Pope's astronomer says he would baptize alien.

[LongTomH]

This interview with Dr. Guy Consolmagno of the Vatican Observatory, appeared in the Guardian UK during the lead-up to the pope's visit.

Speaking ahead of a talk at the British Science Festival in Birmingham tomorrow, he said that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. "Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul." Would he baptise an alien? "Only if they asked."

OK, once we get over the giggle factor at the image of a priest baptizing a grey alien or little green man, there's a serious side to this. Dr. Guy Consolmagno is also Brother Guy Consolmagno of the Jesuit order; he's also an astronomer with good scientific credentials who has contributed to various astronomy and astrobiology publications and websites.

On Professor Stephen Hawkings recent comments:

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, of which Stephen Hawking is a member, keeps the senior cardinals and the pope up-to-date with the latest scientific developments. Responding to Hawking's recent comments that the laws of physics removed the need for God, Consolmagno said: "Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist and when it comes to theology I can say he's a brilliant physicist."

On creationism and ID:

Consolmagno curates the pope's meteorite collection and is a trained astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican's observatory. He dismissed the ideas of intelligent design – a pseudoscientific version of creationism. "The word has been hijacked by a narrow group of creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn't originally mean at all. It's another form of the God of the gaps. It's bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning."

I've encountered articles by and interviews with Dr./Brother Consolmagno in Ad Astra, the newsletter of the National Space Society and Astrobiology Magazine.

And no, I'm not Catholic; but I think Brother Guy Consolmagno has some interesting things to say.

[eleny]

1. I thought your Subject header was a National Enquirer front page story

[Octafish]

2. Cool.

Perhaps the aliens understand the message: Love God. Love One Another.

[dipsydoodle]

3. Would that be before or after

molesting/abusing/mistreating it ?

[Nevernose]

4. Guy's got a good wit, I'll give him that

I'm an atheist, for the record, but the line about Hawking was pretty clever.

[Stevenmarc]

5. Well if Mormons get to baptize the dead then the Pope gets to baptize aliens

Got to keep the quotas up

[Cleita]

6. I was raised a Catholic and went to Catholic school through college.

We got our share of crazy teachings in religion class but science classes were the best science of the day. My zoology professor in college, definitely a believer in evolution, was also a theologian. I asked her once how she reconciled the two and her answer was that religion was about the spirit and was separate from the material universe so in her view there was no conflict. I can imagine her now turning in her grave over these uninformed and crazy creationists.

[JVS]

7. Space Pope!

[tanyev]

8. "Only if they asked"

Well, that's certainly an improvement from the baptismal policy during the Spanish conquest of Latin America.

[old mark]

9. Exactly-I was imagining the Vatican Swiss Guards surrounding a

UFO and spraying everyone inside with fire hoses while the big guy says the words...
then of course you have to kill them while they are in a state of grace. Who knows what those things would do!

mark

[KittyWampus]

27. but at least if you kill them after baptizing them with the fire hose-

you can then administer the Last Rights and they'll go to heaven. Yeah!

[old mark]

35. Doing them a favor, really, just like them Indians...they're all in heaven right now! nt

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

26. It's because the relative power levels in this case tend to be somewhat different. -nt

[Posteritatis]

31. Depends, as always, on who finds whom.. (nt)

[lunatica]

10. The Church baptised the Indians in the Americas before they killed them

So their souls would be saved. So would the Church do the same for those many tentacled aliens?

[NightWatcher]

11. is it me, or are more religions sprinting full speed towards crazy cult status?

this isnt the absolute nuttiest thing I've heard, but it seems to me that more and more "mainstream" religions are going off the rails. I'm not too heartbroken either that the illusion is failing for many of them.

Now revoke all of their tax-free status and let's take a few more steps forward as a species.

[BolivarianHero]

22. It's really not nutty at all...

If an extra-terrestrial with the capcity to consent wishes to be Baptized in the Catholic Church, or course they ought to Baptize him. (though why anyone would want to believe that stuff is beyond me)

[Retrograde]

12. The Pope's got a meteorite collection?

Cool!

[ORDagnabbit]

13. it would be awesome if the alien visitors were in fact the galactic psychiatrists and they were here

to collect all the crazies....and they took all the wackadoodle religious nuts off the planet.


what an wonderful world that would be.

[Cleita]

16. Is that what the rapture would be about?

Boy will those nutjobs be surprised when they end up in a padded room on another planet.

:rofl:

[Fumesucker]

14. The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope..

It's on Mt Graham in AZ..

[LongTomH]

17. The Wikipedia page for the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope

The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, AKA the VATT. The "advanced technology" comes in with the techniques for producing the 1.8 meter mirror objective and the secondary mirror.

The heart of the telescope is an f/1.0 honeycombed construction, borosilicate primary mirror. The mirror was manufactured at The University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory<1>, which pioneered both the spin-casting and the stressed-lap polishing techniques which are being used for telescope mirrors that include the 6.5 meter aperture MMT and Magellan telescopes and the two 8.4 meter mirrors of the Large Binocular Telescope. The VATT's mirror is unusually 'fast', f/1, which means that its focal distance is equal to its diameter. Because it has such a short focal length, a Gregorian design could be employed which uses a concave secondary mirror at a point beyond the primary focus; this allows unusually sharp focusing across the field of view.

The unusual optical design and novel mirror fabrication techniques mean that both the primary and secondary mirrors are among the most exact surfaces ever made for a ground-based telescope. In addition, the skies above Mount Graham are among the most clear, steady, and dark in the continental North America. Seeing of better than one arc-second even without adaptive optics can be achieved on a regular basis.

[n2doc]

15. ...and then a Priest would molest the alien's offspring and start a war n/t

[ZombieHorde]

18. Unless they were gay. nt

[Vickers]

19. Or pro-choice. n/t

[sakabatou]

24. Or Protestant

[Posteritatis]

30. My guess is that the Vatican's cool with converts. (nt)

[RagAss]

20. Thorazine for Everyone !!!!

[Posteritatis]

21. Seems wholly reasonable to me. (nt)

[phantom power]

23. I can't wait for the alien pope's astronomer to offer to baptize the pope.

:rofl:

[sakabatou]

25. "We baptize you in the name of Cthulhu."

[KittyWampus]

28. "No matter how many tentacles they have"? I wonder if he reads Lovecraft

:evilgrin:

[Posteritatis]

29. You're right! The Vatican is biased against formless blobs! (nt)

[MisterP]

32. plug!

http://www.borders.com/online/store/TitleDetail?sku=0449912558

[Posteritatis]

33. I almost bought that a few years back..

Should I assume that I should remove the "almost" part?

[Fumesucker]

34. There's actually quite a bit of religiously based SF..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_ideas_in_science_fiction

http://sfgospel.typepad.com/sf_gospel/2007/12/the-10-best-sf.html