Posts Tagged ‘Church’
Oh, the complexity and stress of being a modern crook!
A metal thief was caught after leaving a can of Polish lager covered with his DNA on the roof of a church he was raiding.
Saulius Ciuzas, 39, stripped £10,000 worth of lead from the 12th century church but left a near full can of Lech beer on the roof of the church.
He made off with 13 strips of lead from St Peter and St Paul Church in Algarkirk, Boston, Lincs., but church warden Peter Wilson found the can the morning after the theft on April 24 this year, Lincoln Crown Court heard on Friday.
Phil Howes, prosecuting, said: “Next to where the lead had been removed was a Lech beer can. It was upright and still had liquid in it. The can was linked to Ciuzas because his DNA was found on it.”
Lithuanian migrant Ciuzas lived 40 miles away in Lincoln but was tracked down and arrested…
He was jailed for 12 months after he was found guilty of the lead theft.
Tidying up after stealing includes a lot more than fingerprints on the chimney nowadays.
Mississippi will vote on the personhood of fertilized eggs
On November 8, Mississippi voters will not only decide who should lead the state, but also indicate whether they agree with the candidates about the status of embryos. The Initiative 26 ballot measure proposes to amend the state’s constitution to redefine ‘person’ as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the equivalent thereof”. If approved, the amendment would effectively bestow human rights on fertilized human eggs, making abortion illegal in the state in most, if not all, circumstances.
“The unborn child in the womb is scientifically proven to be a human being, and when it comes down to it we are a human-rights organization,” says Jennifer Mason, communications director for Personhood USA…Ms. Mason, like most of her peers, is deluded, a hypocrite, a liar.
By defining personhood so broadly, the measure would also have an impact beyond abortion—for example, it could rule out research using human embryonic stem cells and put doctors who offer in vitro fertilization (IVF) in a dubious legal position, because not all embryos created during fertility treatment survive the procedure.
“This is a dangerous and extreme government intrusion into women’s health, women’s rights and families’ health,” says Stan Flint, a consultant to Mississippians for Healthy Families, based in Jackson, which opposes the amendment.
Similar propositions have been put to voters in the United States twice before—during statewide campaigns in Colorado, where the personhood movement first emerged as a strategic challenge to abortion laws. But in both 2008 and 2010, personhood initiatives were roundly defeated, respectively winning only 27% and 29% of votes cast…Mississippi could be very different…
The Mississippi vote itself will have little direct impact on human embryonic stem-cell research, because the state is not a major player in the field. The potential threat to reproductive technology is more immediate…
As the campaign for Initiative 26 heads into its final days…defeat of the Mississippi initiative would be a turnaround, but an increasingly vocal opposition movement has thrown predictions of an easy victory for the initiative into question. “Starting from a dead stop at two months out, we have put together a major campaign,” says Stan Flint. “The momentum has swung strongly towards the opposition to this amendment.”
Just as fundraising for organizations like Planned Parenthood were an absolute necessity in the days spent fighting for a woman’s right to choose an abortion, for everyone’s access to birth control – here we are, again, faced with religious nutballs trying to enforce their 14th Century ideology on the Land of Liberty.
That they choose to couch their intellectual backwardness in terminology that includes the word “science” sprinkled here and there is lip service to rare notice of what century we really live in. In truth, many of our politicians are as backwards as the people who elect them to “lead”. I expect as little from them as I do from the huddled clusters of fanatics who say Mississippi is God’s Country.
Thanks, Ursarodina
A lawsuit filed in Georgia to require allow guns in church
A legal battle is brewing in Georgia over whether licensed gun owners should be allowed to carry firearms to churches, synagogues, mosques and other places of worship.
The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, heard arguments last week on a lawsuit brought by a central Georgia church and the gun rights group GeorgiaCarry.org claiming that a state law banning firearms in places of worship violates their constitutionally protected religious freedoms.
State lawyers said it was a small price to pay to allow others to pray without fearing for their safety. The panel of judges roundly criticized the suit after hearing arguments but did not immediately make a ruling…
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of the Baptist Tabernacle of Thomaston, where the Rev. Jonathan Wilkins said he wanted to have a gun for protection while working in the church office. The judges also questioned how banning firearms in a place of worship violates religious freedoms…
“I think that by continuing to arm ourselves, we’re perpetuating this cycle of violence that only ends up hurting the whole society,” said Bradley Schmeling, pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Atlanta. “And faith communities in particular should have the right to say no weapons in this place.”
I laugh over the crap ideology that prompts reactionary nutballs to prate about their opponents having a “hidden agenda”.
Seems to me it’s rightwing ideologues who say they’re only defending the 2nd Amendment – who end up trying to drag firearms into churches and bars. A parallel to the liars who say they’re defending life though they never seem to show up for anti-war demonstrations – who end up trying to restrict any number of rights including that of choosing to use birth control.
Hypocrites all.
Sermon in the Dutch bible belt: “Make the most of life on earth, because it will probably be the only one you get”
The Rev Klaas Hendrikse can offer his congregation little hope of life after death, and he’s not the sort of man to sugar the pill.
An imposing figure in black robes and white clerical collar, Mr Hendrikse presides over the Sunday service at the Exodus Church in Gorinchem, central Holland.
It is part of the mainstream Protestant Church in the Netherlands (PKN), and the service is conventional enough, with hymns, readings from the Bible, and the Lord’s Prayer. But the message from Mr Hendrikse’s sermon seems bleak – “Make the most of life on earth, because it will probably be the only one you get”.
“Personally I have no talent for believing in life after death,” Mr Hendrikse says. “No, for me our life, our task, is before death.”
Nor does Klaas Hendrikse believe that God exists at all as a supernatural thing…
Mr Hendrikse describes the Bible’s account of Jesus’s life as a mythological story about a man who may never have existed, even if it is a valuable source of wisdom about how to lead a good life.
His book Believing in a Non-Existent God led to calls from more traditionalist Christians for him to be removed. However, a special church meeting decided his views were too widely shared among church thinkers for him to be singled out.
A study by the Free University of Amsterdam found that one-in-six clergy in the PKN and six other smaller denominations was either agnostic or atheist.
The Rev Kirsten Slattenaar, Exodus Church’s regular priest, also rejects the idea – widely considered central to Christianity – that Jesus was divine as well as human.
“I think ‘Son of God’ is a kind of title,” she says. “I don’t think he was a god or a half god. I think he was a man, but he was a special man because he was very good in living from out of love, from out of the spirit of God he found inside himself…”
Professor Hijme Stoeffels of the Free University in Amsterdam says it is in such concepts as love that people base their diffuse ideas of religion.
RTFA. Long, detailed, interesting to anyone who cares about an ethical, growing society.
Of course, being about open-minded Christians, I imagine the response in our own bible belt will be the calling down of fire and brimstone upon the heads of these Christians who dare to differ with the past.
Pastafarian religious headgear strains Austrian driving license
An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as “religious headgear”.
Niko Alm first applied for the licence three years ago after reading that headgear was allowed in official pictures only for confessional reasons. Mr Alm said the sieve was a requirement of his religion, pastafarianism…
A self-confessed atheist, Mr Alm says he belongs to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a light-hearted faith whose members call themselves pastafarians.
The group’s website states that “the only dogma allowed in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the rejection of dogma”…
Mr Alm’s pastafarian-style application for a driving licence was a response to the Austrian recognition of confessional headgear in official photographs.
The licence took three years to come through and, according to Mr Alm, he was asked to submit to a medical interview to check on his mental fitness to drive but – straining credulity – his efforts have finally paid off.
It is the police who issue driving licences in Austria, and they have duly issued a laminated card showing Mr Alm in his unorthodox item of religious headgear.
The next step, Mr Alm told the Austrian news agency APA, is to apply to the Austrian authorities for pastafarianism to become an officially recognised faith.
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is, of course, as legitimate as any other organized religion on this silly little planet. Though official recognition by the state and a license to steal still awaits in many nations.
Is the Church of Scientology being investigated by the FBI?
Anonymous defectors
The Church of Scientology…the controversial and secretive group – whose celebrity backers include the actors Tom Cruise and John Travolta – has effectively been accused of enslaving members.
FBI agents are said to have interviewed defectors across the US about the techniques used by church leaders to control members’ lives and track down those who attempt to leave.
The leader of the church, David Miscavige – who was best man at Cruise’s wedding in 2006 – is accused of repeated violence towards staff and members, which he has denied…
The claims were made in an extensive investigation into the church by Lawrence Wright, a highly-respected and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, in the New Yorker magazine…
Wright reports that Valerie Venegas and Tricia Whitehill, agents from the FBI’s office in Los Angeles devoted to fighting human trafficking, have been investigating the group.
RTFA – these allegations have been around for a spell. I don’t know if the Scientology crowd is more or less repressive than any other American weirdo religion. The target demographic ain’t anyone who lives in my neighborhood.
The chuckle for me is that I go back far enough into early post-war years of sic-fi to recall how absurd some of the discussions, attempts at building early ideology by L.Ron Hubbard really were.
Philosophical idealism was taken to absurd ends when he tried to prove the drawing of a radio could be made to work as well as the real deal!
Dumb GPS tale of the day
Two British pensioners landed in hospital in southern Germany after their car’s global positioning system directed them to drive into a church.
While driving their Renault in the evening on a back road near the Austrian border, the navigation system instructed the couple to turn right where there was no road.
“They were confused and didn’t notice that the navigation system was faulty,” a police spokeswoman said.
The 76-year-old driver then plowed into the side of the village church, writing off the car, knocking a picture off the wall and damaging the building’s foundations. Total damages were some 25,000 euros, police in the nearby town of Immenstadt said.
The couple, who were traveling to France, spent the evening in hospital recuperating from minor injuries.
That’s got to leave a mark.
Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley’s “you’re not my brother…” remark
You’ll have to click on the pic, then click on the link.
What he said: “”If you’re a Christian and if you’re saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister.
“Now I will have to say that, if we don’t have the same daddy, we’re not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.”
As a southerner with a number of decades behind me, I have sat through many a speech and sermon where this tactic is employed. The listener is left to feel that, no matter how nice a person he may be, he is very much an outsider until he follows a few simple steps, which, of course, the speaker will be happy to provide him. The best part of all is that it is “free”. Of course, if, after the instruction, the Lord lays it upon your heart to cough up some of your money, that would be all right. We won’t stop you.
How sad that we have come so far and yet are still debating who is whose brother.
If you believe in brotherhood, you have a choice. You can accept the narrow world view reflected in the Governor’s words above, or the wider view. But whatever you do, please keep your money to buy your groceries, pay your bills, or help a brother or sister in need.
Woman in miniskirts “should not be surprised if they get raped”
Hanging out with too many guys in long black dresses
A top cleric in the Russian Orthodox Church is under fire for saying that women who wear miniskirts and get drunk should not be surprised if they get raped.
Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the head of the Orthodox Church’s department for relations between the church and society, complained that Russian women dressed like strippers and suggested a nationwide dress code should be introduced to ensure both sexes dress more conservatively.
“If she (a woman) is wearing a miniskirt, it is provocative,” he said. “If she is drunk at the same time then she is even more provocative, and if she herself is actively seeking contact with people and is then surprised when that contact ends in rape she is wrong…”
Human rights activist Ludmila Alexeyeva said: “It’s all nonsense. Let people dress how they like. Next they’ll be telling women not to wear lipstick…”
Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the cleric who likened women to strippers, appeared to be in no mood to apologise however. He said he was glad he had started a public debate, denied he was justifying rape, and said a nationwide dress code was needed.
He also criticised men for wearing shorts, trainers and T-shirts.
The dude has serious problems with recognizing the outline or form of the human body. Methinks he’s transferring his own anxieties and hangups to everyone else.
Christians wish they had John Paul II’s heart, but must settle for his blood. Huh?? Wha??
A vial containing blood drawn from Pope John Paul II shortly before he died will be installed as a relic in a Polish church…
Piotr Sionko, the spokesman for the John Paul II Center, said the vial will be encased in crystal and built into the altar of a church in the southern city of Krakow that is opening in May…
The blood was drawn for medical tests at Rome’s Gemelli Polyclinic shortly before John Paul’s death on April 2, 2005…
After John Paul’s death, some Polish officials said they hoped John Paul’s heart would be removed from his body and returned to his homeland for burial. However, church officials dismissed any possibility of dismembering the body, saying the age had passed for that practice.
The last part comes almost like a punchline. It’s interesting to watch the church “evolve”,
isn’t it?
