According to the Onion, the Pope, looking panicked, proclaimed that it is actually OK to have abortion, reversing a long-standing ban on abortions.
I mean no disrespect to the hundreds of dead, thousands injured, and 100,000 now homeless in Italy. But Pope Whatsizname must have been asleep at the switch. Most prayers that I hear of contain a plea for personal well-being. Doesn’t this indicate an expectation that the God of The Church should provide some protection in this life? If anyone had influence with a kind and loving supernatural God, wouldn’t he use it to protect his almost completely coreligionist neighbors from such otherwise inevitable natural disasters?
Either God or the Church must be impotent in such matters. Pick one. Either one. Or am I out of line?
I am mostly incensed that the Big News of the day in the local paper and TV news shows was about how the local weather may affect spectators of a local sports team. Eventually they got around to mentioning that there was an earthquake somewhere. And now the weather, after these brief…
And Governor Jindal publicly mocked funding of seismic research just last month.
HIV/AIDS is possibly the worst health crisis to hit this planet. It’s also arguably the worst thing to happen to the African continent since white people were regularly kidnapping its inhabitants and trading them like farm machinery.
But the one hopeful thing about the whole situation is this: while there’s no cure yet, AIDS is easily preventable. Ridiculously easily preventable. Avoiding the sharing of needles & using contraception are the two most effective ways to avoid the long, tortuous, wasting death we’ve all come to associate with this horrendous epidemic. And if you’re not an intravenous drug user (or you studiously avoid sticking sharp, blood-stained things in your body), there’s 50% of your prevention pretty much sorted already.
So … how the hell are you supposed to react when the gold-robed, paedophile-protecting dictator-for-life of the Catholic Church continues to threaten people with eternal torment for using contraception during sex (based on a very, very, um, interpretive interpretation the Bible) and instead tells people “just say no” to sex? In this story (BBC) Pope Oberstumbannfuhrer Herr Kaiser Ratzinger (I refuse to use his picked-out stagename, he’s not Axl Rose for crying out loud) once again proves to the world that not only is his outlook anachronistic, unrealistic & laughable, it’s also flat-out fatal. To millions upon millions of people.
I am a practicing Roman Catholic, and will vote for Barack Obama for President of the United States. Not only will I vote for Senator Obama, I will do so gladly and with a clear conscience. The reasons are many. This lengthy post enumerate many of those reasons, providing ample links in support.
I accept the [...]
I learned about this sculpture in Nature (June 26, 2008 Edition, available online only to subscribers). Scroll down after clicking the link. You won’t miss it.
The creator is Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. What does the sculpture mean? In the Nature article, Martin Kemp indicates that Cattelan leaves some clues:
The title, La [...]
I wouldn’t make this up. It was reported on MSNBC today.
Pope Benedict XVI has reasserted the universal primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, approving a document released Tuesday that says Orthodox churches were defective and that other Christian denominations were not true churches.
How does the Pope know this? Hey, he just knows. Just like he [...]
I don’t know why the Pope constantly gets such intense press coverage. I know he is the leader of a large church, but he most often speaks in platitudes, double-speak or with dark-ages insight. Here’s a good example–his recent muddled pronoucement on evolution.
According to the Associated Press, Pope Benedict XVI has concluded that the scientific [...]
