Carl Sagan Quotes
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
Sagan, Carl. Contact. Simon and Schuster, 1985, p. 143.
Some politicians then and later were not as religious as the leading clerics would prefer. The quotation shows that priests commonly married at that time even though the church had forbidden it.
This was a fairly radical constraint on what had been a traditional priestly prerogative throughout the ages. However, the penalty for such a sin and infraction was rather modest—a warning for the first offence, followed by reducing the cleric’s income. There were more serious punishments proscribed for repeated offenses, but typical of most reform efforts a newly prohibited activity carries a very light penalty. For example $20 fines for providing alcohol to a minor was the initial penalty in some states. A then current comparison can be made since elsewhere in this council dueling between Christians was also prohibited. But the penalty for even the first offence was excommunication.
His quotations are very important because he wrote many of the Islamic legal opinions that governed Muslim Spain and influenced the Arabs of North Africa. There are many in the modern world who tend to agree with this view of priestly celabicy especially in the light of the Roman Catholic Sex Scandals involving priests throughout the world of the beginning of the 21st century.
Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages intended to be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them.
