love how they both ignore the fact that children only starve because of war and such. mostly for resources that are paid handsomely on space exploration, changing hands on wars often dressed as religious ones.
There are often wars in places where resources like food and water are scarce. People fight over what little there is, or they see the weakened country as a target for an invasion. Somalia for example, has been in the grip of war for years but also has had significant droughts over the past few years. The two problems are related. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_East_Africa_drought
And a lot of people, including me, would love to go there and work on cheap desalinization if we didn't have the certainty that our lives would be at risk, and our work would stand a very high chance of being expropriated by a number of predatory competing quasi-governments in case it does work.
Look at Zimbabwe's food output on a chart and you'll see what I mean.
Yet somehow every single metric about human happiness, life, security, etc has massively risen up since we've given up on theocracy or strong theological aspects in government and society in general. The countries that still have these beliefs are middle east hellholes that are exporting terrorism around the world over cartooning.
Why do you assume the nun is a theocrat? Religion is still fairly strong in peaceful secular states and hasn't dragged them into hellholes. That some religious fundamentalists hold odious beliefs doesn't mean that the nun who wrote the letter does. For all you know she's some kind of liberation theology type who doesn't subscribe to anything you've generalized about.
Religions are very complex things, simplistic black-and-white thinking and generalizing about them doesn't really help anything at all, nor does it promote anything beneficial to humanity, it just empowers fundamentalists by supporting their ignorant simplistic black-and-white thinking about religion and science.
Please show me evidence that a plurality of catholic nuns want legalized abortion. Otherwise I will continue to assume they don't that via basic common sense, current catholic theology, experience, and history.
You know the guy who invented the birth control pill was a devout Catholic?
Catholic nuns in particular, BTW, are somewhat infamous for butting heads with power structures both in and outside the Church, from a progressive standpoint--birth control, sex work, women's rights, and GLBT rights are a handful of issues that have been known to come up. It seems to come from working directly with the affected people on the ground.
And of course many nuns do the same thing and remain staunchly conservative. People are people.
But if you think that you can accurately pigeonhole anyone with different beliefs than yours into a narrow little box, you're no better than the bogeyman you're fighting.
> You know the guy who invented the birth control pill was a devout Catholic?
Your point is irrelevant to the discussion but I'm curious. Do you have a source for this? Greg Pincus' Wikipedia entry says absolutely nothing about his religious affiliation.
It happens on a regular basis around abortion clinics (the latest victim was Dr Tiller just a few years ago).
I am tempted to say that the horrors that Mother Teresa inflicted in her clinics would also qualify as terrorism, but that's probably more open to interpretation (well, the horrors are not open to interpretation, whether it should be called terrorism can arguably be).
Have you never heard of the IRA or Basque separatists? These days most terrorists in the US & EU are protestants, but the Catholics have not given up their attempt to wrest first place from these upstart prods...
The Catholic Church does not endorse murdering entire populations, including children, newborns and cattle. In fact, it is in no uncertain terms completely opposed to such things.
I asked you about the Catholic Church and you tell me about the Bible. You are free to argue that the Catholic Church is hypocritical and misinterpreting the Bible when they condemn murder, but that wasn't the question.