Eideard

When politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn arrived in France last week, cleared of a New York sex scandal, he returned home smiling despite facing a frosty reception. Maybe he should have gone to Mexico, instead.

Pay attention Anthony Weiner, Tiger Woods, Brett Favre and others caught up in public, sexual indiscretions.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday shows 57 percent of Mexicans would be either very likely or somewhat likely to tolerate the sexual indiscretions of stars and politicians.

They were followed by Belgians at 55 percent. In the United States, the tolerance factor was 48 percent. France, in fact, was way down the list at only 33 percent, while Japan was the least forgiving country at only 28 percent…

In recent months Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund and a presumed candidate for the French presidency, faced a possible trial in the United States for allegedly attempting to rape a hotel maid.

Last week, New York City prosecutors dropped charges, allowing him to return to France where he faced a mostly chilly public reception and unease among his political allies.

Former U.S. congressman Weiner, golfer Woods and football star Favre faced their own sex scandals in the last two years.

A slight majority of the respondents around the world, 51 percent, said women were just as likely as men to engage in sexual indiscretions but less apt to get caught in the act. Perhaps it’s no surprise, Mexicans agreed, at 51 percent.

I can only supply subjective feelings on the subject – though based on many years of travel and discussion, a worldliness that reflects my attitude about being a citizen of Earth rather than restricted by nationality.

In general human beings are masters of self-deception and hypocrisy. More so men than women. More so True Believers than secular folks who try to deal with material reality.

A Cypriot monk caught at a Greek airport with the skeletal remains of a nun in his baggage on the weekend told authorities he was taking the relics of a saint back to his monastery…

Revering the skeletal remains of saints is common in the Greek Orthodox tradition. A sect within the church may have venerated the nun even though she was not an official saint.

In many churches, venerated relics are put on display for the faithful to touch or kiss and a box for collecting donations from the faithful placed nearby.

“It appears to be the work of charlatans with a financial interest…”, [said] Cyprus’s Archbishop Chrysostomos…

Appears to be?

The monk was … suspended from his monastic duties for three months for going away without leave….

Uh, o.k.

Poland is still an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation, still conservative and still religious, especially when compared with its European neighbors. But supporters and critics of the Roman Catholic Church all acknowledge that the society is changing. They agree that church representatives in Poland have lost authority and credibility, and that much of the population is moving toward a more secular view of life, one with a greater separation between church and state, and a rejection of church mandates on individual morality.

“We are considered the European museum of Catholicism, but let me tell you we are no longer,” said Szymon Holownia, program director for Religia TV, a relatively new station that aims to convince Poles that faith can and should be relevant in modern life with programs like a cooking show led by a nun. “The relationship between faith and state is changing; it is changing dramatically in Poland,” Mr. Holownia said. “It is really huge.”

“Twenty years of freedom and religion is evaporating,” he said. “This is the crisis of Christianity in Poland.”

Church supporters said the trend was evident in the numbers: 95 percent of Poles identify themselves as Catholic, but only 41 percent attend Sunday Mass regularly. In the big cities of Warsaw and Krakow, only about 20 percent attend Mass regularly on Sundays, according to the Institute of Statistics of the Church. Supporters of the church also said that the numbers dropped far below the 41 percent when it came to accepting moral mandates about issues like divorce and in vitro fertilization, both of which the church opposes and a majority of people appear to support.

“It seems we are Catholics in a cultural way; we identify as Catholic, but do not attend church,” said Tomasz Terlikowski, editor of Fronda, a conservative Catholic magazine, who said he was upset with what he called the lack of effective church leadership against the secular tide…

Antichurch sentiment has run so hot that one of the most popular politicians in the country, Janusz Palikot, started a political party based largely on an anticlerical platform…

RTFA. Lots of rationales and excuses offered by clergy who obviously are panicked over their loss of stature within Polish politics, fear of a massive reduction in social and political power in daily life.

That’s what happens when your ideology is irrelevant. That is, in nations where education and learning aren’t limited [or self-limited] to exclusively parochial concerns. True throughout Europe. Becoming true through Asia and Latin America.

For almost 1,000 years, Lincoln Cathedral has been a sanctuary of peace and spiritual contemplation for the inhabitants of the historic county town.

But the tranquility of the medieval streets surrounding the cathedral is being shattered by binge drinking yobs, who shout obscenities and indulge in “vulgar” behaviour on Friday and Saturday nights, according to a senior churchman.

Canon Alan Nugent, the subdean of Lincoln Cathedral, said the “crude” lifestyle of loutish drinkers had replaced Christian values as the defining influence on modern Britain.

He said he was particularly troubled by the spectacle of inebriated young women who “demean themselves” in public…

“By contrast you can sit in an Italian city of an evening with no fear of drunken yobs.”

Canon Nugent dismissed the suggestion that the English have adopted vulgarity as an “ideology”.

“I suspect the reason is much simpler,” he said. “Christianity no longer has significant influence on the way people behave.

“The deliberate attempt to remove the Christian faith from the national life – or at least seriously to marginalise it – which I have witnessed time and again during the period of my ministry, has succeeded.

“In its place a style of society – very crude, very unattractive – has emerged, which demonstrates itself so often in vulgar behaviour.”

There are occasional moments when I think the conservative scribes of the 4th Estate as managed in the UK really are poking fun at the most out-of-date members of their clan. This article, after all, is one long, strung-out straight line begging for a smartass retort, sentence after sentence.

Life is more complex than that – and blaming someone else for your organizational irrelevance isn’t especially productive.

A South Korean professor who claimed he could make tap water into holy water will face fraud charges, police say.

The man, named as Prof Kim, claimed he could digitally capture the elements of holy water from Lourdes, France, that believers say has healing powers.

He had sold devices to more than 5,000 people, making almost 1.7bn won ($1.3m, £870,000).

Eight people, including Prof Kim’s wife and brother-in-law, will also be charged.

The famous shrine to the Virgin Mary at Lourdes offers water which some believe has healing powers.

Mr Kim had claimed his ceramic and paper filters, and plastic cards used in water purifiers, had captured those powers for onward transmission…

The police also said that the people who had bought the devices had complained when they did not work.

Write your own punchline (if you can come up with anything better than the final line).

Brit Hume turned evangelist on Fox New Sunday, in a segment with panelists predicting the future for Tiger Woods after Woods’ notable “transgressions” (now a 2009 top euphemism, along with “Appalachian Trail,” as a signifier for “mistress.”)

Hume forecasts Woods will recover as a golfer but

…Whether he can recover as a person depends on “his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, “Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world…”

Woods got similar advice from A. Larry Ross, minus the slap to Buddhism, in a column recently at Huffington Post. Ross, spokesman for Rev. Billy Graham and Rev. Rick Warren, is a veteran of evangelism talk. It was a column on grace and the God of “second chances.”

And Jews have advice, too. Rabbi Irwin Kula told the Jewish Journal that the Nike spokesman — and the rest of us — should learn from the patriarchs that you can’t “just do it” when “it” is wrong.

Will religious blowhards ever cease their papier maché punditry before the world of ordinary people. When Britt Hume starts opposing wars of aggrandizement and greed – I might give him a listen.

Another brain-dead Christian for love and brotherhood

A Tempe pastor who delivered an inflammatory sermon praying for the death of President Obama is now under scrutiny by the US Secret Service and the nation’s leading tracker of hate groups.

Pastor Steven L. Anderson delivered the sermon, “Why I Hate President Obama,” while the president was visiting Arizona in August.

“Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow,” he said in the sermon. “Let his children be continually vagabonds and beg.”

On Sunday, Anderson repeated his wish outside his church: “I hope it happens today, not when he gets older. I hope he (the president) dies of brain cancer today…”

Heidi Beirich, research director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, places Anderson’s comments against a larger backdrop of increasing militia activity in the U.S. and growing hostility toward the government and the president.

“We’re facing a revival of the militia movement, a revival of extreme anti-government beliefs and a lot of that has also turned very racial,” Beirich said…

Bill Straus, Arizona regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, adds that Anderson has the First Amendment on his side.

“Was it in any way over the line of protected speech? It wasn’t,” Straus said…

“We are aware of the comments and appropriate follow-up will be conducted,” said Darrin Blackford, spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, D.C.

As usual, all the nutballs crossover into each other’s specialty. One of the pastor’s loyal flock was part of the militia group that showed up at an Obama town hall – toting a rifle and a handgun. He will be supported by the NRA who say their focus is on our self-defense, guns for sport.

It ain’t traditional American conservatives or liberals. It ain’t progressives and radicals who believe in electoral politics. It’s direct action nutballs on the Left who haven’t the smarts or emotional stability for a long haul political campaign. It’s gun-crazy militia, John Birchers and Klan-types on the Right – so consumed with fear of folks even a little bit outside their gray conformist world they want to kill ‘em all.

Up until last summer, Jennifer Gray of Columbus, Ohio, considered herself “a weak Christian” whose baptism at age 11 in a Kentucky church came to mean less and less to her as she gradually lost faith in God.

Then the 32-year-old medical transcriptionist took a decisive step, one that previously hadn’t been available. She got “de-baptized.”

In a type of mock ceremony that’s now been performed in at least four states, a robed “priest” used a hairdryer marked “reason” in an apparent bid to blow away the waters of baptism once and for all. Several dozen participants then fed on a “de-sacrament” (crackers with peanut butter) and received certificates assuring they had “freely renounced a previous mistake, and accepted Reason over Superstition….”

Within the past year, “de-baptism” ceremonies have attracted as many as 250 participants at atheist conventions in Ohio, Texas, Florida and Georgia. More have taken place on college campuses in recent years, according to Hemant Mehta, chair of the board of directors for the Secular Student Alliance, a group that promotes atheism among high school and college students….

In Christian theology, baptism can’t be undone. If a Southern Baptist renounces his or her baptism, then that person is usually presumed to have never received an authentic baptism in the first place, according to Nathan Finn, assistant professor of Baptist studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.

Personally I like the Southern Baptist aesopian response best: Your first baptism was sour anyway. Har!