Pope Allegorizes Creation

Here's the problem: It doesn't matter what the Pope says. As far as most parishioners are concerned, he is irrelevant. If he does not issue a command to the priests to teach their parishioners that the evidence is so overwhelming for a 14-billion-year-old universe and the Big Bang, then what's the point of him saying it? If they don't say from the pulpit that you can no longer take Genesis literally, then his words are meaningless.

There is still a large percentage of the Catholic church (over 40%) that do not accept the science of evolution even though the past Pope agreed with evolution. That's because the past Pope didn't pass an edict for all the priests to tell their parishioners about it.

Bill Donahue is spinning in his own bile right now, fuming at the liberal Pope who accepts the Satanic Sciences!

This will be the downfall of Christianity, in the long run

Not likely. We of all people should know that religion is not about coherence. An earlier pope declared that the earth was flat - and the bible says so, yet millions of people still subscribe to papal infallibility. Christmas itself was an adaptation to co-opt earlier religious traditions.
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Religion will adapt to political and cultural realities to survive. Eventually, they will incorporate evolution and astrophysical theory. There will always be a god of the gaps.

I agree with Dave. By admitting that the Big Bang was real, he has given up on the last great gap. No more significant gaps for which gods are needed. Not sure why the Pope did this. Did he read Hawking's book?

The fact that intelligent people participate in religion proves that HUMANS ARE NOT AMATEUR PHILOSOPHERS. The sooner we accept this, the faster we will progress. If thousands of volumes of scientific data and real technological outcomes haven't yet convinced people that the empirical method is a superior source of knowledge than groupthink faith, don't expect the next scientific finding to do so.
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If we find aliens on other worlds, perfect cold fusion, or build spaceships that travel through time and space, it won't be enough. They'll just adapt, incorporate the new information into the dogma, and continue to participate because PARTICIPATION IS REWARDING TO THEM.
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Religion is a social psychological phenomenon and a means by which people maximize economic gains, not a bunch of smart people making the same error over and over again, deciding to believe in magical flying invisible dead people and such.

Yes, and g-d gave little boys butt-holes so priests would have somewhere to stick their penises, you f**king pedophile Poop! Right????????????

There is the theory that the Vatican is really being controlled by the CIA through MK-Ultra. Just a theory though.

The Catholic Church has been trying to portray itself as progressive and compatible with science since John Paul the II... As someone who was raised Catholic, I can say that they are not big on referring to the Bible in general, especially nothing in the Old Testament. They will typically write it off, stating that with the New Testament, Jesus/God created a new covenant. Helps to explain away its many contradictions and nastiness. I heard these kind of statements from my priests and Catechism teachers all the time growing up. The Pope is just reflecting the general sentiment of the Church.

I'll be excited when a televangelist says something like this.

Much as I would love to believe this is going to happen I think we risk falling into the same narrow-minded trap as Ken Ham fell into.

I'm prefacing this by saying I, in no way, believe this about the bible, but it is possible that one section of a book is fiction while another is not.

The thing is, myths/allegories aren't really true or false because they're not trying to be true. The moral they're attempting to tell may be evaluated as true/false, as could the statement "this myth actually happened". However, they are distinct propositions. Religion comes from a long tradition of using myth to teach people life lessons. A real problem arises when they make the additional statement "this myth actually happened."

That being said, I would like to see how the pope now justifies many of the beliefs held by the church. As the author has already stated, original sin is a big question. I'm sure they could wiggle out of it through enough philosophical/theological musing. I'm interested to see if they claim heaven and hell as allegorical.

The thing is, we're winning. You can't disprove the existence of a sufficiently vague god, you can disprove the existence of specific gods. As science progresses, we shine the light of knowledge into the dark corners of the universe only to find that god is not there. Theists then have to modify their definition of god such that he can still exist within that framework. However, the more immune to logic and evidence they make their god, the more vague they become. The more vague they become, the more useless they become. Eventually, god is reduced to the last stronghold he could possible occupy, the point past which the big bang obscures all information of previous states.

Yes, god COULD HAVE created the universe, or at least there's no current way to prove that he did not. Even evidence that god isn't necessary doesn't necessarily exclude god. However, such a god behaves much like a simple law of nature. It reduces god to an unknowable first principle. He is stripped of his mind, his consciousness, his religious ties, his values and the need to be worshiped. At that point, why even call such a thing a god?

I look at it as another card in the house of cards being flicked out of the structure of the Catholic church. Every time science contradicts religion, religion changes to accommodate science. Perhaps, as far as the Universe is concerned, this might be as far as they will be required to go.
Grasping at straws, aren't they?

Wow!! I can't believe I almost didn't think to post this article about the prior pope.

NSFW, obviously: Pope Admits: 'God Ain't Said Shit To Me'

I agree with Dave. Here's why. The priests will continue to dis-believe more and more, just as I think the more catholic like religions do.
This will manifest upon the people and will likely occur more in Europe where the population is much more intelligent.

I feel we need to continue to encourage people to think. Intelligence will follow.

I think we're already seeing the effect of this in many ways. There are already Christians in developed countries leaving the faith. As each of these revelations happen, more leave. In some cases, they bolt one Christian denomination for another. In others, they find another religion. New religions pop up all the time to fill a need and attempt to support scientific advances, so as not to argue with simple, provable fact.

Judaism and Christianity evolved due to such changes. Religions, including Judaism, used to believe in a wrathful God, because they couldn't explain natural disasters, death, and the crimes of humanity. Their believers were told God did this to them because of their sin. Later, religious leaders found it was more effective to paint God in a friendly, loving light. Satan was then blamed for all the bad in the world, and God was kind and loving but allowed such bad things to happen to test our faith.

There will be a small number of current Christians that will leave the faith with these and future revelations, but Christianity is so much more than Catholicism and the Pope. There are Christians who "charm" snakes, believe in six day creation and the planting of fossils to fool us, who think it's okay to kill homosexuals, minorities, and Muslims, and actually believe wine turns into blood and bread chips turn into body inside them. There are even Christians who maintain their faith even when they discover that the virgin birth is a myth shared by other mythologies that predated Jesus. That was the beginning of the awakening for me, because if Jesus was not divine, then he was not God's son, and therefore his blood was not adequate as a sacrifice for my sin.

People want something to believe in. Not just to explain the unexplainable, but also to have hope because they don't know how to find hope without a God. They can't fathom the idea that their consciousness will end one day as their brain cells deteriorate. If Christianity becomes insolvent, there will be other religions that rise up to claim their members. They don't even have to make logical sense. Just look at Scientology. A religion created on a bet with concepts such as theta and extra-terrestrials, and modern, intelligent people buy into it. There will always be people who believe in aliens at Area 51, ghosts, a conspiracy surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald, and something called a soul that lives on after we die in some form.