Thats all.
RIP
RIP
The Pope just died
- Thread starter Repack
- Start date
I actually think it's for real this time.
BBC has the story....but CNN is slow.......
BBC has the story....but CNN is slow.......
yep 9:37 or something like that. To bad he was a good guy.
It's true 9:37PM in Rome (2:37 EST). RIP to an amazing leader! 
The soviets were afraid of him. He was an integral part of ending the arms race. Appologized for sins of the catholic race.chicodude01 said:
WOW...he apologized, I feel better now, and all the kids who got raped by priests are all the sudden better. Not that he did anything wrong, just saying who the hell cares if he apoligizedRip said:
I think popes are overrated.
well thats just great.
I just lost 50 bucks.
I placed all of my money on mon.
I just lost 50 bucks.
I placed all of my money on mon.
Yeah...not like back in the Gilded Age of the Papacy, you know, when the Pup was basically emperor of Europe (1300sish).specialist said:
I'm probably going to offend a ton of people here, but I really think the Catholic Church (actions and history, not its beliefs) has done more harm than good to the human race.
Now this thread is bound straight to PolyHell...
I completely agree, it's just the worlds largest business thriving on people who feel they need to believe in something to give meaning to their life....Now I suppose if you believe in God and an after life thats up to you and I don't really care, it's just I hate the fact that religions make you believe the same thing as millions of other people, and threaten what happens to you in the "after life" if you do not comply....seems like a screwed up way to live if you ask me. I mean people kill each other because they have had it beaten into their head that only their beliefs are right...alright I'm done rantingblue said:
D
d-sop
Guest
thats awesomeJekyll800 said:
how is that awesome he just lost money you ****ing dumbassd-sop said:
stratguy1618 said:
its ok. It balances out the money I won on the schiavo death pool.
McT said:
Toss in another 10 bucks and we have a deal.
Too bad. He was supposedy the best pope ever. First NON Italian in 800 years.
Wow - the antagonism towards this past pope is pretty strong, I'm surprised considering as far as papal leader goes, this one was pretty cool...
I hope whoever is elected next to this position is as surprisingly liberal as this one. Not referring to the AIDS epidemic, but:
Robert Fulford's column about Pope John Paul II
(The National Post, December 21, 1999)
There's never been anyone like Pope John Paul II, that fierce intellectual with the charisma of a rock star. Old and infirm, slow in speech and step, he nevertheless remains unstoppable. Even his schedule seems superhuman: In the first 17 days of December he gave 25 speeches, long and short, to crowds large and small. But while this public side of him remains astonishing, there's another side, just as surprising, that emerges from his written works. To read a thick sheaf of papal encyclicals and speeches, as I've been doing lately, is to expand and alter one's view of him.
Early in 1979, in his first encyclical, he noted that the Church was preparing for a great jubilee in 2000. He added that in the intervening years he wanted to change the Church by inspiring a new evangelical spirit and renewed ecumenism. After 20 years there's little evidence that those particular hopes have been fulfilled. But something else has happened. John Paul has turned himself into a one-man Church renewal, generating so much energy by his ideas that he and the Church can't be ignored. In the last two decades of the century, this has been one of the great performances on the world stage. As Roman Catholicism finally turns toward the year of bimillennial celebration, the most remarkable fact about that ancient institution is the nature of the man who leads it.
Even if he had done nothing else, global politics would have given him a place in history. When the Soviet empire died, he became the only pope of this millennium who has watched and encouraged the crumbling of the Church's chief worldly enemy. And, unlike many popes, he has made the Vatican bureaucracy his servant rather than his master and manager. He's also the most literary of popes, a sometime poet and playwright for whom the world exists first of all in the form of words.
He must be the most prolific pope ever. He sends out to the world an unceasing torrent of ideas and exhortations, almost instantly available in several languages at www.vatican.va. He will leave a literary record without precedent in the history of religion. Presumably he maintains a platoon of ghost writers, each of them able to hit unerringly the same tone -- solemn, learned, and just slightly tentative.
The words can occasionally be empty sloganeering ("As the family goes, so goes the nation!"), but more often they carry weight and potency. You sense pressure behind the writing, an urgency. The style is often subtle and effective. In one place he speaks of people acting ethically, "according to a free and rightly tuned will." The tuning of the will -- that's a commonplace thought expressed eloquently in uncommon language.
His ideas are sometimes eccentric, an odd quality in a pope. He tends to present Christianity as a series of literary devices, figures of speech. To notice this is not to question his faith but to consider the shape that it takes in his mind. At certain times, reading him is like reading a Protestant literary critic, such as Northrop Frye.
Last July he brought this approach to his discussions of heaven and hell. To the surprise and alarm of many, he casually reconfigured Catholic images of the afterlife. As he spoke about them, on two successive Wednesdays, he managed to make both places sound like poetic imagery rather than "real" sites of divine or satanic reality. He seems to have concluded that, just like the story of Adam and Eve, heaven and hell are metaphors -- or, at most, states of mind.
Heaven is the human being's meeting with God, he said. No surprise there. But he added: "Metaphorically speaking, heaven is understood as the dwelling place of God." Metaphorically speaking? For centuries, heaven has existed in the Christian imagination as a real place. True, philosophers, back to Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, have speculated on its metaphorical quality, but who knew that a pope could think and speak this way? But then, John Paul is a philosopher. He loves the rigours of philosophy and sees much of life as a seminar on truth.
A week after the talk about heaven, he had more striking news. Hell, he said, is not a punishment imposed by God, despite what everyone has always said. No, it's just an unwise choice that humans make. The images of hell in scripture, he suggested, are taken too literally. Actually, hell is the condition of those who separate themselves from God, "the pain, frustration and emptiness of life without God." Artists trying to follow scripture have depicted hell as a world of fire controlled by devils with pitchforks. The Pope thinks those are metaphors, every one of them.
The Pope has severely criticized postmodern thought, which he sees as a means of dissolving belief in universal truth. A dominant view has emerged in the humanities: We should not think we are working toward the truth, because it doesn't exist; we are all working toward the selection of truths that will be best suited to our own lives. It's a question of values. You have yours, I have mine, and the political bosses of China have theirs.
The Pope vehemently refutes this view: There is universal human truth, he says, and we should all seek it. Truths, if important, don't differ from place to place. "If something is true, then it must be true for all people and at all times." He's a universalist, obviously.
But at the same time, he shows a distinctly postmodern side. He's the first pope for whom multiculturalism has acquired vivid meaning, and the first who has carefully studied what the universities call comparative religion. He may be the first to see Catholic truth as one truth among many, though clearly the superior one.
Last year, in the encyclical Faith and Reason, he pointed out that people in all human cultures have asked the same questions: "Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going?" He finds those questions in the texts of Hinduism, in Confucius, Lao-Tze, the Buddha and, for that matter, in Homer, Euripides and Sophocles. He insists that Catholics should look to these writings for wisdom. In answering the great questions, he says, "every people has its own native and seminal wisdom."
That's a postmodern idea. The Church has always tried to teach other races, and on its best days has done so with kindness. It has also learned from the ancient pre-Christian philosophers. But learning about spiritual matters from other races is hardly an ancient habit of the Church. John Paul II also insists that Catholics should learn from India about liberating the spirit "from the shackles of time and space." And they should draw on the wisdom of China, Japan and other Asian countries, as well as "the riches of the traditional cultures of Africa, which are for the most part orally transmitted." All of this, while less arresting than the material about heaven and hell, makes surprising reading.
Pope John Paul defends freedom ("There is no morality without freedom"), but it's a fairly selective freedom. During his time as Pope, priests and professors have been rebuked and replaced for heresy. Yet his own words often stray some distance from orthodoxy. Earlier popes would look with grave suspicion on his views about heaven and hell, and would be baffled by his affection for the ideas of heathens, pagans, etc. It may be that he's decided to allow himself liberties he wouldn't grant others. Can it be that heresy is a privilege reserved for the Pope? Is it possible that the words of a pope are by definition heresy-free? Those are among the more compelling and startling of the questions raised by a reading of his words.
http://www.robertfulford.com//JohnPaul.html
I hope whoever is elected next to this position is as surprisingly liberal as this one. Not referring to the AIDS epidemic, but:
Robert Fulford's column about Pope John Paul II
(The National Post, December 21, 1999)
There's never been anyone like Pope John Paul II, that fierce intellectual with the charisma of a rock star. Old and infirm, slow in speech and step, he nevertheless remains unstoppable. Even his schedule seems superhuman: In the first 17 days of December he gave 25 speeches, long and short, to crowds large and small. But while this public side of him remains astonishing, there's another side, just as surprising, that emerges from his written works. To read a thick sheaf of papal encyclicals and speeches, as I've been doing lately, is to expand and alter one's view of him.
Early in 1979, in his first encyclical, he noted that the Church was preparing for a great jubilee in 2000. He added that in the intervening years he wanted to change the Church by inspiring a new evangelical spirit and renewed ecumenism. After 20 years there's little evidence that those particular hopes have been fulfilled. But something else has happened. John Paul has turned himself into a one-man Church renewal, generating so much energy by his ideas that he and the Church can't be ignored. In the last two decades of the century, this has been one of the great performances on the world stage. As Roman Catholicism finally turns toward the year of bimillennial celebration, the most remarkable fact about that ancient institution is the nature of the man who leads it.
Even if he had done nothing else, global politics would have given him a place in history. When the Soviet empire died, he became the only pope of this millennium who has watched and encouraged the crumbling of the Church's chief worldly enemy. And, unlike many popes, he has made the Vatican bureaucracy his servant rather than his master and manager. He's also the most literary of popes, a sometime poet and playwright for whom the world exists first of all in the form of words.
He must be the most prolific pope ever. He sends out to the world an unceasing torrent of ideas and exhortations, almost instantly available in several languages at www.vatican.va. He will leave a literary record without precedent in the history of religion. Presumably he maintains a platoon of ghost writers, each of them able to hit unerringly the same tone -- solemn, learned, and just slightly tentative.
The words can occasionally be empty sloganeering ("As the family goes, so goes the nation!"), but more often they carry weight and potency. You sense pressure behind the writing, an urgency. The style is often subtle and effective. In one place he speaks of people acting ethically, "according to a free and rightly tuned will." The tuning of the will -- that's a commonplace thought expressed eloquently in uncommon language.
His ideas are sometimes eccentric, an odd quality in a pope. He tends to present Christianity as a series of literary devices, figures of speech. To notice this is not to question his faith but to consider the shape that it takes in his mind. At certain times, reading him is like reading a Protestant literary critic, such as Northrop Frye.
Last July he brought this approach to his discussions of heaven and hell. To the surprise and alarm of many, he casually reconfigured Catholic images of the afterlife. As he spoke about them, on two successive Wednesdays, he managed to make both places sound like poetic imagery rather than "real" sites of divine or satanic reality. He seems to have concluded that, just like the story of Adam and Eve, heaven and hell are metaphors -- or, at most, states of mind.
Heaven is the human being's meeting with God, he said. No surprise there. But he added: "Metaphorically speaking, heaven is understood as the dwelling place of God." Metaphorically speaking? For centuries, heaven has existed in the Christian imagination as a real place. True, philosophers, back to Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, have speculated on its metaphorical quality, but who knew that a pope could think and speak this way? But then, John Paul is a philosopher. He loves the rigours of philosophy and sees much of life as a seminar on truth.
A week after the talk about heaven, he had more striking news. Hell, he said, is not a punishment imposed by God, despite what everyone has always said. No, it's just an unwise choice that humans make. The images of hell in scripture, he suggested, are taken too literally. Actually, hell is the condition of those who separate themselves from God, "the pain, frustration and emptiness of life without God." Artists trying to follow scripture have depicted hell as a world of fire controlled by devils with pitchforks. The Pope thinks those are metaphors, every one of them.
The Pope has severely criticized postmodern thought, which he sees as a means of dissolving belief in universal truth. A dominant view has emerged in the humanities: We should not think we are working toward the truth, because it doesn't exist; we are all working toward the selection of truths that will be best suited to our own lives. It's a question of values. You have yours, I have mine, and the political bosses of China have theirs.
The Pope vehemently refutes this view: There is universal human truth, he says, and we should all seek it. Truths, if important, don't differ from place to place. "If something is true, then it must be true for all people and at all times." He's a universalist, obviously.
But at the same time, he shows a distinctly postmodern side. He's the first pope for whom multiculturalism has acquired vivid meaning, and the first who has carefully studied what the universities call comparative religion. He may be the first to see Catholic truth as one truth among many, though clearly the superior one.
Last year, in the encyclical Faith and Reason, he pointed out that people in all human cultures have asked the same questions: "Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going?" He finds those questions in the texts of Hinduism, in Confucius, Lao-Tze, the Buddha and, for that matter, in Homer, Euripides and Sophocles. He insists that Catholics should look to these writings for wisdom. In answering the great questions, he says, "every people has its own native and seminal wisdom."
That's a postmodern idea. The Church has always tried to teach other races, and on its best days has done so with kindness. It has also learned from the ancient pre-Christian philosophers. But learning about spiritual matters from other races is hardly an ancient habit of the Church. John Paul II also insists that Catholics should learn from India about liberating the spirit "from the shackles of time and space." And they should draw on the wisdom of China, Japan and other Asian countries, as well as "the riches of the traditional cultures of Africa, which are for the most part orally transmitted." All of this, while less arresting than the material about heaven and hell, makes surprising reading.
Pope John Paul defends freedom ("There is no morality without freedom"), but it's a fairly selective freedom. During his time as Pope, priests and professors have been rebuked and replaced for heresy. Yet his own words often stray some distance from orthodoxy. Earlier popes would look with grave suspicion on his views about heaven and hell, and would be baffled by his affection for the ideas of heathens, pagans, etc. It may be that he's decided to allow himself liberties he wouldn't grant others. Can it be that heresy is a privilege reserved for the Pope? Is it possible that the words of a pope are by definition heresy-free? Those are among the more compelling and startling of the questions raised by a reading of his words.
http://www.robertfulford.com//JohnPaul.html
I'm certainly no "fan" of the Catholic faith but John Paul wasn't too bad........I'm still "iffy" on the whole AIDS/Africa deal........but other than that he (I think) did a good job of not aligning himself with either liberals or conservative.Jr_Bullit said:
betcha didn't know this:
pope apologized to muslims for crusades
pope apologized to muslims for crusades
The whole HIV/AIDS thing really burns me. Coupled with the fact that the Vatican hired Bernard Law aftrer he resigned from the Boston diocese after the church abuse coverup came to light. And people wonder why their attendence numbers are going down.
blue said:
Yeah i am glad he is gone... man his ancient ideas did not fit in these modern times. How about he was against the use of condoms, did not saw womens as eqaul people. Kept the priest in the Vatican very short under his thumb like he was a dictator. He interact with tha people like he really believed in them, like going to a rockconcert. But that was all makebelieve to make himself more popular. In the beginning,he looked like he was a modern pope. But it's time for a modern thinking pope. I even heard that is sayd by older people, who are 70 years. That must really mean something when they also say that.
So i feel
for his dead. After the urbi-@ orbi wich he really could not pronounce, i thought it would take only take a few days he would deseese.
I would be really suprised if the new pope elected takes political stances too far from those of John Paul II. He's had quite the reign to appoint around him like-minded cardinals who are the ones who will be voting in the next pope.
I agree with you Repack that the whole HIV/AIDS/Condom thing really gets me. How in this day and age can one be so blind to what's around them. And what about basic population control and being able to support and properly raise the children you have, and yet they still won't condone the use of birth control! Truly mind-boggling in my opinion. It's like putting your fingers in your ears and singing "I am not listening to you. I am not listening to you. If I can't hear you then it's not true."
I agree with you Repack that the whole HIV/AIDS/Condom thing really gets me. How in this day and age can one be so blind to what's around them. And what about basic population control and being able to support and properly raise the children you have, and yet they still won't condone the use of birth control! Truly mind-boggling in my opinion. It's like putting your fingers in your ears and singing "I am not listening to you. I am not listening to you. If I can't hear you then it's not true."
It's not natural. It's not God's way.Velocity Girl said:I agree with you Repack that the whole HIV/AIDS/Condom thing really gets me. How in this day and age can one be so blind to what's around them. And what about basic population control and being able to support and properly raise the children you have, and yet they still won't condone the use of birth control! Truly mind-boggling in my opinion. It's like putting your fingers in your ears and singing "I am not listening to you. I am not listening to you. If I can't hear you then it's not true."
However, starvation and population decimation IS a natural response to overpopulation, and so apparently is God's way.
I disagree that starvation and the like is "God's way" but it certainly became the Catholic churches way. That said, I think they take such a position regarding birth control (which BTW some fundamentalist protestants take regarding married people, that they should not use BC :mumble: ) is to create a "fence" so that no one gets close to the slippery slope of abortion.Silver said:
In thinking through this whole Africa thing, I agree that abstience is best and the most effective way to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. That said, what is the greater good? Saving peoples lives, or making sure they don't commit the sin of sexual immorality? IMO, if we can save their lives then and they decide to become a follower of Jesus then they can be taught about the whole sexual immorality thing. Anyway, that's a tight rope to walk for sure.........
But modern day society has adopted alot of things that years ago might not have been considered "God's way" . I just think they need to get up with the times and at rethink a few of these things or they will continue to face declining numbers as more and more of the younger generations will scoff at these rules. I knew it was coming, but I almost fell out of my chair laughing/in suprise/disbelief when I went thru counseling with the priest for my first marriage and he told me that bc was a sin and that we need to practice the rythym method.Silver said:
You've got to be kidding me? As long as sexual relations are not those defined as sexually immoral in the Scriptures, I don't see where anyone associated with the church (be it staff or lay person) has any business as to what goes on in the marriage bed...........yikes............Velocity Girl said:
I kid you not!!! To my knowledge, even if married, the only acceptable form of birth contol according the Roman Catholic Church is the rythym method (at least that's what the priest told us). He was a real "fire and brimstone" type priest. He even had to ask if it was ok for my matron of honor to stand up for me after seeing her last name and realizing she was jewish (well half jewish half catholic is what she considers herself actually...hehehe). If I hadn't been iffy about the catholic church before then, that whole experience really soured me even further.Andyman_1970 said: