Sunday, November 26, 2006
Next february the Roman Catholic Church might officially change its policy on condoms, whose use might be considered legitimate if the purpose is that of protecting one's spouse.
If so, all of the sudden, the flock of Catholic sheep who privilege loyalty and passive obedience over reasonability and objective data will be authorised to act reasonably without anathemas. And priests - passive notaries of the Church's presumption of truth - who until yesterday have clutched at straws to justify the prohibition of condoms will be authorised to say that, yes, condoms are ok.
Too bad that this despicable delay is likely responsible for the death of thousands, if not millions, people.
Considering how long it takes for the Roman Catholic Church to recognise some mistakes (only in 1758 was the prohibition against heliocentrism removed from the "List of prohibited books") one can draw a sure conclusion: if you are a Catholic, in case of doubt on right or wrong always rely on what you think is right. Chances are that in a few centuries the Church too will recognise that your position was right!
And in any case, it is better to act in full conscience and conviction, even if you may later regret your actions, than be a passive and unconvinced drone of "proper behaviour" under the commands of an external entity. A personal mistake is better than a mistake done by blindly following other people's instructions. There is nothing noble, virtuous, or human even, in mere obedience.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
From Spiegel Online:
My Half-Year of Hell With Christian Fundamentalists
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Dowd: Voters sick of 'macho politics by marshmallow men'
"This will be known as the year macho politics failed – mainly because it was macho politics by marshmallow men," Dowd writes. "Voters were sick of phony swaggering, blustering and bellicosity, absent competency and accountability. They were ready to trade in the deadbeat Daddy party for the sheltering Mommy party."
[read more]
An excerpt of a Report of the United Nations on violence against children published on 29 August 2006:
- WHO [World Health Organisation] has estimated, through the use of limited country-level data, that almost 53,000 children died worldwide in 2002 as a result of homicide.
- Studies from many countries in all regions of the world suggest that up to 80 to 98 per cent of children suffer physical punishment in their homes, with a third or more experiencing severe physical punishment resulting from the use of implements.
- Reporting on a wide range of developing countries, the Global School-based Health Survey recently found that between 20 and 65 per cent of school-aged children reported having been verbally or physically bullied in the past 30 days. Bullying is also frequent in industrialized countries.
- WHO estimates that 150 million girls and 73 million boys under 18 experienced forced sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual violence during 2002.
- According to a WHO estimate, between 100 and 140 million girls and women in the world have undergone some form of female genital mutilation/cutting. Estimates from UNICEF published in 2005 suggest that in sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt and the Sudan, 3 million girls and women are subjected to genital mutilation/cutting every year.
- Recent ILO estimates indicate that, in 2004, 218 million children were involved in child labour, of whom 126 million were in hazardous work. Estimates from 2000 suggest that 5.7 million were in forced or bonded labour, 1.8 million in prostitution and pornography, and 1.2 million were victims of trafficking. However, compared with estimates published in 2002, the incidence of child labour has diminished by 11 per cent and 25 per cent fewer children were found working in hazardous occupations.
But the data of the Report of the UN on violence against children suggest that for many newborns reality turns out to be crudely different. And, in some cases, some children might experience tensions and violence even before being born, perceived through the body of their mothers.
This, I believe, is one of the most spread out and horrible tragedies, at any latitude. Any glimpse of awareness we may possibly develop on this issue can hardly match the actual impact and vast implications violence on children (physical and/or sexual and/or psychological) has in our world, for even our own instinct of survival contributes, partly or totally, to a repression in our own subconscious mind of the violence we may have experienced when children (and, in various degrees, most people have). A repression for the sake of survival necessarily associated, on the one hand, to the emergence of reactive neurotic or psychotic symptoms and perpetuated destructiveness and, on the other hand, to a maintained admiration and honouring of our parents no matter what (in line with the authority-enforcing unconditional commandment of the Thou shalt honour thy father and thy mother). Thus the vicious cycle of violence continues: the abused child, when parent himself, forgotten his own past of abuses received, will however make sure to make his own child pay for them.
And so will, often, in their own way, the teacher, the priest and many other representatives of the adult world of "normal" violence. Each past victim often becomes an aggressor.
How many parents use their children to give vent to their own aggressiveness and tensions with ferocious outbursts of rage and slaps? Or use children to gratify their ego, as if they were an extension of their own deficient self? Or charge the relationship with their children with an excessive emotional investment (possessiveness, jealousy etc.) due to personal unsatisfactions?
How many teachers have their own back on children with humiliations or even corporal punishment? (corporal punishment is legal in public schools in 23 states of the USA)
How many priests or pastors, due to a childhood of physical and/or psychological abuses which they have repressed in their subconscious mind, and exposure to guilt-making religious fanaticism, develop a disturbed, dissociated personality and vex and/or abuse children they are supposed to "educate" besides imposing primitive, non-educational, psychologically unsound content?
And how many psychologists act as if children or adolescents must be "straightened up" or made dull and sedated with antidepressants, turning a blind eye on the responsibilities of parents and society?
The future of the world is played on the way children are brought up. The sooner the problem of violence on children is tackled, in all its forms, the better. Violence on helpless, vulnerable children must be brought to light from the untouched, secreted little kingdoms of violence, governed by absolute rulers who act in total impunity, which families often are. And a different, more sound, pedagogy, must be adopted in many other institutions, such as schools. While also the negative role of religion, often accomplice of abuses and of the perpetuation of unhealthy attitudes, must be firmly denounced.
Further readings:
Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child by Alice Miller
The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting by Alice Miller
For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence by Alice Miller
Narcissism by Alexander Lowen
Love, Sex, and Your Heart by Alexander Lowen
Fear Of Life by Alexander Lowen
The Insanity of Normality: Realism As Sickness : Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness by Arno Gruen
Betrayal of the Self: The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women by Arno Gruen
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
The Iraq disaster caused by an unnecessary war started on false pretenses, and protracted incompetence, chronism, corruption, hypocrisy, usurpation of executive powers, bullying, intolerance, confusion between religion and state, phoniness were not exactly a winning electoral ticket.
And Rumsfeld has resigned.
Monday, November 06, 2006
Haggard and the White House: Both Living in Denial
By Arianna Huffington
Let's face it: the Bush administration is sick. The fall of Ted Haggard is just the latest manifestation of the central disease of President Bush and his cohorts: the pathological refusal to accept reality, and the delusion that reality can be changed by rhetoric.
As Andrew Sullivan said last week on CNN, "this is not an election anymore, it's an intervention."
How many more examples of this disease do we need? The insurgency is in its "last throes," we've "turned the corner" in Iraq, gutting Social Security would "save" it, global warming doesn't exist, evolution is just "a theory," Rumsfeld and Cheney are "doing a fantastic job" etc., etc., etc.
Mark Foley and Ted Haggard are textbook examples of how the relentless denial of reality perverts judgment and rots the soul. Same with the Bushies.
Was Ted Haggard's absurd claim this week that, yes, he saw Mike Jones, but only for massages and that, yes, he bought meth from Jones but never used it, really that different from Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld continuing to claim we're winning in Iraq?
[read more]
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Army Times: "Time for Rumsfeld to go"
An editorial scheduled to appear on Monday in Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times, calls for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The papers are sold to American servicemen and women. They are published by the Military Times Media Group, which is a subsidiary of Gannett Co., Inc.
Here is the text of the editorial, an advance copy of which we received this afternoon. [READ MORE]Ted Haggard, leader of the Evangelical congregation "New Life Church", frequent participant in conference calls with the White House, and ferocious gay basher, admitted of having indulged in "sexual immorality", buying drugs (metamphetamines), and being a "deceiver and a liar".
The story of Mr. Haggard really appears emblematic of the duplicity often present in those who spread hate, intolerance, and vexing philippics against "immoral sex" (be it homosexuality or premarital sex), with a violence likely proportional to the destructive and abusive upbringing (often bolstered by puritan religious rules) they themselves might have been subject to and that they perpetuate.
No doubt the intrinsic psychological abuse of puritan and religious upbringing is a source of hypocrisy and of mental, emotional and sexual disturbances.
From now on, when Bush pushes his Born-again agenda on sex-related issues (abstinence, same-sex marriage etc.), we can have in mind a shining example of the results - in terms of hypocrisy - associated to his primitive and intolerant vision.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Vanity Fair Exclusive: Now They Tell Us
Neo Culpa
As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.
by David Rose VF.COM November 3, 2006
I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London's Grosvenor House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing victory in Iraq. "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," he said. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding." Perle seemed to exude the scent of liberation, as well as a whiff of gunpowder. It was February 2003, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the culmination of his long campaign on behalf of regime change in Iraq, was less than a month away.
Three years later, Perle and I meet again at his home outside Washington, D.C. It is October, the worst month for U.S. casualties in Iraq in almost two years, and Republicans are bracing for losses in the upcoming midterm elections. As he looks into my eyes, speaking slowly and with obvious deliberation, Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11. "The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state"—is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."
According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."
[read the whole article here]
Friday, November 03, 2006
British believe Bush is more dangerous than Kim Jong-il
· US allies think Washington threat to world peace
· Only Bin Laden feared more in United Kingdom
Julian Glover
Friday November 3, 2006
The Guardian
The ICM poll ranks the US president with some of his bitterest enemies as a cause of global anxiety.
Carried out as US voters prepare to go to the polls next week in an election dominated by the war, the research also shows that British voters see George Bush as a greater danger to world peace than either the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, or the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Both countries were once cited by the US president as part of an "axis of evil", but it is Mr Bush who now alarms voters in countries with traditionally strong links to the US. [read more]
The rich are getting much richer, much faster than everyone else
By Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy Newspapers
(MCT)
WASHINGTON - Over the past quarter-century, and especially in the last 10 years, America's very rich have grown much richer. No one else fared as well.
In 2004, the richest 1 percent of households - 719,910 of them, with an average annual income of $326,720 - had 19.8 percent of the entire nation's pretax income. That's up from 17.8 percent a year earlier, according to a study by University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. [read more]
It happened in Favara, a small town in Sicily in the province of Agrigento, not too far from the magnificent Valley of the Temples, where one can see ancient Greek Temples which were built during the 6th and 5th century B.C..
Now in Favara - the Corriere della Sera online reports today - the Town Hall commissioned a statue of artist Lorenzo Reina, titled "Goddess of Freedom".
The local Catholic church complained that the statue is indecent!
The statue might not be a masterpiece, but really the word indecent is not applicable.
Perhaps if the artist had portrayed San Sebastian (incidentally well-known gay icon) shot with arrows and bleeding, or some other semi-naked kinky male saint martirized for God-Almighty-who-loves-us-so, or some scene of Saints licking or kissing lepers' sores (see St. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, or St. Damien), it would have been ok to those priests! But, hey, WE HAVE A NAKED WOMAN here, not an impaled and/or scourged and/or crucified semi-naked man who is suffering like hell, therefore the statue is considered indecent!
What a regression from the intelligence, balance and taste of Ancient Greek times!
As a Web site reports, Agrigento, who when Sicily was part of ancient Greece, was named Akragas "was a flourishing cultural centre: it gave the world Empedocles, the pre-socratic philosopher, whose concept of matter as divided into four elements- Earth, Air, Fire and Water- was the foundation of science for many centuries to come. The city attracted poets like Simonides and Pyndar who described it as 'the most beautiful of mortal cities'. In Roman times, Agrigento was visited by Cicero in search of evidence of pro-consul Verres' abuse of power and later described by Virgil in the Eneid."
Photo of the Valley of the Temples by Salvatore Ippolito found here.
In old Greece's culture the "human body was central". But then came the corruption and psychotic obsessions of the Roman Catholic Church, rejecting the beauty of the human body.
And in year 2006 an innocent statue of a naked woman can raise controversies and be considered indecent.
Really, what a regression.
Deo libera nos ab detestabilibus sacerdotibus aegritudinibusque! (Latin for: God free us from horrible and sick priests ;) )
