I believe that in order for mankind to move forward and become a sustainable, environmentally conscious, global community, we must ditch the bronze age myths that we are here on this planet because of a supernatural being, and instead work to build a society based upon the principle of doing what is best for all human beings, all animals and this wonderful planet we call home.
A senior rabbi from a party within Israel's coalition government has called for Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to "vanish from our world".
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of Shas, spoke out as Middle East talks are poised to begin in Washington.
The United States condemned the remarks as "deeply offensive".
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu distanced himself from the comments with a statement saying that his government wanted peace with the Palestinians.
The attack on Mr Abbas, delivered in the rabbi's weekly sermon, also prompted chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat to condemn the remarks as "an incitement to genocide".
So in short, the state asks for peace, the religulous ask for a plague.
WASHINGTON — An enormous and impassioned crowd rallied at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial this weekend, summoned by Glenn Beck, a conservative broadcaster who called for a religious rebirth in America at the site where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech exactly 47 years earlier.
“Something that is beyond man is happening,” Mr. Beck told the crowd, in what was part religious revival and part history lecture. “America today begins to turn back to God.”
The rally organized by Mr. Beck, a Fox News broadcaster who has been sharply critical of President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats, had been attacked as dishonoring the memory of Dr. King by being set on the anniversary of his speech. Despite Mr. Beck’s protestations, his event and a much smaller and mainly black counter-rally seemed to underscore the country’s racial and political fissures.
Critics have suggested that Mr. Beck was trying to energize conservatives for the midterm elections in November. Mainstream Republican leaders remain skittish about the group emerging on their right — and the influence it displayed in primary elections Tuesday — and had little to say about the Beck event.
But in an interview aired Sunday, Mr. Beck denied any political motivation — or political aspiration — and shrugged off conservatives’ suggestions that his ability to mobilize so large a crowd made him presidential material.
“There’s nothing we can do that will solve the problems that we have and keep the peace unless we solve it through God,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”
Sheryl WuDunn's book "Half the Sky" investigates the oppression of women globally. Her stories shock. Only when women in developing countries have equal access to education and economic opportunity will we be using all our human resources.
About Sheryl WuDunn Sheryl WuDunn and her husband, Nick Kristof, won a Pulitzer for their New York Times coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Their joint reporting work in China and other developing nations convinced them both that, just as slavery was the moral issue of the 19th century, sex trafficking, gender-based violence and other abuses make women's rights the moral issue of the 21st. In their book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, WuDunn and Kristof make the case for empowering women as a means of development. Women tend to spend more on education, nutrition and business, the economic engines of growth in a community. And if we can find ways to develop the untapped potential of the millions of women who are now left uneducated, denied basic rights, oppressed and threatened -- we'll turn on a firehose of economic power that could transform the developing world.
Forget skimmer ships, top kill, and any gibberish that came out of James Cameron's mouth: MIT researchers have invented a super-absorbent robot that can lap up oil faster than you can say Deepwater Horizon.
Crap, where were these guys a few months ago?
Seaswarm, as they call it, basically works like a maxi pad. A patented hydrophobic nanofabric devours as much as 20 times its own weight in oil without collecting water. To capture the oil, the nanofabric's draped over a conveyor belt that's then dispatched on the surface of the ocean like "a rolling carpet," to quote Assaf Biderman, associate director of MIT's Senseable City Lab. The robot's entirely autonomous; it swims along, powered by a pair of solar panels.
Senseable City Lab is unveiling the first prototype at the Venice Architecture Biennale on Saturday. The hope's to produce a whole fleet of Seaswarms that'll be able to attack oil spills like, yes, a swarm of bees.
The substance resembles powdered sugar and could revolutionise the way chemicals are used.
Each particle of dry water contains a water droplet surrounded by a sandy silica coating. In fact, 95 per cent of dry water is ''wet'' water.
Scientists believe dry water could be used to combat global warming by soaking up and trapping the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
Tests show that it is more than three times better at absorbing carbon dioxide than ordinary water.
Dry water may also prove useful for storing methane and expanding the energy source potential of the natural gas.
Dr Ben Carter, from the University of Liverpool, presented his research on dry water at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston.
He said: ''There's nothing else quite like it. Hopefully, we may see dry water making waves in the future.''
Agora, directed by Alejandro Amenabar, opened in Spain on October 9, 2009, becoming the highest grossing film for the year in that country, grossing over $32 million in the first three months post-release. Featuring Academy Award winning actress Rachel Weisz, The movie featured at the Cannes Film Festival, and won a Best Original Screenplay in Spain. With the ingredients and the feel of a big budget blockbuster, why has the film been limited to just a few indie outlet screenings within the U.S?
Significantly, Agora found success in these small urban cinemas, and according to Rentrak, which tracks movie ticket data in North America, recording the highest per-theatre-average of any film in the marketplace during the Memorial Holiday weekend this year. Yet no major U.S Distributor believes it to be a worthy punt for wider cinematic release. We must ourselves why? Either the movie is of poor substance, or it’s the substance that causes concern. Judging by the film’s success elsewhere, we can presume the latter.
Set in Alexandria, Egypt during the fourth century (391 A.D) Weisz plays the role of Hypatia, a female mathematician, philosopher and astronomer who investigates the flaws of the geocentric Ptolemaic system and the heliocentric model that challenges it. In lay terms, does the sun revolve around the earth, or the other way around? In the background, the gradual collapse of the Roman Empire, and the violent uprising of Christianity within pagan centers.
Central to the plot is Hypatia’s efforts to preserve the city’s library, a library that Christians seek to destroy because they believe science interferes with the worship of Jesus. Whilst much of the drama is a fictionalized, this narrative is historically correct. In fact, historians refer to the destruction of the Alexandrian library as the end of the first period of enlightenment and the commencement of the Dark Ages.
In the years leading to the period of the film’s setting, the Roman Empire was beginning to implode upon itself; the cracks in the wallpaper were evident to the intellectual elite and to the Roman Emperor Constantine. The empire stretched to the most northern parts of Europe, to the edge of Asia, and down into the African continent. With so many varying societies and cultures under his control, with a myriad of respective religions and gods, Constantine believed a one-god religion could bring stability and unity to all his nations. However, in the shopping aisle of one-god religions, there was only Judaism or Christianity. He chose the latter because the Romans believed the Jewish beliefs to be barbaric and outdated.
In signing the Edict of Milan in 322 A.D, Constantine gave legitimacy to Christianity, a religion whose followers totaled less than 40,000, representing less than 1% of the Jewish population at that time. Mass conversions began. Christianity, unlike paganism and Judaism, is a proselytizing faith, and Agora illustrates the ugly, brutal, and politically motivated origins of America’s favorite religion.
The film leaves you asking many questions i.e. how many centuries earlier would we have discovered the germ theory of disease, thus preventing the premature deaths of billions of people, had Christianity not been forced upon mankind in such a belligerent fashion, as it was in 391 A.D?
CJ Werleman
Author ’God Hates You. Hate Him Back’ (Making Sense of the Bible)
WASHINGTON — A US court on Monday ordered a temporary halt to federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, which President Barack Obama had authorized, saying it involved the destruction of human embryos.
US District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ruled in favor of a coalition of groups, including several Christian organizations, which had sought a temporary injunction on funding of the research ahead of a planned lawsuit.
"Plaintiffs have demonstrated a strong likelihood of success on the merits," Lamberth said.
The coalition argues that President Obama's March 2009 lifting of a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research violates legislation that prohibits government funding for research in which embryos are discarded or destroyed.
"ESC (embryonic stem cell) research is clearly research in which an embryo is destroyed," Lamberth's ruling said.
Researchers believe that stem cells, so-called because they are the foundation for all human cells, provide two promising avenues for scientists.
First, they can be used for research that cannot be performed inside the body. But scientists believe they can also coax the foundational cells into cardiac, pancreatic or brain cells to replace damaged or infected cells and allow tissue or organs to reconstitute themselves.
In reversing the ban put in place by his predecessor George W. Bush, Obama pointed to the potential breakthroughs the research could yield, and he rejected the "false choice" between sound science and moral values.
But the research is fiercely opposed by religious conservatives, who believe that life begins at conception, because it involves the disposal of embryos.
From Ggskelding's YouTube Channel: This is a group from a church at the end of a street. Apparently they have been grouping in front of a couple's house and reading their bible loudly for the past 7 years. They may have also driven another couple from the area as well by doing the same thing. Tonight most of our neighbours came out and were successful in getting them to leave. The people who go to that church don't even live in our area! Police came by shortly thereafter.
Plastic causes a trifecta of problems. We’re running out of places to dump our non-biodegradable plastic waste and it’s clogging up our oceans. Burning plastic releases tons of CO2 into the atmosphere contributing to global warming. And to make the stuff, it soaks up 7% of our annual petroleum use, an in demand, diminishing resource.
Akinori Ito, the CEO of Blest, a Japanese company, has somewhat of a panacea. If plastic is just oil, why don’t we simply turn it back into what it was, he pondered. So the guy made a machine to do it. His solution is safe, eco-friendly and efficient.
“If we burn the plastic, we generate toxins and a large amount of CO2. If we convert it into oil, we save CO2 and at the same time increase people’s awareness about the value of plastic garbage,” Ito told Our World 2.0.
Blest produces the machines in various sizes suitable for more industrial purposes or simple home use. There are already 60 in use across Japan at farms, fisheries, and small factories with some beginning to ship overseas for the environmentally conscious and curious abroad.
One kilogram of plastic waste produces almost a liter of oil while using about 1 kilowatt of electricity.
“To make a machine that anyone can use is my dream,” Ito says. “The home is the oil field of the future.”
The number of faith schools in Britain is rising. Around 7,000 publicly funded schools - one in three - now has a religious affiliation.
As the coalition government paves the way for more faith-based education by promoting 'free schools', the renowned atheist and evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins says enough is enough.
In this passionately argued film, Dawkins calls on us to reconsider the consequences of faith education, which, he argues, bamboozles parents and indoctrinates and divides children.
The film features robust exchanges with former Secretary of State for Education Charles Clarke, Head of the Church of England Education Service Reverend Janina Ainsworth, and the Chair of the Association of Muslim Schools, Dr Mohammed Mukadam.
It also features insights from child psychologists and key players in faith education as well as insights from both parents and pupils.
Dawkins also draws on his own personal history as a father, arguing that the government must stop funding new faith schools, and urges society to respect a child's right to freedom of belief.
"Marriage as the union between one man and one woman has been the universally-recognized understanding of marriage not only since America's founding but for millennia.”
—Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council, in response to the recent finding that gay people have a fundamental right to form families based upon legal marriage.
Having just co-authored a book where we survey the concept of marriage across many cultures, I’m calling B.S. on Mr. Perkins. He hasn’t got a clue what he’s talking about.
But Perkins isn’t alone in his vehement ignorance. A common refrain among those arguing against allowing same-sex marriage is that doing so would alter a long-standing trans-cultural definition of marriage. Rick Warren, the controversial evangelist Obama invited to speak at his inauguration, told Ann Curry in an NBC interview that, "For five thousand years, every single culture and every single religion has defined marriage as a man and a woman."
A study has measured the amount of plastic debris found in a region of the Atlantic Ocean over a 22-year period.
US researchers, writing in Science, suggest the volume of plastic appeared to have peaked in recent years.
One reason could be tighter marine pollution rules that prevent vessels dumping their waste at sea.
The team said monitoring the free-floating plastic also provided an insight into the behaviour of ocean surface currents.
They found plastic, most pieces measuring no more than a few millimetres, in more than 60% of 6,136 samples collected by dragging fine-meshed nets along the ocean's surface.
The researchers - from the US-based Sea Education Association (Sea), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Hawaii - described plastic as a "major contaminant".
"Their chemically engineered durability and slow rate of biodegradation allow these synthetic polymers to withstand the ocean environment for years to decades or longer."
The impacts caused by the debris include:
sea animals becoming entangled
seabirds and other marine creatures eating the plastic
the debris being used as a "life raft" by some species to reach areas outside their normal distribution range
"While high concentrations of floating plastic debris have been found in the Pacific Ocean, only limited data exist to quantify and explain the geographical range," they said.
"In the Atlantic Ocean, the subject has been all but ignored."
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Human pluripotent stem cells, which can become any other kind of body cell, hold great potential to treat a wide range of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injuries. However, scientists who work with such cells have had trouble growing large enough quantities to perform experiments — in particular, to be used in human studies. Furthermore, most materials now used to grow human stem cells include cells or proteins that come from mice embryos, which help stimulate stem-cell growth but would likely cause an immune reaction if injected into a human patient.
To overcome those issues, MIT chemical engineers, materials scientists and biologists have devised a synthetic surface that includes no foreign animal material and allows stem cells to stay alive and continue reproducing themselves for at least three months. It’s also the first synthetic material that allows single cells to form colonies of identical cells, which is necessary to identify cells with desired traits and has been difficult to achieve with existing materials.
The research team, led by Professors Robert Langer, Rudolf Jaenisch and Daniel G. Anderson, describes the new material in the Aug. 22 issue of Nature Materials. First authors of the paper are postdoctoral associates Ying Mei and Krishanu Saha.
Human stem cells can come from two sources — embryonic cells or body cells that have been reprogrammed to an immature state. That state, known as pluripotency, allows the cells to develop into any kind of specialized body cells.
George Carlin May 12 1937 - June 22 2008 Thank you George Carlin, your insight was of huge importance for the human race, you will be greatly missed by many. You are forever in our thoughts.
This remarkable film is posted on Pharyngula, where most of the commenters are understandably debating whether it can possibly be genuine. My first thought, too, was that it must be a hoax. Surely nobody could be quite so blatantly arrogant, saying more or less explicitly that 'Nobody should be allowed to vote unless they agree with me!' But this bulletin seems to provide corroborating evidence that Michael Voris is a bona fide Catholic activist, not a satirist lampooning Catholic idiocy and arrogance. -Richard Dawkins.
Preview of the first 13 minutes of the forthcoming documentary "Collision". The film follows renowned author and anti-theist Christopher Hitchens and Pastor Douglas Wilson as they debate the topic: "Is Christianity Good For The World?". A Darren Doane film.
And now congregation, put your hands together and give thanks, for I come bearing Good News. Britain is now the most irreligious country on earth. This island has shed superstition faster and more completely than anywhere else. Some 63 percent of us are non-believers, according to an ICM study, while 82 percent say religion is a cause of harmful division. Now, let us stand and sing our new national hymn: Jerusalem was dismantled here/ in England's green and pleasant land.
Now that only six percent of British people regularly attend a religious service, it's only natural that we should dismantle the massive amounts of tax money and state power that are automatically given to the religious to wield over the rest of us. It's a necessary process of building a secular state, where all citizens are free to make up their own minds. Yet the opposition to this sensible shift is becoming increasingly unhinged. The Church of England, bewildered by the British people choosing to leave their pews, has only one explanation: Christians are being "persecuted" and "bullied" by a movement motivated by "Christophobia." George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, says Christians are now "second class citizens" and it is only "a small step" to "a religious bar on any employment by Christians".
Really? Let's list some of the ways in which Christians, and other religious groups, are given special privileges every day. Start with the educational system. Every school in Britain is required by law to make its pupils engage every day in "an act of collective worship of a wholly or mainly Christian nature". Yes: Britain is still a nation with enforced prayer. The religious are then handed total control of 36 percent of our state-funded schools, in which to indoctrinate children into their faith alone.
These religious schools, paid for by you and me, are disfiguring Britain. I know one reason I grew up without the prejudices of some of my older relatives was because I went to school with kids from every conceivable ethnic and religious group, and I could see they were just like me. A five year old will make friends with anyone, and he'll be much less likely to believe smears against those friends for the rest of their lives. But in Britain today, that mixing is happening less and less. Increasingly, the children of Christians are sent to one side, Jews to another, Muslims to another still, and they never see each other except from the window of their parents' cars. After the race riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley in 2001, the official investigations found that faith schools were a major cause.
If you missed Rachel Maddow’s show last night, you’ll want to catch this clip:
As usual, Maddow and her crew put together a good summary of what currently ails religious and political conservatism in the USA. To the smart political conservatives out there – and I know there are many of you – I reiterate a plea I’ve made before: please purge the Republican party of the wing-nut wing. They’re dragging you down. Tea Partiers, Creationists and their ilk are giving conservatism, which once was a respectable set of social and political ideals, a bad reputation. Tea Partiers, Creationists, etc., aren’t going to listen to people like me. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll listen to fellow conservatives. If not, then hurry up and throw out your trash. The stench is leaking outside the conservative house and it’s nauseating the neighbors.
Some Catholic site is giving advice on how to field questions from Leftists about homosexuality (CLICK HERE). After all, those danged lefties keep bringing up issues of equality and civil rights when gay marriage comes up, and it's awfully hard to talk about restricting gay rights without sounding like a bigot or homophobe, so you've got to have a different set of talking points you can switch to whenever talk about equality and fairness and those other non-Catholic doctrines are brought up. So they've come up with five different tactics Catholic bigots can use to divert attention from their bigotry. They hope. Mainly, though, it diverts attention to the fact that they use really, really bad arguments. Here are the five, reworded from their misleading rhetoric to a blunter description of what they propose.
Obfuscate about rights. Redefine rights any old way you want to, endorse equal rights for everyone, but then claim marriage isn't a right because there are restrictions (can't marry your sister, there's an age of consent, you have to pay a fee to get a marriage license), so it's OK to add one more restriction. Never mind that by this reasoning the old miscegenation laws are perfectly valid, and don't really deny anyone a right.
Point out that heterosexuals have damaged marriage. How this helps the Catholic case against gay marriage is a mystery, but they're welcome to make the argument — they're saying that contraception and divorce and artificial fertilization are all also crimes against nature. What a winning strategy!
Lie about how awful homosexual parents are. Kids need both a mother and father, because mothers are nurturing and fathers are brave and disciplined. Yes, right, arguing from sexual stereotypes is OK if you're Catholic, and it also means you get to ignore the fact that a third of all households are headed by single mothers.
Slippery slope! Some guy wanted to marry his horse, there are horrible awful polyamorous relationships, and even if you allow gays to marry, they don't all rush to the altar. This is a pointless argument: it's basically saying that we should only permit traditional 1 man:1 woman marriages because if we allow other possibilities, not all marriages will be between 1 man:1 woman. We also allow marriage between couples of different races, and a Catholic can even marry a Protestant — this has not led to a massive rush to marriages between a man, an oyster, a pelican, and a watermelon.
Lie with statistics. This one is my favorite argument here. Gay marriage will hurt people! Did you know that 31% of lesbian report physical violence with their partner in the last year? (Don't mention the fact that 39% of women in a heterosexual relationship report domestic violence.) Gay men are more likely to be killed by a partner than a stranger! (Don't mention that heterosexual women are five times more likely to be killed by their partner than a stranger.)
Oh, and they do cite sources: most of them seem to be something called the Witherspoon Institute, which made a report…funded by the Templeton Foundation. Don't be surprised. Those rich jerks are pouring money into all kinds of dubious, religiously-motivated projects.
According to the late Harvard University biologist Ernst W. Mayr, the greatest evolutionary theorist since Charles Darwin, “species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively isolated from other such groups.”
Reproductive isolation is the key to understanding how new species form, and many types of barriers can divide a population and split it into two different groups: geographic (such as a mountain range, desert, ocean or river), morphological (a change in coloration, body type or reproductive organs), behavioral (a change in breeding season, mating calls or courtship actions), and others. After isolation, if members of the split populations encounter one another and cannot produce viable offspring that can themselves later successfully interbreed and produce viable offspring (hybrids such as mules are infertile), then these two populations constitute two different species.
Let’s say that a species migrates out of Africa into Europe around 400,000 years ago and becomes reproductively isolated from its ancestral population for the next 320,000 years. It evolves distinctive anatomical features and adaptations for the colder climes. Moreover, even after other descendants of the original ancestral population move into Europe around 80,000 years ago, the skeletons from both groups show no obvious signs of blended characteristics. Modern scientists classify the creatures as two different species.
Then, however, genetic analysis reveals that members of these two species interbred and produced viable offspring that populated Europe and spread eastward as far as China and Papua New Guinea. By Mayr’s definition, these two interbreeding populations are not two species after all, but two sibling subspecies of the original African species. A subspecies has a characteristic appearance and geographic range, Mayr explains, yet he adds this significant qualifier: “It is a unit of convenience for the taxonomist, but not a unit of evolution.”
Thus it is—revealing the identity of my example—that we must reclassify Homo neanderthalensis as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies of Homo sapiens. A comprehensive and technically sophisticated study published in the May 7 issue of Science, “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” by Max Planck Institute evolutionary anthropologists Richard E. Green, Svante Pääbo and 54 of their colleagues, demonstrates that “between 1 and 4% of the ge nomes of people in Eurasia are derived from Neandertals” and that “Neandertals are on average closer to individuals in Eurasia than to individuals in Africa.” In fact, the authors note, “a striking observation is that Neandertals are as closely related to a Chinese and Papuan individual as to a French individual.... Thus, the gene flow between Neandertals and modern humans that we detect most likely occurred before the divergence of Europeans, East Asians, and Papuans.” In other words, our anatomically hirsute cousins are actually our genetic brothers.
In a move that has stunned critics Pope Benedict XVI has rejected the resignations of two Dublin auxiliary bishops.
Bishop Raymond Field and Bishop Eamonn Walsh had both tendered their resignations in 2009 in the wake of the Murphy report into clerical child abuse.
Both men had come under intense pressure because they had served as bishops during the period investigated by the Murphy Commission into clerical child sex abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin.
The Murphy Commission in Ireland found that sexual abuse was 'endemic' in boys' institutions but that the church hierarchy protected the perpetrators and allowed them to take up new positions teaching other children after their original victims had been sworn to secrecy.
'Following the presentation of their resignations to Pope Benedict, it has been decided that Bishop Eamonn Walsh and Bishop Raymond Field will remain as auxiliary bishops,' Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said in a letter to priests of the Archdiocese reported in The Irish Catholic.
HONG KONG - Chinese zoos and safari parks treat their animals "barbarically," including abusing them to perform tricks and depriving them of proper food and shelter, an animal welfare group said.
Hong Kong-based Animals Asia Foundation said its investigation of 13 Chinese zoos and safari parks between September 2009 and August 2010 uncovered evidence of animals being beaten with sticks and metal hooks as well as tigers and lions with their teeth and claws removed, causing chronic pain.
The group's 28-page report documents "the barbaric treatment of animals and the poor living conditions they are forced to endure."
"A large number of captive animal establishments in China provide animal performances as a form of entertainment for visitors. The techniques used to force such animals to perform tricks are cruel and abusive," said the report released Monday.
"Showmen frequently engage in negative reinforcement, whipping and striking the animals repeatedly, forcing them to carry out tricks that go against their natural behaviour."
The group said its probe also uncovered evidence of animals housed in "small, barren, concrete enclosures often in darkened rooms at the back of the performance areas away from the visitors."
"The living conditions for performing animals fail to meet their basic welfare needs. Many of the animals have no visible access to water," it said.
The report features photographs of bears being forced to "box" each other and ride motorcycles along a highwire, tigers prodded into jumping through flaming hoops, and elephants "performing uncomfortable and humiliating tricks such as standing on their heads, and spinning on one leg."
All I ask is would they allow the same treatment to their beloved panda?
WARSAW, Ohio -- Strip-club owner Tommy George rolled up to the church in his grabber-orange Dodge Challenger, drinking a Mountain Dew at 9 in the morning and smoking a cigarette he had just rolled himself.
Pastor Bill Dunfee stepped out of a tan Nissan Murano, clutching a Bible in one hand and his sermon in the other, a touch of spray holding his perfectly coiffed 'do in place.
Inside the New Beginnings Ministries church, Dunfee's worshippers wore polyester and pearls.
Outside, George's strippers wore bikinis and belly rings.
Both men agree it is classic sinners vs. saints. But George says it is up to America to decide which is which and who is who.
Dunfee says God already has chosen.
"Tom George is a parasite, a man without judgment," Dunfee said. "The word of Jesus Christ says you cannot share territory with the devil."
The battle that has heretofore played out in the parking lot of George's strip club - the Foxhole, a run-down, garage-like building at a Coshocton County crossroads called Newcastle - has shifted 7 miles east to Church Street.
Every weekend for the last four years, Dunfee and members of his ministry have stood watch over George's joint, taking up residence in the right of way with signs, video cameras and bullhorns in hand. They videotape customers' license plates and post them online, and they try to save the souls of anyone who comes and goes.
Now, the dancers have turned the tables, so to speak. Fed up with the tactics of Dunfee and his flock, they say they have finally accepted his constant invitation to come to church.
It's just that they've come wearing see-through shorts and toting Super Soakers.
Global warming is cutting rice yields in many parts of Asia, according to research, with more declines to come.
Yields have fallen by 10-20% over the last 25 years in some locations.
The group of mainly US-based scientists studied records from 227 farms in six important rice-producing countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, India and China.
This is the latest in a line of studies to suggest that climate change will make it harder to feed the world's growing population by cutting yields.
Climate Change is such an obvious phenomenon now, with so much evidence clearly showing that the climate is changing and that we will have to adapt accordingly, that you have to wonder why people still want to argue.
On the one hand it is all us, we are the ones changing the climate and we should do everything in our power to slow the process down giving us more time to develop solutions that will ensure that ourselves and/or as many species as possible don't become extinct as a direct result of our actions.
Or; if it isn't us and the climate change is instead a direct result of natural changes, ice age cycles, volcanic dust clouds, etc. then surely it makes even more sense for us to start making the necessary changes to our technologies and resource use to ensure that we don't exacerbate these changes with our own man-made causes. Ultimately giving us more time to develop solutions that will ensure that ourselves and/or as many species as possible don't become extinct as a result of our actions.
Allegations of involvement in covering up child abuse have dogged Pope Benedict VXI, and now senior figures in Scotland say there is a criminal case to answer under Scots law. Steven Raeburn investigates whether the Pope could face prosecution when he visits Scotland in September.
Your eyebrows may have been briefly raised during April by a series of press reports claiming that noted anti-theist and proponent of evolutionary theory Richard Dawkins was calling for the arrest of his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Britain in September. The reports treated rather hilariously the genuine and serious contention that the incumbent Pontiff may actually have a case to answer arising from his claimed historic knowledge of ritualised paedophilia undertaken by priests under his authority.
After a few follow up comments the story has moved off the agenda and Dawkins -together with colleague Christopher Hitchens - has been largely silent on the subject since then. Both had in fact engaged solicitor Mark Stephens and human rights counsel Geoffrey Robertson QC to shore up their argument, and on the face of it there appears to be a compelling logic to the proposal, which considers factors including jurisdiction, civil and criminal liability, and the question of the Pope's immunity as head of state, a defence which they dismiss on the basis that the Vatican is not recognised as a state under international law.
However, with typical anglocentricity, the coverage totally omitted any reference to Pope Benedict's trip across the Hadrianic divide into our jurisdiction, which not only has a completely different criminal justice system and process, it also has its own priorities which have -post Operation Algebra and the Strachan & Rennie case- set new benchmarks and standards of evidence for securing convictions not only for sex offenders, but for those who assist in conspiring to cover them up. Dawkins, even if he was minded to, couldn't get near the Pope during the English leg of his trip, but the prospect of Strathclyde or Lothian and Borders Police slapping the handcuffs on the Pontiff just as soon as he has kissed the tarmac may yet be such a sufficiently real prospect that the visit may be cancelled. The Crown Office have not ruled out the possibility of a prosecution, and a recent papal excursion to Malta was marred by fresh allegations of his involvement in covering up for paedophile priests. The defining event of his tenure as Pontiff could see Benedict XVI escorted from the tarmac to a Reliance van and into the dock in Glasgow's High Court, and off to Barlinnie thereafter, which would make for quite a photograph.
Anderson Cooper I just flew down to Washington to talk with author Christopher Hitchens. He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in June, and is currently undergoing chemotherapy.
Many people upon receiving a cancer diagnosis would ask "why me?" Hitchens's answer, is "why not me?"
Much of his hair has fallen out, but he seems strong as ever. We discussed whether his diagnosis has in any way altered his well-known opinion of religion and prayer.
This morning I was reading my usual websites and catching up on a little news, after a weekend of running the City2Surf competition and drinking excessively afterwards, and I came across this little questions on one of my favourite sites and I thought I'd share it with you:
Recently I met a guy online who I liked. We got into a discussion about god and it became pretty obvious that he didn't believe in any kind of higher power. Soon after finding out I do, he stopped replying to my messages. Now I might be completely wrong about why he stopped messaging me, but it made me think: Is it really such a big of a turn off?
I'd be interested to hear of anyones thoughts on the matter. For me personally I think I genuinely could not form a romantic relationship with someone who believed that God was looking out for them. I'm too opinionated and wouldn't be able to let the topic drop, for that is a flaw of mine.
However, there was probably a more reasonable response that I'll also share with you, but I'd love to know your opinion on the subject too.
No, believing in a higher power isn't a turn-off for me. However things like:
Young-Earth creationism
Denial of the scientific method as a self-correcting and objective way to ascertain the nature of Reality
Inability to argue logically
Inability to entertain a notion without agreeing to it
Inability to question one's beliefs
Inability to grant the possibility that one is wrong about the existence or nonexistence of God
Those things are turn-offs for me. I wobbled between being an atheist, a theist, and a deist all while dating a Christian girl. Only broke up because she had trouble not fucking another guy. I know... I know. I thought that too.
Black atheist! Do these words mean anything? Certainly not if such a person does not exist.
Everyone knows that black people love Jesus. With tears in our eyes and a bittersweet joy in our hearts, we marvel at the wonder of the divine. With hands raised high we sway to our own celestial rhythm. With a look of transcendent torment upon our faces, we sing His praises. Don’t we love Jesus? Don’t we all love Jesus?
I’ve heard it said that black people have a “Jesus fixation”, a single minded focus on God. From our earliest days we are taught that there is a mysterious and powerful man in the heavens above- enthroned some place between time and space. Omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient- He is God-the-Father. The ethereal embodiment, if you will allow, of benevolence and love. We are taught by parents, grandparents and the preacher that “God is good!”
But, as the lesson of God’s goodness is taught with one breath, we are taught that God is awful with the next. He knows our thoughts, He knows our feelings, He knows what we will do next, and He knows our secrets and the hour of our deaths. This God is not to be trifled with. What fool would question Him- even in the quiet of one’s own mind?
Respecting the God that black Christians serve means not speaking doubt or even thinking it. How could there ever be such a thing as a black Atheist?
You serve the Lord with fear and trembling. You serve Him in perfect submission. You must love Him always. You must never think ill of Him. He is without fault. He is responsible for everything good in your life- not you. You are responsible for everything bad in your life- not Him. Praise the Lord when things go right; beg His forgiveness when they go wrong.
Now, how did we end up with this particular religious system? Well, that’s simple: Slavery. One of the original justifications for slavery was to bring the “heathen” African into contact with Christianity. The earliest enslaved Africans were converted by force before even leaving the slave castles of western Africa. They were now Christian by virtue of the slave trader’s power.
Apologists for the Vatican have recently claimed that the Catholic Church does not compare sexually abusing a child with attempting to ordain a woman, but that it merely included both crimes in the same document as a procedural matter.
However, this is not true. A Vatican official has explicitly described the crimes contained in this document as being “on the same level” of seriousness. They are the “Delicta Graviora”, the crimes which the Catholic Church considers the most serious of all, and which are reserved to the Holy See for judgment.
In 2007, the Vatican published a pamphlet on Paedophilia and the Priesthood, written by Monsignor Raffaello Martinelli, an official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and member of the editorial commission of the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This pamphlet explicitly states:
“The seriousness with which the Church evaluates and judges acts of pedophilia is shown by the fact that with a new law passed in 2001, the Holy See (and not the local bishops) decided to reserve the right to judge those crimes…
The fact that the Pope wanted to reserve to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — a dicastery of the Holy See — judgment of the acts of pedophilia committed by priests, shows that the Church considers those acts to be very serious, serious crimes on the same level of the other two serious crimes — reserved to the Holy See — that can be committed against two sacraments: the Eucharist and the holiness of confession.”
In 2010, with the updated document Normae de Gravioribus Delictis, the Vatican has now added the attempted ordination of women to this strange list of the most serious crimes of all.
And the direction of the comparison is not that they consider these theological crimes to be as serious as sexually abusing a child, but that they consider sexually abusing a child to be as serious as these theological crimes, to be judged by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which used to be the Congregation of the Inquisition.
For example, sexually abusing a child is listed not as a crime against the child, but as a crime against the Biblical commandment forbidding adultery. And attempting to ordain a woman attracts a more serious punishment than sexually abusing a child. This is the type of morality that results when people put theology ahead of reality.
Ethical issues should be evaluated on the basis of human rights, compassion, well-being and suffering, not on the basis of theological dictates from people who believe they are getting messages from the creator of the universe.
U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled on Wednesday that the California's Proposition 8 ballot initiative denying marriage rights to same-sex couples was unconstitutional, in a case that will almost certainly go all the way to the Supreme Court.
Walker ruled that Proposition 8 is "unconstitutional under both the due process and equal protection clauses." The court, therefore, "orders entry of judgment permanently enjoining its enforcement." Two key sentences from the ruling:
Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same sex couples.
Every two years the National Science Foundation produces a report, Science and Engineering Indicators, designed to probe the public’s understanding of science concepts. And every two years we relearn the sad fact that U.S. adults are less willing to accept evolution and the big bang as factual than adults in other industrial countries.
Except for this time. Was there suddenly a quantum leap in U.S. science literacy? Sadly, no. Rather the National Science Board, which oversees the foundation, chose to leave the section that discussed these issues out of the 2010 edition, claiming the questions were “flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because responses conflated knowledge and beliefs.” In short, if their religious beliefs require respondents to discard scientific facts, the board doesn’t think it appropriate to expose that truth.
The section does exist, however, and Science magazine obtained it. When presented with the statement “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,” just 45 percent of respondents indicated “true.” Compare this figure with the affirmative percentages in Japan (78), Europe (70), China (69) and South Korea (64). Only 33 percent of Americans agreed that “the universe began with a big explosion.”
Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in "monkeynomics" shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too.
About Laurie Santos Laurie Santos studies primate psychology and monkeynomics -- testing problems in human psychology on primates, who (not so surprisingly) have many of the same predictable irrationalities we do.
Every year, 3.5 million people die of water-borne illness. Diarrhea is the second largest cause of death among children under five. Lack of access to potable water kills more children than AIDS, malaria and smallpox combined. Worldwide, approximately 1 in 8 people lack potable water.
In just one day, more than 200 million hours of women’s time is consumed by collecting and transporting water for domestic use.
The situation of lack of sanitation is far worse, for it affects 2.6 billion people, or 40% of the global population.
These are the 41 countries that abstained in the July 28 UN General Assembly vote on Bolivia’s resolution to recognise access to water and sanitation as basic human rights. Rather than honestly vote “no”, they abstained to avoid being labelled as opponents of access to water, but many made statements that reveal their hostility to the very idea of recognising water as a human right.
Among others:
Canada complained that the resolution “appeared to determine that there was indeed a right without setting out its scope”.
The UK said “there was no sufficient legal basis for declaring or recognising water or sanitation as freestanding human rights, nor was there evidence that they existed in customary law”.
The United States said “there was no ‘right to water and sanitation’ in an international legal sense, as described by the resolution”.
Australia “had reservations about declaring new human rights in a General Assembly resolution”.
A senior rabbi from a party within Israel's coalition government has called for Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to "vanish from our world".
