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Thursday, November 9, 2017

POPE FRANCIS WILL MAKE CATHOLICS FUME OVER THIS!

The Pope forbids the sale of cigarettes in the Vatican

Greg Burke: No profit can be legitimate if it puts people’s lives at risk
By decision of Pope Francis, the sale of cigarettes to employees, religious and diplomats within the Vatican territory will be prohibited from 2018, in order not to cooperate with a “practice that damages health”.

“The Holy Father has decided that the Vatican will end the sale of cigarettes to its employees in 2018”, Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said, confirming the Argentinean press agency Telam and Wall Street Journal which had anticipated the news. The reason - Burke continues - is very simple: the Holy See cannot cooperate with an exercise that clearly damages people’s health. According to the World Health Organization, each year, smoking causes more than seven million deaths worldwide. Cigarettes, sold to Vatican employees and pensioners at a discounted price, were a source of income for the Holy See. However, no profit can be legitimate if it puts people’s lives at risk.



30 comments:

Rood Screen said...

I'm wondering when he'll take away their cars.

Reform of the Reform said...

I am surprised that it has taken so long to do this. Cigarette smoking is so addictive that it is hard to stop by oneself. The more institutions and people around smokers encourage but also make it difficult for smokers, the more courage and determination will smokers get to break out of the addiction. Addictive substances should either be banned, tightly controlled, or made prohibitively expensive.

Anonymous said...

Cars are necessary. Cigarettes are not.

Agnes said...

Seems to me there are more important things for him to be focusing on. Also, at what point do people learn to be responsible for themselves?

Anonymous said...

Maybe we should sell toxic and non-toxic drugs and allow people to "be responsible for themselves" and choose the safe one...

Anonymous said...

Maybe banning cigarettes should come after he stops the gay orgies...

Anonymous said...

Bee here:

Uh oh. Did you see the report on what WiFi does to seeds? Some high school girls did a science experiment putting seeds near a WiFi router. "[The] cress seeds next to the router did not grow, and some of them were even mutated or dead."

http://ofthebox.org/wifi-experiment-done-group-9th-grade-students-got-serious-international-attention/

Watch out for setting a precedent like this, Holy Father. Pretty soon it will be sugary soft drinks, cappuccinos, and your cell phone.

:-)

God bless.
Bee

John Nolan said...

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy MC (1883-1929) was an Anglican chaplain in the First World War. A non-smoker himself, he always had his pockets full of cigarettes to give to wounded and dying soldiers. He was nicknamed 'Woodbine Willie' - Woodbine was a popular brand of cigarettes.

If you read the recollections of soldiers you are struck by the contribution tobacco made to morale. It was said that 'Woodbines won the war'.

Nowadays a padre should refuse a cigarette to a dying man on the grounds that it might damage his health. The same argument would refuse a last cigarette to a condemned prisoner; I would not be in the least surprised if this has happened in the USA, the only civilized country still to apply capital punishment and which is also the headquarters of political correctness and health fascism.

Agnes said...

Anon at November 9, 2017 at 9:51 AM:

Cigarettes have been around for a long time, and the vast majority of people understand they are unhealthy. If a person doesn't, he just has to read the government mandated warning label on the pack. I'm not sure how that compares to putting out a toxic drug that has a non-toxic counterpart.

The reality is there has to be some point where people have to be responsible for their own decisions, without the government or some other entity trying to keep us from hurting ourselves. I'm waiting for the day when some politician decides we all have to wear a helmet when we walk, because we just might fall and bump our heads if we don't.

TJM said...

Ah, so instead of providing spiritual guidance, Santita, is engaged in "virtue-signally" so the New York Slimes and other heathens will love him.

TJM said...

Ah, so instead of providing spiritual guidance, Santita, is engaged in "virtue-signalling" so the New York Slimes and other heathens will love him.

Anonymous 2 said...

But cigarettes are good for one’s health. The smoke kills germs and all that coughing and spluttering in the morning helps to clear out the lungs and get the heart pumping, thereby restoring healthy cardio-vascular function for the new day. The nicotine stained walls in the home of a heavy smoker also provide effective pest control. Disease carrying roaches just fall off the walls dead as soon as they come in contact with it. I’m sure you can find all this (and more) on the internet.

Anonymous 2 said...

John:

Over here in the States we have the Marlborough man, a cigarette smoking cowboy riding a horse onto which he pulls himself up by his own bootstraps.

Anonymous 2 said...

P.S. I Anglicized Marlboro just for you (and me).

John Nolan said...

Anonymous 2

Continuing with the Anglicisms, perhaps by banning fags PF thought he was stopping the gay orgies.

Православный физик said...

Of things that should be banned and dealt with, cancer sticks are far down the list.

ByzRc said...

"No profit can be legitimate if it puts people’s lives at risk By decision of Pope Francis, the sale of cigarettes to employees, religious and diplomats within the Vatican territory will be prohibited from 2018, in order not to cooperate with a “practice that damages health”."

To be complete, hopefully he cancels his next shipment of alcohol too.

Anonymous 2 said...

John:

The English language can get one into trouble, and there is much truth to the well-known observation that the English and the Americans are “two nations divided by a common language.” For example, when I paraphrase Margaret Thatcher’s husband Dennis by saying that he once ascribed his long life to a diet of “booze and fags", as I sometimes do, I invariably find that I have a lot of explaining to do.

John Nolan said...

Moderate use of cigarettes can have health benefits - smokers, like singers and wind instrument players tend to use their full lung capacity, it does stimulate the heart, and most of all it reduces stress, reckoned by many to be the greatest killer.

But, as with alcohol, excessive consumption is harmful, so government health officers adopt an absolutist position which is on the surface nonsensical.

S. Truth said...


Health consequences of smoking 1–4 cigarettes per day

"Conclusions: In both sexes, smoking 1–4 cigarettes per day was associated with a significantly higher risk of dying from ischaemic heart disease and from all causes, and from lung cancer in women. Smoking control policymakers and health educators should emphasise more strongly that light smokers also endanger their health."

- http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/14/5/315

John Nolan said...

S. Truth

Yes, you have summarized the absolutist position. What evidence it is based on - for instance, did they monitor a significantly large sample of 1-4 a day smokers over a period of 70 years against a control group of non-smokers? I doubt it. Did they look at stress levels in both groups and examine the causes of death in the control group? Again, I doubt it.

People nowadays, lacking religious belief, are 'blinded by science'. They fail to realize that far from being omniscient, scientists start with a hypothesis and then look for evidence to support it. Any that does not do so is discarded.

Contrast this with the historian who starts by examining the evidence and then arrives at a conclusion. Should he come across, in some dusty archive, a piece of evidence that destroys his hypothesis, he cannot discard it as 'experimental error'. He must change his hypothesis.

S. Truth said...

Participants: 23 521 men and 19 201 women, aged 35–49 years, screened for cardiovascular disease risk factors in the mid 1970s and followed throughout 2002.

Evidence that does not support a scientific hypothesis is not discarded, as you suggest. So, what happens when the experimental evidence produces findings contrary to the hypothesis?

"Scientists often find that their predictions were not accurate and their hypothesis was not supported, and in such cases they will communicate the results of their experiment and then go back and construct a new hypothesis and prediction based on the information they learned during their experiment. This starts much of the process of the scientific method over again. Even if they find that their hypothesis was supported, they may want to test it again in a new way."

Negative evidence is, to a scientists, VERY valuable and is not simply discarded. And the historian who find evidence that destroys his hypothesis can simply close the book, put it back on the shelf, and tell no one.

John Nolan said...

S. Truth

Not to mention 'peer review' which means asking like-minded people to agree with you.

When the 'scientific' evidence on anthropogenic global warming is shown to be as accurate as phrenology and the phlogiston theory, I shall, as an historian, laugh like a drain.

S. Truth said...

Peer-review is not asking for agreement.

You might take a look at "Eight reasons I rejected your article - A journal editor reveals the top reasons so many manuscripts don’t make it to the peer review process."

It begins "When a manuscript is submitted to a high-quality scholarly journal, it goes through intense scrutiny — even before it's seen by the editor-in-chief and selected for peer review. At Elsevier, between 30 percent to 50 percent of articles don't even make it to the peer review process."

The journal in question is "Carbon" - the international journal of the American Carbon Society.

S. Truth said...

Further, "Characteristics of 63 journals publishing peer-reviewed articles on atmospheric science were collected from online information and through a survey e-mailed to the journals. The rate that submitted manuscripts were rejected for publication (hereafter, the rejection rate) was available for 47 (75%) of the journals. Although the range in rejection rates is quite large (2%–91%), most journals reject between 25% and 60% of submitted manuscripts, with a mean of 38.7%, a result of more than 6,000 manuscripts a year rejected for publication."

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2009BAMS2908.1

Why do you make assertions that are so easily shown to be false?

Anonymous said...

John, you’re arguing with Kavanaugh, who has told us before that he has a BA in Biology. That makes him an expert on everything science, don’t you know.

John Nolan said...

S.Truth

For the simple reason that they are not easily shown to be false. Your bombardment of statistics concerning 'scientific' journals tells us a lot about 'scientific' journals and precious little about science.

Scientific research is very much dependent on who pays for it. It is expensive and relies on funding from organizations which are well-funded and may be ideologically motivated. Environmental politics, like gender politics, is global and has little to do with objective standards of research.

S. Truth said...

Of course, statistics are, by the very nature, unreliable! How silly of me!

Now, maybe you'll adopt the same attitude toward the "statistics" that show "traditional" religious orders are growing fastest and "traditional" congregations are on the increase. (I will not hold my breath...)

But, to your erroneous suggestion that peer review is self-serving, just read the available articles on how many offerings are rejected following peer review. It's just that simple. They're available online. You've shown an ability to use a computer. (Ditto)

John Nolan said...

Perhaps the articles which didn't make into 'Carbon' were those sceptical of anthropogenic climate change. Do you have any statistics on this?

John Nolan said...

Statistics are statistics. They are not unreliable per se, but can be manipulated to appear to give support to a conclusion already arrived at. In some cases they can be falsified. Notable cases of this include the Soviet census of 1939 and wild exaggerations of the number of victims of the Inquisition.

As Mark Twain famously observed, 'there are lies, damned lies and statistics'.