While struggling to understand the logic of the cardinals in
selecting Pope Francis, I reinforced my conclusion that the Church and the
people are somehow discordant, which as always means there are two paths to
follow; the can become more in harmony with their members or they will become
less coordinated and therefore eventually be dissolved. The sign the Cardinals in
Rome sent this week was that they chose the way to extinction. They are
following an ideology that is causing them to lose droves of members across the
world, but especially in the southern part of the United States and throughout
Central and South America. Their members are not improving their situations by moving
to the “hell, fire, and brimstone” of the Pentecostal Church, in fact, they may
be worsening it, but they are switching affiliations in hordes. As a disclaimer,
I make these observations as a biologist who does not believe in religion.
Throughout the two thousand year history of the Catholic
Church, they thrived on an ideology they created. Aside from the attractiveness
of an everlasting life, the glory of heaven, and the fear of hell, the leaders based
their teachings on genetically determined hierarchy dominance. There was a hierarchy with some ill defined holy
spirit at the top followed by a hierarch generated by the Church, cardinals, bishops,
priests, monks, elders, etc. To establish this hierarchy meant they went to a ridged
republican process. Like the Muslims, they could not elect a God but they could
elect a person they thought was closest to God. In the process, they made a
series of fundamental mistakes. They sought to marry the Church to the secular
state with the Church in charge. It should be immediately obvious this is wrong
at an innate level—to put it succinctly, having two bosses never works. Two
leaders, a Pope (taken as God) and a President of King as secular leaders is an
inherent conflict. Muslims solve the problem by putting religious leaders in charge
of appointing a civil government—a caliphate. In a democracy, which is form of
government that is rapidly spreading around the world, the people elect a government.
That does not prevent the Church from trying to dominate secular government,
which is where we are now.
Humankind thrives on variability. It is the basis of evolution.
Human behavior has a genetic base just as our physical being has a genetic
base. Human behavior has resulted in an organization for our genetically innate
hierarchy dominance we call democracy. The will of the people prevails. That
means that evolution has modified bestial strength of ancient human history
into a majority rules or strength of numbers. It transformed solutions solved
by violence into peaceful outcomes solved by votes. We are still working on
this as part of our humanization or civilization. Along the way we reject
behavior we do not agree with but we sometimes make a mistake. Against this background,
I feel that the selection of the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics by 115
conservatives Cardinals was a mistake.
Our civilizing process, right or wrong, has chosen liberalism
and altruism over conservatism and selfishness; more and more of us are kind to
people who are different, and we are inclined to share. The masses of the
people have chosen gay rights manifested by same sex marriage, quality of life
of the mother over prohibition of abortion, rejection of moral groups formation
manifested as “our” church members are going to heaven while members of every other
church are going to hell and especially atheists. Above all else, masses of
people chose secular government but tolerate multiple subsets of religious
authority over their members but not over others—we call freedom of religion. Apparently,
the cardinals “elected” a humble man to be Pope because he was humble. The new
Pope is a conservative, which means he tells 1.2 billion Catholics they cannot
marry out side the Church, cannot have an abortion because of a quality of life
issue, that women can be nuns but not priests, that priest and nuns must deny their
sexuality, that denies the science of evolution but in spite of this tells the
world everyone should be kind to one another. This is rhetoric out of the first
century. It may be a new Pope but is he the right one for 2013 until . . . .
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