The view from the Vatican observatory.

That's right the Vatican has an observatory; has had one for a very long time:

At the “Living The Catholic Faith” conference promoted by the American archdiocese of Denver, the Jesuit Fr. Guy Consolmagno, astronomer for the Vatican Observatory said: “Science is one of the best ways to know God”. He added that his study of the universe through science has helped him to better understand the person of Christ. The Italian American Jesuit brother and scientist, who has been studying comets and asteroids for thirty years (one asteroid bears his name) does not exclude the possibility of intelligent life outside Earth. But the existence of E.T. does not rock the faith: “What we learn does not invalidate what we already know. If one day we discovered we are not alone in the universe, all we believe in will not necessarily be wrong, we're going to find out that everything is truer in ways we couldn't even yet have imagined.” To confirm this Fr. Consolomagno quotes the beginning of the Gospel of John "In the beginning was the Word. The Word is, of course, Jesus, the Word is the second person of the Trinity, the Word is the salvation, the Word is the incarnation of God in the universe, who according to the Gospel is there before the universe was made. The one point in space-time that's the same on every timeline. So that the salvation occurs and is made manifest in the person of Jesus Christ here”.

Before the Universe was created, Christ existed and therefore he embraces not only us and the earth, but also other hypothetical beings. “Modern atheism tends to understand God as being merely a force that fills the gaps in our understanding of the universe” observed the Jesuit who was born in Detroit in 1952. “ To use God to fill the gaps in our knowledge is theologically treacherous”, because it minimizes God to just another force inside the universe rather than recognizing him as the source of creation. Those who believe in God should not be afraid of science, but should see it as an opportunity that God gave humanity to get to know him better.

And:

Other religions and philosophies can give us a rational view of the universe, but “only the Gospel could tell us that Reason itself became flesh and dwelt among us” in the form of Jesus Christ. Thomas Aquinas spoke of many worlds. According to the Gospel the Incarnation happened here, but it could also have happened elsewhere; after all "The Bible is divine science, a work about God” explained Consolomagno “It does not intend to be physical science and explain the making of planets and solar systems”. The limitless universe "might even include other planets with other beings created by that same loving God. The idea of there being other races and other intelligences is not contrary to traditional Christian thought. There is nothing in Holy Scripture that could confirm or contradict the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe". Human understanding "is always incomplete. It is crazy to underestimate God's ability to create in depths of ways that we will never completely understand. It is equally dangerous to think that we understand God completely," by narrowing his work to Earth and mankind. Observing asteroids, meteorites and celestial bodies “is one of the things that brings me closer to God” Consolomagno said.

St. Thomas Aquinas was always proposed by the Church as a master of thought and model of the right way of doing theology. He too was able to recognize that nature, the object of his philosophical thought, could contribute to the understanding of the divine revelation.

Living off of Christian capital.

The real meaning of "noon", How the ancient Jews (and medieval Christian monks) continue to influence modern society.
 

How “noon” came to mean “mid-day”

As the Christian monks and priests, in their prayer books, had adopted the ancient Jewish mode of counting time, the Jewish “hours of the day” came to be identified with the “hours” (or prayers) of the Divine Office. Ultimately, the prayers of the Breviary came to be more dominant in the European mind even than the original meaning of the Jewish “hours”.

When the prayer of “none” (now pronounced and called “noon”) came to be prayed not at the “ninth hour” (i.e. 3pm) but at mid-day, 12 pm began to be called “none” after the prayer time of the monks and priests. Thus, the English word “noon” originally refers not to 12 pm (or mid-day) but to the “ninth hour” which is 3 pm. However, because the monks and priests began to pray the Breviary earlier in the day, the word “noon” has come to mean “mid-day” or 12 pm.

Modern society is rooted in Christianity and Judaism

Many modern secularists refuse to speak of “Christmas” and instead insist upon the “winter holiday season”. They do this in order to keep Judeo-Christian biblical ideas out of modern language.

However, if such secularists really wanted to “purify” modern language from its Christian and Jewish roots, they would have to stop using even the most common words – like “noon”. Here, as bad as modern society may sometimes seem, it is encouraging for Christians to remember that the biblical influence on modern western society is so deep that the only way to remove the Judeo-Christian roots would be to utterly destroy Western Civilization. We can only hope that the secularists will recognize this truth.

I'm posting this because I'm reading John Loftus' "The End of Christianity," which contains an essay by Hector Avalos that argues that the Bible should not be studied because it is totally irrelevant to modern society.  This seems like an apt counter-argument that could be replicated throughout modern culture.

So, apparently, "real estate" poisons everything.

Too bad, so sad, for New Atheist types, but it seems that only a really small minority of wars have been caused by religion since the Treaty of Westphalia.

To establish a baseline for comparing religious conflicts with other reasons why countries fight, we gathered information on three additional issues where Holsti collects data: real estate (territorial disputes), riches (battles over resources), and regimes (where one country attempts to replace another country’s government with one it prefers). Like the religion analysis, this involved bundling several of Holsti’s issues under a broader category for each issue of conflict, since many if not most wars have multiple issues. The results are listed below:

As you can see, in no time period since the Peace of Westphalia did religious wars ever constitute the dominant issue for why countries fight. In no case did religion ever consist of more than half the number of the next-lowest category of conflict.


But there’s still the matter of Huntington’s argument that we may be entering into some new age of religious wars. So far, the data doesn’t necessarily reflect that.

We also looked at the new Correlates of War dataset on conflicts since 1990. The Correlates of War project is perhaps the most respected scholarly endeavor to collect data on conflict and the factors associated with it. Some of these conflicts are territorial disputes (Ecuador-Peru over the Cenepa Valley, Ethiopia-Eritrea over the Badme border town, India-Pakistan over Kargil). Others involve conflict between Iraq and other countries, which are fought for a host of issues, none of which seems to have a religious component.

Even in the Balkan wars, the international component to these (NATO versus Bosnian Serbs or Serbia over Kosovo) did not directly involve religion, even if the groups on the ground battled under the banners of differing faiths. Here, the literature splits on whether religion was the genuine cause or merely an easily cited rationale hyped by Western media and armchair diplomats. The same might be said of the fight between Muslim Azerbaijan and Christian Armenia over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Only the Afghanistan conflict seems to have a clear religious element, but like the religious disputes of old, only Afghan Taliban ally Osama bin Laden claimed it as such.

Of course, while countries with different religions go to war, religion does not have to drive the dispute. Japan did not try to convert the United States to its religious beliefs by bombing Pearl Harbor, any more than the American response was an attempt to Christianize the Japanese islands.

Well, obviously.  Anyone who studies history knows this, but it is amazing how Hitchens et al. can get away with this bag of wind.