Apostles' Creed

Weeping Santa Jesus

I just found this:
“Remembering” by Fran Lagana-Brooks. From the “Weeping Santa” collection.

All I can think of when I see Super giant Jesus comforts weeping Santa, damn it - we haven't even had Halloween yet, people! Also, notice Jesus didn't leave any foot prints - walks on water, whether frozen or liquid.

Jesus would be proud

File under WWJD?

Unicorns in the Bible

Hey, did you know that the bible mentions Unicorns, not once but eight times!? That's about as often as it mentions love! Okay, so I'm over reaching, it's 310. Know how many times it mentions blood? 447 times. Money? 63,294 times.

"God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn."—Numbers 23:22

"God brought him forth out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn."—Numbers 24:8

"His glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns: with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth."—Deuteronomy 33:17

"Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee? Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him? Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it into thy barn?"—Job 39:9–12

"Save me from the lion's mouth; for thou hast heard me from the horns of unicorns."—Psalms 22:21

"He maketh them [the cedars of Lebanon] also to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn."—Psalms 29:6

"But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of the unicorn: I shall be anointed with fresh oil."—Psalms 92:10

"And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with their bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness."—Isaiah 34:7

Just a useful key for all those times that you are asked to take the bible literally.

Priests Do It... Even Buddhists Do It too!

Don't worry, Catholics, you're not the only one! Seems that even though their beliefs are completely different, abusing children is universal -- and same with the incredibly dense support staff to enable it and hide the wrong doers from any light of justice!

(Read More)

A Tribune review of sexual abuse cases involving several Theravada Buddhist temples found minimal accountability and lax oversight of monks accused of preying on vulnerable targets.

Because they answer to no outside ecclesiastical authority, the temples respond to allegations as they see fit. And because the monks are viewed as free agents, temples claim to have no way of controlling what they do next. Those found guilty of wrongdoing can pack a bag and move to another temple -- much to the dismay of victims, law enforcement and other monks.

"You'd think they'd want to make sure these guys are not out there trying to get into other temples," said Rishi Agrawal, the attorney for a victim of a west suburban monk convicted of battery for sexual contact last fall. "What is the institutional approach here? It seems to be ignorance and inaction."

Paul Numrich, an expert on Theravada temples in the United States, said that like clergy abuse in other religious organizations, sex offenses areespecially egregious because monks are supposed to live up to a higher spiritual calling. The monks take a vow of celibacy."

One serial offender, Boa-Ubol, has been definitively caught with a DNA test — he fathered a child on a 14-year-old girl. His temple chastised him, and claimed that he had left the US to go to Thailand. Where is he now? California. In a temple. Working with children.

Amish Paradise

I'm sure there's a logical explanation for this... anyone?

Sun Worship - Happy Solstice

Sun worship, I'd say, is not the most basic form of religious expression, but in fact, the purist.

Worship or adoration of the star that sits smack dab in the center of our solar system as the primary symbol of the deity as the most glorious object in nature is a pretty nice idea. Well it does give all life on Earth it's source of light and heat - and in plants, it's food.

Oh, it's easy to laugh off the primative folks in loin cloths or lifting up pyramids in the desert to be unsophisticated rubes killing lambs to make sure the sun rises tomorrow. I mean, where are their funny hats and collection plates?

But to the core, it is the purist expression of thanks to worship a massive ball nuclear hydrogen fireball.

Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Aztecs and the Incas of Peru were down with looking up. The Sun played a big part of the religions of Greece and Rome, and a pile of Native Americans, the Druids of England, and in Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Mithraism, and Buddhism. And, if you really want to get technical, Christians seem to care about the winter solstice quite a bit too.

Now if you're wandering around looking to find "The Creator", just look UP, stupid. Every atom of your body was created in the sun’s atomic furnace. We're all made of stars. Oooooo.

Now if you want to get super fancy, we, the sun and everything in our galactic neighborhood was probably created by a supernova 7 billion years ago, but that would mean that we're also all apart of the original Bang, and the universe as a whole -- which pisses people off, because they think they're special.

But, here, I'll let someone more elequent explain it.

‘I’ve begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It’s there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There’s no mystery, no one asks for money, I don’t have to dress up, and there’s no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to God are all answered at about the same rate.
~George Carlin - US comedian, satirist and free speech activist

So is sunscreen Blasphemous? Hmmm...?

Too Harsh?

Warning a Child of the Irrational World

Richard Dawkins letter to his 10 year old daughter (how to warn your child about this irrational world)

To my dearest daughter,

Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the Sun and very far away? And how do we know that the Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the Sun?

The answer to these questions is ‘evidence’.

Sometimes evidence means actually seeing (or hearing, feeling, smelling….) that something is true. Astronauts have traveled far enough from the Earth to see with their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The ‘evening star’ looks like a bright twinkle in the sky but with a telescope you can see that it is a beautiful ball – the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing (or hearing or feeling…) is called an observation.

Often evidence isn’t just observation on its own, but observation always lies at the back of it. If there’s been a murder, often nobody (except the murderer and the dead person!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather together lots of other observations which may all point towards a particular suspect. If a person’s fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it. It doesn’t prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it’s joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realize that they all fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.

Scientists – the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe – often work like detectives. They make a guess (called a hypothesis) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: if that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveler, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started. When a doctor says that you have measles he doesn’t take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then he says to himself: if she really has measles, I ought to see… Then he runs through his list of predictions and tests them with his eyes (have you got spots?), his hands (is your forehead hot?), and his ears (does your chest wheeze in a measly way?). Only then does he make his decision and say, ‘I diagnose that the child has measles.’ Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-rays, which help their eyes, hands and ears to make observations.

The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something, and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called ‘tradition’, ‘authority’, and ‘revelation’.

First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion with about 50 children. These children were invited because they’d been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by ‘tradition’. Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents, which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either. They said things like, ‘We Hindus believe so and so.’ ‘We Muslims believe such and such.’ ‘We Christians believe something else.’ Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn’t all be right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite proper, and he didn’t even try to get them to argue out their differences with each other. But that isn’t the point I want to make. I simply want to ask where their beliefs came from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they’ve been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over centuries. That’s tradition.

The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up a story that isn’t true, handing it down over any number of centuries doesn’t make it any truer!

Most people in England have been baptized into the Church of England, but this is only one of many branches of the Christian religion. There are other branches such as the Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic and the Methodist churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe even slightly different things from each other often go to war over their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty good reasons – evidence – for believing what they believe. But actually their different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.

Let’s talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn’t die but was lifted bodily into Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other religions don’t talk about her much and, unlike Roman Catholics, they don’t call her the ‘Queen of Heaven’. The tradition that Mary’s body was lifted into Heaven is not a very old one. The Bible says nothing about how or when she died; in fact the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn’t invented until about six centuries after Jesus’s time. At first it was just made up, in the same way as any story like Snow White was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as an official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950. But the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented 600 years after Mary’s death.

I’ll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in another way. But first I must deal with the two other bad reasons for believing in anything: authority and revelation.

Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the Pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are old men with beards called Ayatollahs. Lots of young Muslims are prepared to commit murder, purely because the Ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.

When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that they had to believe that Mary’s body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in 1950 the Pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The Pope said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the things that Pope said in his life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why, just because he was the Pope, you should believe everything he said, any more than you believe everything that lots of other people say. The present Pope has ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If people follow his authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines, diseases and wars, caused by overcrowding.

Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven’t seen the evidence ourselves and we have to take somebody else’s word for it. I haven’t with my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the speed of light. This looks like ‘authority’. But actually it is much better than authority because the people who wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about Mary’s body zooming off to Heaven.

The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called ‘revelation’. If you had asked the Pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary’s body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been ‘revealed’ to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling ‘revelation’. It isn’t only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?

Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You’d be very upset, and you’d probably say, ‘Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?’ Now suppose I answered: ‘I don’t actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have this funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead.’ You’d be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you’d know that an inside ‘feeling’ on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, and sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don’t. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.

People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’.
But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.

Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn’t even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can’t trust them.

Inside feelings are valuable in science too, but only for giving you ideas that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a ‘hunch’ about an idea that just ‘feels’ right. In itself, this is not a good reason for believing something. But it can be a good reason for spending some time doing a particular experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything until they are supported by evidence.

I promised that I’d come back to tradition, and look at it in another way. I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us. All animals are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish are built to be good at surviving in fresh water, while lobsters are built to be good at surviving in the salt sea. People are animals too, and we are built to be good at surviving in a world full of … other people. Most of us don’t hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters, we buy it from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We ‘swim’ through a ‘sea of people’. Just as a fish needs gills to survive in water, people need brains that make them able to deal with other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is full of difficult things to learn. Like language.

You speak English but your friend speaks German. You each speak the language that fits you to ‘swim about’ in your own separate ‘people sea’. Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way. In England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these words is more correct, or more truer than the other. Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at ‘swimming about in their people sea’, children have to learn the language of their own country, and lots of other things about their own people; and this means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous amount of traditional information. (Remember that traditional information just means things that are handed down from grandparents to parents to children.) The child’s brain has to be a sucker for traditional information. And the child can’t be expected to sort out good and useful traditional information, like the words of a language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.

It’s a pity, but it can’t help being the case, that because children have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence or at least sensible. But if some of it is false, silly or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children believing that too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do? Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So, once something gets itself strongly believed – even if its completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place – it can go on forever.
Could this be what happened with religions? Belief that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief that wine turns into blood – not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this is because they were told to believe them when they were young enough to believe anything.

Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were told different things when they were children. Muslim children are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers, Mormons or Holy Rollers, and all are utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. They believe different things for exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English and someone speaks German.

Both languages are, in their own country, the right language to speak. But it can’t be true that different religions are right in their own countries, because different religions claim that opposite things are true. Mary can’t be alive in the Catholic Republic but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.

What can we do about all this? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

Your loving,

Daddy

Richard Dawkins is one of the worlds most renowned scientists who is known for speaking out against the dangers of religion.

Only 10 Days to Save

I had a long post about the origin of the Family Radio's reasoning and campaign that is warning about the coming Rapture...

But then Blogger buggered out, and took the last couple days worth of effort into the great mists .... Rapture?

Anyhow, here's a cut'n'paste on Family Radio and their 'Math' that has them believing that the world is about to come to an end.

Central to Family Radio's and Camping's teaching is the belief that the Bible is the Word of God and completely true. However, he emphasizes, this does not mean that each sentence in the Bible is to be understood only literally. Rather, the meaning of individual Biblical passages needs to be interpreted in the light of two factors. The first is the context of the Bible as a whole. The second is its spiritual meaning: in Camping's words, "the Bible is an earthly story with a Heavenly meaning." In Camping's latest publication, "We are Almost There!", he states that certain Biblical passages point unquestionably to May 21, 2011 as the date of "Rapture", and October 21, 2011 as the end of the world.

Since leaving the Reformed Church in 1988, Camping has taught doctrines that may conflict with doctrines of the Reformed Church and other church denominations. The principles of Biblical hermeneutics upon which Camping frames his present teachings are:

1. The Bible alone is the Word of God.
2. Every Biblical passage must be interpreted in the light of the Bible as a whole.
3. The Bible normally conveys multiple levels of meaning or significance.^[16]
4. Numerology cannot be applied to numbers in the Bible when following the Biblical rules—some individuals have attempted to apply the concept to Camping's research.
5. That salvation is unmerited and cannot be achieved by good works, prayer, belief or acceptance. It is a pure act of God's grace and that those to be saved were chosen "before the foundation of the world". He has been accused of adding conditions to salvation and teaching relative free will of humanity. However, he has admitted that some, though very few, could be saved, while still in the worldly churches, just as there would be those saved inside the nation of Israel, and that leaving the churches is merely something a believer should do, just as a believer should not lie or cheat. He also gives credit to God for what has been called "common grace", where the unsaved, the yet to be saved and the saved are blessed to do good works, but this is not considered the gift of salvation itself.

Examples of how Camping's teachings vary from past conventional doctrines are:

• Departing from doctrines stating no one can know the time of Christ's second coming, he teaches that the exact times of the Rapture and the End of the World are to be revealed sometime towards the end of time: (Daniel 12:9-13) prophecy.

• Camping teaches that the "Church age" is over, that Satan now rules in all churches, and that no person remaining in a church at the time of the Rapture can be saved. He distinguishes his ministry from a "church", saying that Family Radio does not have a "membership" or hold "authority".

• Camping now teaches that "hell" is synonymous with "death" and the "grave", and that there is no everlasting torment.

• Camping now teaches that The Cross was just a demonstration of what had already happened before the foundation of the world.

• Camping teaches that the world will end May 21 2011 using the following reasoning:

1. According to Camping, the number five equals "atonement", the number ten equals "completeness", and the number seventeen equals "heaven".
2. Christ is said to have hung on the cross on April 1, 33 AD. The time between April 1, 33 AD and April 1, 2011 is 1,978 years.
3. If 1,978 is multiplied by 365.2422 days (the number of days in a solar year, not to be confused with the lunar year), the result is 722,449.
4. The time between April 1 and May 21 is 51 days.
5. 51 added to 722,449 is 722,500.
6. (5 x 10 x 17)2 or (atonement x completeness x heaven)2 also equals 722,500.

Saturday Morning Video: Damn Atheists

The people were ridiculous, but the reporter was surprisingly impartial. Bravo.

Another thought, Billboard for a christian church - everything is fine and dandy.
Billboard for an athiest gathering - HOW DARE YOU!

But, why does an Atheist need to discuss with other Atheists what they don't believe? Why does god need a Starship?

It's Official

Al Qaeda confirmed the death of Osama bin Laden in an Internet message that vowed revenge on the United States and its allies, including Pakistan, according to a statement issued by the Islamist militant group.

-- Now here's the gag, they were kind of in a bind.... They were going to have to confirm or deny Bin Laden’s death. If they’re to have credibility among the faithful who follow their jihad, they must identify a new fearless leader. If they are to call for revenge, they must admit to the reason for that rabid outcry.

Al Qaeda confirmed the death of its leader as a historic moment, and vowed not to deviate from the path of armed struggle.

"In a historic day for the great Islamic nation... the mujahid (holy warrior) Shiekh Abu Abdullah, Osama bin Mohammed bin Laden, God have mercy on him, was killed on the path taken by those before him and will be taken by others after him."

"Congratulations to the Islamic umma (community) for the martyrdom of its son Osama."

The global militant group, which said it will soon release an audio tape made by its leader a week before he died, vowed not to deviate from the path of armed struggle and said bin Laden's blood "is more precious to us and to every Muslim than to be wasted in vain."

"It will remain, with permission from God Almighty, a curse that hunts the Americans and their collaborators and chase them outside and inside their country," the militant network said in a statement released on Islamist Internet forums.

"Their happiness will turn into sorrow, and their blood will be mixed with their tears," al Qaeda said.

"We call upon our Muslim people in Pakistan, on whose land Sheikh Osama was killed, to rise up and revolt to cleanse this shame that has been attached to them by a clique of traitors and thieves ... and in general to cleanse their country from the filth of the Americans who spread corruption in it."

The al Qaeda statement also urged the United States to treat the bodies of Osama bin Laden and those killed with him in the raid with care, and to return their bodies. Ooops. Hold on, I'll get a net.

"We warn the Americans not to harm the corpse of the sheikh or expose it to any indecent treatment or to harm any members of his family, living or dead, and to deliver the corpses to their families," it said. So, the sailors shouldn't have wrapped it in bacon? Was that wrong?

"Any harm done will open the doors of evil upon you doubly, and you will not have anyone but yourselves to blame." Yes, that statement is true, and goes triple for you.

Bucket of Blood

Blood taken from Pope John Paul II before he died is to go on display at his beatification on Sunday.

One of four small vials of blood removed from John Paul during his final days will be used, the Vatican said in a statement…

More than 50 heads of state and several hundred thousand pilgrims are expected to travel to Rome for the beatification, a step before full sainthood…

The vial will be placed in a “precious reliquary” prepared specially for the occasion by the Office of Papal Liturgical Celebrations.

After being extracted, the blood was mixed with an anti-coagulant in the container to ensure it remained liquid.

Catholics are kind of scary.

You know what's even more creepy? They're going to make the man who presided over the largest secret pedophilia ring into a Saint.

Sweet Cheesus

Stop the presses:

The face of Jesus has been spotted – in a three cheese pizza. Restaurant staff at the Posh Pizza shop in Brisbane, Australia, noticed the manifestation after taking the pizza from the oven. Maree Phelan says: “Some people are already calling it the Cheesus Pizza…

After attracting 26 bids on eBay, the pizza sold for a tasty £98.

I guess the three cheeses represent the Holy Trinity of Cheese?

Thanks Dvorak

God Hates Figs: Matthew 21:19

God Hates Figs: Matthew 21:19

21:19 And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away.

21:20 And when the disciples saw it, they marveled, saying, How soon is the fig tree withered away!

So when you see a Westboro member - politely change their sign to read Fig. Funny how a spellchecker would have fixed that small issue?

Dante's Search Engine

Organizers of a conference in Rome say the rise of Satanism has been dangerously underestimated in recent years

The web has made it easier than ever before to access information on Devil-worshiping and the occult, experts said.

Exorcism is the subject of a six-day conference being held this week at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome, which is under the Vatican's authority.

"The internet makes it much easier than in the past to find information about Satanism," said Carlo Climati, a member of the university who specializes in the dangers posed to young people by Satanism.

"In just a few minutes you can contact Satanist groups and research occultism. The conference is not about how to become an exorcist. It's to share information about exorcism, Satanism and sects. It's to give help to families and priests. There is a particular risk for young people who are in difficulties or who are emotionally fragile," said Mr Climati.

[Read More]

Yeah, it's Satan that's the biggest threat to the church and the dangers posed to young people. No, wait, I isn't it pedophile priests who were abusing their power?

Atheists in Foxholes

Army Group Says There ARE Atheists in Foxholes

In fact, atheists, agnostics, humanists and other assorted skeptics from the Army's Fort Bragg have formed an organization in a pioneering effort to win recognition and ensure fair treatment for nonbelievers in the overwhelmingly Christian U.S. military.

"We exist, we're here, we're normal," said Sgt. Justin Griffith, chief organizer of Military Atheists and Secular Humanists, or MASH. "We're also in foxholes. That's a big one, right there."

For now, the group meets regularly in homes and bars outside of Fort Bragg, one of the biggest military bases in the country. But it is going through the long bureaucratic process to win official recognition from the Army as a distinct "faith" group.

That would enable it to meet on base, advertise its gatherings and, members say, serve more effectively as a haven for like-minded soldiers.

"People look at you differently if you say you're an atheist in the Army," said Lt. Samantha Nicoll, a West Point graduate who in January attended her first meeting of MASH. "That's extremely taboo. I get a lot of questions if I let it slip in conversation."

Read More...

The term, by the way, comes from Reverend William T. Cummings, who served at Bataan. He declared, "There are no atheists in foxholes." In addition, Lieutenant Colonel Warren J. Clear, who also served at Bataan, used the expression in an interview printed in U.S. newspapers.

Chaplain F.W. Lawson of the 302d Machine Gun Battalion, who was wounded twice in wartime, declared "I doubt if there is such a thing as an atheist. At least there isn't in a front line trench." Henry More wrote: "In agony or danger, no nature is atheist. The mind that knows not what to fly to, flies to God."

One Religious Nut Incites Other Nuts to Start Killing

Protests Over Koran Burning Spread In Afghanistan, With 9 Dead In Kandahar

KABUL — Violent protests over the burning of a Koran spread to the heart of Taliban country Saturday, as clashes between demonstrators and Afghan police in Kandahar left at least nine people dead and more than 90 injured, according to Afghan officials.

The clashes marked the second consecutive day that mobs thronged the streets of major Afghan cities to protest the burning of Islam’s holy book last month by a Florida pastor. On Friday, a mob attacked a U.N. compound in the normally placid northern city of Mazar-e Sharif and killed seven U.N. employees: four Nepalese guards and three European staff members.

The Koran burning also prompted more peaceful demonstrations in the capital, Kabul, in the western city of Herat and in the northern province of Takhar.

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The book burning was just an excuse to start the Spring Cycle of violence by the Taliban and their supporters. Expect more killings and protests in the next few days.

I'd like to see the pastor from Florida, Terry Jones, personally apologize to everyone he's offended. I'll even buy his plane fare to Afghanistan. I'd also like to say that when General Petraeus said that this is exactly what would happen... and then it did.

'Hold Islam accountable': U.S. pastor defiant after his Koran-burning publicity stunt led to two UN staff being beheaded and five others murdered -- Daily Mail

Afghan Rioting Spreads Over Quran Burning -- Wall Street Journal

Protests Over Koran Burning Reach Kandahar -- New York Times

Afghan Violence Spreads Over Terry Jones' Quran Burning - ABC News

Charles Schultz on theism

At'a boy, Snoopy.

Religion May Become Extinct

...in nine nations, says study.

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.

Science! Math!

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team's mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

Note, I don't see the USA on that list...

"In a large number of modern secular democracies, there's been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%."

There's more about being a member of a group, speaking dead languages - read more

Wow. Just imagine.