in the Bible, but predate Dante. "Deal with the Devil" predates Dante and is only weakly founded in scripture. "Devils" (plural, as opposed to "the Devil") being distinct from "Demons" is a translation artifact, popularized by Dungeons & Dragons. There being various types of demons long precedes Dante. Variants of Universalism (including "Nobody goes to Hell" and "it's possible to escape Hell") are explicitly rejected in scripture.

Those are all the aspects of "modern concept of hell" that I can think of (let me know if you can think of more), and the connection to Dante seems pretty weak.

Re: Pope Francis has died

#708
post #289

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Also not a Roman Catholic, but there were some good things about Pope Francis that I could appreciate, particularly his very Augustinian take on reason and the restlessness of the heart found in his lecture from the launch of the Spanish edition of Msgr. Luigi Giussani's book "The Religious Sense."

A written version of Bergoglio's talk is published in chapter 7 of "Generative Thought: An Introduction to the Works of Luigi Giussani" by Elisa Buzzi, 2003 https://isidore.co/misc/Res%20pro%20Deo/Giussani's%20errors/...

Yes, thank you for sharing a link to the PDF. I see you are familiar with the literature. Yesterday I posted a couple of screencaps pointing to this: https://x.com/wyclif/status/1914276336690139440

Re: Pope Francis has died

#709
post #685
post #636

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Why is this ironic?

It's ironic because no matter how much science they embrace, they never come around to realizing their God is just as much make believe as every other.

oh. thanks for clarifying. I'd thought the irony lies in some image of being anti-scientific.

the fun thing, ironic itself, about dismissing religion in it's entirety is that most religions have long understood that G'd can't be proven, measured, captured with experiments. the irony in this is that while you can't prove G'd you can't disprove G'd either, so the lack of proof is no proof of a lack of "The Force". quantum physics did not not exist just because the was no proof for it.

one interesting train of thought in this regard was the conclusion of a book on the neurobiology of meditation, (the title escapes me right now): what if the only "instrument" to measure religious experience is the brain? we can measure effects of systematic religious practice on the brain, like meditation aka contemplative prayer. we can identify some aspects of states that humans describe as religious experience, in the brain, as they happen. why would we dismiss those as mere "brain formations"? while we accept equally measurable effects of sound or light on the brain as "real"?

it's non-trivial...

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