context: apparently one pope who went by the stage name John XII made a personal enemy of a bishop named Liutprand, the latter who then devoted his life to writing down every single accusation against the young (18 when he started) pontiff. there were a few other people who briefly documented a scandal here and scandal there, but since the Liutprand story is the only extended one that survived, guess who gets cited the most

now, we know that some what Liutprand wrote is exaggerated, but seeing as this happened 1000+ years ago, in what historians refer to as the “pre-twitter” era, it’s hard to refute it. as so his version of the story is included with a little “unverified” footnote in every document about John12. so now we have unverified accusations of the pope summoning demons to help him in gambling and equally unverified accusations of him eventually dying when a husband caught said pope sleeping with his wife and beat him to death.

don’t get me wrong, this pope does come across as something of a bad person overall so don’t feel too much pity for the guy, but man did the cardinal get the last laugh here.

well, sort of. they’re both dead i guess so it can’t matter that much. in any case: if you hate someone, learn to write biographies well. who knows, you might become the topmost source on their life.

ones that are laws or close enough:

• though shall not kill
• though shall not steal
• though shall not bear false witness

ones that are not even remotely laws

• you shall not have other gods before me
• you shall not take the lord’s name in vain
• you shall keep the sabbath day holy
• honor thy mother and thy father
• thou shall not commit adultery
• thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife
• thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s possessions

and as a bonus, since no society ever thought that murder, stealing, and lying under oath were good ideas, we can say that america doesn’t in fact follow anything that’s unique about the ten commandments.

that’s using the catholic commandments btw, if you’re protestant then drop the ‘name in vain’ and add ‘no graven images’ and i think some other minor changes too.

next week: why the constitution doesn’t even remotely say what you think it does

well, conceptual replacement anyways. nature is real.

in less serious, i heard a cute response to “god asked me to pray for you” which was “well tell him to man up and talk to me directly and not go behind my back like this spreading rumors”.

it’s quite good and very british in style in that everyone first gets uninterrupted long statements, then the audience asks questions in ‘bulk’ so to speak, after which people get time to respond to the questions in any way they see fit, and when that is over, a closing statement is made. no cross talk and yelling.

what jumped out at me is that at one point stephen fry makes a very valid point that i never quite formulated clearly about the fact that catholic church has been on the side of what it now considers to be poor moral choices, including being pro-slavery and killing people who owned non-latin bibles. the excuse it used for not apologizing for all those times was that this was a product of it’s time and should be judged as such.

the problem, as stephen fry points out, is that the catholic church is supposed to be an absolute moral compass, and if your moral compass isn’t able to tell you that slavery is wrong until society catches up, then it’s not a compass, it’s stick floating downstream.

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one thing that goes unsaid in the debate btw is this apparent belief on the MPs side that without the catholic church people would absolutely lack guidance and devolve into an animal world of murder and rape, while stephen fry thinks we’d transcend into a humanist morality. both are probably wrong, but i think part of their lack of communication has to do with that issue.

i’m biased here in that i do hate the “oh, you’re atheist? so you’re immoral then right?” train of thought, but i also think that religion is often just a veneer for simplistic phobias that won’t disappear even after you admit that they’re not divine in nature.

which is why i’m glad that the debate concentrated on the actual actions and policies of the catholic church (condoms, hiding child abuse) since those are the actual effects the church as an entity, and not religion, has on the world.

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i will also say that the final result was heartening, and separately that the british MP sounds like a monty python parody of a woman. it’s that voice they use for “i don’t like spam” or “penguins don’t come from africa”. i’m amazed anyone has it in real life, i always thought it was a silly bit of overacting.

well, i found my own counterexample: the conservapedia project decided that the bible is too liberal and have taken it upon themselves to rewrite it, re: http://conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project . they’re adding free market rhetoric and removing things like forgiveness (including the ‘cast the first stone’ story and the line ‘forgive them father for they know not what they do’)

another little piece of evidence that it’s not religion that’s the problem, it’s lack of empathy for ‘the other’ that comes from living in small, closed and close-minded communities. these people are not taking religion seriously in any way. make them atheist and they’d simply remove the word ‘god’ from the book and go on right on happily rewriting it to keep justifying their own behavior to themselves.

it’s amazing how much modern spirituality, philosophy, and general thinktanking is spent rationalizing and justifying being shitty to others.