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Despite the santorum splattered about, the Pontiff of the Church Universal and Triumphant [EDIT: This is actually referring to the Roman Catholic Church, not the Church Universal and Triumphant] is going to agree with the climate change consensus in an encyclical to be released on Thursday. Early leaks give some idea of the content.
Pope Francis is preparing to declare humans as primarily responsible for climate change, call for fossil fuels to be replaced by renewable energy and decry the culture of consumerism, a leaked draft of his much anticipated statement on the environment suggests.
The source for this somehow concerns Australians, but we will take any indication of infallibility where we can get it.
So the humble submitter has to wonder, does this mean that climate-change deniers are now to be considered heretics, rather than just Petro shills or anti-environmental conservative conspiracy theorists? It does add a entirely new dimension to the debate, and I hope that God will forgive your Conservative asses for screwing up Her creation in the quest for profit.
UPDATE - janrinok 18 Jun 12:36UTC
is it possible to update/append aristarchus' post "Pope Affirms Anthropogenic Global Warming" (https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/06/17/0317256), as follows:
Update: The encyclical can be read and downloaded here.
I am not affiliated with the submitter, aristarchus, or the pope. I have a slightly paranoid reason for asking for this update; it is my experience that, whenever politically important documents are published, the actual document often gets overshadowed by an enormous load of blog commentary, providing a bit of "damage control" and "spin". It is my fervent opinion that the readership of Soylentnews deserves to read the actual source documents. (It's only 82 pages long, in this case, anyway).
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 17 2015, @03:14PM
While I agree that in this case it is not true that climate change deniers are heretics, the idea is that since the Pope is infallible in Catholicism, anybody who identifies as Catholic but does not agree with the official pronouncements of the Pope, which become Catholic doctrine, is engaging in heresy.
The reason deniers aren't heretics in this case is that the Pope is not speaking ex cathedra in issuing this encyclical. Had Francis done so, Paul Ryan and the like would have some 'splainin' to do.
It's more complicated than that. If we are taking the Bible as literally true, the only people to have ever seen God while alive are Adam, Eve, Lilith (if you follow the view that there were two creations of woman), and Enoch (who "was not" shortly thereafter), and none of them report any particular gender identifying marks such as a beard. The reason that masculine pronouns would have been used has a lot more to do with grammar than any particular interpretation: the Hebrew "Elohim", "El", and "Adonai", as well as the Latin "Deus" are all masculine nouns. But the Greek "Theos" can be either masculine or feminine, the Latin "Deus" was used for both male gods and mixed groups of gods and goddesses prior to the Christians, and one of the first Hebrew phrases used to describe God, "Ruach Elohim", is feminine.
There are also phrases that suggest God either has no gender or both genders. For example, God creates humans in his own image, male and female.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Funny) by M. Baranczak on Wednesday June 17 2015, @03:50PM
God is a ladyboy.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Wednesday June 17 2015, @04:30PM
Please... God prefers He/She!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Thursday June 18 2015, @01:51AM
Everyone knows that God prefers non-shes!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2015, @09:23PM
> God is a ladyboy.
Bakla God?
Sounds like baklava.