Yes. I heard. Try to stay safe.

Thank you.
I am actually staying home almost everyday and I am extremely careful to avoid crowded place...
... and I will keep it this way during all the national lockdown we are currently experiencing in France!

C'est donc par le sang contaminé du christ qu'on devient un vampire? C'est... tentant.

En fait c'était Lui le patient zéro et non notre pauvre pangolin !

Il s'agit en réalité de Dolly, la brebis clonée....

Du coup, c'est Dolly ou bien son clone ?

D'après les infos retrouvées, Dolly était bien un clone, et elle a même été capable de donner naissance à six agneaux en bonne santé....

Moi je prefererais Dolly Parton

They probably are still a lot safer now than they were centuries ago.

Centuries ago...
- when clever girls were tortured and burned alive because considered as witches ?
- when Science was considered as Heresy and leaded the savants to jail... or stake ?
- when pandemics were considered as a God punishment ?... and death as the only expiation ?
- when everything was explain in the Holy Bible and other knowledges were considered as evil ?

I agree that, after listing these considerations, churches were definitely not safe centuries ago !
Yet, I don't use the murkier periods of History as an "it-could-have-been-worse" excuse...

I thought it was not until after all the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War that witches were even feared to begin with, and before that they were considered harmless nuts. Also, it was the Catholic Church itself whose observatories established how long a year really was.

If you think religion is bad, try atheism. The most murderous tyrannies in human history were the result of secular governments which made no pretense of being inspired by higher powers.

Cancel Religion!

No, cancel atheism. The atheists of the world have spilled a lot more blood and caused far more misery and destruction.

Incidentally, the least religious part of the world (from what I've heard) is the Czech Republic. It is not a center of great culture and scientific knowledge.

Atheism is a religion. It does have the same features as all the others

Atheists like to claim that they lack religious beliefs. But atheism IS a religious belief-that there is no higher power. You can only lack religious beliefs if you have no concept of higher power in the first place. In fact, this issue did cause a brief argument on a different forum.

At that point you are just debating definitions. You can call atheism a religion, but it would be a strange religion indeed - one defined not by what it is, but what it isn't.

I'm not sure how you are even trying to define that argument. There haven't really been many explicitly atheistic (rather than secular) governments in history to wage any war in the name of atheism. I can only think of two: The Soviet Union prior to WW2, and post-revolutionary France. Can you think of any others that persecuted or killed people for being religious in general? Governments that persecute or kill people for being the wrong type of religious are ten-a-penny, certainly historically and even today, but actively anti-religious forces just haven't had the opportunity to wield such power very often.

Nearly every war in history has involved armies of both side marching into battle with a prayer and a conviction that God is on their side. Perhaps because religion is such a useful social tool, and a very effective way to justify actions already desired. There's a reason the Soviet Union dumped their initial 'opiate of the masses' opposition to religion in WW2, and started actively promoting the state-controlled Russian Orthodox Church: It was a great way to help build a national identity and sense of patriotism, and sustain the morale of the people during a time of brutal conflict with Nazi Germany. A government, I think it worth noting, that also expressly identified as a Christian party in their manifesto and used religion as both a justification for their policies and a means to win popular support from the people. Just like every other government always does.

Most or least religious country doesn't mean anything without a clear definition too. Do you count simple percentage of believers by self-identification, or try to measure intensity of belief? If a person professes to be Christian, but has never read the bible and only sets foot in a church for weddings and funerals, do they count? Japan is a particularly odd case, as they widely practice religious traditions, but even many of the people who attend shrines will openly admit they don't truly believe in any of it - the sense of tradition and respect appears more important than actual supernatural belief.

I get the impression your beliefs on the matter are based on a very circular definition.

Half-true on the observatories. The length of the year was known with near-perfect precision long before the Catholic church. You can thank Egyptian astronomers for refining that estimate, and Caesar for reforming the Roman calendar by incorporating their observations. He formed the committee of experts that developed the Julian calendar, and used his position as de facto ruler of Rome (And Pontifex Maximus, which put him in charge of the calendar) to see that it was adopted. It was very nearly spot on too, but not quite right - it lasted 1600 years, before Pope Gregory XIII introduced a minor revision to the leap year placement to reflect some improved measurements - and those were indeed from Catholic observatories. Amusingly enough, the Pope's title is also Pontifex Maximus.

So yes, Catholic observatories did establish the length of a year - but they were only refining early pre-Christian findings, which were damn-near-perfect. Even after 1,600 years, the Julian calendar had only accumulated ten days of error.

Nowdays we have secular astronomers dealing with even more precise measurements with leap-seconds and grumbling that earthquakes keep slightly altering the length of a day, but by that point the levels of precision involved are far beyond what most people need to be aware of.

Secular and atheistic are not the same thing. Take the modern United States for example. The government is - at least nominally - secular. It's forbidden by constitution from either endorsing or prohibiting any church. But at the same time, congress is around 90% Christian, with the rest made up almost entirely of non-Christian religious believers and one lone atheist*, and politicians routinely play up their Christianity during election season as a way to win popular support. Can you still call it secular? You can hardly call it atheistic, when atheists make up less than half a percent of the legislature.

Britain is something of the opposite: In principle our government is expressly Christian. We not only have a state church, but representatives of that church hold formal voting positions in the House of Lords, and our monarch is also the head of that church. Yet in practice, religion plays a far smaller role in our government and our politics than it does in the US.


*Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz, if you're curious.

Yes! More happy stuff like this.

You have just given me a very bad idea...

Does it involve blowing me up like a balloon?

Catholics are actually vampires :3

Catholics are vampires and atheists eat children... tough time.

Hé la brebis ... fait attention a  Lord_Foxhole ... LOL If you're the new messiah, I'll be the one to drive in the nails !

DUDE NO WAY

Are you sure → http://explosm.net/comics/3292/ ?

I like the bats and the Art Nouveau~!