Hi Paul,

What did the pharaoh say after his tomb was ransacked?

I want my mummy.

What did the pharaoh say to his driver?

Toot-and-come-in.

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Dear Foxy,

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It took the Catholic Church 450 years to realise that Copernicus was right and it was wrong to believe that the Earth revolved around the sun and not the inverse. In the meantime, the Catholic Inquisition condemned Galileo for heresy in declaring that he had arrived at the same conclusion as Copernicus from his telescopic observations.

It took the Catholic Church 490 years to realise that it was wrong to judge Joan of Arc guilty of heresy and have her burned at the stake when she was 19 years old.

Le Chevalier de la Barre, the last person executed for blasphemy in France, was tortured, decapitated, and burned at the stake when he, too, was only 19 years old :

« On 1st July 1766, Chevalier de la Barre, a young nobleman accused of blasphemy, was executed in Abbeville [France]. His death sentence came soon after the name of Jean Calas was cleared, notably after a long struggle waged by Voltaire. The executioner tossed a copy of Voltaire’s Pocket Philosophical Dictionary into the flames as the decapitated body of de la Barre was burned at the stake. Despite his efforts and those of other authors, the philosopher failed to obtain a judicial review of the de la Barre case. However, Voltaire’s 1791 re-burial in the Panthéon presented an opportunity to restore the chevalier’s good name ; Alexandre Devérité, the printer and Jacobin from Abbeville who was elected to the National Convention in 1792, had advocated it as well, in anonymous articles published as far back as 1776. And so began a process that culminated in a decree issued in the autumn of 1793 by the National Convention, that finally cleared de la Barre’s name » (http://www.cairn.info/revue-histoire-de-la-justice-2020-1-page-75.htm)

I wonder how long it will take the Catholic Church to realise that LGBT+ individuals are just as natural and respectable as heterosexual individuals.

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« The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013-7) found that the Australian Catholic Church had a particularly bad record with sexual abuse of children and failing to respond to it. It recorded 4445 claimants who alleged sexual abuse in a Catholic setting. Some 7% of Catholic priests were alleged offenders, with offending occurring at a constant rate from the 1950s to the 1980s » (http://australiancatholichistoricalsociety.com.au/history-resources/the-sexual-abuse-crisis/)

The Australian Christian Lobby and Archbishop Peter Comensoli of the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne persuaded Scott Morrison (whose Pentecostal faith is notorious) to grant them a certain number of religious privileges that resulted in the current project of law reform that has been maintained by Anthony Albanese.

They want to change the law so that religious schools can discriminate against schoolteachers who do not share their brand of religion and hire only those schoolteachers who do so that there will be no contestation about what they teach the children in their custody – or what else they do with them.

It’s an extraordinarily quick turnaround for the Catholic Church from its disgraceful paedophile pandemic that has left such a vivid stigma on its reputation and remains an open wound that’s still so fresh in everybody’s mind.

I think they should wait at least another four or five hundred years for that just as they did for Copernicus, Galileo and Joan of Arc.

Don’t you ?

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Dear Banjo,

You put things far more eloquently than I ever could.

And certainly religious institutions have a lot to answer.
As you say - hopefully it won't take another 400 years
or more, for them to instill tolerance, respect, and the real
values that they're supposed to believe in, teach and practice.

Poor Galileo was made to recant his theory of the universe.
And we can see that we can't dismiss religious intervention
as a thing of the past especially on issues which require
radical solutions that are likely to harm vested political or
economic interests. Hence the existence of censorship today.

At least the current government is trying to find acceptable
solutions. Whether they succeed or not is up to all sides of
politics giving the support to something that's long overdue.

"It's believed that in Ancient Egypt the common people had to labour for part of the year for the State/Pharaoh, a kind of tax. "

There's two schools of thought here. One is as Paul states, that it was a form of enforced labour in lieu of taxes.

The other is that it was considered a religious obligation. Remember the Pharoah was considered a god. Much like Muslims are required to visit Mecca at least once in their life, it is thought Egyptians were required to spend at least some time working on the god's monument. As such, like Muslims visiting Mecca, the labour was given freely and with joy as a form of religious tithe.