Catholic Bishops Support Net Neutrality 304
An anonymous reader writes "This week, in their annual 'State of the Union' address, the President of the US Catholic Bishops Conference spoke on a number of issues, in particular a surprisingly strong statement in favor on Net Neutrality. 'As the Internet continues to grow in its influence and prominence in Americans' lives, we support legislation and federal regulations that ensure equal access to the Internet for all, including religious and non-profit agencies, as well as those in more sparsely populated or economically distressed areas. True net neutrality is necessary for people to flourish in a democratic society,' said Archbishop Timothy Dolan. It's always interesting to see the Catholic Church joining in a crusade that means so much to so many Slashdotters!"
Re:You may be surprised (Score:5, Informative)
No, Intelligent design is a radical Protestant scam. It is an attempt to save the Genesis account of creation at any cost, because if they don't, there's no original sin for Jesus to be sacrificed for rendering the whole of Christianity meaningless.
Re:You may be surprised (Score:2, Informative)
In fact roman church has no sympathy for intelligent design, young earth mith, creation myths and so on.
They accept evolution theory too. Since evolution theory has no provision to say that there is any objective and gives no characterization to evolution church takes it's freedom to just say that it could be God to be driving it. The genesis could just be interpreted to be an allegoric account.
Roman catholic church is not stupid. They just want to stop scientists from studying human genetics(no problem with animal and vegetable ones though) because their beliefs tell them so. I disagree but can understand them
Re:You may be surprised (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the official position of the Catholic Church is that the Big Bang and evolution are the best models currently available to describe the universe that God created, and the process of how we came into being. There is no conflict between evolution and Catholic teaching, and the Big Bang was originally put forward by a priest, but dismissed by much of the rest of the scientific community as being too much like a "God did it" theory.
ID isn't blasphemous to Catholics because it's limiting God. ID is just wrong because A) it isn't science. B) it assumes taking the BIble literally. Catholics theologians are fully aware of how the Bible has changed, is sometimes self-contradictory, and has been reinterpreted over the centuries, and so taking a specific translation and treating it as word-for-word literal truth is a simplistic and juvenile approach.
Re:Crusade? (Score:5, Informative)
Sad, very sad and ironic. In this day and age, having to defend Technology with the help of Religion.
Even sadder that this story suggests the Church is actually FOR net neutrality as we understand it today.
They are pontificating (sorry) about net ACCESS.
They totally miss the main points of net neutrality such as traffic shaping, throttling, or prioritizing your own traffic over competitive traffic.
I don't see this as a strong statement at all, simply lip service leaving me wondering if they truly understand the issue.
Religion defending technology...catholics built it (Score:2, Informative)
So why is it strange the catholic church is pro-technology ? Yes, they do find that technology must be moral, and even research must err on the side of morality (therefore - e.g. no killing embryos for research). The large majority of our technology was developed by catholic clergy. From the laws of physics to things like glasses (even now the catholic church is sponsoring Stephen Hawking - read his book once - and doubtless many others), and generally any and all technology we knew about before 1900. Especially in the medical field the catholic church is extremely well-represented. Without the catholic church, there would not be any universities, nor would we even have knowledge of the classical age in the first place.
The catholic church has been an institution of learning and knowledge during all of it's existence. During several time periods it has been the *only* such institution. It is not only the oldest organization that still exists, but is also the one of the very, very few organizations that have managed to avoid destroying all the knowledge they had available. (most "civilizations", from islam, to chinese, to mayas, incas have destroyed all their own knowledge, and they almost all did it to themselves)
IT IS NOT ABOUT NET NEUTRALITY. (Score:3, Informative)
This has NOTHING to do with ensuring that there is no discrimination amongst providers. It has everything with ensuring that there is no discrimination amongst consumers in ability to get to it. THat is all.
This is a BIG difference.
The odd thing is that the church could simply pay for the access for their poor parishioners. But, they do not want to do that. They want the GOV. to do that.
Re:With friends like that... (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. They're the ones who originally promoted the whole idea of copyright. They wanted to keep control of the Bible, stop people from making unauthorized copies.
[citation needed]
I always understood the Statute of Anne to be about protecting the vested interests of publishers sympathetic to the crown. And anyway, Queen Anne was a protestant, not a Catholic, so Catholic lobbying is unlikely to have been effective.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"How the Bible has changed" (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah. I think the Vulgate was the main source for the KJV translators.
It's problematic to use the term "original version" when discussing the Bible. At best we tend to have what would be described as the oldest sources available, and in some cases these oldest sources appear themselves descended from earlier unknown sources. I'm not sure what you're defining as insignificant here, and whether you're talking about the canonical Bible or its individual books?
The Bible, as in a canon of collected works, has been pretty stable for a long time now, but it's not as if 2000 years ago the Bible fell from the sky in its current form. There have been a number of canons and apocrypha. It took hundreds of years to arrive at what would be almost universally accepted as the canon we know today. That canon itself has been pretty consistent for at least 1500 years, and the KJV dates from the 16th or 17th century century (can't recall which), so it is wrong to claim that the *Bible* itself has changed a great deal. It is however perfectly correct to highlight the incredible quantity of apocryphal works and what appear to be later additions to individual books. I think the more important thing to look at is how interpretations of the Bible have changed.
I like to use KJV and NIV side-by-side. NIV is a bit dry and at times over-simplified, but far easier to comprehend. KJV alone can be a bit misleading, such as in Exodus (I forget the verse) where the word "gift" in the KJV is more correctly translated as "bribe". That wouldn't make sense to a KJV reader unless they were very careful to read the verse in its correct context.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Funny you should say that (Score:2, Informative)
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition [wikipedia.org]
Second sentence confirms point made.
A more Catholic spin on it is given at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm [newadvent.org] (see the section titled The inquisition in Spain).
2. Again Wikipedia is a good starting point ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades [wikipedia.org] ), and has many references for further reading. "The Crusades were fought mainly by Roman Catholic forces (...) against Muslims who had occupied the near east since the time of the Rashidun Caliphate,"
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Christianity [wikipedia.org] Hitler rejected all of the Old Testament, which places his version of Christianity quite far from anything commonly accepted as Catholic or Lutheran.
4. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair [wikipedia.org] (in the Dialogue section). Essentially the Pope would only allow Galileo to publish a book on his theory if he included the Pope's view in the book as well; Galileo made the character giving the Pope's view an idiot (named Simplicio) and this upset people a lot (as they assumed he was trying to make the Pope look like an idiot).
Re:Crusade? (Score:5, Informative)
I suspect that those bishops who understand the issue are in favour of network neutrality.
The USCCB's 2006 expression of support [nccbuscc.org] for net neutrality rules being incorporated into federal law would certainly provide a fairly strong basis for the conclusion that the conference does, indeed, support net neutrality as well as expanded consumer access, rather than conflating the two issues as some Slashdotters have suggested is the reason for the two sentences (one on access and on one neutrality) in the current statement.