Among reactions to the Pope's recent flurry of major messages, here is one refreshing commentary from a Jewish councilor in Tel Aviv who writes for the very leftie Huffington Post, in its section on 'Science and Religion'-
` and Science'... In the course of a reflection on the relation between science and religion, the writer comments on the Holy Father's recent message for this year's World Day for Social Communications.... I will simply reproduce that which concerns the Pope, omitting his general introduction about the relationship between science and religion.
The Pope on social networking:
A practical meeting ground
for science and religion
... the meeting between science and religion is rarely a meeting about ideas at all. Conflicts about evolution and intelligent design dominate headlines, but they are rarely, if ever, the most important story to tell about the relationship between science and religion.
In fact, even when a conflict about science and religion seems to be about ideas, usually it is at the same time also about something else altogether. Obviously, these meetings are often about politics.
Equally often, they are about identity, autonomy, authority and manners. They can be about economics. They can be about knowledge and what counts as reliable knowledge. Who is an expert and who is a charlatan.
Sometimes, though they seem to be about abstract ideas, meetings of science and religion are really about how best to bring up your kids and how to be a mate. Or about whether and when and how to have sex or use drugs. Or about what counts as health and what counts as illness. Or about whom one should turn to for advice when facing a problem. Or about how to entertain yourself and how to spend your money.
A few days ago, Pope Benedict XVI issued a statement about social networks like Facebook, called "Truth, Proclamation and Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age."
The Pope's tone is one of reflection and careful measure, and he finds online things to admire and things to avoid. He sees in the Internet "a new appreciation of communication itself, which is seen first of all as dialogue, exchange, solidarity and the creation of positive relations."
At the same time, he finds in posting and Tweeting and poking a "tendency to communicate only some parts of one's interior world" and a "risk of constructing a false image of oneself, which can become a form of self-indulgence." Life online shakes up life as we knew it, raising important questions:
Who is my "neighbour" in this new world? Does the danger exist that we may be less present to those whom we encounter in our everyday life? Is there a risk of being more distracted because our attention is fragmented and absorbed in a world "other" than the one in which we live? Do we have time to reflect critically on our choices and to foster human relationships which are truly deep and lasting?
What makes this document moving is the fact that in it Pope Benedict tries to make sense of how the vast changes quickly wrought by scientific technologies affect the lives of our kids and our own lives, how they might bring people together or keep them apart, how they add to our loneliness or subtract from it, how they allow us to find meaning and love, or prevent us for this.
What makes it moving is the Pope's certainty that "the truth of Christ" and "the task of witnessing to the Gospel" are affected by the Internet (and other technologies served up by science), alongside his wavering and worried uncertainty about just how they are affected. [Interesting comment from a Jew who do not consider Jesus as other than a controversial - perhaps even heretical - rabbi in his day!]
The Pope knows that social networks answer a "desire for relationship, meaning and communion" that are the soul of what it means to be human, and he knows that at the same time they provide new ways for people to bully and berate one another, another human tendency.
Even more than tired polemics about Darwin, this is where science and religion meet in ways that matter, behind the locked bedroom door of a teen at a screen, waiting, forlorn, to be 'friended'.
Meetings of this sort reflect no "great war of ideas." They are something more delicate than that, far from headlines, taking place at a scale more human than seminar room polemics, with stakes that are, in the end, higher.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/02/2011 20:27]