Your Religion Is False » galileo

Worst Jobs: Vatican Astronomer

Joel — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:37:01 +0000

You probably think you’ve heard them all. Lifeguard at the sewage plant. Public school teacher. Dick Cheney’s hunting buddy. Bill collector for Dr. Kevorkian. Oakland Raiders assistant coach.

Well, now there’s a new one to add to the list: Vatican astronomer.

Sure, the hours are OK, and Rome is full of easily-charmed young women, and you can spend most of the workday goofing off and theorizing whether space aliens are allowed to take communion or not.

However, there’s also the real possibility that if you start doing, you know, science, then you might be arrested as a heretic and locked away in the basement where they keep confiscated copies of The Da Vinci Code.

But this doesn’t seem to worry star astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno:

Q: Is there something spiritual in it for you?

A: Anybody who’s looked at the stars, it’s got to be spiritual. Now, I don’t want to say I find God in the stars. It’s the other way around. … You know, the reason that they fund us … is to show the world that the church embraces science.

For whatever reason, the world seems not to be convinced about the whole “embraces science” thing yet. Perhaps when the church abandons its evidenceless claims of human parthenogenesis and resurrection and transsubstantiation and miracle cures “they” don’t want you to know about, then we might start taking Brother Guy’s claim seriously.

(Plus, “it’s got to be spiritual” is not exactly scientific reasoning at its finest.)

Now, that’s not to say that the job doesn’t have its perks. For instance, while non-Vatican scientists have to spend lots of time becoming familiar with what counts as “evidence” for things, Brother Guy gets to remain blissfully unaware:

Q: Any evidence of Heaven in the heavens?

A: In a funny way, yes. It’s not enough that the universe makes sense, and that we can study it — that there are laws to be found. … But the fact is, the skies are beautiful. And even the laws of physics that describe the skies are beautiful. And to me that is the beauty of the creator coming through.

Q: Any evidence that after you die you go to heaven or hell depending on whether you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior, ate his cracker-flesh, and let a priest fondle you in a dark booth?

A: In a funny way, yes. The skies are beautiful!

Q: Any evidence that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim?

A: In a funny way, yes. The skies are beautiful!

Q: Any evidence that there’s a lost city of Atlantis somewhere under the ocean and that it’s populated by bloodthirsty merpeople who are waiting for the Mayan Prophecy Year of 2012 to come aboveground and conquer us all as revenge for the plastic we’ve been dumping into the Pacific?

A: In a funny way, yes. The skies are beautiful!

Or come up with your own. Thanks, Catholic Church!

Chesty "Crush on Benedict" videos

Joel — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:54:11 +0000

Never let it be said that the Catholic Church doesn’t embrace change. They lifted a ban on publishing Galileo’s works only 76 years after he died, and they lifted their general prohibition on works advocating heliocentrism only 40 years after that. And only a year after the Cadaver Synod they forbade any future prosecutions of corpses.

So it should be no surprise that the Pope plans to join Facebook in 2009, only a couple of years after your mom:

The Church wants to emulate US President Barack Obama’s use of the internet, both during his election campaign and since he took office.

Hopefully, in addition to Facebook, it will include some of the following:

Chesty “Crush on Benedict” videos
Use of Chilean midgets to mock rival Priests
Creation of MyBenedict private social network
Viral “things only evil and inhuman” remix video featuring will.i.am, Scarlett Johnasson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Herbie Hancock, and Nick Cannon
“change.va” website to take suggestions for ways to improve the Catholic Church, followed by online town halls where Benedict mocks the most popular suggestions

You can keep track at the unfortunately-named Pope2you website once it goes live (I am guessing that “Pope2U” wasn’t available, or maybe they were afraid of violating a Prince trademark).

And let me be the first to say, “Welcome to 1998!”

Mormons, grave-robbing, and baptism

Joel — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:22:31 +0000

There are a lot of good reasons to dig up a corpse. Maybe you need the gold in his fillings. Maybe you’re trying to figure out whether former President Zachary Taylor was poisoned. Maybe you want to make a skull bong. Or maybe you just want to find out if Galileo’s vision problems might have affected some of his astronomical findings.

But you know what’s not a good reason to dig up a corpse? To baptize it into the Mormon church:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints confirmed Tuesday afternoon that someone improperly, posthumously baptized the late mother of President Obama into the Mormon faith.

So if you’re a Mormon, you can’t drink, you can’t have coffee, you can’t do drugs, you have to dress up in stupid clothes and wander around the world trying to sign up converts, you have pretend that stupid Mormon movies like Napoleon Dynamite aren’t moronic, you have to read terrible Mormon novels about sexless pedophile vampires, and you have to wear magical undergarments to calm the urges. AND YET YOU’RE ENCOURAGED TO DIG UP DEAD PEOPLE AND BAPTIZE THEM! WHERE IS THE QUALITY CONTROL?

Update:

It has been pointed out to me that Mormons do not actually dig up the dead to baptize them. In fact, they do not baptize them at all; they just gather together in one of their Mormon caves and splash water on each other and say the name of the dead person.

In my defense, this was reported as news, which made me think that something newsworthy had happened, which a bunch of weirdos in a cave pouring water on each other and saying people’s names certainly isn’t.

You can appreciate my confusion. Thanks a lot, Jake Tapper.