yayyyyyy God

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Police search for publisher behind boozy textbook image of Christ

Christians in India's northeast are outraged after a picture showing Jesus Christ holding a beer can and a cigarette was discovered in primary school textbooks.

The image appeared in a handwriting book for children in church-run schools in the Christian-majority state of Meghalaya, where it was used to illustrate the letter "I" for the word "Idol".

"We are deeply shocked and hurt at the objectionable portrayal of Jesus Christ in the school book. We condemn the total lack of respect for religions by the publisher," Shillong diocese Archbishop Dominic Jala told AFP.

Police said they were hunting for the owner of the New Delhi-based publisher, Skyline Publications, who faces charges of offending religious sentiment, local police superintendent A.R. Mawthoh told AFP.

The Roman Catholic Church in India has banned all textbooks by Skyline, while Protestant leaders called for a public apology.

The state government also denounced the publication.

"We strongly condemn such a blasphemous act. Legal action has been initiated against the publisher," M. Ampareen Lyngdoh, an education minister in the Meghalaya government, said.

English-language daily The Shillong Times said Skyline had apologized for "hurting people's religious sentiments," but had offered no explanation as to how the error occurred.

Efforts are underway to recall all copies of the book, the publisher was quoted as saying.

AFP was unable to reach Skyline for comment.

Christians account for 2.3 per cent of India's billion-plus Hindu-majority population. The main concentrations are in the northeast, the eastern state of Orissa and in the southern states of Kerala and Goa.

In 2008, anti-Christian riots in Orissa left more than 100 people dead, according to Christian groups, after missionaries were accused of killing a Hindu holy man.

[jonyak]

since when was blasphemy illegal?

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

They just put blasphemy laws back on the books in Ireland (though there are lots of challenges going on with that right now), but in India, dissing other people's gods can sometimes get you shoved in a pile of burning tires before getting bludgeoned or hacked to death.

[Kanada Kev]

[Kanada Kev]

Interesting comments from Deepak Chopra:

Only Spirituality Can Solve The Problems Of The World

Before addressing the importance of spirituality in modern times, we should first define it. Spirituality is the experience of that domain of awareness where we experience our universality. This domain of awareness is a core consciousness that is beyond our mind, intellect, and ego. In religious traditions this core consciousness is referred to as the soul which is part of a collective soul or collective consciousness, which in turn is part of a more universal domain of consciousness referred to in religions as God. When we have even a partial glimpse of this level of awareness we experience joy, insight, intuition, creativity, and freedom of choice. In addition, there is the awakening of love, kindness, compassion, happiness at the success of others, and equanimity. As the turbulence of our mind settles down, our body also begins to heal itself because it also quiets down. The body's self-repair mechanisms are activated when the mind is at peace because the mind and body are at the deepest level inseparably one.

All religions are founded on a deep spiritual experience of unity consciousness where there was complete union between the personal and universal. Unfortunately, many times the followers of religion, instead of understanding the religious experience and seeking it for themselves ended up merely worshiping the founder of the religion. It is more important to fully grasp the teaching of the religion and its basic tenets, that have come from a deeper experience of transcendence. Self-righteous morality is not a means for experiencing higher consciousness. Higher consciousness, spontaneously leads to moral and ethical behavior. However, because spiritual knowledge is powerful, the custodians of organized religion have frequently ended up with destructive behaviors -- power mongering, cronyism, control, corruption, and influence peddling. As a result organized religion has frequently become quarrelsome, divisive, and led to conflict. No organized religion has been immune to this unfortunate tendency. So, we have had the crusades and witch-hunts of Christianity, the Jihads of Islam, the violent communal riots instigated by fundamentalist Hindus and the persecution of minorities and ethnic cleansing all in the name of God.

Our present times are particularly dangerous because ancient habits combined with modern capacities and technologies of destruction are a devastating combination that can destroy life on our planet.

As we begin to have a more scientific understanding of the transcendent level of our existence and look at the basic tenets of all religions, we find that the spiritual experience is fundamental to all and similar in all. This experience can be had by anyone through the practice of meditation, prayer, contemplative self-inquiry, the expression of love and compassion in action, intellectual inquiry into the deeper meaning of life, and self-less service. With these practices, we begin to realize that consciousness is a field of infinite possibilities; that it is omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient and infinitely creative. This experience also leads to unbounded love and compassion. Getting in touch with our deepest self is therefore the utmost importance because it is our connection to the mystery that we call God.

As the Sufi mystic Rumi has said, "You're not just a drop in the ocean, you're also the mighty ocean in the drop." If there is anything that will at this moment heal our wounded planet with its immense problems of social injustice, ecological devastation, extreme economic disparities, war, conflict and terrorism, it is a deeper experiential understanding and knowledge of our own spirit. With this deeper understanding and with an interfaith dialogue that looks at our commonalities rather than our differences, we have the opportunity to solve the problems of the world, address its inequities and heal ourselves. The word, "healing" and the words, holy and whole, all mean the same thing. To be healed is to have the return of the memory of who we really are. When we return to our sacred source, the world will be holy, and it will be healed.

Deepak Chopra on Intent.com

deepakchopra.com

Edited February 28, 2010 by Guest

[Kanada Kev]

Wicked:

[Kanada Kev]

Porn for Bibles

http://en.video.canoe.tv/video/news/world/1896809959/porn-for-bibles-exchange-riles-texas-campus/69502744001

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Great book, nicely summarised here.

B5MkpzMAOZM

[hamilton]

^^^ I loved that book!

[Esau.]

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Perfect way to start the morning .

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Interesting angle on the Westboro crowd.

Nate Phelps on growing up in "the most hated family in America"

Kevin Libin, National Post

Published: Friday, March 19, 2010

When celebrity nonbeliever Richard Dawkins finished addressing his hundreds of Godless followers at the American Atheists Convention at Atlanta's Emory Center last April, the follow up act was a man virtually no one in the room had ever heard of. Onto the dais walked a middle-aged, doleful-eyed cab driver from Cranbrook, B.C., by the name of Nate Phelps. He had come to talk about how his childhood in a religious household had brought him to atheism.

Mr. Phelps was not from a typical churchgoing family, but from what a BBC documentary once called "the most hated family in America." His father, pastor Fred Phelps, leads the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. The family, and a handful of followers, has held nearly 43,000 demonstrations, mostly in U.S., a few in Canada, once in Iraq, picketing synagogues and Holocaust memorials, disrupting the funerals of American soldiers killed in action, and of murdered Amish schoolgirls. They are infamous for their hatred and cruelty. Their signs insist that "God Hates Fags," and hates America, too, for tolerating homosexuality. They chant "Thank God for 9/11," and for the bombs killing U.S. marines. They tried infiltrating the Winnipeg funeral in 2008 of Tim McLean, who was brutally murdered and decapitated on a Greyhound bus, calling it God's punishment for Canadians' sins, but backed off over fears for their safety. They march with broad smiles on their faces, their young children beside them, delighting in the outrage they provoke.

This is the family into which Nate Phelps was born 51 years ago and fled 33 years ago. At the time, his father had not yet graduated to street protests, but used a fleet of fax machines to broadcast his unabashedly hate-filled screeds to the world. Of his 12 brothers and sisters, only he and two others have deserted: The rest have grown Westboro with their own sons and daughters, inculcated in Pastor Phelps' intolerant, Armageddonist preaching.

Nate Phelps was in Calgary this week, speaking to the University of Calgary's Centre for Inquiry. Up until a year ago, he was driving a taxi in B.C.'s interior, quietly questioning God by soaking up in his off hours the anti-religion arguments of Mr. Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Today, as a faith-doubting refugee from Christianity's ugliest extreme fringe, he has become, rather by accident, a figure in the North American atheist movement.

"I'm not inclined to settle on that my dad's truth is the right truth, because it's a pretty scary truth if it is," Mr. Phelps says. "But it's just as difficult for me to settle on mainstream Christianity as the truth, because the essence of the message is still there. That these miraculous things happened; that this man who supposedly lived 2,000 years ago did this for us; and this is the basis of where we will spend eternity. Those are tough concepts to look at and say ‘yeah, that makes perfectly good sense.'"

Mr. Phelps' own story itself is not an easy one. His father, as he tells it, was a tyrant who believed strongly in the Biblical injunctions not to "spare the rod," thrashing his children with barber straps and mattock handles in ways designed to evoke maximum levels of righteous pain. By the age of 7, Nate could recite all 66 books of the bible in 19 seconds; his father, impatient at his children's inability to follow quickly along with his preaching, demanded it. The pastor was a bigoted, furious man.

Mr. Phelps has blurry memories of grandparents who were so bold once as to bring him Christmas gifts, and were banished for their pagan worship, and their attempts to moderate their increasingly zealous son. The children were forced onto eccentric, punitive fitness regimes, required to run 10 miles a day and eat milk curds for dinner, to treat their bodies as the temples the Bible commands. In the pastor's version of Calvinism, he promised that nearly all humans were sinners, pre-destined before birth to spend an eternity in a lake of fire. There was nothing anyone could do about it. It was terrifying.

"What has stayed with me all these years is the psychological [effect]," Mr. Phelps says. "It's the message, it's the information that you take in in your youth that you carry with you for the rest of your life."

Yet there was an undeniable integrity in his father's message, he believes. This was a literal translation of the Bible; it was a rigid interpretation, but all the mercilessness, all of it, could be justified by scripture.

But, as he matured, he noticed hypocrisies: the beatings were, the Bible said, a loving father's duty, yet his dad only spewed hatred for his children. There was all the ruthless judgment of an angry God toward the world, but none of Jesus's mercy.

A cocktail of "doubts, contradictions and fears" led Mr. Phelps to leave home the very moment, midnight, of his 18th birthday. His family calls him a "rebel against God" condemned to hell; his ties with the brother and sister who also left are strained, at best. They'd like to have a relationship, he thinks, but "we just don't know how." There are "trust issues," he says.

He tried keeping up links to his Christianity, occasionally attending mainstream churches in California, where he first settled. But they seemed "pale and feeble" compared to the fervency he felt in Westboro's pews. He got married, and had children. His faith began to die.

"I didn't think I was going to have kids. I really held somewhere inside of me this notion that I was going to be punished" for abandoning his father's church, his defiance of his father's will. "When you have been told, over and over, your whole life that there is a force out there, a malevolent force that will strike you down, that will cause you harm if you stray... it was unconscious, but I believed for years that I was going to pay a price." He didn't.

Attempting one Christmas to explain to his three kids notions of heaven and hell, they burst into tears at the prospect of eternal punishment. Remembering his own boyhood terror at God's wrath, he left Christianity for good.

Since divorced, and moved in with a Canadian woman he met on the Internet, it was by accident that Mr. Phelps found himself sharing the stage with Richard Dawkins. A chance meeting in his taxi with a UBC journalism student led to an article in the university newspaper. When it was republished on the web, Mr. Phelps was soon contacted by fellow atheists across North America. Then came speaking invitations. He is writing a memoir, and working with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science on plans to lobby for laws against denying children medical care for religious reasons.

Still, Mr. Phelps seems not entirely comfortable in the skin of a preacher, like his father, even if it is to urge moral secularism instead of God's hatred. He is uneasy with the anti-religious antagonism of Hitchens and Harris; there are too many, he knows, some in desperate circumstances, who find solace and strength in their faith. "I'm going to denounce that?" he says. "I have some serious trouble with the idea of just saying ‘let's discard it all,' because there's value. I see value."

No doubt Mr. Phelps has an exceptional empathy for troubled souls seeking comfort, having been one himself. After an isolated childhood in the spiteful world of Fred Phelps, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He spent time in a psychiatric hospital. He suffers depression. Talking about his childhood sometimes helps. Sometimes it makes things worse.

Coming from such a wretched corner of the Christian world, he allows that he may not represent most people's experience with faith. He has heard from many atheists with similar stories, though he admits that may be the self-selecting nature of the more activist side of the movement. And he has contemplated whether it's fair for someone with his abnormal experience to be held up as evidence against religion everywhere. But then, he says, if life under the Westboro Baptist Church led him anywhere, it wasn't to hatred - not for gays, or Jews, and not, even as a reaction to his father's viciousness, toward religion. It was learning the Bible in such a severe, literal way that made him see its illogic, that prompted him to weigh the evidence in favour of God's existence next to that against it, and to find the proof against faith "speaks for itself." It was witnessing the reality of true, undeviating faith, he says, that opened his eyes to doubt.

"I'm not 100% settled on anything," Mr. Phelps concedes. "But growing up in that environment, certainly gave me the motivation to seek out the answers, to find out the truth."

[Kanada Kev]

Thanks for posting that DEM. Interesting article.

I try not to truly hate anyone. However, the Westboro freaks are simply intolerable.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Yeah, but they thrive off of people's hate. Kind of like Moe Sizlack feeding off of people's disappointment in parking lots when they see him almost drive away and leave a parking spot, but he doesn't.

Who knows how long it will be before one of them crosses the line and actually physically harms someone.

[Kanada Kev]

That's true. They are probably itchin' for the moment when somebody actually does one of them harm at a protest. It would fuel their fire for sure

So sad when kids are involved with no choice

I like these responses:

http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/2008/11/homosexual-hating_westboro_bib.php

[bradm]

Holy Crap: Kevin Smith's fundamentalist horror film 'Red State' has been given the go-ahead!

The movie’s called ‘Red State’ and it’s very much about that subject matter, that point of view and that position taken to the absolute extreme. It’s certainly not Phelps himself but it’s very much inspired by a Phelps figure. And to me, too, the notion of using a Phelps-like character as a villain, as horrifying and scary as that guy can be, there’s even something more insidious than him that lurks out there in as much as a public or a government that allows it and that’s the other thing that I’m trying to examine in a big, big way. It’s weird because for a few months I’ve been saying ‘horror movie’ and technically it is, but it’s also not a very traditional horror movie in the sense that people have been asking me, ‘Is it a slasher movie? Is it like the Japanese horror flicks?’ It’d be much easier to just show it to them when I’m done and be like, ‘This is what I meant.’ At which point I’m sure there’ll be people saying, ‘This ain’t a horror movie!’ But to me, it is.

Aloha,

Brad

[SaggyBalls]

Thanks for posting that DEM. Interesting article.

I try not to truly hate anyone. However, the Westboro freaks are simply intolerable.

Intolerance is certainly different from hatred. I might be wrong, but I would find it hard to believe that you truly hate those people and might even feel a little compassion for them...at an arm's length of course.

[Kanada Kev]

[Kanada Kev]

How to beat the Westboro Baptist Church. This is fantastic:

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Yeah - that is a great angle. Well conceived .

[Kanada Kev]

ugh!

Father of dead soldier ordered to pay Westboro Baptists $16k in ongoing court fight

http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/posted/archive/2010/03/29/father-of-dead-soldier-ordered-to-pay-westboro-baptists-16k-in-ongoing-court-fight.aspx

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/29/father-of-dead-marine-ord_n_517614.html

http://www.matthewsnyder.org/

Edited March 30, 2010 by Guest

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

If I believed in Hell, then I would absolutely believe that there is a special circle there for the Westboro family. And I'd bet all the rest of the eternally damned would keep their distance from them, too.

But this is exactly that these people are all about - drawing attention, and as much money as possible, towards themselves.

[Kanada Kev]

Edited April 1, 2010 by Guest

[Kanada Kev]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/happy-zombie-jesus-day

[Kanada Kev]

What the KKK think of Westboro ...