Christian preacher arrested for saying homosexuality is a sin

Regardless of my views on the matter of whether or not religion is crazy for its underlying hatred of homosexuality, surely it is wrong to arrest a guy for expressing his beliefs!

Dale McAlpine was charged with causing “harassment, alarm or distress” after a homosexual police community support officer (PCSO) overheard him reciting a number of “sins” referred to in the Bible, including blasphemy, drunkenness and same sex relationships.

The 42-year-old Baptist, who has preached Christianity in Workington, Cumbria for years, said he did not mention homosexuality while delivering a sermon from the top of a stepladder, but admitted telling a passing shopper that he believed it went against the word of God.

This is completely irrational and very upsetting that someone can be arrested for stating his point of view. Is this not the same as threatening harm on the creators of South Park for practicing their right to free speech?

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Abuse Case Offers a View of the Vatican’s Politics

The two former Mexican seminarians had gone to the Vatican in 1998 to personally deliver a case recounting decades of sexual abuse by one of the most powerful priests in the Roman Catholic Church, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado.

But in little more than a year, word emerged that Cardinal Ratzinger — the future Pope Benedict XVI — halted the inquiry. “It isn’t prudent,” he had told a Mexican bishop, according to two people who later talked to the bishop.

For five years, the case remained stalled, possibly a hostage to Father Maciel’s powerful protectors in the Curia, the Vatican’s governing apparatus, and his own deep influence at the Holy See.

In any case, it took Cardinal Ratzinger — by then Pope Benedict — until 2006, eight years after the case went before him, to address Father Maciel’s abuses by removing him from priestly duties and banishing him to a life of prayer and penitence, though without publicly acknowledging his wrongs or the suffering of his victims.

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Nightline Face-Off: Does God Have a Future?

Sam Harris and Michael Shermer debate Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston on Nightline (23rd March 2010).

If you want to watch some more debates click here.

Do chimps know death?

An interesting article on how we as great apes deal with death.

I've always said that we are the only species whose members know they’re going to die. I’m not sure that’s true, of course, but there have been suggestions that some mammals, even if they don’t grasp their own personal mortality, at least understand that death is something final and unique.

Two years ago, Natalie Angier of The New York Times had a piece on this issue, prompted by the death of a baby gorilla in a German zoo whose mother continued to carry the corpse for days, refusing to surrender it to keepers. Angier mentioned work by Karen McComb and her colleagues showing that African elephants preferentially fondle the bones of dead elephants as opposed to bones from other species.

The latest issue of Current Biology has two thanatological notes (thanatology is the scientific study of death) suggesting that chimps, our closest relatives, perceive death as something unique.

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The Power to Open our Eyes

In The Blind Watchmaker, penned by Richard Dawkins almost 25 years ago, Tim Radford rediscovers a writer who is patient, lyrical and immensely persuasive.

One sometimes forgets, given his recent combative secular humanism, just how warm and lyrical Richard Dawkins can be. This is a patient, often beautiful book from 1986 that begins in a generous mood and sustains its generosity to the end. It takes its title from a famous sentence in William Paley's Natural Theology (1802), which Dawkins calls "a book that I greatly admire..."

Not only does he profess admiration, he even concedes that he might once have been convinced by Paley. "I could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859, when Darwin's Origin of Species was published," he volunteers.

This generosity extends even to the "sincere and honest", but clearly somewhat confused, Church of England bishop Hugh Montefiore who could not believe (Dawkins calls this the Argument from Personal Incredulity) that natural selection explained, for instance, the whiteness of polar bears.

But most of all, Dawkins' generosity extends to the reader, who is confronted with meticulous reasoning, leavened by lyrical riffs upon metaphor that have always been his trademark.

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Who wants absolute morality?

It's funny how religion can make all of these irrational claims, and yet if an Atheist says anything in disagreement then they claim they are offended.

They offend us constantly. Double standards.

All we ask for is rational discussion on what actions would be best to help all people have a better life.

Why no Asbo for the Pope?

A very cutting article by A. C. Grayling of the Independent about the lack of punishment for the Pope regarding his involvement in the Catholic Churches Child Abuse cover up

Why is it that large, rich, influential organisations and those who run them get away with big crimes and misdemeanours, when ordinary folk are punished for their miniature versions of them? It's an old story, of course, but no more pleasant or right for being so.

Compare the circumstances of two men whose occupations and avocations have brought them to pubic notice recently. One is Harry Taylor, an unemployed 59-year-old, who was found guilty last week in a Liverpool court of putting "offensive religious images" in the prayer room of the city's John Lennon airport (which he did on the grounds that having such a room in an airport named after John Lennon would, he said, have offended John Lennon). The jury of 10 women and two men had all sworn to consider his case fairly – on the Bible.

Mr Taylor received a five-year Asbo forbidding him from carrying religiously offensive images in public, and sentencing him to six months' imprisonment suspended for two years, but with 100 hours of unpaid work and £250 costs to make him feel the sting of the judge's disapproval.

The other man is Joseph Ratzinger, otherwise Pope Benedict XVI, right, current head of the Roman Catholic church. To appreciate the contrast between the Pope and Mr Taylor, we need to remind ourselves of the following simple facts. Child sex abuse is a serious crime. Concealing crimes is a serious crime. Systematic, decades-long deliberate concealment of many thousands of crimes in many countries is a very large-scale criminal conspiracy. It is a matter of public record that the Catholic church is guilty of just such a conspiracy. The Pope, as head of the church, is accountable for the its actions. It is also on public record that he personally protected abusers and covered up cases of child abuse before becoming Pope.

Is the Pope in any danger of receiving 100 hours of community service for hiding hundreds of paedophiles from the law all round the world? Is he likely to get an Asbo? Or has he been invited to the United Kingdom as an official visitor who will meet the Queen and be feted and courted, secure in the knowledge that efforts to arrest him and put him on trial for heading a huge criminal conspiracy will fail?

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