721–730 of 875 posts
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I doubt many Americans can name a single Canadian province or Mexican state.
just to be clear, mine was not a jab against the georgaphy or culture knowledge of the average Italian. They are likely to know more details about German, French or Spanish geographical or culinary features than something from the balkans despite sharing a border.
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He said Ukraine should surrender. To Russia which wants to exterminate Ukraine as a nation, culture and language. Feel free to google for more details. There were multiple occurrences when he doubled-down on his words after backlash.
Went to Jesus in a keffiyeh, that in itself is atrocious!!! Then simped for jihadis. Plenty of similar stuff. It's hard to blame all the catholics that are sighing in relief hoping for a better successor.
I will never forget his sympathy for the motives of the terrorists who massacred staff at Charlie Hebdo: “If my good friend Dr Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch,” Francis said while pretending to throw a punch in his direction. He added: “It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.” [0] [0] https://www.independen…
That’s reprehensible, but also refreshingly open-minded. It shows an awareness that other religions deserve an equal footing to his own. I prefer this over the nuts who decry Sharia law while wanting to implement a Christian equivalent.
The idea of a "Christian equivalent" to Sharia law is actually very fringe. The near unanimous teaching of Christianity, from the Church Fathers through to the mainstream Reformers, is that the criminal laws in the Jewish Torah were only ever intended for Jews, and Christians are not bound by the letter of them – they could be used as a source of moral principles which might influence secular legislation, but were not meant to be directly applied in Christian societies.
And Christianity always drew a distinction between ecclesiastical law, which governed the internal affairs of the Church (canon law), and temporal law (criminal and civil) which governed society at large. Temporal law was derived from secular, pre-Christian sources (especially the laws of the Roman Empire, but also the legal traditions of the Germanic tribes which invaded it); Christianity influenced aspects of it but the bulk of it was non-Christian in origin. Canon law did sometimes intrude into issues most nowadays would consider secular (such as marriage and inheritance), but the bulk of everyday legal matters were governed by the law of the State, not the law of the Church – the two were kept distinct (with separate court systems, legal professions and legal education), even if much more intertwined than most people nowadays would feel comfortable with.
It was only in the 20th century that a small group of American Protestants (R. J. Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen and Gary North) began to spread the contrary idea, theonomy, that the criminal laws of the Torah are meant to be applied by Christians in the present day, as opposed to merely serving as a source of moral principle. But this is a very novel idea in Christian history, and it remains one which the vast majority of Protestants (even conservative Protestants) formally reject, to say nothing of the resolute Catholic and Orthodox opposition to it.
Islam is very different in that, unlike Christianity, it always proposed its religious laws (Sharia) as something to be adopted by the State. The whole Church-vs-State distinction which is fundamental to most Christians never existed to anywhere near the same degree in Islam, prior to the modern period. In mediaeval Muslim-ruled states, all judges were religious officials primarily implementing religious law – with decrees of the secular ruler at best serving as a supplement to it – quite unlike the situation which prevailed in Christian-ruled states, where Church and State had two parallel court systems applying two separate legal systems. The closest the Muslim world came to that, was granting religious minorities (primarily Jews and Christians) the right to legal autonomy, to impose their own laws and courts on their own communities (primarily in matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance) – but as the law of the state, Sharia applied to everybody.
And among Jews, the vast majority believe that the Torah laws (with a few exceptions) were only meant to apply to Jews; and shouldn't be the law of the State of Israel prior to the coming of the Messiah. There is a minority who disagree (Kahanists, Hardal, some hardline Religious Zionists), and believe the modern State of Israel should implement Torah law today, but >95% of Jews worldwide disagree with them. Even the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews disagree with them.
So I really think drawing this kind of parallel between Islamic Sharia and Christianity or Judaism displays either a lack of understanding of all three religions, or else an excessive focus on very fringe minority positions. Although I also recognise that a lot of people drawing the parallel are actually complaining about attempts by conservative Christians (and to a lesser degree Jews) to legislate their own moral views on controversial social issues – but that isn't really akin to Islamic Sharia (except for the very fringe Christian reconstructionist/theonomist/Kahanist/etc minorities), since they are trying to amend secular law based on religion-influenced morality, quite unlike the Sharia approach of directly applying religious law to essentially secular issues such as murder cases or business contracts.
In 2021, during a visit to the Greek island of Mytilene, Pope Francis delivered one of the finest speeches I've ever read: > This great basin of water, the cradle of so many civilizations, now looks like a mirror of death. Let us not let our sea (mare nostrum) be transformed into a desolate sea of death (mare mortuum). Let us not allow this place of encounter to become a theatre of conflict. Let us not permit this “s…
With no opinion one way or another on the pope.. In the modern world this is a weird criteria to judge people on. I assume like every modern politician, he doesn't write his own speeches. A quite google search seems to confirm it https://cruxnow.com/church/2015/02/does-the-pope-write-his-o...
Even if Pope Francis gave the charge of writing his speeches to someone else, that would be an heavy responsability for that person.
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I rarely feel this way about someone of Pope Francis' age and social position, but I've genuinely admired Francis as a thinker. He was a bona fide Jesuit, through and through. The next pope has big shoes to fill.
Benedict seemed more academic, but Francis seemed more humane.
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> but in their hearts are capable of deciding I question both the organ and the action.
People downvote this guy because obviously nobody actually thinks with their blood-pumping organ. But as for the quote, it's incredibly clear how little empathy most people have towards others, to the point where AI will easily out-empathy them, both as a conversationalist and as a robotic assistant (such as a 24/7 robot nurse with no other patients).
Sorry but not everyone is an American.
And as Conway's law applies, of course AI done by American or Chinese companies will be oppressive - with only superficial politeness à la GladOS.
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There are still groups(at least I'm aware of them in Poland, I've met people who are part of them) who believe exactly this, that the second Vatican Sobor was a mistake and the "real" mass is only the one conducted in Latin.
It seems unlikely that Jesus spoke Latin at the last supper.
The focus on latin is a pure nitpicking and virtue signaling from the Conservatives (the irony!).
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> including rightfully limiting the Latin mass Why is that a political thing though? The mass of the roman church was for centuries (almost all it’s history?) in latin.
It's complicated. Few people in the church, including the priests themselves, are fluent in Latin (there's a story told, I think by Francis himself, about an diocese in England that required priests to pass an exam to give a Traditional Latin Mass, and almost none of the requesting priests could pass). The TLM obscures what the mass is about, which creates space for practitioners to substitute in their own things, wh…
Strictly speaking, as well as the Tridentine Mass, one can also have the current Mass in Latin. From what I've heard (never been to one to experience it first hand), Opus Dei centres worldwide say it almost every day. Outside Opus Dei, I believe it is quite niche – but, strictly speaking, all Catholic priests (of the Latin Church, or Eastern rite with Latin faculties) are allowed to say the current Mass in Latin, and Traditionis custodes didn't do anything to change that. I think few are interested, and from what I've heard, to try to prevent people shifting from Tridentine-in-Latin to current Mass-in-Latin, bishops have been quietly instructed by Rome to disallow it in practice, even if it is still formally allowed on paper. However, if a priest wants to say the new Mass in Latin privately, or to a small group which isn't widely advertised and flies below the radar, I think that is both officially allowed and likely in practice too. But, the linguistic competence concerns you mention about Tridentine-in-Latin apply equally to current Mass-in-Latin.
Quite separately, there is a history of the Tridentine Mass being translated into other languages, both in some cases authorised by Rome, and also by external groups such as Anglo-Catholic Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, Old Catholics, Polish National Catholic Church – I think all the cases of this in communion with Rome have all effectively lapsed through disuse. But still, it is another reason people ought to avoid equating Latin and Tridentine.
> The TLM obscures what the mass is about, which creates space for practitioners to substitute in their own things, which, as it happens, tends to be idiosyncratically ultra-conservative stuff. The church is a top-down institution, and the TLM gets in the way of that and divides it.
I think a big potential problem with what Pope Francis did – it made no difference to the quasi-schismatic SSPX, or the more explicitly schismatic groups to their right, who were very used to ignoring everything the Pope said (except maybe if they liked what he was saying on that occasion) – but it upset that minority of Catholics who were involved in the TLM within the Catholic Church proper, and potentially drove them into the arms of those more schismatic groups. Now, to what extent has that potential been fulfilled in practice, I don't have enough personal experience of this topic to say–but I'm sure it has happened in some cases, however many. And I know there are even quite a few conservative-leaning Catholics who weren't involved in TLM in practice, but found the decision upsetting, and it might increase the odds of them wandering off as well.
Of course, the people we are talking about are a small minority in comparison to over 1 billion Catholics worldwide. But most of that one billion are far from devout – people who rarely attend Mass. At the more devout end, at least in some geographies, those involved in TLM, or who aren't but were upset by this papal decision, are arguably much more significant. And much of the institutional strength of any religion comes from its devout minority, as opposed to millions of people who identify with it at some level but far more rarely actively engage with it.
So, I think even if one doesn't have any personal affinity for the Tridentine Mass, there are genuine reasons to question the prudence of this decision.
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It seems unlikely that Jesus spoke Latin at the last supper.
It was certainly not in Latin. It was either in Hebrew of in Greek. The focus on latin is a pure nitpicking and virtue signaling from the Conservatives (the irony!).
I think it was very likely mostly Aramaic, possibly with some Hebrew mixed in (certain set prayers, with Torah readings in Hebrew followed by extemporaneous Aramaic translation). By the 1st century, Jews had abandoned Hebrew as an everyday tongue, a situation which didn't change until Zionists revived it in the late 19th century (which caused great controversy, since the traditional Jewish belief was that Hebrew is a holy language which should be reserved for religious purposes only, a position still maintained by most non-Israeli ultra-Orthodox to this day.)
Putting aside any claims of supernatural linguistic abilities, Jesus of Nazareth would likely have been fluent in Aramaic (his native tongue), competent in using Hebrew for certain religious purposes (but not as a language of everyday life), possibly some limited ability in Greek (but probably not fluent), maybe a few words of Latin (but very unlikely to be fluent).
> The focus on latin is a pure nitpicking and virtue signaling from the Conservatives (the irony!).
The majority of TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) adherents care more about keeping the traditional Tridentine (pre-Vatican II) liturgy than about Latin in itself – Catholic priests are allowed to say the contemporary Mass in Latin (subject to certain conditions), but there is rather little demand for it.
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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:/…
Because it is. As your own link shows, later term abortions are for medical purposes. Any legislation restricting it is just adding liability for doctors, which results in harm to women because doctors are now second guessing themselves instead of focusing on the woman’s healthcare.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/raw-data-abor...
The “issue” being legislated against is non existent.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/raw-data-abor...
It is only politically popular due to disinformation and people liking the feeling of being morally superior to others. A tried and true strategy to winning votes.