Always baffling to me that people accuse researchers and doctors, people who have devoted their life to helping others, of brazen greed and deception. With no evidence, of course. Maybe the accusation says more about you than about them?
The researchers and doctors probably have better motives but the pharmaceutical industry wants nothing more than getting you on a lifetime of prescriptions. They are just like street dealers but they dress better and blend in with normal society.
If you're a Catholic, then the choice of interpretation is clear: you must accept the Pope's interpretation. That's what it means to be Catholic. The Pope is God's representative on Earth. To defy him is to defy God.
The alternative would be to declare him a False Pope and to select an alternative divine representative. Of course, that would make you a heretic. If you ditch the pope as soon as he says something you don't like, you're not much of a Catholic. The Church is not a democracy.
> If you're a Catholic, then the choice of interpretation is clear: you must accept the Pope's interpretation…
cf. Hyperpapalism
Thankfully, Hyperpapalism is a misunderstanding of the role of the teaching-governing authority of the Bishop of Rome, and Catholics can be and remain good Catholics while disagreeing with the Pope on a variety of matters.
Pope John XXII publicly taught erroneously re: death and the Beatific Vision. Jean Gerson threatened to burn him at the stake and in general there was much public resistance, from royalty to common folk.
"Erroneous" is an opinion. Papal doctrine is the word of God until a subsequent pope says otherwise. Jean Gerson is entitled to his opinion, even if speaking that opinion made him a heretic.
> Papal doctrine is the word of God until a subsequent pope says otherwise
No, that’s Hyperpapalism, which is an error.
The Pope does not have the authority-power to transform error into truth, nor can he make “new truths” (of the Faith), whatever that might mean. He does have the solemn duty to faithfully hand on and explain the Apostolic Tradition. In an extra-ordinary act of his office, the Pope can, without error, define the proper understanding of Catholic teaching on a matter of faith or morals.
In the case of John XXII he proposed something false as pertains to Catholic doctrine, repeatedly, in public sermons. He was rebuked for it and recanted before he died. What he taught was not somehow “intermittently true”, it was an error through and through, and it was completely right that his subjects called him out on the matter.
> The Pope does not have the authority-power to transform error into truth,
The problem with your argument is that it is "left as an exercise for the reader" to determine what is actually true. If that were the case, then the Pope, as the representative of God on Earth, serves no purpose: everyone can individually determine what is true and what is an error. That does not agree historically with the role of the papacy.
If everyone has a right to their own interpretation of doctrine, what does the Pope do, and why should anyone listen to him?
Your position that absolute faith in the word of the pope
is a fallacy is itself a self-supporting fallacy, which you hold only because you don't believe in the correctness of the pope.
> he taught was not somehow “intermittently true”
Yes, it was. God would not allow a Pope who spoke in error.
a few comments back, you stated a Catholic must accept the pope's interpretation; I think this is generally true?
The problem here is, we're saying the person who claims to be pope has contradicted past teachings that popes infallibly taught already. So the only way out then would be to consider they were never popes in the first place or else you have the contradiction of a pope taught error or that the pope is not infallible.
For example in Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Liberty) in the Vatican 2 documents it states: "This Vatican synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. Such freedom consists in this, that all should have such immunity from coercion by individuals, or by groups, or by any human power, that no one should be forced to act against his conscience in religious matters, nor prevented from acting according to his conscience, whether in private or in public, within due limits."
This is obviously contrary to the Catholic understanding of conscience and coercion - the "due limits" and "religious freedom" are never defined, when they were already somewhat clearly defined.
Hence being ambiguous, we would understand these in themselves to not be Catholic teachings. Consider if someone asked a person if they are a Catholic and they answered "I am a Christian". In itself, their answer does not explain if they are Catholic or not: some Catholics might argue that "only Catholics are Christians" and that the statement could mean "I am a Catholic"; some protestants might argue that "only non-Catholics can be Christians" so that the statement means "I am not a Catholic". Hence, in itself the statement is "objectively ambiguous" - the Vatican 2 statements are of this character, and if you had to categorize them as either "Catholic or not", it seems they would resolve to being considered as "clearly not Catholic". In any event, it seems we would be forced to reject the language as it stands and new documents that are clearer would have to be drawn up and agreed to.
For example, a person does not have the right to declare they have the "religious freedom" to be a "Pirate" and that they are free to steal from other people "conscientiously"; they are allowed to be "coerced" to not steal, if they try to steal.
Regarding John XXII from the other comment, I believe St. Robert Bellarmine in De Romano Pontifice examined all cases of alleged papal heresy and explained why no popes had been heretics. John XXII simply speculated as a private theologian about an issue that had not been defined by the Church yet, hence did not enter in to error in doing so.
If the read and the write are separate messages, i.e. the computation of the modified value happens sender-side, as in the parent example, then I don’t see how a serializing queue prevents the race condition, for two concurrent senders (clients). For that you need transactions, exactly like a database.
That's not how you would implement mutating messages in an actor system. Instead you could do either of these:
* Have an "increment" message that adds n to the current value and returns the old value.
* Have separate "read" and "write" messages, where the "write" message is parameterized by a timestamp returned by the "read" message. If the owner detects that the timestamp sent by the write is older than the most recent timestamp, it's rejected.
Because messages are handled serially, it's easy and safe to create messages that behave sanely event without explicit locks.
The point is that you have to implement it in the specific ways you describe in order to prevent a race condition. The actor model doesn’t eliminate race conditions by itself. This is true in all programming models. A database also doesn’t eliminate race conditions, you have to use appropriate transactions in order to prevent them. What you describe for the actor model is virtually the same thing: you have to use transactional messages in order to prevent race conditions. And that doesn’t happen by itself, the programmer has to implement the program logic in that specific way. There is no magic silver bullet.
> The actor model doesn’t eliminate race conditions by itself.
Sure, and the actor model was never marketed as "a tool to eliminate race conditions." That's not what it's for.
You have to use your tools correctly. One benefit of the actor model is that the tool eliminates large categories of race conditions (but not all of them). One benefit of garbage collection is that the tool eliminates large categories of memory errors (but not all of them). The same can be said of anything, from high-level languages, to debuggers, to linters, the IDEs, etc. Just because a tool is not a "silver bullet" does not mean that it does not deliver a strong advantage for the programmer.
This is correct, but databases only help to the extent that the whole world is happy to live in your database.
As soon as you have customers (who interact via REST), or partner payment systems (e.g. stripe) you're back to:
Two customers do a GET. This gets dispatched to the DB, wrapped in a nice transaction, the transaction ends, the customers get their result.
The two customers then do a POST to set a new value. Also wrapped in a transaction.
As I pointed out above, that's not the API that would be exposed in an actor model. See in particular the timestamp-based update condition, if you're principally concerned with end-user-caused races.
Less relevant, but message queues in Erlang and related languages are typically in-memory, no DB transaction required.
Hi,images are fully AI generated. Stories ideas and chapters, myself with AI help. The hardest part is trying to make images coherent all along with same visual style, all the prompting and steering is where must of the work was. Thanks
Yes, but no one is really complaining about "not enough kids." They are complaining about not enough kids of their preferred skin tone. So they see immigration as an exacerbation.
I can't help but agree here. "Declining birth rate in the western world" just comes across as a dog-whistle to me. I guess I kind of only alluded to this myself with my response that they were being "weirdly cagey", and I wish I had been more direct like you were willing to, so thank you for this
The world population has been increasing steadily and shows no sign of slowing down.
The dog whistle in question is the inordinate concern that certain groups show for the population of the "western world" specifically, which is not-so-secret code for white babies specifically.
It is not a stretch. Tolkien was a devout Catholic. The story has a wide variety of allegorical symbolism pointing to a profound Catholic faith. The ring is a metaphor for sin. In famous scene of Boromir’s death, in telling Aragorn he succumbed to temptation by the ring he says, “I have failed.” To which Aragorn, the rightful King, recognizing Boromir’s atonement, replies, “No, brother, you have won a great victory.” This is a blow-for-blow metaphor of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, aka Confession.
There are many Catholic authors. Not everything they write is necessarily a "Catholic work."
> The ring is a metaphor for sin.
You are welcome to your Catholic interpretation of his work, but Tolkien himself famously said that "There is no 'symbolism' or conscious allegory in my story."
As a piece of symbolism, the ring doesn't make any sense. Is he saying that elves helped make sin? And that it can be destroyed in a volcano? In context, it's incoherent and inconsistent with Catholic dogma.
Even if we buy your view that the ring is a symbol for sin, that hardly makes it specifically Catholic. Many religions have a concept of sin, including other branches of Christianity.
If you were to make a case that LOTR is a Catholic work (not an Evangelical, or Lutheran, or Hindu, or Jewish work) you would need to include some specifically Catholic references, such as that scene where the Orcs worship Sauron's mother. (/s)
I was excited until I realized that the interview is not with Tolkien, but with some random bozo pushing a religious-nationalist agenda. What makes his interpretation of Tolkien's work more valid than that of Tolkien himself?
Also, you did say that it's not unusual for popes to cite Tolkien. I'm still waiting for your supporting evidence in this matter.
Your pointless cynicism (about a man who turned down many opportunities to make money) is not instructive about the question of whether or not his work is "Catholic."
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