Again about healthcare - a small note

[fpb]

A real and serious issue with exporting any European or Japanese model of universal health coverage to the USA is the size and diversity of the nation. The attempt to micro-manage the British Health Service - by now reduced, thanks to the growth of local parliaments, to England alone - from Westminster is notoriously one of the major problems with

Comments

[secularhermites]

I do not intend to be disrespectful, but I thought that the Catholic Church had room for those who believe God created the heavens and the earth (as taught in Creationism). I know Pope John Paul II as well as Pope Benedict personally support evolution and have released documents stating as such, but I was unaware that evolution is now an official teaching of the Church. (?) Please confirm.

[fpb]

Not really. To begin with, the Church has NEVER taken an inerrantist, literal view of the Bible. Indeed, far from being "old-time religion", inerrantism of the Fundamentalist brand is a very modern kind of beast; it begins in the 1890s, that is, rather later than Huxley or Darwin. If we catch Catholic or even Protestant writers before the nineteenth century speaking as though the details of Genesis were factually real, it is because these were parts of their inherited store of images and expressions of sacred truth, but not because they necessarily took them to be real in detail

[secularhermites]

Yes, thank you for clarifying. It is also my understanding is that evolution is not Catholic dogma, but rather a current position. - It can get sticky when getting into natural selection, etc