alt Hacker NewsFormer Catholic. I left the church for a variety of reasons, one of which being the child abuse scandal. I am aware of the Catholic Church's long and often sordid history. What I am trying to say is there is no love lost between me and the Catholic Church.
With that out of the way, the Pope is right. Knowledge should be used for the benefit of humanity and I don't think any of the big AI companies have our best interests in mind.
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> I left the church for a variety of reasons, one of which being the child abuse scandal.
What you do is your business, but you understand the fallacy, yes? One does not belong to the Church for the priests. And btw, if you want to be consistent, you should dissociate yourself from all institutions, because statistically, the rate of abuse in the Church (estimated by John Jay to be around 4%) is representative or less than the rates in all other religious or secular institutions. Public schools are notoriously bad in this regard, but you wouldn't know it, given the obsessive coverage of the Church to the exclusion of everyone else.
(I, of course, condemn all such sexual abuse, and I am critical of those who failed to deal with the issue properly. There is indeed a sense in which abuse by a priest carries much more gravity, and this is the position of the Church itself. Sexual abuse also peaked during the heyday of the sexual revolution, roughly during the 1960s-1980s. It wasn't a pedophilia scandal, as around 80% of victims were post-pubescent male teenagers. It was a homosexual ephebophilia scandal. Still terrible, but it does shift understanding of the nature and source of the problem significantly.)
> I am aware of the Catholic Church's long and often sordid history.
Sure, if you simply accept the ignorant tropes, ideological propaganda, and black legends circulating in a culture hostile to the institution since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, then maybe you'll be left with a dramatically dark picture that you describe as "sordid". But this is historically illiterate and intellectually immature.
I don't really get this, so I genuinely want to understand.
You can still follow a religion while rightfully thinking that the organization representing it to be corrupt (and how could it be otherwise, as it's made from mortal sinners?).
But you either believe that St.Peter and its descendants in Rome have been tasked by god to spread (and interpret) its word or you don't.
It's fine if you don't (I don't my self, I'm an atheist), but I don't get why can't you be a catholic if you believe and also find the organization flawed.