Is Pope Francis Bringing Christianity Back?

[why me]

Actually, Marxism is very utopian and millenialist -- in which communism means automatic harmony in a wonderful classless society, which Lord Bertrand Russell considered a religious view.  And, of course, Russell considered religion to be dangerous.  Very dangerous.

One of the problems that the world faced with the fall of communism was neoliberalism, a ramped up version of capitalism. And with it the pursuit of profit and consumerism and greed. And a lack of state intervention in the public sphere and the fall of welfare states in western europe which has not done well for the rate of poverty in europe. This has not helped climate change at all: t e he absolute quest for profits. Naomi Klein has written a great book about it. It is called: This Changes Everything. One cannot separate neoliberal globalization from climate change.

 

Unfortunately, the pope can not get too political but he has been critical of neoliberalism without mentioning the word. But he can not come out and say the word 'social(ism)'. Thus, his hands are tied with only non-ideologocial sentences to state his positions.

[Robert F. Smith]

If things go that way, that human die-off will take place over a good deal of time, not in just a few years. That's got nothing to do with the apocalypse.

The problem is that, with incremental ocean rise in the near term, low lying areas such as Bangladesh will have storm surges which kill millions and displace millions more.  India will not be able to absorb the refugees, which means major political destabilization and war.  This will come at the same time that the rain and snow of the Himalayas is reduced, and billions in China, India, and Southeast Asia are completely dependent upon that riverine water for survival.  That is merely one area of the world which your children will see fall into chaos, and in which nuclear weapons are readily available.

 

Fortress America will have more time to cope, and will hopefully not be hit by ICBMs -- once local wars start.

[Robert F. Smith]

One of the problems that the world faced with the fall of communism

There was no "fall of communism," since it never existed, except as a utopian dream of Marxist theoreticians.   Socialism as the dictatorship of the proletariat was considered by Marxists as a major first step on the road to the communist ideal.  But that could come only after the withering away of the socialist state, which of course never happened.

 

Unfortunately, the pope can not get too political but he has been critical of neoliberalism without mentioning the word. But he can not come out and say the word 'social(ism)'. Thus, his hands are tied with only non-ideologocial sentences to state his positions.

Socialism in Europe has been democratic socialism, about which Americans know nearly nothing, and it has actually been quite successful.  However, we do have a mixed economy here in the States, which includes elements of socialism.

[thesometimesaint]

I won't argue with you; you are correct that there will be upheavals if things keep going the way they seem to be going. But I don't think we have any guarantees that things will continue the way they seem to. The world's climate is cannot by any stretch of the imagination be reduced to a simple model. What I am most afraid of is the tendency of politicians to be swayed by "solutions" that look good from some politically correct viewpoint but that don't actually work in reality. And I am afraid that such "solutions" may cost enormously in terms of human suffering, money, and opportunity, and then don't work, or make things worse.

And I absolutely agree with you that we need science to make fusion work. I believe that this will eventually be successful in development. But how long will it take?

To be totally speculative, and I can't even imagine how it could be done, imagine the great use it would be to have a black hole for energy production!

If we could create (or capture) a small black hole, then we could feed matter into its event horizon in a controlled flow, and thus produce prodigious amounts of energy. In fact, we could feed waste material of all sorts into its event horizon and kill two birds with one stone. It seems possible to capture a small black hole because black holes actually have electrical charges, and we could contain such a hole by surrounding it with a magnetic bottle (actually, a spherical bottle). In order to be successful, however, the hole would have to be quite small, or else the energy needed to keep the hole centered within a magnetic field, and to keep the system in a stationary position would be prohibitive. Fortunately, the energy available from allowing matter to fall into the black hole could easily be used for this stationkeeping. The problem inherent to this idea is that due to Hawking Radiation, very small black holes (with the mass of, say, Mauna Kea in Hawaii), would evaporate in very short order (in seconds), radiating unimaginable amounts of energy, meaning that any such holes that might have been created in the Big Bang disappeared long ago. You'd have to have a black hole with a mass around that of the Moon in order to be stable enough to be usable. So, looking at the mass of the Moon as a lower-limit on size (and possibly an upper limit as well!), that seems like quite a tall order.

In fact, the most convenient way to go about this would be to take the Moon and squeeze it down until it collapsed into a black hole. A black-hole Moon would still be able to raise tides on Earth as before, so that's good, but it would no longer shine in the night (because it would be about a tenth of a millimeter in diameter, and surrounded by the structure of a magnetic bottle energy injection and collection system. And no more solar eclipses! Nuts.

 

I'm not that pessimisstic.

[Stargazer]

We won't be able to adapt quickly enough, although fusion is an answer in the long term -- it will give us unlimited energy and allow us to do some terraforming (on a grand scale).  Billions will die in the interim.

Humans will not adapt to this by evolving biologically. That would take too long. Humans will adapt by shaping their environments. For example, the Inuit people lived in incredibly cold and difficult conditions much of the year, and they adapted not by growing hair all over their bodies and becoming like polar bears, but by fashioning highly efficient clothing, shelters, and implements. They even adjusted their diets. During the medieval warm period, Europeans colonized parts of Greenland that became, temporarily, suitable for the kind of crops and animals that they were used to. When the MWP ended, they had to leave, because they failed to adapt (or didn't want to start eating seals and whales). So it will be with some of us. When it becomes too hot at the equator (if it does), the higher latitudes will become more habitable, and so people will move there. And some will stay and figure out how to live in the hotter climate.

Things are always changing! We might even get hit by that asteroid some day and no amount of carbon sequestration will save us then.

I doubt very seriously that billions of people will die due to global warming. Or even millions. Not directly, anyway. People migrating due to global warming could cause problems.

[Stargazer]

I'm not that pessimisstic.

I'm not either, but when you're responding to people in a panic you tend to temporarily adopt some of their fears, if only to better address those fears.

In fact, I bet that global warming will ultimately be a good thing, and will end up increasing human wellbeing in the long run.

[Tony Frank]

If you won't take Rory's word for it, there is an easy way to establish the truth of his claim. Would you agree that St. Thomas Aquinas was a preeminent Catholic thinker, one of the most influential to this day?

 

OK. St. Thomas Aquinas looms large in the Catholic realm. Give me what you have on St. Thomas Aquinas being a prophet or having revelation or prophecy, something that contradicts my statement that the Catholic Church maintains that there will be no prophecy or revelation beyond what is contained in the Bible.

[Robert F. Smith]

Humans will not adapt to this by evolving biologically. That would take too long. Humans will adapt by shaping their environments. For example, the Inuit people lived in incredibly cold and difficult conditions much of the year, and they adapted not by growing hair all over their bodies and becoming like polar bears, but by fashioning highly efficient clothing, shelters, and implements. They even adjusted their diets. During the medieval warm period, Europeans colonized parts of Greenland that became, temporarily, suitable for the kind of crops and animals that they were used to. When the MWP ended, they had to leave, because they failed to adapt (or didn't want to start eating seals and whales). So it will be with some of us. When it becomes too hot at the equator (if it does), the higher latitudes will become more habitable, and so people will move there. And some will stay and figure out how to live in the hotter climate.

Things are always changing! We might even get hit by that asteroid some day and no amount of carbon sequestration will save us then.

I doubt very seriously that billions of people will die due to global warming. Or even millions. Not directly, anyway. People migrating due to global warming could cause problems.

I said nothing about people dying from heat.  They will simply die from the overall consequences of global warming -- catastrophic rise in ocean levels, which makes Holland, Bangladesh, and Miami uninhabitable.  Evacuating Holland and Miami are doable.  Bangladesh not.  Major droughts, freak weather on a scale not seen in recent history, and the like will dog us and bring Malthusian disasters in their wake.  Pretending or hoping will not adequately compensate for our failure to act expeditiously when we still had time to make major adjustments.  It is now too late.

[Stargazer]

That is a scary possibility. The worst possibility is that our planet becomes like Venus, but thank goodness there is not enough evidence for that.

For all that there are people who like to point at Venus as an example of runaway greenhouse effect, there is no way of knowing why Venus like it is. The fact that Venus is roughly the same size as earth, yet receives hugely more solar irradiance, seems to me to be more than a sufficient explanation for its extremely high temperatures. Of course, having an atmosphere that is thicker than Earth's, Venus is going to trap heat just from that reason alone.

When Earth becomes subject to such extremes of solar irradiance, in a billion years or so, we'll be much hotter, too. And it won't be because of runaway greenhouse.

[thesometimesaint]

I'm not either, but when you're responding to people in a panic you tend to temporarily adopt some of their fears, if only to better address those fears.

In fact, I bet that global warming will ultimately be a good thing, and will end up increasing human wellbeing in the long run.

 

Panic never did anyone any good. However it does stop rational steps from being taken. We can solve this problem. Use less, use it more efficiently, save the remainder.

 

Eventually it may. All things change given enough time. But I doubt our granchildren will appreciate our lack of doing what we can. Fighting the problems we have today will let our children, and grandchildren, fight their own.

[Stargazer]

but climate change damage will be more expensive than anything else. Climate Change will cost  $43 trillion dollars in damage.

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2807.html

Trying to stop climate change may cost trillions of dollars, too, and is most likely going to fail. In my humble opinion.

 

Climate Change will probably not end humanity, but it will cause significant damage.

That much is certain.

 

We need more scientists and more science funding.

I have no argument with that.

Our planet is warming fast. It could get 2 degrees warmer in just a couple of decades.

That's interesting, because during the last interglacial period it was warmer than that. The North Sea alone was 2 degrees warmer than in the present, and the sea level was 8 meters higher than now. The climate was also more unstable during that interglacial, with sudden shifts that we haven't seen the like of during this interglacial.

I do wonder if the advent of agriculture, with the changes in carbon sequestration that resulted, in fact caused this interglacial to become more stable than many of the previous ones. If so, then humans have been happily responsible for a very good thing. That's my speculation, though. As has been pointed out, correlation is not causation.

[Stargazer]

I said nothing about people dying from heat.  They will simply die from the overall consequences of global warming -- catastrophic rise in ocean levels, which makes Holland, Bangladesh, and Miami uninhabitable.  Evacuating Holland and Miami are doable.  Bangladesh not.  Major droughts, freak weather on a scale not seen in recent history, and the like will dog us and bring Malthusian disasters in their wake.  Pretending or hoping will not adequately compensate for our failure to act expeditiously when we still had time to make major adjustments.  It is now too late.

The adjustments that need to be made are not adjustments to stop the global warming juggernaut. King Cnut knew very well that a royal command could not stop the tide. Stopping me from burning leaves in my back yard will not help, either. Even if we got the People's Republic to go totally nuclear and stop burning coal and driving a billion cars would not help either.

Well, I guess Bangladesh is doomed, then. What a casual dismissal! But India will be forced to accommodate the Bangladeshi who run ahead of the tides. Not even the Indian Army will be able to stop the tide of people. Bangladesh doesn't have nuclear weapons, and why would India think nuking Bangladesh could stop people from fleeing Bangladesh? It seems more likely to make people flee faster.  India's nukes pose no danger to Bangladesh, just for that reason.  There's no mutual assured destruction.

[thesometimesaint]

The adjustments that need to be made are not adjustments to stop the global warming juggernaut. King Cnut knew very well that a royal command could not stop the tide. Stopping me from burning leaves in my back yard will not help, either. Even if we got the People's Republic to go totally nuclear and stop burning coal and driving a billion cars would not help either.

Well, I guess Bangladesh is doomed, then. What a casual dismissal! But India will be forced to accommodate the Bangladeshi who run ahead of the tides. Not even the Indian Army will be able to stop the tide of people. Bangladesh doesn't have nuclear weapons, and why would India think nuking Bangladesh could stop people from fleeing Bangladesh? It seems more likely to make people flee faster.  India's nukes pose no danger to Bangladesh, just for that reason.  There's no mutual assured destruction.

 

When you find yourself in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging. We keep digging at a faster and faster rate.

[Stargazer]

Panic never did anyone any good. However it does stop rational steps from being taken. We can solve this problem. Use less, use it more efficiently, save the remainder.

 

Eventually it may. All things change given enough time. But I doubt our granchildren will appreciate our lack of doing what we can. Fighting the problems we have today will let our children, and grandchildren, fight their own.

 

Again with the "do something" disease.  WHAT is to be done to stop it?  WHAT is going to work?  So far, in all the verbal vomiting we hear about doing something, nobody has come up with anything that is going to stop the problem.  We here in the US are more efficient at using our resources, but that's because we don't have to slash and burn in order to grow our crops.  

 

And getting some people in the US (and let's add Canada to the mix) to be more efficient with resources and save what we don't need to use is not going to matter a hootin' holler if the other 80% of the world population is throwing carbon into the atmosphere like there's no tomorrow.  India alone has 42.5 million cows that fart methane at a rate of 80kg per cow per year.  That's 3.4 million tons of methane per year.  And they can't eat them and they can't kill them.  Not legally, anyway.  So, I guess we have to attach hoses to those cows and collect the methane.  And just where do we put it?  WHAT do you do about the cows?  And I don't want to seem to be picking on India, so what about OUR 100 million cows?  But it's worse than that, because there are about 1.2 billion large ruminants on the earth today, and every single one of them is a methane factory.  Assuming the conservative value of 80kg per ruminant per year, that's a total of 96 million metric tons of methane every year.  And methane is a more efficient heat retainer than carbon dioxide ever thought of being (23x the warming potential).  See Ruminants and Climate Change.

 

This is why I say we must kill all the cows.  And goats, sheep, deer, antelopes, giraffes and yaks.  No more wildebeest, either!.  Santa's sleigh will have to be drawn by horses.

 

Ah yes, horses.  They are not ruminants, and don't fart methane.  They also taste just fine; i once ate horsemeat, when on my mission, and it tasted great!  And there will still be pigs.

 

You see, the most effective way to reduce our worldwide carbon footprint (killing all the ruminants) is something that nobody would advocate.  They'll go around exchanging carbon credits, tut-tutting China for burning coal (but not do anything about it), and other useless politically-correct measures (like building more windfarms), but ultimately nothing effective will be done.

 

We'd be better off anticipating what the effects are going to be, and preparing for them.  But we won't do that, will we?  We'll just fiddle while Terra burns.

 

OK, I am not going to add any more AGW to this thread.  I think it's been hijacked sufficiently as it is.  

 

Although i will say to TSS that yes we must stop digging, but again the question is HOW?  What will work to stop the digging?  There's not enough political will in the world to do anything useful that would cover all bases.  The problem cuts across national boundaries, and there is no state upon the Earth that will willingly cut its own throat so as to help save the world.

 

So again, prepare for what WILL happen BECAUSE we can't stop it.  Stop hyperventilating about causes and get ready for the inevitable.

Edited October 26, 2015 by Stargazer

[LesleyOi]

일산건마 ≪드라마≫ Opyo01。CoM 일산휴게텔【오피요】 장항오피 장항건마 장항동건마

일산오피 ≪드라마≫ Opyo01。CoM 일산휴게텔【오피요】 장항오피 장항건마 장항동건마!ENDVALUE!

[LesleyOi]

일산오피 ≪드라마≫ Opyo01。CoM 일산휴게텔【오피요】 장항오피 장항건마 장항동오피

일산오피 ≪드라마≫ Opyo01。CoM 일산휴게텔【오피요】 장항오피 장항건마 장항동건마!ENDVALUE!

[LesleyOi]

일산오피 ≪드라마≫ Opyo01。CoM 일산휴게텔【오피요】 장항오피 장항건마 장항동오피

일산오피 ≪드라마≫ Opyo01。CoM 일산휴게텔【오피요】 장항오피 장항건마 장항동오피!ENDVALUE!

[LesleyOi]

일산오피 ≪드라마≫ Opyo01。CoM 일산휴게텔【오피요】 장항오피 장항건마 장항동오피

일산건마 ≪드라마≫ Opyo01。CoM 일산휴게텔【오피요】 장항오피 장항건마 장항동건마!ENDVALUE!

[LesleyOi]

일산건마 ≪드라마≫ Opyo01。CoM 일산휴게텔【오피요】 장항오피 장항건마 장항동오피

일산오피 ≪드라마≫ Opyo01。CoM 일산휴게텔【오피요】 장항오피 장항건마 장항동오피!ENDVALUE!

[volgadon]

OK. St. Thomas Aquinas looms large in the Catholic realm. Give me what you have on St. Thomas Aquinas being a prophet or having revelation or prophecy, something that contradicts my statement that the Catholic Church maintains that there will be no prophecy or revelation beyond what is contained in the Bible.

In the Latin West, the attitude of the scholastics to prophecy was complex, but for the famed doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas, revelation still stood at the basis of God's relationship to man.

"Thomas Aquinas expresses in his De ente et essentia the relationship between the Creator and the fallen creature. According to the idea of the analogia entis, an analogy will always exist between God and man. This analogy is based in man’s being created in God’s image, which is expressed primarily in man’s reason, the direct place of encounter between him and God. For Thomas and the entire Scholastic tradition, reason is seen as the umbilical cord between God and man, and yet reason in itself will never suffice to fully understand and know God. Even if the analogia entis teaching expresses that there is and remains an analogy between God and man, it is far more important to acknowledge in this analogy a greater difference: while man and God can meet, this meeting can occur only on the condition that God never can be completely or fully comprehended.

This continued analogy guarantees the possibility that God can lift the veil that lies between himself and man and communicate himself to man. Although before the Fall there was continued openness, after it revelation was required whereby man might commune with God. And if the continued analogy makes continued revelation possible, God’s love makes it necessary. During the entire history of Israel, the prophets are the champions of continued openness and communication between God and man, his instruments through which he seeks to reestablish the broken unity. It is this revealing activity of God’s love that is continued in the vocation of the Christian prophets, whereby Christian prophecy may be seen as the most immediate expression of God’s revealing activity. It is immediate because not only is it a sign of God’s general revealing activity, but it is, in itself, a type of experienced revelation."[9]

Here, too, man experiences direct communication from God, and this experience is to culminate in man's ultimate goal- union with God.

"Prophecy is revealing in its mode, inasmuch the prophet considers his or her experience a form of direct communication from God through which God reveals his truths. Second, Prophecy is revealing in its scope, inasmuch as God through the prophet seeks to attain the goal of his activity, namely, to lead man back to his original union with God."[10]

[9]Niels Christian Hvidt, Christian Prophecy: the Post Biblical Tradition, p. 124

[10]Ibid., p. 125.

http://calba-savua.blogspot.com/2013/09/celebrations-of-learned-men-nibley.html?m=1

Edited October 26, 2015 by volgadon

[Scott Lloyd]

and that is what Pope Francis is doing. Many Americans don't like that stuff he is saying. 

I also like the fact that he saying that climate change is the greatest threat to the poor and weak. 

It is a moral issue and should be a bipartisan issue. 

 

PS Many here are extremely tired of that topic, but Christianity should be compassion. 

 

 

Global warming? When did Jesus talk about global warming?

 

 

Oh, dear.  So you only live by the words of Jesus that He uttered 2000 years ago?  No continuing revelation?  No application of His words to our current day by someone in authority?

 

By chance, you're not an evangelical, are you?

 

Apparently you did not pick up on the fact that my post was a gentle mockery of TheSkepticChristian who was trying to derail the Elder Oaks separation of church and state thread by incessantly asking the irrelevant question, "Where did Jesus talk about religious freedom?" and by putting up distracting graphics in post after post. I started this thread for him (he can't start threads of his own) as a means of giving him someplace to vent without hijacking or trying to shout down the other thread.

 

Perhaps you can see the irony (some might call it hypocrisy) of his connecting the teachings of Jesus with climate change with no clearer of a tie-in to the Biblical teachings of Jesus than there is a tie-in between religious freedom and the Biblical teachings of Jesus.

 

Incidentally, I can make a case that Jesus Christ talked about principles embodied in the U.S. Constitution -- and referred directly thereto -- in revelations contained in the Doctrine and Covenants. Perhaps TheSkepticChristian does not accept the Doctrine and Covenants revelations as containing the authentic words of Jesus Christ, but his unbelief is not binding on others -- particularly on this board, which is primarily intended to discuss the beliefs of Mormonism.

 

Oh, dear.  So you only live by the words of Jesus that He uttered 2000 years ago?  No continuing revelation?  No application of His words to our current day by someone in authority?

 

Why don't you pose that question to TheSkepticChristian? It was he who tried to sabotage the other thread by haranguing us about whether Jesus said anything about religious freedom.

Edited October 26, 2015 by Scott Lloyd

[Scott Lloyd]

Well,

 

I vaguely recall a passage about ice flowing...

 

And I also vaguely recall at least one other passage about the earth being renewed to a garden state.

 

Are such things associated with global cooling?

Apparently you did not pick up on the fact that my post was a gentle mockery of TheSkepticChristian who was trying to derail the Elder Oaks separation of church and state thread by incessantly asking the irrelevant question, "Where did Jesus talk about religious freedom?" and by putting up distracting graphics in post after post. I started this thread for him (he can't start threads of his own) as a means of giving him someplace to vent without hijacking or trying to shout down the other thread.

 

Perhaps you can see the irony (some might call it hypocrisy) of his connecting the teachings of Jesus with climate change with no clearer of a tie-in to the Biblical teachings of Jesus than there is a tie-in between religious freedom and the Biblical teachings of Jesus.

 

Incidentally, I can make a case that Jesus Christ talked about principles embodied in the U.S. Constitution -- and referred directly thereto -- in revelations contained in the Doctrine and Covenants. Perhaps TheSkepticChristian does not accept the Doctrine and Covenants revelations as containing the authentic words of Jesus Christ, but his unbelief is not binding on others -- particularly on this board, which is primarily intended to discuss the beliefs of Mormonism.

Edited October 26, 2015 by Scott Lloyd

[Scott Lloyd]

Don't you believe in continuous revelation?  Was global warming or climate change an issue when Jesus lived?

 

Well it is today.

Apparently you did not pick up on the fact that my post was a gentle mockery of TheSkepticChristian who was trying to derail the Elder Oaks separation of church and state thread by incessantly asking the irrelevant question, "Where did Jesus talk about religious freedom?" and by putting up distracting graphics in post after post. I started this thread for him (he can't start threads of his own) as a means of giving him someplace to vent without hijacking or trying to shout down the other thread.

 

Perhaps you can see the irony (some might call it hypocrisy) of his connecting the teachings of Jesus with climate change with no clearer of a tie-in to the Biblical teachings of Jesus than there is a tie-in between religious freedom and the Biblical teachings of Jesus.

 

Incidentally, I can make a case that Jesus Christ talked about principles embodied in the U.S. Constitution -- and referred directly thereto -- in revelations contained in the Doctrine and Covenants. Perhaps TheSkepticChristian does not accept the Doctrine and Covenants revelations as containing the authentic words of Jesus Christ, but his unbelief is not binding on others -- particularly on this board, which is primarily intended to discuss the beliefs of Mormonism.

Edited October 26, 2015 by Scott Lloyd

[TheSkepticChristian]

Perhaps you can see the irony (some might call it hypocrisy) of his connecting the teachings of Jesus with climate change with no clearer of a tie-in to the Biblical teachings of Jesus than there is a tie-in between religious freedom and the Biblical teachings of Jesus.

 

Climate Change is a problem, religious freedom alarmism is not.  Jesus was worried about the poor, not about the politics of religious freedom. 

Edited October 26, 2015 by TheSkepticChristian

[Zakuska]

Climate Change is a problem, religious freedom alarmism is not.  Jesus was worried about the poor, not about the politics of religious freedom. 

 

Jesus wasn't worried about climate change alarmism either. Word is it's going to get real hot right before he gets back. Why do we need to worry about the inevitable?  He'll be able to change the weather to a balmy 75 degrees at will or so the scriptures say.

.