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606 points saikatsg | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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andrepd ◴[] No.43928526[source]
New pope: https://collegeofcardinalsreport.com/cardinals/robert-franci...
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aoki ◴[] No.43928874[source]
> His educational background includes a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Villanova University

Huh. Career counselors take note, new path opened up.

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andrepd ◴[] No.43929224[source]
Francis had a degree in chemistry if I'm not mistaken.
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ryandv ◴[] No.43929408[source]
It's a modern rhetorical fallacy that science is directly antithetical to religion, when many of history's greatest scientists were themselves "spiritual" in some way (though that degree of spirituality may have ranged from near-atheistic scientific pantheism a la Einstein and Sagan, to members of the clergy). I am glad there are still numerous counterexamples of those with firm educations in hard STEM fields that still contemplate the divine.

Probably two modern developments presaged this viewpoint: the laughable apologetics of the Creationists, which have already been refuted ad nauseam by the New Atheists; and semantic drift and inaccurate (or even lacking) definitions for the word "god," which is probably better understood in modern English as "mind" or "mental construct" or "the abstract" (as contrasted with the "concrete" or physical body a la Descartes, in a similar fashion to the distinction between the rarefied air of mathematical models, and the hard reality of physical law).

It's easy to chastise an ideology when you misunderstand some of its most basic terminology, as has been done with words like "god" or "spirituality."

Ironically I often find it is people who are not educated in STEM that cleave most vociferously to the point of view that religion and science are fundamentally irreconcilable.

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1. spauldo ◴[] No.43930192[source]
The joke was of all the jobs a person might get after attaining a mathematics degree, "pope" usually isn't on the list.