'Reason' needn't have anything to do with it.

[RascalPuff]

Reason



At the time when all France was mad about Law's system, and Law was controller-general, there came to him in the presence of a great assembly a man who was always right, who always had reason on his side. Said he to Law:

"Sir, you are the biggest madman, the biggest fool, or the biggest rogue who has yet appeared among us; and that is saying a great deal: this is how I prove it. You have imagined that a state's wealth can be increased tenfold with paper; but as this paper can represent only the money that is representative of true wealth, the products of the land and industry, you should have begun by giving us ten times more corn, wine, cloth, canvas, etc. That is not enough, you must be sure of your market. But you make ten times as many notes as we have of silver and commodities, therefore you are ten times more extravagant, or more inept, or more of a rogue than all the comptrollers who have preceded you. This is how I prove my major."

Hardly had he started his major than he was conducted to Saint-Lazare.

When he came out of Saint-Lazare, where he studied much and strengthened his reason, he went to Rome; he asked for a public audience of the Pope, on condition that he was not interrupted in his harangue; and he spoke to the Pope in these terms:

"Holy Father, you are an antichrist and this is how I prove it to Your Holiness. I call antichrist the man who does the contrary to what Christ did and commanded. Now Christ was poor, and you are very rich; he paid tribute, and you exact tribute; he submitted to the powers that were, and you have become a power; he walked on foot, and you go to Castel-Gandolfo in a sumptuous equipage; he ate all that one was so good as to give him, and you want us to eat fish on Friday and Saturday, when we live far from sea and river; he forbade Simon Barjona to use a sword, and you have swords in your service, etc., etc., etc. Therefore in this sense Your Holiness is antichrist. In every other sense I hold you in great veneration, and I ask you for an indulgence in articulo mortis."

My man was put in the Castello St. Angelo.

When he came out of the Castello St. Angelo, he rushed to Venice, and asked to speak to the doge.

"Your Serenity," he said, "must be a scatter-brain to marry the sea every year: for firstly, one only marries the same person once; secondly, your marriage resembles Harlequin's which was half made, seeing that it lacked but the consent of the bride; thirdly, who has told you that one day other maritime powers will not declare you incapable of consummating the marriage?"

He spoke, and was shut up in the Tower of St. Mark's.

When he came out of the Tower of St. Mark's, he went to Constantinople; he had audience of the mufti; and spoke to him in these terms:

"Your religion, although it has some good points, such as worship of the great Being, and the necessity of being just and charitable, is otherwise nothing but a rehash of Judaism and a tedious collection of fairy tales. If the archangel Gabriel had brought the leaves of the Koran to Mahomet from some planet, all Arabia would have seen Gabriel come down: nobody saw him; therefore Mahomet was a brazen impostor who deceived imbeciles."

Hardly had he pronounced these words than he was impaled. Nevertheless he had always been right, and had always had reason on his side. - Voltaire

[austintorn@aol.com]

Wonder what the Pope has been doing lately…

[Mikal]

Actually at the present time the Pope and the vatican enbroiled in the worst priest molestation case so far. The protests involved stretch from Germany to Ireland and involve the church that was the Pope's church when he was Archbishop. It has been revealed that he consented to consealing very serious sexual abuses not only by one of his priests but also by his own brother who headed the choir and the young altarboys...the protests have been huge..but of course the henchmen very busy protecting and defending the Big Chief....I have been following it...

Regards Mikal

[austintorn@aol.com]

The Pope just called me today for some advice…

I told him to get rid of the celibacy rule; note that priests have 17% rates of schizophrenia while the general population has only 1%; ease up on sex not being natural, for it is; read Voltaire, and give up dogma, for it states its truths all at once, only to have them fall one by one; that the charity stuff was great, but get rid of everything else, such as indoctrinating children (and all) with theories deceptively stated as truth with proof.

[austintorn@aol.com]

THE ILLUMINATION OF SCIENCE

The Illuminati of today
Are not those of the past,
For they have mutated,
Some even picking up on notions
That others falsely ascribed to them.

Back then they were scientists.

The Church and its scripture
Is basically immutable,
Still according to the myths of old;
That is, the idea of Jehovah told
Wiped out the numerous Gods of old
And became the new—
The one and only, too.

Religion may not be burning scientists
At the stake anymore, but if one thinks
They’ve released their reign over science,
One must ask why half the schools in the U.S.
Are not allowed to teach evolution,
Why the U.S. Christian Coalition
Is the most influential lobby
Against scientific progress in the world…

As for the Illuminati of old,
The obliteration of Catholicism
Was their central covenant.

The brotherhood held that
The superstitious dogma
Spewed forth by the church
Was mankind’s greatest enemy.

They feared that if religion continued
To promote pious myth as absolute fact,
Scientific progress would halt,
And mankind would be doomed
To an ignorant future
Of senseless holy wars.

And, I might add to the above,
Much like we see today.

So, Bush killed stem cell research
And went to war against Iraq
After consulting with a ‘Higher Father’;
Holy wars now being everywhere, since
How could the other religions be so wrong!

Those trying to hold a monopoly on truth
Cannot help but to label the contrary as evil,
And, thus, act accordingly.

So, we do have to worry, still,
When the Church wants to be
The sole interpreter of the ‘truth’.

Flawed and arbitrary concepts of good and truth
Only cause the contrary to be labeled as evil.

Ah, thought Galileo,
As he wandered past the deserted
And flower-grown ruins of Rome, one night,
This looks to be the same now as it will and was
A thousand years before and after me.

Would that there could be a day
When science was free,
When the once great Roman glory
Would pale beside that brightest light of day!

Galileo looked about and around and behind;
No one was following him to his ultra secret lair,
Where other scientists would join him again
On this starry night, safe therein to congregate
And discuss the topics forbidden by the Vatican.

(To this day no one has found Galileo’s lair,
Called The Church of Illumination.
I am obtaining all this information about Galileo
From his little known ‘lost’ diary.

I even have an unpublished book of the Holy Bible
And a few of Leonardo’s ‘missing’ diaries,
But, those are other stories.)

…go to Rome, which is the sepulchre,
Oh, not of him, but of our joy: ‘tis nought
That ages, empires and religions there
Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought;
For such as he can lend,--they borrow not
Glory from those who made the world their prey;
And he is gathered to the kings of thought
Who waged contention with their time’s decay,
And of the past are all that cannot pass away.
(Shelley)

Galileo noted the ancient sculptures
Still standing against mouldering time,
Knowing that the new scientists arriving,
If they were worthily smart enough,
Would have to use the clues provided
As the way to the secret meeting place,
For there was no map made and never would be.

As the word of this
Scientific brotherhood began to spread,
Scientists would travel thousands of miles
But upon the slim hope of chancing a glance
Through Galileo’s fine telescope
And discussing the master’s many ideas.

Go thou to Rome,--at once the Paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,
And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress
The bones of Desolation’s nakedness
Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access
Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread;
(Shelley)

As Galileo wandered among the ruins
Made one with Nature in their decay,
Or gazed on the Praxitelean shapes
That thronged the Capitol,
And the palaces of Rome,
His minding soul imbibed all the forms,
This loveliness becoming a portion of himself,
As well as its science, even right here,
Within the realm of the Pope’s Holiness
That shadowed him—
Much as the darkness of night
Condemned the day.

And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;
And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned
This refuge for his memory, doth stand
Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath,
A field is spread, on which a newer band
Have pitched in Heaven’s smile their camp of death,
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.
(Shelley)

Many had been burned before, thought Galileo,
So ‘tis a difficult path to follow,
Yet the truth calls me forward…
And so he had published
The ‘Starry Messenger’.

Later on, Galileo had argued
That the Bible had to be interpreted
In the light of what science had shown to be true.

Galileo had several opponents
And they made sure that a copy of
The ‘Letter to Castelli’
Was sent to the Inquisition in Rome.

In 1616 Galileo wrote
The ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess’
Which vigorously attacked
The followers of Aristotle.

In this work, which he addressed
To the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine,
He argued strongly for a non-literal interpretation
Of Holy Scripture when the literal interpretation
Would contradict facts about the physical world
Proved by mathematical science.

… Galileo walked on slowly,
For his health had become poor,
And noted the setting moon—
The sky would be wonderfully dark.

He would soon be found guilty and condemned,
But he knew none of that this night.

The eventual ‘Father of Science’
Again sat with the scientific Illuminati of his time,
The discussions as free and glorious as ever…

He was later put under house arrest
In his home in Florence,
Having by then nearly gone blind,
But the starry memories of the Milky Way,
The moons of Jupiter and more
Remained in a mind still free—
That which could never be taken away by ‘Dogma’.

His body was concealed
And only placed in a fine tomb
In the church in 1737 by the civil authorities,
Against the wishes of many in the Church.

On 31 October 1992,
350 years after Galileo’s death,
Pope John Paul II gave an address
On behalf of the Catholic Church
In which he admitted that errors had been made
By the theological advisors in the case of Galileo.

He declared the Galileo case closed,
But he did not admit that the Church was wrong
To convict Galileo on a charge of heresy
Because of his belief that the Earth
Rotates round the sun.


The Torch Passes Its Light:

His eyes were so weak
“That he could no longer see the sky.”

A young Illuminatus embarked on a long pilgrimage,
“A sojourn to Galileo’s delightful villa at Arcetri,
Just beyond the walls of Florence.

“There it was that I found and visited
The famous Galileo grown old,
A prisoner to the Inquisition,
For thinking in Astronomy otherwise
Than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers.

“I was his last disciple, as you say
I went to him, at seventeen years of age,
And offered him my hands and eyes to use.”

Galileo recalls the momentous occasion
(‘‘that day of days’’):

When, quietly as a messenger from heaven,
Moving unseen, through his own purer realm,
Among the shadows of our mortal world,
A young man, with a strange light on his face
Knocked at the door of my house.

His name was John Milton.

Milton at the gate: Friend! let me pass.
Dominican: Whither? To whom?
Milton: Into the prison; to Galileo Galilei.
To this, the Dominican guard protests that,
Where Galileo is being held, there are no prisons,
Only confinements of sorts
For those guilty of “heretical pravity”
And “other less atrocious crimes”.

Not to be taken in by such rhetoric,
Milton stands his ground and demands
(on divine authority)
That the gates that confine the great astronomer
Be opened at once.

Responding to the demand,
The Dominican guard
Can only admire the young man
Who confronts him.

To himself the guard exclaims:
“What sweetness! what authority!
What a form! what an attitude! what a voice!”
After which he acknowledges
That his “sight staggers; the walls shake;
He must be—do angels ever come hither?”

…Plots had been perhaps laid against Milton
As one who had ‘seen’ and ‘heard’
Matters that were best left untold.

In Galileo, ‘frail and old,’ Milton had ‘seen’
One of those near blind illustrious
Of whom he had so often dreamt,
And of whom he was to be himself another.

O, dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark.

Some thought that
Milton’s Lucifer (Latin for ‘light bringer’),
Came off much better in ‘Paradise Lost’
Than did God Himself.

Lieber in der Hölle regieren als im Himmel dienen.
[Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.]

‘Twas here, his final resting place,
In a church…
At last enshrined
As the Father of Science.

Embellished, as the Master in stone,
He’s ever looking up
Whence forth came the light
From the starry skies.

[austintorn@aol.com]

The Fanciful View From Today and a Review:


Back when religion persecuted science,
The Illuminati became a secret organization
Taking refuge from the scourge of the Church.

The Path of Illumination

In 1600 Rome, the Baroque theatre
Of political intrigues and inquisition trials,
One of the most influential secret societies
In history was born: The Illuminati.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Galileo Galilei,
The twin heads of the society,
Scattered throughout the Eternal City
Clues and enigmas which, once solved,
Would lead Illuminati adepts to a hidden lair.

It was thought that the rumored ambigram
For ‘Illuminati’ could never be found,
It reading the same upside down.

There were Four Altars of Science,
Representing the four elements
Of earth, air, fire and water,
And a mysterious text from John Milton,
They being the key clues that, once decoded,
Would lead on the Path of Illumination.


Doom?

“Behold this droplet of anti-world,
My anti-matter that LHC created,
Enough material to see.”

“My God, a visible amount!”

“See, here it is, suspended
In a vacuum in this tube,
For even the air would ignite it.”

“Quick, send it away,
Get rid of it.”

“No, for I have discovered Creation.”

[austintorn@aol.com]

In the news, lately, there are calls for the Pope to resign, really.

I will be taking his place.

[austintorn@aol.com]

WHERE NO PRIEST HAS GONE BEFORE

Her legs beckoned the great beyond(‘s) delight…
But, lax in psalm reading, the priest had none,
Her paradise lost by the dashboard light;
But, next time, of heavenly body, he’ll have nun.

[austintorn@aol.com]

PROGRESS

Astrology gave way to astronomy,
Alchemy to chemistry,
And religion to philosophy and science.

Discovering truth provides freedom
From the shackles of myth;
It is not doom,
As the notion of Pandora’s box
Deceptively paints it.

The box of truth opens by itself,
No matter how much
One might try to put a lid on it.

[austintorn@aol.com]

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 30, 2010

It doesn’t seem right that the Catholic Church is spending Holy Week practicing the unholy art of spin.

Complete with crown-of-thorns imagery, the church has started an Easter public relations blitz defending a pope who went along with the perverse culture of protecting molesters and the church’s reputation rather than abused — and sometimes disabled and disadvantaged — children.

The church gave up its credibility for Lent. Holy Thursday and Good Friday are now becoming Cover-Up Thursday and Blame-Others Friday.

This week of special confessions and penance services is unfolding as the pope resists pressure from Catholics around the globe for his own confession and penance about the cascade of child sexual abuse cases that were ignored, even by a German diocese and Vatican office he ran.

If church fund-raising and contributions dry up, Benedict’s P.R. handlers may yet have to stage a photo-op where he steps out of the priest’s side of the confessional and enters the side where the rest of his fallible flock goes.

Or maybe 30-second spots defending the pope with Benedict’s voice intoning at the end: “I am infallible, and I approve this message.”

Canon 1404 states that “The First See is judged by no one.” But Jesus, Mary and Joseph, as my dad used to say. Somebody has to tell the First See when it’s blind — and mute — to deaf children in America and Italy.

The Vatican is surprised to find itself in this sort of trouble. Officials there could have easily known what was going on all along; archbishops visiting Rome gossip like a sewing circle. The cynical Vatican just didn’t want to deal with it.

And now the church continues to hide behind its mystique. Putting down the catechism, it picked up the Washington P.R. handbook for political sins.

First: Declare any new revelation old and unimportant.

At Palm Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York bemoaned that the “recent tidal wave of headlines about abuse of minors by some few priests, this time in Ireland, Germany, and a re-run of an old story from Wisconsin, has knocked us to our knees once again.”

A few priests? At this point, it feels like an international battalion.

A re-run of an old story? So sorry to remind you, Archbishop, that one priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, who showed no remorse and suffered no punishment from “Rottweiler” Ratzinger, abused as many as 200 deaf children in Wisconsin.

Archbishop Dolan compared the pope to Jesus, saying he was “now suffering some of the same unjust accusations, shouts of the mob, and scourging at the pillar,” and “being daily crowned with thorns by groundless innuendo.”

Second: Blame somebody else — even if it’s this pope’s popular predecessor, on the fast track to sainthood.

Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn defended Pope Benedict this week, saying that then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s attempt in 1995 to investigate the former archbishop of Vienna for allegedly molesting youths in a monastery was barred by advisers close to Pope John Paul II.

Third: Say black is white.

In his blog, Archbishop Dolan blasted church critics while stating: “The Church needs criticism; we want it; we welcome it; we do a good bit of it ourselves,” adding: “We do not expect any special treatment. ...so bring it on.” Right.

Fourth: Demonize gays, as Karl Rove did in 2004.

In an ad in The Times on Tuesday, Bill Donohue, the Catholic League president, offered this illumination: “The Times continues to editorialize about the ‘pedophilia crisis,’ when all along it’s been a homosexual crisis. Eighty percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male and most of them are post-pubescent. While homosexuality does not cause predatory behavior, and most gay priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been gay.”

Donohue is still talking about the problem as an indiscretion rather than a crime. If it mostly involves men and boys, that’s partly because priests for many years had unquestioned access to boys.

Fifth: Blame the victims.

“Fr. Lawrence Murphy apparently began his predatory behavior in Wisconsin in the 1950s,” Donohue protested, “yet the victims’ families never contacted the police until the mid-1970s.”

Sixth: Throw gorilla dust.

Donohue asserts that “the common response of all organizations, secular as well as religious,” to abuse cases “was to access therapy and reinstate the patient.” Really? Where in heaven’s name does that information come from? It’s absurd.

And finally, seventh: Use the Cheney omnipotence defense, most famously employed in the Valerie Plame case. Vice President Cheney claimed that his lofty position meant that the very act of spilling a secret, even with dastardly intent, declassified it.

Vatican lawyers will argue in negligence cases brought by abuse victims that the pope has immunity as a head of state and that bishops who allowed an abuse culture, endlessly recirculating like dirty fountain water, were not Vatican employees.

Maybe they worked for Enron.