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from the mixing-religion-with-climate-change dept.
The Telegraph reports that as the Vatican forges an alliance with the UN to tackle climate change, skeptics accuse Pope Francis of being deeply ill-informed about global warming. The Pope discussed climate change with Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary-General, who then opened a one-day Vatican conference called "The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development". Organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, SDSN and Religions for Peace, the goal of the conference is to help strengthen the global consensus on the importance of climate change in the context of sustainable development.
But a group of British and American skeptics say the Pope is being fed “mistaken” advice from the UN and that he should stick to speaking out on matters of morality and theology rather than getting involved in the climate change debate. "The Pope has great moral authority but he’s not an authority on climate science. He’s a learned man but the IPCC has got it wrong,” says Jim Lakely of the Heartland Institute, a conservative American pressure group partly funded by billionaire industrialists who question climate change. "The Pope would make a grave mistake if he put his moral authority behind scientists saying that climate change is a threat to the world. Many scientists have concluded that human activity is a minor player. The Earth has been warming since the end of the last Ice Age.”
It was the first time the Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago and has been described by the New York Times as "the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism," has traveled to Rome to try to influence a pope. "The sideshow envisioned by these organizations will not detract from the deep concern that Pope Francis has for the truth and how it relates to the environment," says Dr. Bernard Brady, Professor and Chair of the Theology Department at the University of St. Thomas. "Pope Francis will probably follow his predecessor, Benedict XVI, recognizing the interrelatedness of climate change with other moral issues and calling for persons, organizations, communities, nations, and indeed the global community, to reconsider established patterns of behavior."
(Score: 2, Disagree) by melikamp on Thursday April 30 2015, @09:00PM
Like what? Please elaborate. I am talking about my personal opinion, first of all, and yeah, everything I heard from him so far was kind of meh. Now here is the issue where lots of money and power is involved, and given his conflict of interest he is really proving to be a vertebrate. And you know what? I still think he is a greedy parasite and a menace overall, just like every (historical) Pope before him, but this is exactly the kind of thing that goes to partially exonerate him as a person.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2015, @05:38AM
Well, some of these apply:
http://theboeskool.com/2013/11/24/10-things-pope-francis-has-done-that-make-me-consider-being-catholic/ [theboeskool.com]
See particularly the one where he f'ed up the cardinal who spent stupid amounts of money on frivolous things.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/12/22/pope-vatican-critique/20752295/ [usatoday.com]
He shit on the "Vatican bureaucracy" here. (autoplaying video)
Sure, maybe he's not completely 'with it', but he's the most seemingly 'with it' pope ever, and the most seemingly 'with it' person over the age of 60 I've ever heard of.
In addition, there's the bits and pieces easily searchable about how he's declared the big bang theory (as in science, not TV) and the theory of evolution to not be contradictory to Catholic faith, as well as the (basically unheard of in any Christian religion) notion that, hey, maybe even atheists who are basically good people who die could still go to heaven, because it's not what dogma people label themselves as, but how they live their lives, that matter. Did I mention he's seemingly more okay with gay marriage than anyone else in the church? He's basically a matter of degrees away from being your model humanist, at least, in every way that matters.
Maybe it's a big lizardman conspiracy and he's really just got an amazing PR team telling him what to do right, but I like to take people at face value as much as possible, and this guy appears to either practice what he preaches, or managed to pay off HuffPo [huffingtonpost.com] for positive articles that buck Catholic traditions in positive ways in spite of fierce resistance. Your opinion is yours, as mine is mine, and neither are likely to change, but I'll let you decide which you think is more likely.