All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 10, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
12:43
1279 True News 20: God Flip-Flops on Darwin!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well. This is true news.
Oh, the Vatican.
So today, 11th February 2009, the Holy See has finally seen the light.
The Vatican claims Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible with Christianity.
The Vatican has admitted that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution should not have been dismissed and claimed it is compatible with the Christian view Of creation.
My god, it's like chewing tinfoil in the brain.
Gianfranco Ravisi, Monsignor Ravisi, said that Darwin's theories had never been formally condemned by the Roman Catholic Church.
Archbishop Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said that while the Church had been hostile to Darwin's theory in the past, the idea of evolution could be traced to St.
Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Fr. Guiseppi Tenseleniti, professor of theology at the Pontifical Santa Croce University in Roma, added that 4th century theologian St.
Augustine had, quote, never heard the term evolution, but he knew that big fish eat smaller fish, which of course has nothing to do with evolution, and forms of life had been transformed, quote, slowly over time.
Aquinas made similar observations in the Middle Ages.
Ahead of a papal-backed conference next month marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the Vatican is also set to play down the idea of intelligent design which argues that a higher power must be responsible for the complexities of life.
The conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University will discuss intelligent design to an extent, but only as a cultural phenomenon rather than a scientific or theological issue.
Monsignor Revasi said Darwin's theories had never been formally condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, pointing to comments more than 50 years ago when Pope Pius XII described evolution as a valid scientific approach.
Mark Leclerc, who teaches natural philosophy at the Gregorian University, said that, quote, time has come for a rigorous and objective valuation of Darwin by the church as the 200th century of Darwin's birth approaches.
Professor Leclerc argues that too many of Darwin's opponents, primarily creationists, mistaken to claim his theories are totally incompatible with the religious vision of reality.
Earlier this week, prominent scientists and leading religious figures wrote to the Daily Telegraph to call for an end to the fighting over Darwin's legacy.
They argued that militant atheists are turning people away from evolution by using it to attack religion.
While they also urged believers in creationism to acknowledge the overwhelming body of evidence that now exists to support Darwin's theory, the Church of England is seeking to bring Darwin back into the fold.
With a page on its website paying tribute to his forgotten work in his local parish showing science and religion need not be at odds.
Oh, dear Lord.
Dear Lord above!
What madness is this?
Well, first of all, science and religion are at odds.
In the same way that intelligence and stupidity are at odds.
In the same way that truth and lies are at odds.
Gold and fiat money are at odds.
You and your government are at odds.
So, yes, I'm sorry to shock everyone, And I'm sure it's not a shock to too many, but religion and science are opposites, because science is rigorous and objective and requires on the scientific method, which is around reproducibility and universality and rigorous theorizing combined with empirical evidence.
And religion is a series of child-abusing ass-clown fairy tales, Designed to guilt innocent children into paying for a cure for a disease that does not exist, called Original Sin, or something akin to it, for the rest of their natural-born lives.
Why is this topic even coming up?
Well, I think it has a lot to do with our good friend Dickie D, Richard Dawkins.
Who has been doing fantastic work.
Of course, what does he mean?
What do I know, right? But I mean, the stuff that I've read of his, particularly The Blind Watchmaker and his recent book on God, The God Delusion.
Great stuff! I don't agree with him on particular forms of ethics and he's kind of statist, but that's not particularly important because I'm not a biologist and he's not a philosopher.
But the stuff that he's been doing is great.
Other secular humanists have been doing fantastic work.
Christopher Hitchens with God is Not Great and The End of Faith by Sam Harris.
The sort of big three, and to a tiny, tiny degree, the work that I've been doing.
We just passed one million views on YouTube as of February 11th, 2009.
Of the Freedom Aid Radio channel, and there are other videos, and it doesn't count podcasts, and we've had about 50,000 or 60,000 books downloaded, so good stuff for a philosophy program, so thank you so much for everyone there.
But atheists have finally stopped Tiptoeing around the creepy, weird sensitivities of religious people.
And I love to approach religious people with reason, with positivity, with friendliness and so on, but if they continue to blather on about faith, which really is just bigotry with a halo, then yeah, I'm sorry.
You are off the civilized roadmap of interactions, and you have become an enemy of reason.
And of virtue and of truth and of common humanity if you continue to trumpet these nonsense fairy tales as if they have any kind of empirical or factual or rational validity.
There is no god, there are no gods, there are no leprechauns, there are no unicorns, and there are no deities.
I think that it's the confidence that atheists have gathered together, particularly because of the uniting power of the Internet, where you and I can talk even though 99.9999% chance would never have met, we can still have our discussions and our back and forths, which helps everyone with a rational minority viewpoint to join hands across the water kind of stuff.
So that is one of the reasons why the Vatican is now opening itself up to The question of the validity of evolution.
The nonsense that goes on in the Bible with regards to Any of the creatures that are described there is all complete nonsense.
It gets just about every biological fact wrong.
You might, of course, ask why there are no marsupials in the Bible.
Well, of course, the simple answer for that is that there were no marsupials in the Middle East, right?
So because they didn't know about Australia, they did not write about Australia.
They also did not write about pandas because they did not know anything about China.
So, of course, it's just this local Nonsense, bullshit fairy tale that spread through violence, terrorizing of children, blood, sword, and burning throughout the world, and through, of course, infecting the Emperor Constantine in the late Roman Empire.
Everything is wrong about biology in the Bible.
It misclassifies animals.
It doesn't describe animals that would not be immediately available to the locals.
It does not talk about anything to do with evolution.
It doesn't describe germs.
Wouldn't it have been great to have a commandment in there which says, wash your hands before operating on people?
How many millions of lives would that have saved throughout human history?
Of course, it doesn't talk about anything scientifically valid.
It doesn't talk about black holes.
It doesn't talk about atoms.
It doesn't talk about theories of gravity.
It doesn't talk about a sun-censored universe.
Doesn't talk about dark matter.
Of course, there's nothing in about quantum physics, because none of these things were known to the people who wrote the Bible, and of course they're not going to make up anything that's true, because it's just sun-baked, delusional Bedouin nonsense.
So, that's, uh, of course, I mean, the idea that there's some precedence for, um, the theory of evolution in the Bible is complete nonsense.
The theory of evolution does not have a magical imaginary sky god snapping his fingers over a six-day period and creating the entire universe.
Approximately a few thousand years ago, according to some superstitious lunatics.
So that's complete nonsense.
But sort of what I wanted to end up this rant with was just this mad nonsense that goes on.
And I'm not a Catholic, obviously, but it's just hard to imagine.
You know, if you're a Catholic, I mean, seriously, how can you take this stuff with even a shred of seriousness?
Seriously? I mean, come on!
These people, these popes and these bishops or whatever the hell they are, monsignors, right?
They... They, of course, go up to the pope, who's infallible.
He got the keys of heaven from St.
Peter or whatever, right? So the pope is infallible.
The pope has a direct line to God, right?
He's plugged into the God matrix, probably under that funny hat.
So he, the pope, and all of the popes, have a direct line to God.
The pope is infallible.
And the pope, of course, will very often change his mind, right?
The ascension of Mary It was invented in the 19th century to avoid the problem of death, right, for Mary.
And then you get this nonsense, right?
Because Christianity is a monotheism, except with the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, and about 10,000 saints.
Oh, no, but it's a monotheistic religion, honestly.
Doctrine has changed continuously.
Throughout the history of the church, as particular scams don't work anymore, they tend to be cast aside, just as a counterfeiter who finds that people are regularly detecting his nonsense notes changes the design, or changes the denomination, or moves to another currency.
So they recently apologized for torturing the elderly Galileo, right?
We're hostile towards evolution, and we assume, of course, that God is dropping these pearls of wisdom down to the popes, because the popes are invulnerable and have this direct line to an infinite, all-knowing, all-powerful consciousness.
So what happens when they do stuff like ditch hell or ditch the concept of limbo or ditch what happens when newborns die or when, you know, a quarter to a third of babies die in utero, right?
Because God is the most prolific abortionist of all time.
Well, you have to kind of wonder, right?
Because they prayed, we assume, or if they didn't pray, they just got this God droppings into their brain.
So that had to be correct, because God is all-knowing, all-powerful, will not lie, cannot lie, knows everything, and the Pope is the little disco ball mirror of God's brain on Earth, right?
So he can't be wrong!
So what happens when he changes his mind?
There was limbo, and now there may not be limbo.
There was hell, now sometimes there's not hell.
Evolution was bad, and now evolution is good.
I mean, do you understand that from the outside, from people who were looking at this with even three daisy-chain brain cells functioning in this area, let's look at that and say, well, that's completely lunatic.
That is complete madness and lunacy.
You can't be infallible and change your mind.
You can't have access to an all-perfect omniscient intelligence, direct access to it, and then change your mind.
You can't! It's madness.
It's embarrassing for people to see this from the outside, right?
Because you say, okay, well, if evolution is now good, and formerly it was bad, then when they prayed to God before, and God obviously told them that evolution was bad, Or at least not good.
And now, obviously, they're praying for divine guidance, and God is now saying, you know what?
Came down tails instead of heads.
Let's make evolution good.
What on earth does this mean?
Of course this is a purely man-made, nonsensical, predatory, child-abusing, superstitious bunch of con men.
And the idea that anyone would take these ass-clowns seriously in anything whatsoever, forget about all of the hiding of the pedophiles, That's sickening and relevant, but it doesn't fundamentally matter because they lie about everything!
And they lie to the most vulnerable and dependent and needy and helpless and innocent beings in the world who are the children.
▲
Export Selection