The Pope would like all of us bloggers to shut the fuck up.
Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday hailed the benefits of silent reflection to stop being "bombarded" by information from the Internet but said social networks could be useful modes of communication.
"People today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware," the pope said in his now-traditional yearly message on the Vatican and social comunications.
Yeah, people get on the internet and discover that there are child-raping priests in their midsts, and that the Vatican struggles to cover up their crimes…and they never thought to ask, “Is Father Flaherty a buggerin’ child molester?”
But apparently, the Pope likes Twitter.
“In concise phrases, often no longer than a verse from the Bible, profound thoughts can be communicated,” the 84-year-old pope said in an apparent reference to the micro-blogging site Twitter.
Concise phrases, like “there is no god” and “you can be good without god” and “fuck the pope” — I agree. There is more profundity on Twitter than in the Bible. Which doesn’t say much about the Bible.
I also discovered something interesting: on the internet, Pharyngula is far more influential than the Bible.
The Vatican’s news website is getting between 8,000 and 10,000 hits a day with peaks of up to 16,000 hits over Christmas, the head of the Holy See’s social media department said on Tuesday.
Uh, really? This is news to be proud of? Pharyngula’s traffic is an order of magnitude greater than that. And I’m just a guy on the internet, with no infallibility or other magic powers.
What will they make of BoingBoing, and aren’t they worried that the anti-christ will spring out of Cute Overload?
“There is more profundity on Twitter than in the Bible. Which doesn’t say much about the Bible.”
This would read better as “doesn’t say much about Twitter.”
In addition to the question you posed in your OP – there are other questions like those that helped me break free of Christianity
Basement cat is on the intertoobz.
Is more warning needed?
Glen Davidson
Stupid internet…with all it’s “information.”
For dictators and religious demagogues, there is nothing more deadly to their ability to control than informed and educated sheep.
Knowledge gives the sheep ideas…
How does one get bombarded with information from the internet? Do you not have to seek out information? I’d hardly liken it to telemarketers calling your house at dinner time. Well, I suppose there are those annoying pop-ups, but still.
That nasty internet, bombarding people with information. Pope gives people only as much information as they need : who they should hate, who they are allowed to fuck and how much money they owe God. Nice and simple, no thinking required.
Soooo PZ
Are you more popular than Jesus????
But the Anti-Christ is on CuteOverload.
“People today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware”
Is it implied here that people need to keep their questions few, or is it just me? And even if not true, isn’t intellectual growth dependent on expanding the number and scope of questions we can ask and answers we can understand? I mean, I love being introduced to new ideas, lines of reasoning, and topics to which I’m not familiar. Cutting oneself from outside Q&A’s would make one uninterested, ignorant, and dependent on some arbitrary source for your reason and information.
Oh… fuck… I just got it. NM!
“Did you know that you have a soul and that it was doomed to an eternity in hell but thanks to a heavily mythologised someone who died 2,000 years ago, it isn’t? No? Now you do.”
Fuck me, but the Pope likes to talk about himself in the third person, using the antiquated pronoun of “everybody else”.
No, that means you’re magical. He’ll cast Blur at lvl. 2, but you’ve got Mordenkainen’s Disjunction at lvl. 20. The Intelligence scores aren’t exactly favorable either. No contest. It’s almost not fair of you to pick on him, really.
I wonder if the Vatican supports SOPA/PIPA?
Yeah. Finding out you don’t even know the right questions to ask is always a bad idea. After all, before Jesus*, did people even know to ask, “Am I a hopeless sinner?” More than that, those needs of which they were unaware? “I didn’t know I needed to be saved from sin!” If only the early Christians had realized that they were bombarding the happy with answers to questions they have never asked and succoring needs those happy people didn’t even know that had, we wouldn’t be in half the messes that the US is in today.
And even better, to make it fit, you can selectively edit things so that, “I do not believe in god,” becomes, “I believe in god.” Or, “My child does not want to be raped by a priest,” can become, “My child want[s] to be a priest.” Makes life so much easier.
Amazing what reality and a refusal to countenance lies can do, what?
* Yeah, I am using a fictional character to make a point. Get over it.1
This post nicely documents which way the pope-wind is blowin. Very encouraging.
I checked. Jesus doesn’t seem to have a website.
There are some fan sites, though…
Glen Davidson
So did Popester and his Vatican lackeys publish this amazing insight on the Internet? Was there a press release? Obviously it’s being disseminated over the internet. All the more noise. The sound of one idiot wagging. Irony of ironies. I suggest the Pope go sit his church in his red slippers and pointy hat, pray to his sky demon, and have a great big cup of shut the fuck up.
Fan sites, and a long tradition of fanfics.
PZ Myers @ # 16: I checked. Jesus doesn’t seem to have a website.
I checked too, by the high-tech technique of typing “jesus.com” into the address bar.
Which promptly redirected me to the Metropolitan Community Church (generally known as the gay christian church in the US, now reportedly losing members as some other congregations become “gay-friendly” and start poaching MCC membership).
No wonder Benny Hex doesn’t want his sheeple web-browsing…
I’m sorry but the internet is bad because it is bombarding us with information all the time but twitter is good because it can bombard us with shorter bits of information?
uncle frogy
I believe Jesus is on Twitter, though.
The Pope has published his latest doctrinal edict entitled The Importance of my Lawn and Why You Sinners Should Get Off It
Well, he’s only the representative of Dog on earth, you can’t expect him to have much of an attentio…hey, look, a bird!
Bronze Dog,
You’re right about the fan sites and fanfics.
One of the things that I hate the most about facebook are the silly people (some of whom I’m related to) who use FB to proselytize. There are people who “update Jesus’ status” every day, and those who upload a bible verse a day.
Sadly, some of these people are people that I care about and I want to know what is going on in their lives. I just get tired of having to work my way past all of this inanity to get to that information.
Sounds about right, “God” didn’t want Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge in their story book, and the Pope doesn’t want his followers to “eat for the tree of knowledge” (read: learn more than he tells them) in real life, too.
It’s almost as if all the ideas the whole religion comes up with all came from the same book. Oh wait…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_popular_than_Jesus
…what kind of fanfics? Are they crossovers? Does Jesus help the CSI team solve crime? Or get it on with Edward Cullen?
#22 chrisbongs
Yes he is!
Jesus M Christ
Won’t Ratzinger be disappointed to know that the first robotic Pope will be raise in a couple of centuries. But he will be gladdened to know that the RCC is still a few centuries away from the first female Pope. Strangely enough, she will be a fembot.
# 22 woops. That’s supposed to be chrisbonDs. Not trying to imply anything there.
What would emmet say? This is clearly not doctrine.
Janine wins the thread.
God is on Twitter too @TheTweetOfGod. He only follows one user, his son Justin Beiber. Here’s a good one: “Americans think I bless democracy, but nothing in My Old Testament track record suggests I’m anything but a totalitarian dictator.” Truer words never spoken from a parody account.
I’m looking for the One True Religion and so I’d like to know: how does the Vatican’s web traffic stack up against Landover Baptist?
@megs226 #28
Nah, he’s on Team Jacob.
I wonder if we could get the Pope to agree to a set of challenges set up by someone like the JREF. Put his holiness up against the average Catholic, a standard evangelical, people from other religions, and a few of no religion at all. Can the Pope do things that average people cant based on communication he has with his diety. If god can’t be put to the test, maybe the Pope should be.
Thanks to Bronze Dog for the link in #19. Hadn’t seen that one before. Very entertaining. It also taught me some Greek (in part 3): apisteo. Very useful: my classical Greek dictionary (yeah, I also got a modern Greek one) lists this as follows:
to not believe, mistrust; doubt; to be infidel; not to trust (sth to someone); to not obey; to not be a believer.
Yay! Ego apisteo (what was the Greek exclamation point again?)
@ ericbast #37 – I like that idea. Sorta like Legends of the Hidden Temple. Only one true religion can make it to the end, but if they don’t assemble the Golden Monkey and make it out of Olmec in time, then well, we know there’s not god (and they don’t win a Huffy bike).
But we all know there’s no god anyway. But it would be entertaining.
I call Blue Barracudas!
Someone introduced him to tvtropes.org?
PedoBear to Pope Palpatine: “…but you said we were BFFs!!”
Megs226: I wouldn’t suggest you google on “jesus slash.” Well, you could, but just don’t hold me responsible for any psychological damage.
Mormon missionaries are taught, “Don’t answer the question they ask, answer the question they should have asked.”
And the LDS Church’s general opinion of the internet is that if you don’t stick to church-approved websites you are inviting The Adversary into your home/mind/heart. Especially the pornography purveying version of The Devil.
So, the lamest porn ever is more popular than the vatican? Figures.
In fact, it makes me wonder what porn is compable to the vatican….? Q-tip porn? Fleece-collector wanking? Drier lint erotica?
Teh Pope:
Pffffft, the bible. Talk about boooor-ring! The most profound Twitter feed belongs to The God Damn Batman. Duh.
https://twitter.com/God_Damn_Batman
If the latter part of your google-fu is an acronym, then yes, you might be bombarded by a large number of promising but irrelevant search results.
I love silent reflection. The end of is often adorned with profound realizations, such as grokking the chain rule or concluding that religion is nothing but a load of rotting lutefisk. I can safely say that Pope Benedict, being a moral and ethical vampire, has never actually reflected at all.
Ewe have got to be kidding.
This papal insight is somewhat ironic though if one considers that the Catholic Church was not at all in favor of letting the people actually read the bible at all. They preferred to give the filtered and manipulated version in form of catechisms. IIRC, they were basically confronted with the Lutheran translation and had to reluctantly accommodate the fact that it existed.
@megs226
It’s Bieber, for dog’s sake.
Ah, PZ, you’re starting to edge over into crankdom. I hold no brief for His [alleged] Holliness, and you want to catalog the disastrous [and deadly] faith-based policies he preaches — e.g. campaign against condom use in AIDS riddled African nations, the “don’t embarrass the Church” cover-up of child rape — I’m on board, no question.
But gotta tell ya, getting all bent out of shape by his recommending the benefits of a little quiet reflection now and then seems just plain cranky to me. Every now and then, it’s kind of nice to turn the damn machine off, the boob tube too, and radio, and just settle back and do a little quiet thinking about whatever it is you feel like thinking quietly about. Maybe watch a sunset the while. Hard for me to see that particular recommendation as a cause for a hissy fit. On or off line.
@flatlander100
“Every now and then, it’s kind of nice to turn the damn machine off, the boob tube too, and radio, and just settle back and do a little quiet thinking about whatever it is you feel like thinking quietly about”
Unfortunately, you decided to do otherwise
Pierce @20 reminds me of a poem:
Little Pope Beep has lost his sheep
and doesn’t know how to hold them
Behind the times, he defines their crimes
to shape their souls and to ‘mold’ them
In the name of love and God up above,
he’ll mutilate, spindle and fold them
Because left to their own, they’d find a new home,
where celibate fathers don’t scold them
— N. Leigh Dunlap
flatlander:
That is not what Benny was recommending. He was attempting to warn people away from the modern day Tree of Knowledge, which is highly dangerous. Can’t have people getting curious or thinking, ya know. Just like back and think of the church, dear.
Aargh, should be: Just lie back and think of the church, dear.
“Hissy fit”? You call that a “hissy fit”?
1. I didn’t object at all to taking a break from the computer, you might notice.
2. I thought it was “shrill extremist militant bomb-throwing”, actually.
That’s not even enough to account for worldwide journalists looking for press releases to cut n paste to fill a slow news day. Let alone actual people that are actually interested in ‘news from the Vatican’ (a phrase that should be right up there with ‘military intelligence’ and ‘republican think-tank’ for levels of oxymoronicity).
@ 37 –>”If god can’t be put to the
testquestion, maybe the Pope should be.”There, FIFY.
Shorter pope: “No Knowledge, Know Jesus!”
The Vatican’s news website is getting between 8,000 and 10,000 hits a day with peaks of up to 16,000 hits over Christmas
that’s essentially saying it’s being completely ignored!
FFS, when I set up NSYNC’s first official website, it got 2 MILLION hits in the first DAY.
it AVERAGED 1.2 million hits a day for the entire time it existed (about 8 months IIRC).
Still, I think the numbers speak more to fangroup’s knowledge of access and advertising than it does to the relative popularity of the Pope vs NSYNC.
I mean, seriously, the Pope DOES have a rather large following after all.
flatlander=flatheader.
more inane posts by it over on the old Pharyngula too.
I’m sorry but the internet is bad because it is bombarding us with information all the time but twitter is good because it can bombard us with shorter bits of information?
Soundbites vs encyclopedias.
Marcus Ranum #44
Do not mock Rule 34.
Why are you so cool? In all fairness, my classmate accounted for .5 million of those.
Most of those hits are from atheists looking for stories they can use to poke fun at the Pope.
A coupla minor corrections to your post.
If you’re going to choose a stereotype, surely Father Gomez would be more accurate.
“Buggerin’ child molesters” should instead read “Child-buggerin’ molesters”
Heh, I’m either a pedant or a pederast. It’s almost the smae thing, right?
When a pope starts ‘suggesting’ we all shut the fuck up…then you know that ‘kiddy fiddlers inc.’ are hurting and panicking!
It just gives a mental image of a red and sweaty benny in a dress stamping his footsies screaming…”Shut up!…shut up!….shut up!…you are all being beastly to us!”
So the advice from Benny de rat for ‘The Roman Catholic Church’s World Day of Communications’ is basically ‘say nothing?’
Bit of a contradiction b’twixt ‘n’ b’tween your theme day and what you actually want folks to do…would you not say Benny?
It reinforces the impression that the RCC, having absolutely fuck all to say on anything remotely relevant anyway, might consider open theist gobs are a potential for further embarrassment…one line or two from ‘donkey breath Donehue is usually enough to demonstrate their problem methinks.
Well a line or two from any RC Cardinal or bishop is more then enough to recognise severe insanity thread that binds.
Anyway the average jeebus drooler is somewhat hampered in silent contemplation cos they have not the mental reserves to actually contemplate in the first place, otherwise they would not be ‘katolic…they tend to function by priestly dictate, contemplation is not a process that is encouraged or indeed required.
And as for the nasty wasty atheists well those make really scary noises which should definitely be silent cos those noises make sense.
So maybe it is a two birder with one stone scenario he is aiming for here.
Methinks that seeing as there is so much chronic asinine toxic stupidity available… talking it out aloud might make the proverbial penny drop with the sheeple with a deafening clang, the more yadda yadda do, the more bums on pew numbers diminish…
Maybe that is Bennies concern…numbers dwindling better keep stum before many more wander off!
But I humbly suggest resistance to the temptation for Atheists to sycophantically fandango to bennies baby’s brain fart and not shut the fuck up!…as if they would!
It would however be ironic if the church misunderstood the edict and actually they shut the fuck up for a year…but that is less likely.
Although I have a fairly strong feeling that ‘Atheist’ is the target for the ‘shutting the fuck up’ expressed clumsily and forlornly for sure but an 85 year old virgin has not much time for subtlety when addressing the enemy at the gates.
…
child porn?In all fairness, my classmate accounted for .5 million of those.
heh, probably so. The unique visitor count was indeed an order of magnitude lower…
Why are you so cool?
you know, those people (NSYNC), their managers, and their circling shark tank that their lawyers formed really tended to disgust and irritate me more than anything.
It always shocked me whenever I would meet with my marine biology mates (I was also working on some related research on sharks at the time), that instead of talking biology, they always wanted to hear about what the latest was in the internet entertainment industry – who I had met, whose website would go up next, etc. Vice versa, of course, whenever my interest in marine research would pop up when I was trying to talk shop with the crew that I was working with on the internet entertainment sites.
*shrug*
I guess it’s just common for people to romanticize the stuff that goes on outside of their own specialties.
Pretty sure the fleece-collectors will be cross about this. Do not annoy the pharyngula phybre squad. They have sharp pointy things.
Do not annoy the pharyngula phybre squad.
and whatever you do, don’t speak ill of Ovis should you ever be posting at Ravelry…
bad juju.
The pope is a moron. His dislike of the Internet stems entirely from his dislike of free information and knowledge. Of course the Internet is full of nonsense, but the actually coherent, useful information is the antithesis to what the pope stands for – subjugation and misinformation.
Clearly this is about information casting light in the shadows where the Church’s malevolencies lurk. Information can lead to prosecution, so the Tweets shall set you free!
I’m guessing this Pope fellow would have really hated the encyclopedia that so enriched my childhood.
Did I really need to know where Andorra was? Not really, but it never occurred to me to complain about “answers I didn’t need.”
The Pope must think that learning new stuff pushes other stuff out of your head. As for Twitter, I suspect some of those names from the Bible would use up most of your allotment of characters on their own.
Killed By Fish
I’m not aware of any way of life where one just gets the information one was looking for. I think that would be downright impossible. Also, how many people were looking to hear what the Powp thinks? I wasn’t.
Marcus Ranum #44
Vati-can haz third-gen firewall?
“Fuck the pope”
Now thats a message that never gets old :)
@72:
Kind of reminds me of a book I read about once… Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Sex But Have Been Forced To Find Out.
Thanks to Douglas Adams, natch!
Why is it that whenever he opens his mouth, something stupid and/or offensive comes out? Heaven forbid you should be exposed to questions you’d never thought of!
“Is Father Flaherty a buggerin’ child molester?”
Yes.
No word of a lie, the buggerin’ child molester in my parish was named Father Flaherty.
Oh, my, PZ! The vapors!
Are you saying the Pope is twittering?
That he is a twit[terer]?
That Bene Dic’t will give the lads a tweat?
He likes Twitter because you can’t get information from Tweets the way you can, say, those information-overloading nasty sites like Wikipedia or talk.origins, etc., that will seize the hearts and minds of the young by the sinister route with heavy-handed dull material fact, rather than the dexterous way he lightly reaches round for them!
But also….All those lovely Ts [pronounced “tease”]! Three of them! “twitter!” Its so woody! Its like the silhouette of Golgotha in a single Word!
And, oh, he do like his Ts! Those altar boys, in their clean white lacy gowns, and under those robes, their soft young rounded smooth warm firm as-yet-unsullied virginal flesh, gently, lovingly parted rondures pursed and dewy as lips at communion awaiting the supreme unction of the orb and sceptre of Papal office….Oh….What’s a Pontiff to do?
Well if you want to ask jeesus how popular he is, our local paper has identified his whereabouts:
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/im-jesus-riverland-man-says/story-e6frea83-1226055976446
He’s had special training.
Nice try, but we know that’s not true, O infallible magic one.
…“fuck the pope”…
It’s good to see that a little of the ‘culture’ of Northern Ireland has stuck to you following your relatively recent visit. Even if somewhat onesided.
I grew up with that very phrase ringing in my ears!
(Non) Cogito @1
Didn’t even hear the wings flap.
Okay, this is just getting hilarious. Mormons, Catholics, and Sophisticated Theologians/Master Debators , all opposed to Evil Non-Biblical Internet Information.
Glen Davidson @17
Spinal Tap have fan sites and I believe …
Also: Not just the internet, but colleges are evil and unchristian too . So speaketh the Paranoid Right-wing Theocrats.
This is an institution that restricted vernacular language, put Galileo under house arrest, burned Giordano Bruno, and put the works of Copernicus, Kepler, Milton, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Kant and many others on a list of forbidden books. The Catholic Church regards education as its Kryptonite, and rightly so. And actually, PZ, I would wager that the pope would be glad if fewer people were reading the Bible.