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Let us speak daggers of truth and let the participles fall where they may. ;-)
"He that has truth on his side is a fool as well as a
coward if he is afraid to own it because of other men's opinions."
Daniel Defoe. Sounds very Emerson.
Pope John Paul voiced sadness for centuries of Christian hatred of Jews, but stopped short of the explicit apology that many Jews had sought from him for the silence of the Vatican in the face of such evil. He irritated many by failing to refer specifically to the Holocaust or to the wartime role of Pope Pius XII. Many Jewish leaders accuse Pius of looking the other way while Hitler's henchmen sent Europe's Jews to their deaths.
In 1998, the Vatican apologized for Catholics who had failed to help Jews against Nazi persecution, but defended the record of Pius XII. There was no reference to the wartime Pontiff in the mid-March, 2000 speech.
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I cheer the Catholic hierarchy's admission of their more ancient sins. Something about their current corruption and their disasterous policy on over-population would've been much more to the point, however. They apologized to Galileo a few years ago, now they've gone further back in history.
Sorry, I'm not too impressed. It's not a saintly admission--it's more like a prison inmate's claim of repentance in front od the Parole Board. "Aren't we wonderful people for not chopping off people's heads any more?"
No, Mr Pope, you're not. Not for that reason, anyway. You have many wonderful people, but one deserves little credit for claiming to stop one's past evil actions, while continuing your current ones (population catastrophy).
Improving from an evil deserves far less applause than always doing good things in the first place. But you're the better for admitting the evil parts of your history (as distinct from the good stuff). You've covered the ancient part, anyway!
. Oh, the WW2 part was relatively recent. That's good, as far as it went--which wasn't half far enough. But the Pope then, Pius XII, should've stood up to the Nazis at least as courageously as the average saint, dontcha think?
. It's a small but encouraging start.
. So let's hear you say something about what's relevant NOW.
Some people haven't noticed that things have changed in the last two thousand years! We are not now being "fruitful" --not husbanding the Earth. Such a population as we have destroys everything; it does the opposite of replenishing the Earth.
We have the brains to figure out that there is a point beyond which multiplying human numbers prevents the replenishment that would happen--by automatic Gaian mechanisms--if we'd stop our ignorant behaviors. We know now that the Earth is perfectly capable of replenishing itself--vastly better than we could do. This is your brain; don't go home without it! Or to church!
On the right to reproduce: "Your freedom to swing your arms ends where my nose begins. So too with your ability to destroy food and living space, lower the quality of life, promote the spread of diseases. How many kids you have is everybody else's business. Your right of reproduction ends where my quality of life begins!
There are still a few of the old religions that claim that God will take care of any additional population in one of his famous "mysterious ways". Well, let's give God a little more credit than that! God probably thought he already took care of that horrible fate by giving humans a brain in the first place!! Any reasonable human brain can figure out such a simple progression of population... and stop it before the disasters.
He'd give man a brain that could figure out what actions replenished the Earth, and what, on the other hand, turned it into an acrid, smog-ridden quagmire, radiated by ultraviolet, and rained upon by acid; a planet where species are going extinct at an incredible rate, where God's proud handiwork is given not only no value beyond profit or survival, but is often just "in the way" of suppying an ever-increasing population.
At our present numbers, and given our human nature, God's handiwork is being negated.
We can see that "dominion over the Earth" is destructive nonsense if we take it to its logical extreme. We could no more do that --control everything-- than we could control with only our conscious thought how to pick up a pencil, or to manage the other second-to-second functioning of all the organs of our bodies.
The hierarchy of the Catholic Church can not claim any moral high ground while they promote a horrific number of children per family. It is an ethical and moral crime, if not yet a legal one. Your policy is today punished by death, just not your own.
Some say that was long ago; the church hierarchy has seen the error of their ways.
Suuuure they've changed. They've seen only the error of their old ways; they remain blind to the present. In old times, they directly caused the death of tens of thousands of people... by hanging or beheading them. So... are they better now? Now they INdirectly cause the death of tens of millions of people... by starvation, disease, or war. They are insuring the death of tens of millions of people, mostly children, by slooowww starvation and disease.
There were only a few million people on Earth at the time, and those were still in danger from lions, tigers, wolves, as well as simple diseases, small wars and other internal violence. The human population was barely holding up.
It's different now. In a dense population, we cannot blame --or at least we can understand-- a starving person eating the last seed instead of planting it; for not working to take care of the effects of his wastes, downstream. Even for taking food from a baby. Survival is a powerful instinct, and ethics are progressively dulled by constant population pressure. Imagine New York City spread everywhere over the Earth, or as it being better than anywhere that will be at that time.
Therefore, I think we can see the enemy of the world: the top political layer in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and perhaps a couple others. Perhaps a dozen old men apiece. If religion is to "bring knowledge into wisdom", then the Catholic hierarchy has failed utterly. I find myself joined in this condemnation by, as all the polls show, a vast majority of the members of that same church!
Obviously, we also condemn anyone's condemnation against people born black, gay, Jewish, Asian, female, left-handed, with the wrong language, color of hair or eyes, or, for the Catholics --dare I say it-- the Huguenots of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre.
However, it is very likely that the next generation of those corrupt hierarchies will hear from their members, saying what the Gaia Church has said. It is extremely likely that the future members of the Catholic hierarchy will say: "Ooops, a mistake was made in our history; please reduce your family size now."
I fully expect other religions to take up as their own --all that you and I have said... eventually. But how many million will die till then because of it?
Being as we've been so tough on the population crisis, we must respond to the Genesis One quote, "be fruitful and multiply. Fill the Earth and subdue it". The Earth is already fruitful and filled. Always was. All humans have done is to ruin parts of it. It's exactly our multiplication that's subtracting from it!
For the "multiply and subdue", those evils are for the Christian scholars to try to explain and counter. Besides, "fruitful" and "multiply" (if we take the first to mean crops or life in general, and the second to mean human population) are obviously contradictory.
I think of a church building itself as so totally sterile. No life whatsoever. Yes, there is a sort of awe, but its mostly just simple surprise at the scale of it. Rock. Concrete. A consequence of civilization. An attempt to recapture the awe and grandeur of nature; as opposed to a forest, which is its own best representation, being the thing in itself. We ask: which best represents a god?
I'll write my own fantasy of Dante's circles of hell, with the last and hottest hole being reserved for those who believe in a god "just in case" a god exists. I bet that most preachers would agree, but I'd also bet that most wouldn't make an issue of it.
We believe that people are good and altruistic simply because we're born that way, and because it's logical. (Studies do back this up, if not quite prove it.) Therefore, it's no more necessary to have any particular religion to force you to be good than for a shaman to make sacrifices to make the sun come up! We're good anyway! The sun comes up anyway!
The Gaia Church is not a faith. It takes nothing on faith. Is it a belief system? Well, careful; the phrase has many definitions and shadings. To fully believe in anything... requires proof. Proof gives us a better and better view of reality, and we find reality awesome! We deeply appreciate scientific proofs --look at the great view it gave us already. We expect even more.
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As an aside, it strikes me that although the Catholic Church invented the concept of the corporation ("making a body" --a fictional "pseudo-person"), when non-profit status is claimed, it is now the IRS that certifies these fictional people as truly altruistic saints. It is now the government that sanctifies these fictional "characters".
Paul d'Holbach, The System of Nature, 1770 (note: that's 1770, and things aren't quite that bad any more.):
"The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of nature. The pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his infancy, which interweave themselves with his existence, the consequent prejudice that warps his mind, that prevents his expansion, that renders him the slave of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error.
Nature tells man to consult reason, and to take it for his quide, religion teaches him that his reason is corrupted, that it is only a trecherous quide, given by a deceitful God to lead his creatures astray. Nature tells man to enlighten himself, to search after truth, to instruct himself in his duties; religion enjoins him to examine nothing, to remain in ignorance, to fear truth.