Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (2460)	10/24/2000 6:38:00 PM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

Thus, the excommunication is against those who affect the lands or rights of the Catholic Church I will try to find the original paper on this later. I'm just going out. nizkor.org (2) In Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovak Official Report for the prosecution and trial of the German Major War Criminals by the International Military Tribunal established according to the Agreement of the Four Great Powers of 8 August 1945 describes in summary form the measures taken by the Nazi conspirators to suppress religious liberties and persecute the churches. The following excerpts are quoted from this report (998-PS): "(a) Catholic Church. "* At the outbreak of war, 487 Catholic priests were among the thousands of Czech patriots arrested and sent to concentration camps as hostages. Venerable high ecclesiastical dignitaries were dragged to concentration camps in Germany. * Religious orders were dissolved and liquidated, their charitable institutions closed down and their members expelled or else forced to compulsory labor in Germany. All religious instruction in Czech schools was suppressed. Most of the weeklies and monthlies which the Catholics had published in Czechoslovakia, had been suppressed from the very beginning of the occupation. The Catholic gymnastic organization "Orel" with 800,000 members was dissolved and its Property was confiscated. To a [Page 282] great extent Catholic church property was seized for the benefit of the Reich

To: Ilaine who wrote (2460)	10/24/2000 8:44:40 PM
From: E	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 28931

It's all in the motivation, as it always is. If the Church Fathers, and the Pope, had been hot to use any weapon they had at hand, including excommunication, as a weapon to save the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, etc., or subsequently wanted to use excommunication to make a moral point, they would have found an interpretation in the paragraph posted by Solon that would have untied their hands: (12) "Those who themselves or through others, invade, destroy, or detain cities, lands, places, or rights of the Roman Church, those who hold possession of, disturb, or detain its sovereign jurisdiction, and all who give aid, counsel, or countenance to these offences." Off the top of my head, the Roman Catholic Church has moral rights, for example. Or maybe they could use disturbing its sovereign jurisdiction. Or giving countenance to those offenses. If the Pope had wanted to use his authority and the authority of the Church, and excommunication, to save Jewish lives there are legions of Jesuits and others who could find ample justification in canon law. It is naive in the extreme, in my opinion, not to recognize that they did what they wanted to do. The title of Chapter One in my college psych book was "The Effect of Motivation on Perception." In the document I mentioned earlier, signed by the Pope and Hitler, the Concordat of 1933, the church agreed not to interfere as long as the state collected a religious tax from church members. This tax remains in effect today. It is 9 per cent of base income, or was in 1997, according to an article in a 1997 copy of Freethought Today I found tucked in the book I quoted from earlier. I do think there is something a bit grotesque about excommunication for membership in Planned Parenthood but not for performing abdominal surgery on unanesthetized twin (post-birth) children to see what you would see. The children were Jews. If they had been Catholic children, I suspect some "rights" and "disturbances" would have come into play that didn't and that the conjunctive or disjunctive nature of the "or" would present little problem! And that the Holocaust wouldn't have been interpreted as a "political dispute" requiring "disengagement," but as a moral issue as grave as membership in Planned Parenthood. It occurs to me that signing the Corcordat about not interfering with the Nazi state (in exchange for the tax money) implies clearly that they might have interfered had they wanted to, and gotten no payoff not to.