Of course, one problem is it's not really true. The video shows the prayer being treated politely, not like a performance at a rock concert, if that was the headline's intended meaning; nor did it seem to disturb the equilibrium of those present, if that was the intended meaning.
There is a much more serious problem, though. The headline strongly implies that what is really important is that the prayer was heard by the Democratic Convention, not that it was heard by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Unfortunately, there is at least some evidence of the same attitude in the Cardinal's prayer. For a few examples: "Help us to see that a society’s greatness is found above all in the respect it shows for the weakest and neediest among us.... Grant us the courage to defend it, life, without which no other rights are secure.... Renew in all our people a profound respect for religious liberty.... Make us ever-grateful for those who, for over two centuries, have given their lives in freedom’s defense...." What do you think, is the Cardinal placing himself among those who
do not see that a society's greatness is found in the respect it shows the weakest and neediest?
lacks the courage to defend life?
lacks respect for religious liberty?
is not grateful to those who have given their lives in freedom's defense?
Or is he saying this because he believes (correctly) that many of the people overhearing his prayer fall into those categories? If so, how does his prayer differ from this well-known prayer?
The Pharisee standing, prayed thus with himself: O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, as also is this publican.
Notice how uncomfortably similar Cardinal Dolan's prayer is to this. It also has the same self-congratulatory tone -- there is no very significant difference between what the Pharisee said and, "O God, I give Thee thanks that this country is not as the rest of nations," which is a fair approximation of such phrases as, "We beseech you, almighty God to shed your grace on this noble experiment in ordered liberty...."
Does the Cardinal pray like that in his private prayers -- the ones heard only by him and God Almighty? Of course not. He no doubt prays for the conversion of sinners, and he no doubt remembers that he himself is a sinner. I respect him enough to believe that in private his prayer is more like that of the Publican: "God, have mercy on me, a sinner."
The problem is not with what Cardinal Dolan was saying to the Democratic Convention, nor with what he had earlier said to the Republican Convention; the problem is that what he was saying, he was saying to the Republican and Democratic Conventions, when he should have been speaking to God, with them and on their behalf. Yet even the Cardinal's supporters agree that he was speaking to the crowds, not God -- for example,
It has often been said that to effectively communicate the truth to
others, it is helpful to affirm the ways in which they already
acknowledge and live out the truth.... Above all, though, Dolan’s prayers were calls to unity and ultimately conversion for leaders and members of both parties.
God clearly is not among the "others" for whom "it is helpful to affirm the ways in which they already acknowledge and live out the truth."
As for the "calls to unity", the decisions for unity are subject to the free wills of "leaders and members of both parties", who, through a shocking coincidence, happened to be in the same room as the Cardinal. It is natural for a man to pray that his girlfriend will marry him, but if he does so as part of saying grace at dinner with her parents, that's not a prayer, it's a proposal. For the same reason, the Cardinal's "calls to unity" were not prayers, they were political proposals.
There is some controversy over the proper plural for RBI, a baseball term meaning "run batted in". Some people say that since the plural of the original phrase would be "runs batted in", which also has the initial letters r, b, and i, the plural of RBI should be RBI. A larger group says the plural should be RBIs (pronounced "Arby eyes").
So I ask the first group: What do you call a single run batted in? Do you call it a RBI or an RBI? If you say "an RBI", you're treating RBI as a new word, not an initialism, so the objection to "RBIs" disappears.
Maybe the best choice is just to follow those who call it a "ribby".
Star Trek: The Motion Picture ends with Captain Willard Decker, as a representative of "the creator", merging with V'Ger, a living machine built around the fictional Voyager 6 probe. This makes it a little odd that the "Voyager scientist" quoted in a New Scientistarticle about Voyager 1 is also named Decker. Don't worry, though; he is Robert Decker. I have no doubt he is tired of all the jokes.
When I was younger, I resisted the idea of biological evolution very strongly. There were several reasons:
my upbringing, specifically the environment in the church and school I attended,
the fact that the most vocal proponents of biological evolution seemed to be insisting not only that it did happen, but that it could not have been otherwise because there is no God, and
the apparent absence of plausible alternative understandings of the first few chapters of Genesis. (Such alternatives do exist, but I was not exposed to them.)
Another reason, though, is that the common representations of life on Earth before the advent of man tended to be drab, boring, and ugly, as lampooned in Science Made Stupid. The real world is too interesting and beautiful for this to be plausible for me.
Today, documentaries like Walking with Dinosaurs have made great strides in making the pre-human world seem lively and realistic, and dinosaurs today are more likely to be represented as colorful, like the Swiss Guards, rather than dull green or gray, like cheap plastic toy WWII soldiers.
My first exposure to the potential for beauty in the prehistoric world, though, was Disney's Fantasia. The dinosaurs were still drab, but the context provided the beauty.
How should we understand this statement, which is defined to be an error in the Syllabus of Errors?
55. The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.—Allocution "Acerbissimum," Sept. 27, 1852.
I think the key thing to notice is that "separated" (along with other forms of the word, such as "separation", as in "separation of Church and State") is an ambiguous term. It can mean distinct, but it can also mean isolated. The Church has always understood that Church and State are distinct -- in terms of their goals, their founding, etc. -- but that they should not be completely isolated from each other.
Since Americans, and modern people in general, have such a hard time distinguishing the sense in which it is right for Church and State to be "separate" from the sense in which it is wrong, it might be useful to consider an analogous situation: the separation of science and state.
In the best American tradition, I will hold these truths to be self-evident:
Science is different from the State in terms of its goals. The goal of science is understanding. The goal of the state is the temporal welfare of its people.
Science is different from the State in what it does. Science seeks to discover the laws of nature, but cannot author them, nor is their any need to enforce them. The State, on the other hand, has rather wide latitude in defining the laws which it enforces.
Science is different from the State in its perspective. Science strives to be objective, but the State has inescapable subjective aspects that require compromises.
Thus science and the State are certainly distinct, and in that sense, separate. As a result,
It would be a disaster for the State to attempt to dictate science. Perhaps the most infamous example was the attempt in 1897 of some Indiana lawmakers to redefine pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. (The bill was, fortunately, defeated in the state senate.)
It would be an even greater disaster for scientists to run the State as some kind of scientific experiment. Don't get me wrong; a scientist can also be a statesman, and vice versa -- Benjamin Franklin may be the best example. We have seen, though, what happens when one group of people has only scientific curiosity about another group of people -- the Tuskegee Experiment, or worse.
On the other hand, no one today really wants science and State to have nothing to do with each other.
We want the State to regulate the conduct of science, for example in the storage and disposal of hazardous chemicals, the ethical conduct of experiments on living beings, etc.
We want science to inform the State on the effects of regulation. This is true whether it relates to the FDA approving drugs for limited or widespread use (or banning them altogether), the granting of offshore drilling permits, the establishing of automobile fuel efficiency or emission standards, etc.
Also, because of both public interest and the widespread benefits promised by science, we want the State to fund and support science.
Thus, although we want science to do science and the State to be the State, we also want them to interact with each other in a mutually beneficial way. Note also that it is precisely when the State is ignorant of science that it is most likely to infringe on what is properly handled by science.
There are significant parallels between the separation of science and State and the separation of Church and State. Of course, there are differences, too. Since I seem to be all about bulleted posts, here are a few more that pertain to Church and State.
Although the primary focus of the Church is the eternal welfare of souls, Christians are to love the whole person, which means looking after their temporal welfare as well. This is why the Church has founded so many hospitals, for example. It also puts the lie to the current administration's attempt to pigeon-hole religious freedom to one hour of worship weekly.
Likewise, just because the State is dedicated to the temporal welfare of its people does not mean that it is properly concerned only with power, wealth, and health. Only recently has Western Civilization begun to forget that knowing the truth is a good, even for this world, and that being a person of good character has value even apart from an eternal reward.
Because of the previous two points, Church and State have had a tendency over the centuries to become excessively intertwined, frequently to the detriment of both. My understanding is that under canon law, priests and bishops are now no longer allowed to serve in government posts; thus Fernando Lugo, onetime president of Paraguay, resigned from being a bishop and priest in order to assume the presidency. (I understand there were irregularities even with that maneuver.) The point is that the prohibition against a confusing of Church and State is not born out of Divine Revelation only, or even of Divine Revelation plus philosophy; it is born most of all from experience.
These days, however, the more likely problem is not confusion between Church and State, but the insistence that if an idea can be seen to have been suggested by the Church, the State must have nothing to do with it. This is an example of the genetic fallacy. The Church has steadily refused to commit this fallacy, which is why She has been comfortable using carefully sifted ideas from non-Catholic and even non-Christian sources. In the final analysis, what matters about an idea is whether or not it is true, not who thought of it first.
Arthur C. Clarke said a number of foolish things. One of his most famous sayings is,
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
What can be made of that?
First of all, notice that this is essentially a statement of religious faith, which might seem odd given his many dismissive statements about religion. Clarke's assurance partakes very much of "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen", because when one points out that today's technology is readily distinguishable from magic, the response would be to nod gravely and point out that today's technology is not "sufficiently advanced". In fact, Clarke never saw "sufficiently advanced technology"; on Earth, at least, it has never existed.
But surely we can extrapolate based on what has happened over the past two centuries or so? After all, the first human flight was only about 230 years ago, in a Parisian hot-air balloon; the Wright brothers made the first flight in 1903; and Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon in 1969. During the same period, we went from mail to telegrams to telephone to emails and texts; we saw the development of silent movies, "talkies", TV, and the Internet. Surely this shows that anything that seems impossible or "magical" today can be done with enough technology?
No. Although technology has enabled us to do things that might have seemed possible, but mind-numbingly difficult, science has placed restrictions that were not known before. In 1783, when the first manned flight in a hot-air balloon was being made, it was not known that perpetual motion machines are impossible. Then in the 19th century, the laws of thermodynamics were discovered, which make perpetual motion machines impossible. In the 20th century, a several new things were discovered to be impossible -- distinguishing one electron from another, moving information faster than the speed of light, and simultaneously determining an electron's position and velocity with arbitrary precision, for example.
In addition, there is a real difference between saying that a sufficiently advanced technology could do things that would look like magic to someone not accustomed to it, and saying anything that happens in a story about magic -- that is, anything that a human being can imagine -- can be done with technology. This latter situation would have to be the case, though, if Clarke's statement, as it is usually understood, were to be true. (I suppose an alternative interpretation would be that sufficiently advanced technology would only work about as often as magic. It certainly feels that way sometimes.)
So, for example, a computer with Internet access does indeed act in some ways like the Wicked Witch's magic mirror. The restrictions on a TV, however, are very different from those on a magic mirror or a crystal ball. A TV cannot see what's happening elsewhere without a camera in the right place; a TV cannot see the future; a TV cannot contact the dead. Likewise, we can now fly, but not at all like superman or even a witch on a broom. It requires pretty big, obvious machines to fly; even the jet backpack, which really only works for short distances, is pretty clumsy, obvious, and limited -- much more so than the descriptions of magic found in folklore. So to recap, although things achieved by technology today might have seemed like magic in years past, the things magic is described as having done still seem like magic today, and there is no reason to believe that this will change. What did you expect? Arthur C. Clarke was a science fiction writer, not a prophet or sage. His quote about technology and magic is not really true, but it can be the premise or inspiration for some entertaining and thought-provoking fiction. That will have to be enough.
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