Vatican buries the hatchet with Charles Darwin

OK, I have to admit! I am confused. Something is definitely going on but for the life of me I can’t see what. Starting with the now infamous speech the Pope gave at his university a couple of years ago and a number of successive moves, along with Blair converting and Sarkozy mumbling about reversing the bill that guarantees the separation of church and state and given the state funding that the UK has granted some creationist schools in the UK and… now more recently the reinstatement of previously excommunicated Ecclesiastes … now this? …

If you think that the church is seeing the light, you have another thing coming. I guarantee you. Something is afoot…

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5705331.ece

By the way. If anybody with an ounce of reading comprehension ever bothered to read the speech the Pope gave at his uni, they will see that the Islamists were up in arms about the wrong thing. They should have been indignated but so should have been a number of followers of other religions. The Islamists were so completely off base about the quote in question that they failed to see the overall meaning of the speech. I’ll leave you with a few quotes from that speech:

“[…] biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. […]

“[…] A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act “with logos” is contrary to God’s nature. […]”

“” […] Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul – “λογικη λατρεία”, worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).[10]”

And then the conclusion:

“For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: “It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being – but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss”.[13] The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. “Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God”, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.”

Let me parse that for you. Christianity and only christianity is a faith that is enlightened and takes reason into account. All other religions are tolerated but in reality they are lacking as not enlightened and, anyways,  it would be best if they were christians.

Read the entire text here. All of three pages. It will take you ten minutes.