Sean Carroll

First ever American pope.

But he's liberal in various of his inclinations.

Not 100% so.

Like, you know, there's always going to be the case that the pope is Catholic, right?

The pope is going to agree with a lot of parts of doctrine that the Catholic Church likes to promulgate.

And some of those will not quite count as liberal.

Some will.

It's all very confusing.

And it's all constructed by human beings, not actually given by God.

But so be it.

The pope has been pushing back.

on various aspects of modern technology and governance.

You know, he has noticed that you should be nice to immigrants as part of what Jesus preaches in the New Testament, in the Gospels.

And yet, there are people who claim to be following Jesus' teachings who are not really very kind to immigrants.

So he says those things, and that riles people up.

Most recently, he put out an encyclical that questions some aspects of artificial intelligence and the possible worries about dehumanization and not taking the soul seriously enough.

And I haven't read the encyclical, I have to say, but it seems that there's a lot of good stuff in there, a lot of thoughtful things.

You know, the Pope and I are not going to agree on everything, but I can still respect—I have people on the podcast who I don't agree with, but I still respect as thinkers.

And as far as I can tell—

The Pope seems like someone who is a respectable thinker, who actually is not just going through the motions, but really taking things seriously and trying to do some good in various ways.