17 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. Although there was not always consistency in practice — given that slavery was long tolerated before being unequivocally condemned — there has been a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being, created in the image of God, even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized. This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached. [176] It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.

      "Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope has ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes themselves played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels.”" - NBC News

  2. Jul 2025
  3. Jan 2024
  4. Dec 2023
    1. the Catholics are much more straightforward about these things they to everything so you know chimpanzees for instance according to Catholic dogma chimpanzees don't have souls when they die they 00:06:36 don't go to chimpanzee heaven or chimpanzee hell they just disappear now where are Neals in this scheme and if you think about this kid whose mother is a sapiens but whose father is a 00:06:49 neandertal so only his mother has a soul but his father doesn't have a soul and what does it mean about the kid does the kid have half a soul and if you say okay okay okay okay neander had Souls then 00:07:02 you go back a couple of million years and you have the same problem with the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees again you have a family a mother one child is the ancestor of 00:07:16 chimpanzees the other child is the an is our ancestor so one child has a soul and the other child doesn't have a soul
      • for: question - Catholic church claim - humans have a souls but other creatures do not

      • comment

      • question: Do only humans have souls?
        • Harari explores this question about the Catholic church's claim that humans have a soul and shows how messy it is
        • Where does "having a soul" begin or end, if we go down the evolutionary rabbit hole?
  5. Dec 2022
    1. By AD 500, the Christian Church had drawn most of the talented men of theage into its service, in either missionary, organizational, doctrinal, or purelycontemplative activity.—Edward Grant, Physical Science in the Middle Ages

      quote


      Google is like the Catholic Church both as organizers of information and society<br /> Just as the Catholic Church used funding from the masses to employ most of the smartest and talented to its own needs and mission from 500-1000 AD, Google has used advertising technology to collect people and employed them to their own needs. For one, the root was religion and the other technology, but both were organizing people and information for their own needs.

      Who/what organization will succeed them? What will its goals and ethics entail?

      (originally written 2022-12-11)

  6. Jul 2022
  7. Jun 2022
  8. Apr 2022
    1. In addition to the practical advantages of thiswriterly inertia, in a work for Catholic consumption (such as the editions of theeighteenth century produced for the seminary in Padua) a traditional definitionfor “terra” was necessary to avoid potential censorship; it was in any case also anaccurate description of what “terra” meant to the ancient authors whose worksthe Calepino was designed to help elucidate.

      I'm missing some context here. Why would alternate definitions of terra face censorship? Related to Galileo's trial and Lodovico delle Colombe's Contro il moto della terra? Or something like Paracelsus and Roman censorship – Johannes Faber’s 1616 report in context?

  9. Jan 2022
  10. Dec 2021
  11. Nov 2021
    1. “Evangelical militancy is often depicted as a response to fear,” she told me. “But it’s important to recognize that in many cases evangelical leaders actively stoked fear in the hearts of their followers in order to consolidate their own power and advance their own interests.”

      This sort of power dynamic in smaller individual churches sounds like the problems of power in the centralized Catholic church. In this case it's decentralized into thousands of smaller churches.

  12. Jul 2021
  13. Jun 2021
    1. Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism.

      The idea of Taylorism as a religion is intriguing.

      However, underlying it is the religion of avarice and greed.

      What if we just had the Taylorism with humanity in mind and took out the root motivation of greed?

      This might be akin to trying to return Christianity to it's Jewish roots and removing the bending of the religion away from its original intention.

      It's definitely the case that the "religion" is only as useful and valuable to it's practitioners as the practitioners allow. In the terms of the McLuhan-esque quote "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us." we could consider religion (any religion including Taylorism) as a tool. How does that tool shape us? How do we continue to reshape it?

      While I'm thinking about it, what is the root form of resilience that has allowed the Roman Catholic Church to last and have the power and influence it's had for two millennia?

  14. Mar 2021
    1. I've come across about 20 reference for Ivan Illitch over the past month. Not sure what is driving it. Some mentions are coming out of educator circles, others from programmers, some from what I might describe as "knowledge workers" (digital gardeners/Roam Cult/Obsidian crowds). One tangential one was from someone in the hyperlink.academy crowd.

      Here's a recent one from today that popped up within a thread shared in IndieWeb chat:

      Ivan Illich continues to be even more more relevant than he was at the height of his New Left popularity. Conviviality in the digital tools we use has continued to wither https://t.co/D88V6KL7Ez pic.twitter.com/OFDYTjXyCn

      — Count Bla (@123456789blaaa) March 15, 2021
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality look very interesting. Perhaps they've distilled enough that their ideas are having a resurgence?

  15. Aug 2020
    1. That restructuring of societies in Western Europe in turn also benefited the church, notes Henrich. "In some sense, the church is killing off clans, and they're often getting the lands in wealth," he says. "So this is enriching the church. Meanwhile, Europeans are broken down into monogamous, nuclear families and they can't re-create the complex kinship structures that we [still] see elsewhere in the world."

      If true, this is an astounding finding.

  16. Aug 2015