Pope Tells Hawking Not to Study Origins of Universe

Dan writes

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Just thought this was worth noting, for the next time someone says organized religion isn't out to stifle knowledge.

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Organized religion isn't out to stifle knowledge anymore than just about most other organizations and institutions that have ever existed.Some examples...Some elements of the Bush Administration have been known to withdraw fundings from science research groups whose conclusions contradict the Administration's claims in environmental issues. A recent one is when fundings were withdrawed from a group that have found that salvage logging hinders a burnt forest's recovery.Harvard president got canned after remarking that perhaps the reason so fewer females are in the fields of science than males is because of the differences in brain physiology... or something like that.The US government traded some Japanese war criminals' freedoms for mountains of data on research in biological warfare. These warcrimes were forgotten for a very long time.Even the scientific community from time to time rejects outright certain modifications in worldview. Big bang, Evolution, ID, etc. have all gone through a period of hardship.Now, Whether these hinderings of development of certain concepts were justified or not is another matter.

Dan Carroll writes

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And he later acknowledged that this statement was unsupported by research or scientific evidence.

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I must admit that I am mostly ignorant about this event. It just came off the top of my head at the time.

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Not sure where knowledge is being stifled there. In fact, it looks like you're saying that something was sacrificed to gain knowledge.

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In this particular case, social knowledge was stifled to gain scientific knowledge.

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Which is by no means the same as saying we shouldn't even investigate a subject.

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True, but it tells us that religious organizations aren't the only ones uncomfortable with new and contradicting ideas to their already well established conceptions of the world.

Dan writes

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What knowledge was stifled? Everyone continued to know they comitted war crimes; they just weren't punished for it.

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As a matter of fact, the military wanted to keep the biological data secret so they had to keep everything else surrounding them secret as well. The whole thing was covered up for 50 years. Not only are these war criminals go unpunished, they also got a free ticket to be forgotten.Japan continues to deny their warcrimes.

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Questioning a new idea, and subjecting it to scrutiny, is the opposite of saying we should not investigate it. This statement just makes you come off as if you're reaching really far, in silly ways, to defend religion.

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I'm not defending religion. I'm only pointing out that everyone has a weakness of being uncomfortable with new ideas and facts. Different groups react to them differently. In the case of religion, religious zealots tend to "ask" people not to question or study things that may contradict their doctrines. In the case of politicians, they tend to suppress researches whose conclusions mean bad bussiness. In the case of the scientific community, subjecting new ideas to scrutiny seems to be the way they approach it.You seem to be under the impression that I am referring these things as somehow bad. I'm not. I just want to point out a different point of view onto this matter.Added by editJust like every entity that we know of, religious organizations do what they can to prevent themselves from being changed and stay in existence. Their fight for non-change can be seen as the same as a person's fight to stay alive. It's within their nature.Edited by rgb, : No reason given.