Archive for the ‘catholic’ Category

The Vatican Took down the Bible from their web site!

Posted: July 14, 2017 by datechguy in catholic
Tags: ,

President Merkin Muffley: Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

I was in the process of writing a blog post about parenthood on the occasion of my oldest son’s birthday and I wanted to finish by quoting St. Paul in scripture so I hit my bookmarks to the psalms as the quickest way to access the bible on the vatican and got this message

My first thought was they finally fixed The Psalm section which was a pain in the neck so I went to my base link on the blog, clicked on the Bible which goes to the index page and got the same thing.

I figured the vatican site might be down but when I clicked on it, it came up normally so I looked for the link to the bible and didn’t see it where it had been before. Looking at the main page I found a reference link which had a page with a link to the Catechism of the Catholic Church , Canon law and some new links I hadn’t seen before including COMPENDIUM OF THE SOCIAL DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH written by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. But at the top of the list was The Bible. So I clicked on the link figured I’d have to update my bookmarks and saw this….

Here is the text if you can’t read the screen shot:

“The Holy Bible is available in almost every language on earth: the Episcopal Conferences take care of the continuous updating of the translations. In order to have access to the latest Bible version, kindly consult the website of your Episcopal Conference. ”

Seriously you’re the vatican and you TOOK THE &(#$(@(% BIBLE OFF YOUR WEB SITE! You actually think it’s more important to carry a 13-year-old document by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace available for visitors than the Bible?

What on earth is going on in Rome?

Closing thought. There is only one thing more frightening to me han the thought that the Bible was removed from the Vatican’s web site without Pope Francis knowledge and approval. The idea that it was.

UPDATE: I decided to see how easy it is to find the bible on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Website. Fortunately there is a front page link that looks like this:

The first two choices take you the readings from Today’s mass in either English or Spanish, the third choice Books of the bible brings you to both a list and a link to each chapter of each book of the bible (and in terms of Psalms is far superior to the old vatican version which had no link to individual Psalms just to the book that started you on #1 which was a real pain in the neck).

Let’s hope all the other conferences worldwide are just as diligent.

I still think pulling the Bible from the Vatican web site is a horrible idea both in terms of practice and in terms of optics.

Update 2: I guess the 1st printing of my book is now a collector’s item as it contains these words in the introduction that will have to be revised:

As might be expected I will be quoting scripture extensively throughout. All scripture used comes directly from the Vatican Web Site (http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/_INDEX.HTM) unless otherwise noted, so that if you have access to the internet, you can confirm the quotes you see.

If you are reading an electronic version of the book you will find some hyperlinks embedded to both scripture and some other items.

I guess I’ll have to fix those paragraphs and redirect the links in the electronic version when I get a chance.  I guess you’d better buy the book now while you can.

Update 3:  Can’t help but thinking of Dr. Strangelove

Gentlemen you can’t read the Bible here, this is the Vatican!

Update 4: Added the text of the screen shot

Update 5: Subscriber Richard Shuford reminds me that the internet and more specifically the Wayback Machine is forever and while the July 5th capture showed the bible gone the June 6 2017 capture still has the main page but I’m linking the Jan 31st 2017 version which has all the pages there available and readable.

Perhaps I should provide a permanent link but the real story is this.

For at least 11 days the Bible has been gone from the vatican web site. This is a newsworthy story and yet I’ve seen no reporting on this other than mine. That means not a single member of the press in the world has attempted to access the bible online there in that time.

I’d like to say that’s a surprise, but that would be a lie.

Update 7: Scripture is back at the Vatican site but Beware of the Leopard!

Common Thread of the Left: We’re killing babies So What…

Posted: January 25, 2015 by datechguy in abortion, culture

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

George Orwell: Animal Farm 1945

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.

Alexander Stephens March 21, 1861

One of the first arguments that generally come out of the mouth of a person who supports abortion when confronted by the argument on innocent life is that you aren’t killing baby in abortion.

Not anymore. Mary Elizabeth Williams has decided to go the other way here is the title or her Salon Piece

So what if abortion ends life?
I believe that life starts at conception. And it’s never stopped me from being pro-choice

Mary Katherine Ham notes the thinking process:

This was the exact thought process that led me to the exact opposite position. I, too, noticed a distinction between how women approached an in-utero child when they wanted the child and how they felt about it when the pregnancy was unexpected and unwanted. Logically, it made no sense to me that the mother’s disposition should change the biological disposition of the baby. Therefore, it made no sense that it should change the ethics of the situation. But Mary Elizabeth Williams goes a whole different direction

Mary Elizabeth Williams doesn’t just go in a different direction she goes all Comrade Napoleon on us

All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss

Katrina Trinko calls asks the obvious:

By this same logic, isn’t infanticide also fine and dandy? After all, if we’re talking about autonomy, kids aren’t exactly independent as soon as they are born. No infant can take care of themselves. And even later on in childhood, children rely heavily on the adults in their life to provide shelter, food, and emotional support. What about kids and adults who become disabled in life? What about quadriplegics?

Elizabeth Scalia, meanwhile is horrified:

When terrorists flew jets into tall buildings, they believed that those 3,000 lives were “worth sacrificing” for the furtherance of their situation. When Nazis led people with disabilities into gas chambers, those lives were “worth sacrificing” for society. When Herod had all the male children killed Bethlehem, those lives were “worth sacrificing” for his ease of mind.

The utilitarian mindset is a crystalline brutality of efficiency. If human beings of unknown or dubious worth cannot contribute to the comfort of a society, or the success of an endeavor or the happiness of one’s life, they are swept aside and away.

I’m shocked none of these ladies mentioned slavery, the ultimate utilitarian argument, consider these words from Williams…

She understands that it saves lives not just in the most medically literal way, but in the roads that women who have choice then get to go down, in the possibilities for them and for their families.

..and remember the arguments in the past concerning the black man, and the red man and how their subordination allowed the superior the more important to advance and achieve, to give them roads to go down and possibilities for them and their families.

And it also ignores something else, the costs of abortion:

A recent study published by Great Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists (H/T Alveda King Blog) includes data collected from 22 studies, conducted over 14 years, involving over 887,000 women, of which at least 166,831 had abortions.  The results? Eighty-one percent of women (81%) who have had abortions suffer an increased risk of severe mental health problems.

All these reactions have merit but they miss the real story of the Salon piece although Elizabeth comes closest…

Were I a cartographer, I would hasten to warn Ms. Williams against this route; I would mark the map, “Here be Monsters.”

Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth you are so close, being kind-hearted you conclude that Ms Williams is taking herself on a monstrous route unknowingly, but observe her argument carefully. This is a place she has been forever, in fact an honest reading of her piece admits the pro-abortion side has been there all along. The only reason she is making this statement in public is she believes it will advance her cause.

In short Ms. Williams is not taking the route toward the monsters, she is the MONSTER and the monster has decided it is strong enough to show true colors. By it being printed in a national magazine publicly it informs others that they can openly discuss this topic without fear.

That begs the question why now? Well that’s a piece is for tomorrow.

8 Opportunities to earn a Plenary Indulgence Nov 1-8

Posted: November 1, 2014 by datechguy in catholic, Church doctrine
Tags: , ,

This post will be bumped annually during the All Saint day octave details below.

(more…)

Disproving the “Catholics kept the Bible from the People” lie in one exercise

Posted: July 19, 2014 by datechguy in catholic
Tags: ,

One of the most common pieces of idiocy I hear over and over on the net is the idea that there was some kind of grand conspiracy of the Catholic Church to keep the Bible out of the hands of the masses that was only foiled with the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg. This idiotic tweet is standard:

@DaTechGuyblog @JasonReinhardt7 @legioviferrata 2 finish WHO would dare keep Bible secret & persecute people who read it 4 millennia Any1?

— CassTete (@CassTete1) July 19, 2014

The amount of historical ignorance it takes to make such a claim is so astounding that one is shocked that a person would be willing to make it in public, but since people know so little of history let me suggest a simple experiment to illustrate the absurdity of it all.

The next time someone tells you this tripe, ask them to do the following.

1. Sit yourself down in front of their  laptop and open up your bible.

2. Starting from Genesis start typing the entire thing out including verse numbers

The new Testament contains 138,020 words in 7956 verses. As you are including the verse numbers that’s an extra word for every say 3 verses so add 2652 words for a total of 140,682.

Now because a person making such a claim is likely a protestant we’ll make the old testament easy by doing what Martin Luther did and lop off the books he didn’t like leaving you 602,585. To make things easier we’ll even excuse you from the verse numbers.

That’s a total of 743,267 words.

A professional typist using a standard keyboard averages between 50-80 words a minute. Taking the low end of 50 words a minute  that means it would take you 14,867.34 minutes to type out the whole thing.

As there are 1440 minutes in the day that means it would take you 10.324 days of 24/7 typing to copy an entire bible assuming you were able to maintain that 50 words per minute the entire time without food, drink or rest

Let’s be kind and assume you need to sleep and be generous and give you say 6 hours a night to sleep. Let’s furthermore allow you a full two hours to eat two to three meals, take a bathroom break and dress So instead of working 24/7 you are working a 16 hour day getting up at 5 to type and hitting the sack at 11 PM with two hours during the day for other things. That would make give you about 960 minutes a day to devote to typing the bible finishing in 15.48 days at that steady 50 Word per minute rate throughout without  error (96% correct simply won’t do)

Ok now lets take away your laptop and replace it with a manual typewriter without an auto correct. How much time would the loading of paper add? The correction of errors. The centering etc? Let’s be EXTREMELY generous and say it would only add 10% to your total time so now we’re up to 17 days to copy a Protestant bible working 16 hours a day seven days a week.

Now lose the typewriter and write it by hand. According to Keller in 1988 An average person can copy text by hand at a rate of 22 words per minutes and now you are dealing with getting pens, starting pages over if you make a mistake etc.  Just how long would it take to hand write a bible?  Well a retired fellow by the name of Phillip Patterson managed to do it in 4 years.

Four years after he began his project to write out every word of the Bible, Phillip Patterson penned the very last lines Saturday at an upstate New York church.“Every single curly-q, every single loop, it was all worth it,” said Patterson, 63, moments after inking the final two verses of the King James Bible. “I’m really going to miss this writing.”

It took Patterson just a few minutes to copy the final lines of the Book of Revelation before a crowd of about 125 people at St. Peter’s Presbyterian Church in Spencertown. He ended the ceremony by saying “Amen.”

But lets assume you are not a retired AIDS patient and much healthier than Mr. Patterson, Moreover we are working uninterrupted for our 16 hours a day every day unlike Keller who devoted a mere 14 hours a day on occasion to work on it.

I’ll wager we can cut that four years down to a single year easy.

Now let’s replace our Pen with a fountain pen.  You have to constantly refill your pen and get your bottled ink, but at least it gives your fingers a rest. Plus you’re going to have to worry about ink stains & accidents. How many days would that add to the project?  Less than 10% say a month or more?

Now replace that fountain pen with a quill, now you have to sharpen that quill and be much more careful since it’s easier to make a mistake as there is no normal ink flow. Plus there is a danger of puncturing the paper with the point. Where do you think we are now? 14 months? 15?

Now cut off your electricity. You can now only write during time of full sunlight or by candlelight.

Suddenly you’re limited to an average of 12 hours a day to work, but that’s OK because now you have 4 hours to use to actually live and rest, but that takes a full 25% off your writing time. We are now up to 18 months to copy that bible. And you’re pretty much doing it the way a medieval monk used to do so, except your glasses are likely much better so you aren’t straining as much as you write.

But if we want to do what the monk did there are two things we can’t ignore..

#1. Being a monk you are observing the sabbath. So you are now losing one day in seven that gets you up to 21 months to finish that book.

#2 What about calligraphy? Most bibles were not written in just plain you are now adding flourishes and fancy lettering.  This is the word of God not some dimestore novel we’re talking about.

Bottom line you are talking nearly 2 years of manual labor working 12 hour days six days a week to produce a single bible.

So are you really going to stand there and tell me that there was a vast Catholic conspiracy to keep Bibles away from the general public when it took two full man years of manual labor to produce a single copy?

Given the amount of man hours it’s a wonder that any Bibles were produced at all and it speaks to the dedication and the faith of both the Catholic Church and the monks at the time that there were bibles even for the clergy let alone for anyone else.

And we haven’t even taken into account the lack of literacy among people living at subsistence level or the cost of such a book. (At $2 an hour 12 hours a day 6 days a week no overtime that $7488 in today’s money not counting materials. Tell me how many $7500 items do you have in YOUR house)?

So the next time some fool tries to tell you of the grand Catholic conspiracy of millennia to keep scripture out of the hands of the people give them this post or tell them to put their fingers where their mouths are.

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