"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
- Mario Savio, Free Speech protest leader
Parental upbringing: sometimes a pretension of absolute, unchallenged power, open to arbitrariness and abuse
In Canada a 12-old girl took her dad to court after her father grounded her and refused to allow her to go on a schol trip. She won.
Many articles criticise this ruling. "The courts shouldn't be raising our kids" screams the National Post. "Father knows best, not court", states solemnly Globeandmail.
A part from the case in point, some questions must be raised:
Does a father always know best? Should a father always be granted the status of that who by definition always knows best, unquestioningly?
Let us ask a simple question: why should the weaker party, a child, be deprived of the simple right to appeal to a higher authority, a right that we recognise for any adult?
Why should the weaker party, the child, by definitinion be subjected to the father's absolute and unchallenged authority, without any chance of appeal to a higher authority?
The simple fact of procreating does not necessarily automatically turn an adult into a balanced, fair, sensitive human being immune from insanity.
The concept of "unruled" absolute authority by parents can lead, and not unfrequently leads, to psychological (and physical) abuse, to a situation in which children have no one to appeal to and can only be forced to accept the - sometimes - pathological and/or unstable and/or violent and/or narcissistic and/or immature and/or sadistic personality of their parents for long, long years.
Years of pain that no adult would feel fair to endure personally: if a wife or a husband are in a painful relationship, they can simply ask for divorce and even ask for mental cruelty compensations!
But not child.
Why do we accept that an adult have guarantees and can legally appeal to a higher authority while people get scandalised if a public authority rules over a family after a minor has sued his father?
Are we saying that law should not "meddle with fathers' business" (a pater familias impunity concept), that a child has no rights and must be left alone, and that the only escape for him or her, in the above-mentioned cases, is mental disease or self-destruction?
If so, we would be subtly accepting a Sparta-like idea of education by which a child must endure anything and everything (some parents do not stop at simple, occasional, grounding in their upbringing style) just because he or she is a child. The strong and the lucky will survive.
"Now children: sooner or later, old or young, we will all end up in here"
I came across an article on an Italian newspaper which reported a quite shocking piece of news.
A Catholic priest, Don Gianluca Santini, at the Sunday Mass for children decided to let the little ones reflect over death. Thus he arranged a coffin in the middle of the church and started to preach the kids. On the Sunday in which the Gospel spoke about Lazarus he decided to talk about "life" in this peculiar way. He lifted the cover of the coffin and said "there is life in here". And then "Sooner or later, old or young, we will all end up in here". This indubitably premeditated act of psychological terror perpetrated on children is only partially surprising: the Catholic religion is rife with images of death, guilt and fear inoculated into the innocent mind of the young since birth. Funereal, obviously twisted, black-gowned individuals are always ready to cast guilt on joy and life while spreading sin alerts, diffidence towards the body and the material world, and images of death everywhere, constantly pursuing their diseased power trips. I will never understand how parents can allow children to be exposed to all this tribalistic, sick content.
Damn Harry Potter is such a dangerous character right?
He is "the wrong kind of hero" right?
While the Catholic ideas of martyrdom, self-flogging, mortification, diffidence towards life and pleasure, sacrifices, blood, victimisation, original sin, devils and angels, exorcism, idolatry of saints and divinities, adoration of relics (objects, bones, mummies, blood), all these and others tribalistic concepts are supposed to be good and educational, right? (not to mention Catholic mysoginy associated to frequent pederasty).
How can the epitomy of dissociation and disease, that is the Catholic Church, claim to sound credible when it comes to saying what is dangerous or not for children?
A high-ranking Vatican priest has been suspended after a TV programme, using a hidden camera, recorded him making advances to a young man and asserting that gay sex was not sinful.
Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, 60, is the director of one of the three departments that make up the Congregation for the Clergy, the Vatican “ministry” for the clergy.
Yesterday he claimed that he was pretending to be gay in an attempt to unmask a Satanic plot to seduce Catholic priests to homosexuality and thus discredit the Church. “I only pretended I was gay to study how priests are seduced,” said Mgr Stenico, a frequent guest on television programmes discussing religious issues. “There are people who go after them . . . I really believe there is a diabolical plan by groups of Satanists.”
Mgr Stenico admits inviting a man whom he met on a gay website to his office, across the piazza from Saint Peter’s Basilica, after expressing an attraction to sado-masochism. What he did not know was that the young man was working for a TV investigation on homosexuality among Catholic priests and went to the tryst with a concealed video camera. The footage was shown this month by La 7, the national TV channel.
It shows the young man entering the lift to Mgr Stenico’s office and then speaking with the priest in his office. The faces and voices are heavily disguised to respect privacy laws but with the help of subtitles the topics being discussed are obvious.
Mgr Stenico asks the man, “Do you like me?” and tells him that he is very good-looking. When the young man expresses fears that having sex would be “a sin in the eyes of the Church”, the priest replies: “I do not feel it would be sinful.” Drawn on the subject of sado-masochistic sex, the monsignor says that these are “inner choices, the psychological basis of a personality”. The young man continues to raise moral and religious objections to actually having sex, until the priest becomes irritated, says that he has no time left and takes him back to the lift. On parting, the Monsignor tells him that he is “really tasty” and that he can telephone him or send him a message.
· Official secretly filmed propositioning young man · Bureaucrat claims he was investigating satanist plot
John Hooper in Rome
Monday October 15, 2007 The Guardian
The Vatican was last night at the centre of an unusually public sex scandal after acknowledging it had suspended a senior official who was filmed apparently propositioning a young man in his office.
Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, a capo ufficio, or section head, at the Vatican ministry responsible for the clergy, insisted yesterday he was not gay. He said he had posed as a homosexual to research a plot by satanists.
The affair is the latest of several indications that the traditional immunity enjoyed by the Catholic church in Italy over sex scandals is gradually giving way.
The Roman Catholic Church is likely the largest gay organization in the world.
That would not be a problem, if they were candid about it.
As it is, the Roman Catholic Clergy enforce unnatural, unscientific prescriptions about sexuality (on premarital sex, masturbation, homosexuality, contraception), contributing to the spreading of sexual - emotional immaturity - of which they themselves have likely been victims - while exactly behaving the opposite and even admitting it, though never in public.
A massive example of duplicity and slimy hypocrisy.
As I have stated in the past, serious reflections should be made on whether it is really a good idea to expose children to the sick vision of the world presented by often sexually-emotionally immature and unbalanced black-gowned men in drag.
Not to mention the fact that to the eyes of many priests a Sunday School is likely a paradise of possible catamites.
Catholic bishop of Florence involved in a gay BDSM party scandal and accused to have covered up abuses and swindles.
An investigation is being carried out in Florence Italy involving the Catholic clergy.
Over twenty women have accused a priest, Lelio Cantini, of having abused them sexually, while numerous parishioners have stated that they were subject to undue influence from the priest and forced to give him money and real estate properties.
It turns out that even the bishop of Florence, Claudio Maniago, might have been aware of the activities of Lelio Cantini, and might have factually covered him up.
Moreover, some witnesses have declared that the bishop too had taken part in some "festini a luci rosse" (XXX parties) with homosexual people.
The police deems that the witnesses are reliable, and have started investigating, finding already some evidence compatible with the statements of the witnesses.
Read on this the article on the Corriere della Sera (in Italian), here.
The newspaper "La Stampa" reports (article here) that the Public Prosecutor, Paolo Canessa, collected on 21 April 2007 the testimony of a self-declared homosexual, P.C., who recognised on the newspaper the Catholic bishop Claudio Maniago as the person who, ten years before, had taken part in a BDSM* party.
I refuse to use the label "atheist" for myself, a label that feels like an anachronistic sign of undue acknowledgement for credences - residues of barbaric, tribal times - that are more and more overcome by ridicule and absurdity.
The idea of God is not even worth a privative prefix.
Unfortunately the recordings are made with a computer-generated voice, however they are faily clear, and for the purpose of going over the texts while, for instance, walking in the park or sitting in the train, they are pretty good.
The text relevant to the files can also be read in the relevant pages.
For the lovers of fairy tales, you can listen to St. Thomas Aquinas' "Catena Aurea". However, as I suspect it might be a bit boring, just go to Epicurus' "Principal Doctrines".
Other audiobooks, but human-read, can be found at ThoughtAudio.com.
Apparently, if you're a Moroccan in Italy you don't have the same rights as ethnic Italians.
The Italian supreme court recently rejected an appeal by the prosecution in the case of a Moroccan girl who had been beaten by her family, her parents and her brother. The appeal was rejected on the grounds that it was for her own good and for her non-conformity with their culture, she had gone out with a friend and her life style was not accepted by her parents. [...]
Una ragazza magrebina, Fatima R., picchiata e segregata da madre, padre e fratello di fede islamica «per la sua frequentazione di un amico e, più in generale, per il suo stile di vita, non conforme alla loro cultura».
Ma i genitori sono stati assolti.
Una sentenza che evidenza delle sacche di medioevo anche in Italia.
E i diritti della ragazza? Ne ha di diritti la ragazza secondo i giudici?
D'ora in poi è possibile pestare i propri figli e legarli "per il loro bene"?
Non dovrebbe la legge tutelare il più debole? Sconcertante e vergognoso.
E un anno fa veniva uccisa Hina Salem, a Brescia (ITALIA), dal padre pachistano, colpevole secondo lui di seguire uno stile di vita non appropriato.
Tehran, 3 August (AKI) - A young Iranian who was searching for his lost puppy in a Tehran neighborhood has been arrested and ordered to stand trial for 'moral corruption'.
According to the Tehran daily, Etemad Melli, the young man was caught while putting up a notice in which he was promising a reward to anyone who found his dog.
"Looking for a lost dog indicates the spread of a corrupt culture, which indirectly popularises keeping a dog at home, something that is completely foreign to the culture and Islamic tradition," said Tehran police spokesman, Mehdi Ahmadi.
"In arresting this young man, we wanted to send a very clear message to our young people, you need to steer away from the corrupt culture imported from the west."
*
All religions are absurd
by Joe London
The above shows religious arbitrariness and intolerance at work.
It would be wrong to shake one's head and shrug off the above as "the usual manifestation of the nonsensical Islam vs. Christian faith"
All religions have their huge share of nonsense, in fact they are base on a lack of sense and evidence, elevated to dogma and absolute. Just read the Old Testament, so dear to many evangelicals, and you will find entire pages of prohibitions.
Some examples from Old Testament (Leviticus):
"And the hare, because it chews the cud but does not part the hoof, is unclean to you. And the swine, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed but does not chew the cud, is unclean to you."
"Everything in the waters that has not fins and scales is an abomination to you."
"You shall not eat any flesh with the blood in it."
"You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard."
"For every one who curses his father or his mother shall be put to death; he has cursed his father or his mother, his blood is upon him."
"You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh on account of the dead or tattoo any marks upon you: I am the LORD."
"If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them."
"And he shall take a wife in her virginity. A widow, or one divorced, or a woman who has been defiled, or a harlot, these he shall not marry; but he shall take to wife a virgin of his own people, that he may not profane his children among his people"
"He who blasphemes the name of the LORD shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him; the sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death." Strictly speaking, it would seem that a pious evangelical who thinks the Bible is the "word of the Lord" should not eat shellfish, pork, should not cut his hair and beard, should not get tattooed, and should enforce the authority of parents with violence. But I am sure the large majority do not follow all this.
Fortunately for our Western societies, many prescriptions of the Bible, result of times of utter ignorance and tribalism, are generally counterbalanced by science, cultural progress and ridicule. Other prescriptions, equally arbitrary, still remain popular amongst pious people, for instance regarding sex and homosexuality. The religious always fails to convincingly explain the logic behind the cherry-picking attitude in accepting certain rules while ignoring others. Many religious people are either not even aware of this or are content to sheepishly acquiesce to the contingent historically-connotated expression of a religious tradition.
But the point I wanted to raise is really that no religion is innocent of intolerance and violence, and unwarranted, absurd prohibitions, whether Islam, Christianity or Judaism or others.
Is prohibiting entering a house "wherein there is a dog" ["I heard Allah's Apostle saying; 'Angels (of Mercy) do not enter a house wherein there is a dog or a picture of a living creature (a human being or an animal)'"] so different than prohibiting haircuts or considering women impure during menstruation, or considering masturbation a disorder?
All religions perpetuate a mindset by which people are expected to respect and follow ancient human-made rules embellished with a cheap and ridiculous gilded "godly" coat, even when they patently clash against what we now know about the human being and reality.
Religions claim to be privileged receivers and custodians of a divine revelation and to have thereafter the right to divide the whole humanity between sinners and non-sinners, saved and non saved, infidels and pious, moral and immoral, in short the right to apply their own arbitrary perspective (and consequent much appreciated power) on others, without obligation to provide evidence for their pretensions (thus spreading a dangerous attitude to superstition). Much like any obsessed witchdoctor in some remote forest, their representatives might even theatrically raise their fingers to the sky, threating eternal damnation if their rules are not followed, and they expect a special treatment and respect for their fabrications as if their theologies were substancially different from the shams and frauds of any glass reader.
Many conflicts of the past and of the present, their most horrible manifestations of brutality, violence, intolerance and racism, often spring out of the core of arbitrariness and blind, dogged pretensions of religions.
You may have read about an ad that was censored in New York, because it was showing some innocent derrieres (read the article of Sewell Chan here, from which the photos and captions below were taken).
New ad: This billboard is on display at 51st Street and Broadway. (Photo: Kitra Cahana/The New York Times)
Old ad: This is the version that the Times Square Church had gone to court to block from going up.
What do I think?
Impurity is the eye of the beholder.
The non-arbitrary exhibition of a part of the body (and this ad is not arbitrary, given the product promoted) should not raise any objection.
But it seems that some puritan / fundamentalist / sex-obsessesed American people have problems with simple parts of the body (while REAL bad taste, or worse, floods TV, cinema and... politics).
The Victorian compulsive rejection of the body is pathological and surely sends wrong messages to people, telling them they should feel shame for something natural. THAT is wrong.
I think the majority of people in America, or elsewhere for that matter, do not have problems with pure derrieres, and would rather not be ruled by 'pious' fundamentalists, who see evil everywhere (perhaps that's the second meaning of "axe of evil" in the States?).
Recently Iran authorities seem to have a problem with women riding bycicles. Some Iranian engineers are now working on the design of bycicles covered in the lower part.
Then you read of innocent ads in America being censored or of Attorney General John Ashcroft ordering to cover two partially nude statues in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice. (On this, read here).
Perhaps the USA is not that much different than Iran? Perhaps some serious thinking should be done on the pathogenic effect of religion, any religion, on people and societies, whether Western or Eastern.
The corpses of the sisters of Stefania Tupputi are taken away by the Italian Police (picture from La Repubblica)
Repubblica online reports on Stefania Tupputi, a 70 year old Italian woman, who has lived for at least one and a half years with the corpses of her dead sisters.
The article says that Police found over 500 pages of a diary (from 1984 to 2007) giving an account of a life of "lucid madness with visions and religious fanaticism" (the women had been followers of a priest who was preaching about the "immediate resurrection of bodies"), but also of the illness and agony of the woman's sisters.
From the diary, 8 July 2006: "I see Mary [My note: The Mary here is Jesus' mother] ever more clearly. She is marvellous. For some days I have been seeing Jesus only. The Madonna is in front of Father Pio who implores her. I am sitting on the bed and Mary, the Madonna, has sat too. Her hair was moving forward, mine was moving backward. In the meanwhile that white rain was falling. I saw God and then Jesus a bit higher than the face of his father".
*
Who knows, had this woman been born about 2000 years ago, now we would call her a Saint!
Religious stories are full of account regarding visions, miracles and so forth. Nowadays, if someone claims to be Napoleon he is considered delusional, but let him utter the word God and he might still have a chance to get away with it. Which gives a hint of how religions originated thousands of years ago, in times of ignorance and superstition
The propensity to, or shall we say the inherited germ of, superstition and delusion are so inculcated that a folkloristic figure like Joseph Smith, treasure-hunter and glass looker (as well as convicted in a court after "an alleged admission to being a 'disorderly person' and an 'impostor'"), managed to start his Mormon religion (a name that sounds a hidden joke) in the 19th century, after stating he had met God and received some "golden plates" from an angel!
But others religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism and so forth), cannot surely smirk with satisfaction for a presumed superiority. They are not less irrational and ridiculous, possibly worse for the capacity they have shown to drive crowds of people to the most bloodthirsty, barbarian and cruel behaviours.
Saints or madmen: a matter of chance, luck and quality/structure of the delusion. But the substance is the same. Surely religious education, embued with "supernatural stories" can be a factor in the transmission of delusional thinking.
"The God of the Christians is a father who is a great deal more concerned about his apples than he is about his children."
-- Diderot, French writer, philosopher (1713-1784), Addition aux Pensees philosophiques, c. 1762
The picture below is of a very rare atmospheric phenomenon that took place in Langkawi, Malaysia, during the Langkawi International Dialogue Summit.
It is a circular rainbow or, technically, parhelion. It is cause by the sun refracting on tiny particles of water suspended in the air (another picture here).
Now, if a phenomenon like the parhelion, or circular rainbow, has the power to strike us with awe, even if we know how it originates, can you imagine the intense feelings of awe and terror people who lived in times of utmost ignorance (when religions started) might have felt in presence of similar phenomena?
As their notions would not succour them in properly understanding what was going on, and assuming that were some utterly powerful, and easily irated, gods that were "sending a sign", they would organise sacrifices, rituals and the like, to ingratiate the (supposed) powerful being.
Of course, the individuals equipped with strong verbal and theatre skills and imagination (shamans and the like, later "priests"), would construct the internally logical, circular nonsense (later called "theology"), to soothe the anxiety of ignorance and the perception of vulnerability of simple-minded people (later, the "flock of faithful"). And thus getting a pretty good position or power with their solemnly uttered fabrications.
Innaiah Narisetti is the chair of the Center for Inquiry/India. This article is excerpted from a paper that he will present at the Center for Inquiry’s congress in China this coming October.
[...]
THE CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD
The human rights of children and the standards to which all governments must aspire in realizing these rights for all children are most concisely and fully articulated in one international human-rights treaty: the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Convention is the most universally accepted human-rights instrument in history. It has been ratified by every country in the world except two: the United States and Somalia. It places children at center stage in the quest for the universal application of human rights. By ratifying this instrument, national governments have committed themselves to protecting and ensuring children’s rights and have agreed to hold themselves accountable for this commitment before the international community.
While it is unfortunate that a powerful country such as the United States has yet to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UN’s efforts are salutary and place much-needed emphasis on improving the lives of children globally.
THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION
However, despite all the effort and rhetoric about protecting children and their rights, there is a severe shortcoming in the global campaign to protect children: the influence of religion and its continuing contribution to many forms of child abuse all around the world.
Such abuse begins with the involuntary involvement of children in religious practices from the time they are born. All religions, through ritual, preaching, and religious texts, seek to bring children into day-to-day religious practice. This gives holy books and scriptures, as well as those who teach them, an early grip on the developing minds of young people, leaving an indelible impression on them. In many cases, most notably in the Catholic Church, this forced and prolonged exposure of children to religious institutions has also been a key factor in the physical, mental, and sexual abuse of children by religious leaders.
This early grip is so strong that very few people, once grown, ever get an opportunity to change their minds, despite being exposed to science and rational thinking, or even other religious systems. Religious beliefs thrive by imposing themselves upon impressionable minds and gaining their blind adherence to certain dogmatic practices. In some ways, this lays the groundwork for sustained psychological abuse of young children by allowing adults the use of religion as a pretext for various other forms of abuse such as forcing them to fight in wars in the name of religion and ethnicity. During 2004, about 300,000 children served as soldiers in national armies, worldwide.
When it comes to the forced inculcation of religion and the resulting abuses of children in the name of religion, the UN, all of its affiliated organizations, and almost all national governments remain steadfastly silent.
The exhibition titled "Vade retro: arte e omosessualità" [Vade retro: art and homosexuality] which was supposed to open in Milan was definitely stopped, after many polemics, and attempts to keep it open and simply remove the most controversial works.
However it might still take place sometime in some other city, as Milan culture councillor and art critic Vittorio Sgarbi announced.
Amongst the most controversial art pieces "Miss Kitty" by Paolo Schmidlin, with the face of Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI (see below). "A masterpiece", stated Vittorio Sgarbi.
"Miss Kitty", the sculpture by Paolo Schmidlin, likely one of the reasons for the controversies related to the exhibition [picture found on La Repubblica website, here].
Another piece from the exhibition [picture found on La Repubblica website, here].
And finally another piece that raised many controversies, "Ecce Trans" by ConiglioViola.
This piece draws inspiration and reinterprets a shot taken of a known politician while he was talking to a transexual [picture found here].
Irrespectively of whether one might like a work of art or not, censorship is wrong.
Personally I think that the "Miss Kitty" and "Ecce Trans" are thought-provoking and interesting.
Both the challenge the viewer to reconcile the idea of "religious" with that of "humanity".
"Ecce Trans", as somebody has suggested, might even be seen as the pictorial representation of the evangelical idea to love the outcasts of society, to see God in them too. Or not?
'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi... You know, so what?'
Interviews with US veterans show for the first time the pattern of brutality in Iraq
By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 12 July 2007
It is an axiom of American political life that the actions of the US military are beyond criticism. Democrats and Republicans praise the men and women in uniform at every turn. Apart from the odd bad apple at Abu Ghraib, the US military in Iraq is deemed to be doing a heroic job under trying circumstances.
That perception will take a severe knock today with the publication in The Nation magazine of a series of in-depth interviews with 50 combat veterans of the Iraq war from across the US. In the interviews, veterans have described acts of violence in which US forces have abused or killed Iraqi men, women and children with impunity.
The report steers clear of widely reported atrocities, such as the massacre in Haditha in 2005, but instead unearths a pattern of human rights abuses. "It's not individual atrocity," Specialist Garett Reppenhagen, a sniper from the 263rd Armour Battalion, said. "It's the fact that the entire war is an atrocity."
A number of the troops have returned home bearing mental and physical scars from fighting a war in an environment in which the insurgents are supported by the population. Many of those interviewed have come to oppose the US military presence in Iraq, joining the groundswell of public opinion across the US that views the war as futile.
This view is echoed in Washington, where increasing numbers of Democrats and Republicans are openly calling for an early withdrawal from Iraq. And the Iraq quagmire has pushed President George Bush's poll ratings to an all-time low.
Best selling children's author censored in the USA over half a millimeter teenie weenie
Read the story below.
An innocent illustration for a children's book is deemed unacceptable in the USA.
But to show scenes of war and distruction, to go to church and see paintings of naked men tortured and flogged and crucified, to even hear gory and morbid details of torments inflicted on "saints", to be exposed for hours to the vulgarity and superficiality of TV shows, quizzes, ads and so forth is Ok in the USA....
Thousand of years of Judeo-Christian obsession with sex and sin drive to levels of absurdity, fertile ground for ignorance and dissociation.
That's the same country where books like James Joyce's Ulysses or Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn have been banned in the past (and are sometime still challenged).
That's the same country where many pious parents would gladly see their children read the Bible instead of a science book, to learn how the world began.
One of Germany's best-selling children's authors is embroiled in an extraordinary transatlantic row about nudity after a US publisher refused to accept one of her books because it contained naive sketches of an art gallery with works depicting naked bodies.
Rotraut Susanne Berner's illustrated "Wimmel" books about the everyday lives of adults and children have won international acclaim and are best-sellers in 13 countries from Japan to the Faroe Islands.
But the 59-year-old author said her American publisher had refused to accept her latest book for US distribution because it contained elements deemed potentially offensive, including drawings of people naked or smoking. Berner said her US publisher, Boyds Mills Press, had objected in particular to one of her illustrations which showed adults and children in an art gallery where the portrait of a naked woman was on show together with a seven millimetre high sculpture of a naked man exhibiting a barely discernible penis.
She said Boyds Mills Press had informed her that she could either agree to have the offending images removed or the book would be withdrawn. "This was a joke," the author said yesterday. "The man's penis is about half a millimetre in length and the naked woman is clearly part of a work of art and not a real person," she added.
The founding fathers of the USA on religion. Clarity then, befuddlement now.
Thomas Jefferson
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear."
Thomas Jefferson
"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man."
Thomas Jefferson, to Jeremiah Moor, 1800
"The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticism of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence."
Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, July 5, 1814, Lester Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (1959) p. 433
"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus."
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp July 30, 1816
"On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind."
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Archibald Carey, 1816
"To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise ... without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence."
Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, August 15, 1820
Thomas Paine
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my church."
Thomas Paine
"It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
"Priests and conjurors are of the same trade."
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistant that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel." Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
James Madison
"Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
James Madison
"Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects."
James Madison, letter to William Bradford, Jr., Jauary 1774
"What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not."
James Madison
Why should the eyes and the heart of children be exposed (and thus be violated) by the turpitude and twisted esthetics of suffering of Christianity?
Why should children be indoctrinated since birth, with a vision of guilt, "original sin", self-denial, flogging and self-flogging, blood, torture, crucifictions?
Why should they be forced to watch the theatrical shows of gloomy black-gowned individuals, with their grimaces of phony and self-indulgent piety, their falsettos, their muliebrile and vain display of vestments and gold, their tribalistic and literally cannibalistic rituals? (the Catholics call their form of cannibalism "transubstantiation").
Why should they be induced to be diffident towards their body and corporeal joys and see sin in them?
Why should they forcedly become familiar with a vision by which, always, free inquiry is constrained in the limits of unquestionable dogmas - dispensed of any evidence whatsoever - established by unquestionable, if arbitrary, authorities. Why this training to be mentally passive, docile and servile?
Why should they, children, be exposed to funereal, guilt-making, sex starved, black-gowned individuals (Catholic priests) who are the farthest one can imagine from sound, balanced, wholesome and mature models for children?
(And why should they risk to be exposed to even simple glances of priests, imbued with a longing for a fullness of life they do not have, expressing a sickening languishing, manipulative, and a peculiar mix of weakness, vanity, vileness and duplicity?)
* * *
Instead, let children be exposed to the most different forms of art, read the greatest books of the world, listen to the myriads of sounds and music from all over the world.... French, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese, African, Japanese etc. etc. .... The world is vast.....
Let them travel (with you at first) as much as possible, see new places, realise how each culture has its own bulk of different traditions and religions and how, predictably, each claimed "perfect" belief always turns out to be the same as that of the country where one was born, or that of the parents.
Let them realise how what is inherited is a mix of truth and falsities, and how important it is to question and inquire, in order to discern between the two.
Let their mind freely exercise itself, so that they will not stagnate in vile mental passivity, ignorance, prejudice and superstition.
Let them understand that a truth is not made by authority, but by reasonability and evidence.
Let them build their mind and body, freely, with no constraints. Let them express themselves.
Be a model by being, in the first place, wholesome, true to yourself and to others, courageous, freely questioning, independent from past visions, curious about reality, and searching answers that do not humiliate your reason, and thus yourself.
If you do so, the "spirit" of your children will grow so much more than it would if exposed to priests, pastors and religions with their fabrications and dogmas, and pernicious vicinity.
They will be free, sound, mature, proud. Able to appreciate the world and its joys.
And you, parent, will have done the best that you could have ever done for them.
A question for President Bush on immigration rose up like a ghost from the grave this afternoon in Ohio.
Only the questioner was a 13-year old blonde-headed girl, Jessica Hackerd, from Brecksville, Ohio, who immediately broke into tears after making her inquiry.
"Mr. President, I know immigration has been a big problem in the U.S. And what is your next step with the immigration bill?" Jessica asked Mr. Bush, during a question and answer period after a speech Mr. Bush gave to a Cleveland business group.
Mr. Bush's sarcastic reply -- a wry "yeah, thanks" -- drew laughter from the crowd of 400. But the attention caused young Jessica, who characterized herself in an interview afterward as very shy, to immediately tear up.
"No, it's a great question. No, I appreciate that," Mr. Bush said, as he saw Jessica's reaction.
Jessica, in the interview, said that she was crying because she was so nervous.
But when the president's sarcastic answer was mentioned, she said, "I heard that too." [...]
Had the elections been imminent, and he electable, Bush would have grabbed the opportunity to put on a compassionate face next to the girl, for a nice staged photography to impress the voters.
But, thanks to the American Constitution, twice is enough (though half term would have been enough, really, or even days) ...
But give Bush a break! No actor can be expected to be at his best the whole time, especially if the script is loose.
Besides, he has the right to freely express his REAL careless and CALLOUS nature sometime, does he not?
And consider how hard it must be to try to sound pious and concerned for the well-being of everybody and not the usual rich mates!
Also, why should he waste his "beautiful mind", as his mother would put it, to reply seriously to a young citizen?
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (choose the new paperback edition) God Is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens
These should become text books in school, to perhaps attempt to amend that particular form of child abuse that commonly goes by the name of "religious upbringing".
In his latest book, “God Is Not Great,” Christopher Hitchens makes the case against religion and for “free inquiry and open-mindedness.” Hitchens, of course, is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School, and author of many books. He spoke recently with Truthdig’s Jon Wiener.
Jon Wiener: You show in your book how many horrible things men have done because of religion. In Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade and Baghdad, men kill other men, and say God told them to do it. But why blame God for the bad things that men do?
Christopher Hitchens: I don’t blame God. I blame religion. I don’t believe there is such a thing as God. Religion makes people do wicked things they wouldn’t ordinarily do. It doesn’t make them behave better—it makes them behave worse. You couldn’t get people to hack away at the genitals of their newborn children if they didn’t think there was a religious obligation to do so. The licenses for genocide, slavery, racism, are all right there in the holy text.
Wiener: Yes, the Old Testament is full of these horrors. But it also contains the Ten Commandments, prohibiting killing, stealing, adultery, and lying—isn’t this a good thing?
Hitchens: No. it’s not. Because these are prefaced by a series of injunctions to fear a permanent, unalterable dictatorship. The first three commandments say “just realize who’s boss.” Let’s assume the story of Moses is true, even though archaeologists have utterly discredited it. Do our Jewish ancestors have to put up with the insult from us at this late stage that, until they got to Sinai, they thought murder and theft and perjury were OK? Of course not. There would have been no such people if they thought that. There has never been a society or civilization that did warrant those things. And you don’t need divine urging to see that they’re wrong yourself.
Church split feared as Pope backs return of 'anti-Semitic' Latin Mass
By Ian Herbert
Published: 30 June 2007
A plan by the Pope to authorise the widespread return of the controversial Latin Mass, despite concerns that parts of it are anti-Semitic, has provoked a backlash among senior clergy in Britain and threatens to divide the Catholic Church worldwide. The 16th-century Tridentine Mass - which includes references to "perfidious" Jews - was abandoned in 1969 and replaced with liturgy in local languages, to make worship more accessible to the bulk of churchgoers. But the Pope announced on Thursday that a long-awaited document liberalising the use of the Mass, which some clergy fear will also limit the Church's dialogue with Jews and Muslims, will be released next week. [...]
It appears that Mr. Joseph Alois Ratzinger, also known as Benedict XVI, has a quite peculiar idea of interreligious dialogue.
Some of his remarks:
On other faiths in general: other faiths are "lesser searches" for the Truth ("Dominus Jesus", 2000)
On Buddhism (1997, interview with French magazine L'Express): It's an "autoerotic spirituality"
Not to mention other remarks, infelicitous given Ratzinger position of leader of the Catholic Church, on other faiths.
Now, it seems that during masses in Latin, the so-called Tridentine Latin Mass, anxiously supported by Ratzinger and by many liturgy-obsessed clerics (who do not care if their archaic show will be absolutely obscure to most people), the pious participants will hear expressions like "perfidious", referred to Jews, that are not particularly pleasant.
But given the arrogant presumption that Catholicism and other religions have of possessing the unique, unquestionable truth, how to be surprised of such expressions?
The Roman Catholic Church, an institution of contemporary pharisees, keeps missing opportunities to grow out of its self-indulgent hypocrisy and arrogance and keeps spreading tribal (and inconsistent) views, unfortunately blind to the consequences: conflicts, intolerance, violence, mental passivity.
From inRich.com, a comment of Michael Paul Williams on the absurd no-contact rule of Kilmer Middle School, Virginia (see previous post):
[...]
This policy is not only draconian, it's counterproductive.
Dr. Arnold L. Stolberg, a professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, describes it this way: "All life is shades of gray. And by having absolute rules, you keep people from making wise decisions. They can't make any decisions at all."
Under the Kilmer policy, "the dilemma is we don't teach children to make wise decisions around physical contact and learn what's appropriate and what's not. It really keeps all parties from learning how to make wise decisions. It's overkill."
But for some educators, bans on touching and cheering are perfectly authoritarian solutions. Perhaps we should replace those DRUG-FREE ZONE signs outside the schoolyard with posted warnings that overt displays of emotion could result in fines or jail time.
Given the carnage from Columbine to Virginia Tech, we can't blame educators for being skittish. But order is no safeguard when inexplicably bad things happen. And when fear and overreaction rule -- inside and outside the schoolhouse -- poor policy is a result.
So graduates, as you march out into the world, do not forget those you leave behind.
Regain control of the boundaries of your personal space. Don't let administrative fiat rob you and your loved ones of the joy of accomplishment. And reward the trust of school officials by behaving responsibly.
Reclaim your right to walk across the stage, grip someone's hand and revel in your accomplishment, as your loved ones give a full-throated cheer.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 18, 2007; Page B01
Fairfax County middle school student Hal Beaulieu hopped up from his lunch table one day a few months ago, sat next to his girlfriend and slipped his arm around her shoulder. That landed him a trip to the school office.
Among his crimes: hugging.
All touching -- not only fighting or inappropriate touching -- is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: "NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!"
A school in Virginia has set an unheard-of no-contact rule for students.
Any contact, hugging and even shaking hands is now forbidden.
This is simply wrong education. No wait... it is nazism, power abuse, disrespect of individual rights of expression.
Even supposing, by hypothesis, that a few people were disturbing others with their expansive behaviour and touches or with childish games, that does not justify a drastic, and frankly unhuman, measure like that set by the middle school in Virginia.
What's next? Forbidding to speak too because perhaps a few people utter prophanities?
Will they do the same in the "adult world"? Will they forbid driving because some people get a speed limit ticket? Ha ha.
Where the heck were those dull teachers educated? Is that what they think education is about?
