Vatican says you can get time off purgatory by following the Pope on Twitter -
Is it really ludicrous that the Vatican should be claiming you can get time off purgatory by following the pope on Twitter?
There are obvious problems. If as a materialist you don't believe in purgatory, or hell, or any kind of moral balancing in an afterlife, then the whole thing is absurd, though no more absurd than any other belief about purgatory. Or you may be a Christian, happy to imagine our souls must be purified before they are fit to see God entirely (and this is the most charitable interpretation of the doctrine of purgatory I can find) but none the less amused and outraged that the pope should stick his oar into the business. Indulgences, after all, were the single greatest and grossest abuse of papal power to inspire the Reformation.
But let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the pope does have an informed opinion on what behaviour pleases God and benefits the soul. Does it then matter at all what technology he uses to spread his opinions? Is there anything intrinsically more ridiculous in following a devotion on Twitter than in the flesh, or on television?
The answer has to be no. The whole point of electronic communication is that it has effects in the physical world. That makes it real so far as I am concerned. If a love affair can be nourished in letters, it can be nourished, too, in email, or even, for very time-pressed lovers, in tweets.
When evangelical churches put their prayers up on PowerPoint displays, they don't lose their spiritual effects through not being printed in books, or on service sheets. What matters is that the congregations say them and mean them. What might make them pointless is the sentiment, not the means of transmission.
And it is quite clear from the Vatican's remarks that merely reading the Twitter feed won't have any effect. What it is claiming is that following along with the feed and allowing it to stimulate your thoughts and behaviour as it is supposed to do will have a beneficial spiritual effect. Again, I can't see that the means of transmission should make any difference at all here.
When you go to a rock concert, and see the performance on huge screens above the stage, this brings most of the audience closer, because that's where they want to be and the technology makes this possible. It would have no effect whatsoever on someone with a different intention – say a man who wanted to throw a stink bomb at Mick Jagger. Screens aren't going to bring him any closer.
So I think that a lot of the fuss about this is misplaced – and there's something delightful about people getting worked up on electronic media about someone using electronic media to do something ridiculous. In the end, what's interesting about this story isn't the medium involved but the concept of purgatory, and – to judge from my tweet stream – we only now believe in purgatorial suffering before death.
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