Posted on 05/05/2006 8:21:56 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
BELIEVING that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed yesterday.
Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a "destructive myth" had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.
He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a "kind of paganism" because it harked back to the days of "nature gods" who were responsible for natural events.
Brother Consolmagno argued that the Christian God was a supernatural one, a belief that had led the clergy in the past to become involved in science to seek natural reasons for phenomena such as thunder and lightning, which had been previously attributed to vengeful gods. "Knowledge is dangerous, but so is ignorance. That's why science and religion need to talk to each other," he said.
"Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism - it's turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do."
Brother Consolmagno, who was due to give a speech at the Glasgow Science Centre last night, entitled "Why the Pope has an Astronomer", said the idea of papal infallibility had been a "PR disaster". What it actually meant was that, on matters of faith, followers should accept "somebody has got to be the boss, the final authority".
"It's not like he has a magic power, that God whispers the truth in his ear," he said.
Since you're not being paid, go ahead. You will anyway :-)
That stuff squeezes in weird ways.
Even still, Max Planck had it right.
Science advances funeral by funeral.
What thread?
Then one has to explain to me how the plant life existed for millions of years with out the sun.Perhaps in the same way the plants didn't instantly die when zapped to life on cold sun-less rock?
I am not a physicist so I may be wrong but... motion relative to a "stationary reference" is but one way a time dilation rate difference may be observed, right? Two different places in space may also have an observable time dilation if the 'space' of one place is more "warped" than the other. The closer you get to a gravitational body such as a black hole, star, planet, the slower time "flows" compared to a place in space that is not as warped.
I sure hope I didn't butcher the terms too much...
I'm so opposed to posting on this thread that I'm not even logged in.
Well, I can think of something ... consider an anaconda, 50 feet long, arranged vertically with his head at the roof of a 5-story building and his tail at the ground level. Time is passing slightly slower on the ground, due to the stronger gravity there. So perhaps, like our anaconda, God could, within himself, experience various rates of time. I don't know what this means in the context of Genesis.
It would surprize me. Show me!
I'm having all the adventure I can handle this night, being a new, pleased, and somewhat horrified owner of a Cold Steel "chisa" katana.
O.M.F.FSM!
May your swash never buckle.
this thing is frightfully sharp, and quite lively despite being significantly heavier than a normal katana.
I'm being VERY respectful as I learn its handling.
I think I'd be wise to make a steel-core boken patterened after its weight and balance, just to be on the safe side as I familiarize myself... If I tag myself with *this* monster, it will be, ah, bad.
Is that Katana a sword of sorts?
That's more charitable than I had come to expect of you...
Cheers!
Can you get me a T-Shirt?
Charming and graceful as ever.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1593799/posts
a sword, yes. single edged, curved, two-handed, with a distinct wedge-like tip. though only a traditionally-forged, folded, multi-billet, differentially-quenched blade can be accurately called a real katana, any blade patterned closely after the Japanese archetype is usually called one.
Wow...that was quite a description...made me dizzy...
My dad had an interest in odd things...he had an immense collection of knives of all sizes, along with billy clubs and handcuffs...he also had a small collection of swords, maybe about 10 of them...one of them he called a katana..now I dont know if it was, as you say, a real katana, or just any blade patterned after the Japanese archetype...but he sure did love these types of things...
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