18 September 2013

A glimpse at the irrationality of the ex-archbishop of Greece

In the pre-blog era, I used to maintain a number of interesting facts, related to lack of logic and rationality, on my university web pages. That was a time when blogs were not so wide-spread and when I, erroneously thought, that every academic, in a scientific field, was rational. (I was mistaken. Irrationality and lack of logic exists in universities, even amongst science people.) I will transfer some of them to this blog.

The ex-archbishop of Greece, His Beatitude, Christodoulos, was known for often maintaining stupid things. Below is one of them, captured by a video. The background of the story is this: at the time (2004), he had written a book titled "Proselyte Greeks: The transition from antiquity to Christianity". In it, he maintained that the transition to Christianity was a smooth one. The irrationality of his arguments was captured in the video clip below, in which he states:
"...The [early] Christians respected the faith and religion of their ancestors and sanctified their temples which were dedicated to idolatric deites, they sanctified them by using them as Churches or by using their materials in order to build Christian Churches."

Here is a short bio of him:

His Beatitude the Archbishop of Athens and all of Greece, Christodoulos Paraskevaides, was born in Xanthi in 1939. He completed his studies in the Law School (1962) and the School of Theology (1967). While a student (1961) he was ordained deacon and priest (1965). He served as a preacher, senior spiritual father (Church of Assumption [sic] of Virgin Mary) and as a Secretary of the Holy Synod. He obtained a doctorate in Theology, has degrees in French and English, and also speaks German and Italian. He is the author of many scientific [sic] and constructive books. He became Bishop of Demetrias (1974) and was Archbishop of Athens and all Greece (1998-2008).

And an amusing fact from his life:

Greece had a seven-year military dictatorship (the `junta', 1967-1974). Human rights violations were, of course, a commonplace back then, occurring on a daily basis. Christodoulos was a priest during that period. Nevertheless, he stated he was completely unaware of anything going wrong then. He had no idea of human rights abuses because `he was busy studying'. Despite his being busy studying and not being aware of any abuses, he used to accompany the dictators in public, as the following images show.


1 comment:




T H E B O T T O M L I N E

What measure theory is about

It's about counting, but when things get too large.
Put otherwise, it's about addition of positive numbers, but when these numbers are far too many.

The principle of dynamic programming

max_{x,y} [f(x) + g(x,y)] = max_x [f(x) + max_y g(x,y)]

The bottom line

Nuestras horas son minutos cuando esperamos saber y siglos cuando sabemos lo que se puede aprender.
(Our hours are minutes when we wait to learn and centuries when we know what is to be learnt.) --António Machado

Αγεωμέτρητος μηδείς εισίτω.
(Those who do not know geometry may not enter.) --Plato

Sapere Aude! Habe Muth, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen!
(Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason!) --Kant