The Holy Inquisition was evil, but it wasn’t probably stupid. Its successor, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was lead by Card. Joseph Ratzinger until he became Pope. He’s no Torquemada, apparently. By the way, someone should tell the Vatican’s webmaster that Ratzinger is not heading the congregation aymore.
Anyhow, when he was still there, having no heretics to burn at the stake, he contented himself with attacking Harry Potter’s novels for “eroding Christianity in the soul of young people” and blurring the boundaries between good and evil. Talk about lameness!
If that’s true, I’m going to recommend the reading of Harry Potter to my daughter when she is old enough. Nothing like a good erosion of Xian beliefs, lest she starts having trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction (like turning water into wine, walking on the waters and resurrecting the dead).
Or worse, lending credit to bullshit like “immanent design evident in nature is real.”
(Via Skeptico)
You know, the sad thing to me as a Christian, is that many of the early “scientists” were theists of one variety or another trying to better understand the universe they believed was created by God.
I read a wonderful book 10 or so years ago, entitled “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” by Mark Noll. While focused primarly on the evangelical movement in America, its foundational criticism is probably applicable world-wide. Christianity has, for various reasons, largely turned its back on science. Noll’s position is that this is ultimately a self-defeating proposition. If God created the natural world, then doesn’t it profit the Christian soul to try to understand it? Noll says that God gave us two books: the Bible, and His creation. To ignore one is to miss half of what He has to tell us.