More Sin

The Rev. Ian Paisley seems to have an awful lot of free time on his hands now, doesn’t he?

I mean, he’s trolling Crooked Timber — I guess it’s a step up on trolling NI, but still.

probably shouldn’t call it self-negating sin, but can’t quite come with a phrase that fits.

Food and petroleum prices are soaring, and global pollution, deforestation, and desertification are eating away at the inhabitable land area. Super-slums, vast concentrations of urban misery are growing. The depletion of natural resources appears to be accelerating. Thus, a population correction seems inevitable.

I would be delighted to know what miraculous magic the Vatican intends to rely on to maintain indefinite population growth and increasing living standards.

Of course there’s always Catholic reproductive rates insuring a solid enough demographic block that after your “population correction” occurs there’s a significant amount of Catholics left to propagate that suddenly roomy world.
Seed bank demographics. You did think of that already, right?
Ken Kesey said clearly, though not in these words, back in the 70’s, that the inherent danger of simplistic yapping about over-population is the abetting of an impulse toward conscious selection of appropriate survivors in the dominant majority. Us gadfly outliers find that prospect very unappealing.
He also said specifically that it isn’t the numbers, it’s the way we’re living.
Reducing the amount of people in the world immediately problematic as it is, but without changing much else, merely gets you a smaller population. One still going in the wrong direction.

But doesn’t their facilitating aids epidemic somewhat alleviate the overpopulation problem they create?

And while acknowledging that “there is no definitive list of mortal sins”

You’d think they’d have taken care of that by at least the 8th century of the church’s existence.

It does suggest a contest to come up with a list of corresponding punishments for the new sins.

birth control: compelled to take temperature every morning, note relative viscosity of bodily fluids, keep chart detailing such in perpetuity. oh, wait…

stem cell research: forced to edit Conservapedia entries for all eternity

drug abuse: (if cocaine) endless Rummikub match with local Burger King franchisee obsessed with urinary tract infections and Johnny Paycheck
(if pot) Simpsons no longer funny
pollution: stuffed head-first into sleeping bag occupied by King Kong Bundy; last words you hear are “dutch oven”

According to the AP: “Vatican officials, however, stressed that Girotti’s comments broke no new ground on what constitutes sin.”

Of course not. What is and isn’t sinful is eternal and cannot change. The Catholic church just has to elaborate here and there and correct some of the ones it previously overlooked, or ignore the ones it previously overemphasized.

wow and i thought poking fun at Catholicism was passe. i guess the movie Dogma still has an audience after all.

seems like the new list of sins is not more silly (circular, redundant, inconsistent, etc) than say, the list of human rights presently embodied in international law, or, for that matter, any brief synopsis of moral or legal norms.

ditto #7.

In yet more sin news, according to Bloomberg (and others), the Vatican has updated its list of mortal sins to include ‘seven social sins'”.

Attribution of actions to “the Vatican” is always a tip-off that the reporter is getting something wrong. What we call “the Vatican” — the Roman Curia — does not (except through the active intervention of the Pope) operate as a unified institution, being a large selection of Congregations, Pontifical Councils (i.e., think tanks), Commissions, Tribunals, and Academies, each of which operates more-or-less independently, answering only to the Pope. If the reporter is keeping his or her facts straight, the report will always very carefully lay out who said it, what part of the Curia they represent and how, and in what context they said it. (The differences can be massive. Congregations, for instance, are authoritative; they are governing bodies. Pontifical Councils, on the other hand, are not authoritative at all; they are think tanks, whose mandate is to encourage beneficial policies and come up with ideas on a particular topic. These have a lot of freedom within their mandate; Tribunals on the other hand tend to be authoritative but have very restricted functions.)

What actually seems to have happened is that someone associated with one of these, namely a tribunal called the Apostolic Penitentiary (primarily the court of appeal for excommunications and dispensations), gave some examples of what he meant by the term ‘social sin’ in an interview. Saying ‘the Vatican is updating a list of sins’ is as utterly absurd and ridiculous as saying that casual examples of commonly violated rights, tossed off by the Deputy Secretary while making a point in an interview, means that the White House is revising the Bill of Rights.

I’m also not at all sure what Bloomberg and AP mean by saying that Girotti is the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary; the head of the Tribunal is the cardinal chief penitentiary, James Francis Stafford. Girotti, as regent, is a second-tier official.

You are such a spoil sport Brandon! There you go pouring water on what is a fundamental non-negotiable inviolate basic human right, second only to God murder (or god Murder. It depends on where you are coming from. Or going to, for that matter). Church Bashing is a scientific, enlightened, urbane, modern, pragmatic and rational birthright. And by God! We shall have it!. We don’t want to get irrational, do we?

Er… Sorry. You were rational. My bad.

And now the question: would like your job description to be “Deputy Secretary” or “Cardinal Chief Apostolic Penitentiary”?

A question: does anybody know if sin applies to corporate personhood?

It is absolutely baffling to me that a religion encrusted with dogma and burdened with a bloody history of persecution of thinkers has attracted the loyalty of outstanding individuals like Teilhard de Chardin, T.S. Eliot, and even Ernst Junger. The only explanation I can think of is some kind of bicameral structure of the mind, half temple of reason and half house of dogma.

In an era of equal rights for women, unprecedented discoveries about the structure of life, and astonishing advances in global communications, the efforts of a male-dominated, quasi-celibate Catholic hierarchy to legislate reality for hundreds of millions of people strike me as ludicrous.

oh snap. on the other hand it’s not clear how far people can be held responsible for stupidity. “bigotry” on the other hand might warrant inclusion.

How can something be asserted to be sinful and simultaneously be called “morally dubious”? If something is sinful its morality cannot by definition be in question.

5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

So Britain´s most powerful God botherer is going to spending quite a few millenia in the snake pit. It almost makes you want to believe in all that crap…

Hmmm. What if I consider Catholicism “morally dubious”?