1 Boring Old Man

from the left coaster:

American bishops warn Catholics that supporting a politician who is not anti-abortion is to be guilty of cooperating with a "grave evil." Evidently this is a worse sin than torture. Or preemtive war. Or even destroying the planet by over-consumption. No wonder this pope and his yes men are increasingly irrelevant to the real moral issues of our time. (I must say I find it weird that the guys who never got too worked up about pedophilia spend so much time worrying about the sanctity of stem cells.)

Bishops issue guidelines for Catholic voters

Catholic voters who back candidates because of their support for abortion or other "assaults on human life" would be "guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil," according to a statement adopted Wednesday by U.S. Catholic bishops. The bishops defined what they called "threats to the sanctity and dignity of human life" as human cloning, embryonic stem cell research, racism, torture and genocide. In the midst of the 2008 presidential campaign season, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops overwhelmingly endorsed an updated statement on faith and politics designed to help Catholics fulfill their political responsibilities to vote and run for office.

"It is not a voter guide," said Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn, N.Y., who presented a final version of the statement before the conference here. "It calls us as bishops to help form consciences for political life, not tell people how to vote or whom to vote for or against." The statement, titled "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility," outlined the bishops’ consensus on various topics, such as opposition to same-sex marriage and the death penalty, while providing a "consistent moral framework" for assessing political platforms.

"A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism, if the voter’s intent is to support that position," said the text. "In such cases, a Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil."…

^{By 1616 the attacks on Galileo had reached a head, and he went to Rome to try to persuade the Church authorities not to ban his ideas. In the end, Cardinal Bellarmine, acting on directives from the Inquisition, delivered him an order not to "hold or defend" the idea that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still at the centre. The decree did not prevent Galileo from discussing heliocentrism hypothetically. For the next several years Galileo stayed well away from the controversy…}

^{Pope Urban VIII personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism. He made another request, that his own views on the matter be included in Galileo’s book. Only the latter of those requests was fulfilled by Galileo. Whether unknowingly or deliberate, Simplicius, the defender of the Aristotelian Geocentric view in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was often caught in his own errors and sometimes came across as a fool. This fact made Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems appear as an advocacy book; an attack on Aristotelian geocentrism and defense of the Copernican theory….}

^{With the loss of many of his defenders in Rome because of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo was ordered to stand trial on suspicion of heresy in 1633. The sentence of the Inquisition was in three essential parts:}

• ^{Galileo was required to recant his heliocentric ideas; the idea that the Sun is stationary was condemned as "formally heretical." However, while there is no doubt that Pope Urban VIII and the vast majority of Church officials did not believe in heliocentrism, heliocentrism was never formally or officially condemned by the Catholic Church, except insofar as it held (for instance, in the formal condemnation of Galileo) that "The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures", and the converse as to the Sun’s not revolving around the Earth.}
• ^{He was ordered imprisoned; the sentence was later commuted to house arrest.}
• ^{His offending Dialogue was banned; and in an action not announced at the trial, publication of any of his works was forbidden, including any he might write in the future.}

^{After a period with the friendly Ascanio Piccolomini (the Archbishop of Siena), Galileo was allowed to return to his villa at Arcetri near Florence, where he spent the remainder of his life under house arrest, and where he later became blind…}

^{Galileo died on January 8, 1642. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando II, wished to bury him in the main body of the Basilica of Santa Croce, next to the tombs of his father and other relatives, and to erect a marble mausoleum in his honour. These plans were scrapped, however, after Pope Urban VIII and his nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, protested. He was instead buried in a small room next to the novices’ chapel at the end of a corridor from the southern transept of the basilica to the sacristy He was reburied in the main body of the basilica in 1737 after a monument had been erected there in his honour.}

^{The Inquisition’s ban on reprinting Galieo’s works was lifted in 1718 when permission was granted to publish an edition of his works (excluding the condemned Dialogue) in Florence. In 1741 Pope Benedict XIV authorized the publication of an edition of Galileo’s complete scientific works which included a mildly censored version of the Dialogue. In 1758 the general prohibition against works advocating heliocentrism was removed from the Index of prohibited books, although the specific ban on uncensored versions of the Dialogue and Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus remained. All traces of official opposition to heliocentrism by the Church disappeared in 1835 when these works were finally dropped from the Index. On 31 October 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for how the Galileo affair was handled, as the result of a study conducted by the Pontifical Council for Culture.}

Their opposition to Abortion is based on a similar devotion to the Narcissism of human kind. We can kill cows, and Kudzu, and insects looking for a meal in our gardens – but we cannot terminate pregnancy in a human being. Nevermind that the central "assault on human life" is our assault of the Planet Earth by overpopulation. Nevermind that a central "assault on human life" and experience is our production of unwanted children who carry those scars forever. So, in the post-Galileo version, the Church bows to science – the Earth is not the center of the universe, but holds on to the absurdity that man is the center of animal life. Jesus didn’t say that! Nowhere is it to be found in the "New Testament."