Alchemy

Category: Religion

  • The trouble with the Pope is…

    …a fundamental one, and it’s one that the Catholic church really can’t resile from.

    The trouble with the Pope is that the whole concept is so ludicrous, that it’s only the simplest and least educated people, concerned almost solely with survival and with no scientific knowledge to draw upon, who could let it through their plausibility radar. I doubt there is a single Cardinal in the Catholic church who genuinely, in their heart of hearts, really truly believes that God is personally choosing the Pope through them, but that’s what Catholics are supposed to believe.

    If God is really personally nominating a human to be his “King on Earth” – to basically be him on Earth, then isn’t he making a bit of a balls-up of the whole thing? Why would he work through the Cardinals to elect Popes who have been shown throughout history to be very bad men? How does that make sense? What is God saying? That He himself can sometimes be a corrupt philandering homosexual paedophile, in direct contravention of the words in the Bible?

    And that’s the problem. The vast majority of sane people don’t really think the Pope is God on Earth – they think he’s a senior Catholic who, for whatever reason, won enough support from other senior Catholics to be elected into the role. Even most educated Catholics, I think, would probably say that if asked. BUT, the Catholic doctrine says he’s God on Earth for Catholics…so if you’re a Catholic, you have to believe that and do what he tells you to do as you would if God himself were to descend from the heavens and tell you.

    In reality, what happens is Catholics cherry pick the things the Pope says or does that they are prepared to go along with. An example is birth control, where Pope John Paul II decreed that no Catholic was allowed to use a condom – an appalling decree in the face of the HIV epidemic at the time. How many Catholics ignored that decree? My bet is plenty did.

    And the whole underpinning of the Catholic church is built on this foundation, of an infallible “God on Earth” Pope. In truth it’s a farcical lie and we see it unravelling bit by bit, as education spreads and inoculates people against such primitive and implausible beliefs.

    I give Catholicism 50 years before it’s consigned to the rubbish bin of history. Less outlandish, and dare I say it, hubristic religions may last a little longer.

     

  • Alchemy and the philosopher’s stone

    Alchemy gets a bad rap these days, seen only as a primitive version of chemistry – its practitioners greedy fools thinking they could turn lead into gold.

    The truth is that Alchemy was an early attempt to understand how the world worked, and it blended ideas from religion and science.

    Some Alchemists believed that if they understood enough about the elemental forces in nature, they would be able to create the philosopher’s stone, which would be able to turn base matter into gold. Other Alchemists were driven more by the quest for spiritual enlightenment, and saw their proto-chemistry experiments as a reflection of an inner journey.

    A guy called Adam McLean has put together a massive site dedicated to the subject. If you’re interested in philosophy or chemistry (or Hermeticism, or the Tarot) go have a look.

  • Religion and the “Moral compass”

    Religious people often claim that atheists can’t possibly have a moral compass that will guide us to behave well, since we have no God to tell us what is right and what’s wrong.

    I find it ironic, therefore, to read in today’s Age an article about a Rabbi at a Jewish college here in Melbourne who “has changed his evidence about his knowledge of alleged paedophilia and conceded he was aware in the early 2000s of rumours that a former security guard had molested children”.

    Suffice it to say that the subject of the rumours was not immediately reported to the police.

    What would you do if there were rumours that a member of your staff was molesting children at your school? Just keep an eye on him and hope you hear nothing more? Or get the police involved and have it properly investigated?

    I don’t know about you, but I’d call the police in, because the consequence of not getting to the bottom of it immediately would be that kids in my care might be at risk of sexual abuse.

    I think my moral compass is in pretty good order.

    How did the Rabbi not consider this his top priority? Was his moral compass broken?

    We can only guess at what religous justification he may have had for acting as he did. Perhaps religion had nothing to do with  his decision. Either way, given that further molesting is alleged to have occurred later, it’s at the very least a spectacular failure of judgement, don’t you think?

    For the Catholics out there: Why are there still Catholics?

    More interesting reading here.