I was looking through this gallery of popemobiles and it occurred to me that, with the transparent, upright, contained tank, this form is ideally shaped to transport a future aquatic pope. Let’s say, a dolphin.
What are the obstacles to cetacean papacy?
The pope is the bishop of Rome and, in Catholicism, only men may be bishops. (Though Mary, of course, is fundamental to the church). There’s a quote from Pope Francis on the Wikipedia page about the ordination of women which I love simply for the language:
In Catholic ecclesiology there are two dimensions to think about… The Petrine dimension, which is from the Apostle Peter, and the Apostolic College, which is the pastoral activity of the bishops, as well as the Marian dimension, which is the feminine dimension of the Church.
So female dolphins are probably excluded from elevation.
Being non-human may prove another hurdle. Dolphins are animals, so their capacity will be questioned. But if we take a hypothetical extraterrestrial of human-equivalent sentience, even they may not be admitted to the church:
If aliens exist, they may be a different life form that does not need Christ’s redemption, the Vatican’s chief astronomer said. …
“God became man in Jesus in order to save us. So if there are also other intelligent beings, it’s not a given that they need redemption. They might have remained in full friendship with their creator,” he said.
So let’s say we were to limit ourselves to male dolphins, even if we then determined that dolphins were capable of reciting scripture (or whatever our definition of sentience is), they may be still disqualified for not being in need of redemption.
Some other faiths allow for a greater divergence between leaders and followers. In Sikhism, after a lineage of 10 humans, the title of Guru was passed to the community itself (as previously discussed).
And more generally, away from the idea of leadership and thinking about the operations of worship, there are already some robots that perform religious rituals (in Vox):
In hospice settings, elderly Buddhists who don’t have people on hand to recite prayers on their behalf will use devices known as nianfo ji – small machines about the size of an iPhone, which recite the name of the Buddha endlessly.
And:
In 2017, Indians rolled out a robot that performs the Hindu aarti ritual, which involves moving a light round and round in front of a deity.
And:
For years now, people who can’t afford to pay a human priest to perform a funeral have had the option to pay a robot named Pepper to do it at a much cheaper rate.
Also, from that same Vox article, a comment from Ilya Delio, a Franciscan sister who holds two PhDs and a chair in theology at Villanova University:
“The Catholic notion would say the priest is ontologically changed upon ordination. Is that really true?” she asked. Maybe priestliness is not an esoteric essence but a programmable trait that even a “fallen” creation like a robot can embody. “We have these fixed philosophical ideas and AI challenges those ideas – it challenges Catholicism to move toward a post-human priesthood.” (For now, she joked, a robot would probably do better as a Protestant.)
Delio is probably joking about BlessU-2, an automated blessing robot from the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau.
Delio continues: We tend to think in an either/or framework: It’s either us or the robots. But this is about partnership, not replacement. It can be a symbiotic relationship – if we approach it that way.
Human/robot symbiosis. This is Garry Kasparov’s concept of centaurs, originally from chess: Rather than half-horse, half-human, a centaur chess player is one who plays the game by marrying human intuition, creativity and empathy with a computer’s brute-force ability to remember and calculate a staggering number of chess moves, countermoves and outcomes.
So maybe the future is not dolphin popes but centaur popes: A singular human pope in the Vatican, with a hundred or a thousand machine popes travelling the world, issuing blessings and on-the-ground decrees wherever required.
And then if one day the human pope were to recede into the background, maybe never seen again, but a century later in 2121 the role of pope was still functionally maintained by the papal swarm, actually way more efficiently now, visiting cities, ordaining bishops, ostensibly semi-autonomous like so many Martian rovers, perhaps there’s a frail hand behind the curtain or perhaps not, it’s best not to ask too closely, would we even notice the change? Would we even mind?
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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I was looking through this gallery of popemobiles and it occurred to me that, with the transparent, upright, contained tank, this form is ideally shaped to transport a future aquatic pope. Let’s say, a dolphin.
What are the obstacles to cetacean papacy?
The pope is the bishop of Rome and, in Catholicism, only men may be bishops. (Though Mary, of course, is fundamental to the church). There’s a quote from Pope Francis on the Wikipedia page about the ordination of women which I love simply for the language:
So female dolphins are probably excluded from elevation.
Being non-human may prove another hurdle. Dolphins are animals, so their capacity will be questioned. But if we take a hypothetical extraterrestrial of human-equivalent sentience, even they may not be admitted to the church:
So let’s say we were to limit ourselves to male dolphins, even if we then determined that dolphins were capable of reciting scripture (or whatever our definition of sentience is), they may be still disqualified for not being in need of redemption.
Some other faiths allow for a greater divergence between leaders and followers. In Sikhism, after a lineage of 10 humans, the title of Guru was passed to the community itself (as previously discussed).
And more generally, away from the idea of leadership and thinking about the operations of worship, there are already some robots that perform religious rituals (in Vox):
And:
And:
Also, from that same Vox article, a comment from Ilya Delio, :
Delio is probably joking about BlessU-2, an automated blessing robot from the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau.
Delio continues:
Human/robot symbiosis. This is Garry Kasparov’s concept of centaurs, originally from chess:
So maybe the future is not dolphin popes but centaur popes: A singular human pope in the Vatican, with a hundred or a thousand machine popes travelling the world, issuing blessings and on-the-ground decrees wherever required.
And then if one day the human pope were to recede into the background, maybe never seen again, but a century later in 2121 the role of pope was still functionally maintained by the papal swarm, actually way more efficiently now, visiting cities, ordaining bishops, ostensibly semi-autonomous like so many Martian rovers, perhaps there’s a frail hand behind the curtain or perhaps not, it’s best not to ask too closely, would we even notice the change? Would we even mind?