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Pope Francis’s fact-free flamboyance

Traveler

Well-known member
By George F. Will Opinion writer September 18

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/pope-franciss-fact-free-flamboyance/2015/09/18/7d711750-5d6a-11e5-8e9e-dce8a2a2a679_story.html

Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony. With a convert’s indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false and deeply reactionary. They would devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak — if his policy prescriptions were not as implausible as his social diagnoses are shrill.

Supporters of Francis have bought newspaper and broadcast advertisements to disseminate some of his woolly sentiments that have the intellectual tone of fortune cookies. One example: “People occasionally forgive, but nature never does.” The Vatican’s majesty does not disguise the vacuity of this. Is Francis intimating that environmental damage is irreversible? He neglects what technology has accomplished regarding London’s air (see Page 1 of Dickens’s “Bleak House”) and other matters.

And the Earth is becoming “an immense pile of filth”? Hyperbole is a predictable precursor of yet another U.N. Climate Change Conference — the 21st since 1995. Fortunately, rhetorical exhibitionism increases as its effectiveness diminishes. In his June encyclical and elsewhere, Francis lectures about our responsibilities, but neglects the duty to be as intelligent as one can be. This man who says “the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions” proceeds as though everything about which he declaims is settled, from imperiled plankton to air conditioning being among humanity’s “harmful habits.” The church that thought it was settled science that Galileo was heretical should be attentive to all evidence.

Francis deplores “compulsive consumerism,” a sin to which the 1.3 billion persons without even electricity can only aspire. He leaves the Vatican to jet around praising subsistence farming, a romance best enjoyed from 30,000 feet above the realities that such farmers yearn to escape.

The saint who is Francis’s namesake supposedly lived in sweet harmony with nature. For most of mankind, however, nature has been, and remains, scarcity, disease and natural — note the adjective — disasters. Our flourishing requires affordable, abundant energy for the production of everything from food to pharmaceuticals. Poverty has probably decreased more in the past two centuries than in the preceding three millennia because of industrialization powered by fossil fuels. Only economic growth has ever produced broad amelioration of poverty, and since growth began in the late 18th century, it has depended on such fuels.

Matt Ridley, author of “The Rational Optimist,” notes that coal supplanting wood fuel reversed deforestation, and that “fertilizer manufactured with gas halved the amount of land needed to produce a given amount of food.” The capitalist commerce that Francis disdains is the reason the portion of the planet’s population living in “absolute poverty” ($1.25 a day) declined from 53 percent to 17 percent in three decades after 1981. Even in low-income countries, writes economist Indur Goklany, life expectancy increased from between 25 to 30 years in 1900 to 62 years today. Sixty-three percent of fibers are synthetic and derived from fossil fuels; of the rest, 79 percent come from cotton, which requires synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. “Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides derived from fossil fuels,” he says, “are responsible for at least 60 percent of today’s global food supply.” Without fossil fuels, he says, global cropland would have to increase at least 150 percent — equal to the combined land areas of South America and the European Union — to meet current food demands.

Francis grew up around the rancid political culture of Peronist populism, the sterile redistributionism that has reduced his Argentina from the world’s 14th highest per-capita gross domestic product in 1900 to 63rd today. Francis’s agenda for the planet — “global regulatory norms” — would globalize Argentina’s downward mobility.

As the world spurns his church’s teachings about abortion, contraception, divorce, same-sex marriage and other matters, Francis jauntily makes his church congruent with the secular religion of “sustainability.” Because this is hostile to growth, it fits Francis’s seeming sympathy for medieval stasis, when his church ruled the roost, economic growth was essentially nonexistent and life expectancy was around 30.

Francis’s fact-free flamboyance reduces him to a shepherd whose selectively reverent flock, genuflecting only at green altars, is tiny relative to the publicity it receives from media otherwise disdainful of his church. Secular people with anti-Catholic agendas drain his prestige, a dwindling asset, into promotion of policies inimical to the most vulnerable people and unrelated to what once was the papacy’s very different salvific mission.

He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources. Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.
 

Traveler

Well-known member
Martin Jr. said:
George F. Will never will attain the good sense of G.K. Chesterton.
Sometimes George seems like someone who's been dead for about 80 years, but he did a great job with the facts on this column.
 

iwannabeacowboy

Well-known member
He's a product of Argentina's education and cultural system where superstition supercedes rational discourse.

The emotion derived from "boogy men" and "hocus pocus" is too strong to oppose no matter the age, if one does not comprehend scientific theory and lend themselves to the credibility of repeatable results in defined situations.

It's a lack of complex and critical thinking.

I know a lady from Argentina that shares in many of his views. She has a university degree, so isn't incapable of thought. But she to buys into the pull of emotion and her belief in what she feels should be reality, more than in reality and all the legitimate evidence supporting it.

Example, she's pregnant. But she's determined that she's firing her OB because he told her the age of the baby based off of ultrasound measurements of which she disagrees. She knows that the baby is 3 weeks younger because she keeps a family planner calendar.....

One is desire, the other evidence. She and the pope choose desired beliefs. They feel better. It's easier to mold reality around what you already believe to be true, than have to reshape your beliefs to fit reality.


In regards to this whole visit, I find it curious that he was able to articulate words about the death penalty, a sentence prescribed to an individual for committing heinus crimes, but cannot enunciate the word abortion? Millions and millions of innocent babies, the most innocent form of life, dying at the hands of the left based laws and funding. It's a hot topic, center stage in this country, but he doesn't utter the word. But chose to argue for those select few measuring in likely the hundreds that made decisions based on hate, evil, voidance of morality that lead to death and argue for their cause? The ones given life, that they threw away. Sentenced only after a trial regulated by a judicial system that demands it to be fair, and by a jury of his/her own peers being all so convinced that they in unison and only in unison must agree on a guilty verdict and that a sentence of lesser punishment is not applicable. And he can't give lip service to the most precious murder victims?

He deserves the acalades of the left.
 

Brad S

Well-known member
I don't think anyone wants to be anti catholic, but this pope lecture really leads to some valid questions. Frankly the U.S. has committed untold charity to the developing world while the Vatican won't even liquidate their ill gotten treasures stolen by the third reich and spirited to the Vatican at the end of ww2 - such treasure could really help the poor.

As far as the lecture about capitalism? Monsanto fed a hell of a lot more than mother Theresa. Oh yeah, as for redistribution of wealth, that's just a nice way of saying slavery. Free will is God given and no government or misguided Vatican hoarder should sanction intrusion into mans free will. Many free people serve their God by freely giving to needy people and don't need the state's intervention, even if someone else's theological teacher wishes it. Have a nice trip back to the opulence of the Vatican - you're not a hypocrite because you rode in a small car while here.
 

Brad S

Well-known member
Oh the confounding mystery - ignoring conjecture with only the illusion of meaning. Discussion of the untestible makes as much sense as digging a hole in a lake's surface. Attack the message not the messenger.
 

TexasBred

Well-known member
Brad S said:
I don't think anyone wants to be anti catholic, but this pope lecture really leads to some valid questions. Frankly the U.S. has committed untold charity to the developing world while the Vatican won't even liquidate their ill gotten treasures stolen by the third reich and spirited to the Vatican at the end of ww2 - such treasure could really help the poor.

As far as the lecture about capitalism? Monsanto fed a hell of a lot more than mother Theresa. Oh yeah, as for redistribution of wealth, that's just a nice way of saying slavery. Free will is God given and no government or misguided Vatican hoarder should sanction intrusion into mans free will. Many free people serve their God by freely giving to needy people and don't need the state's intervention, even if someone else's theological teacher wishes it. Have a nice trip back to the opulence of the Vatican - you're not a hypocrite because you rode in a small car while here.


Another good read:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/michael-sanchez/the-catholic-church-is-the-largest-charitable-organization-in-the-world/399364450111086
 

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