yayyyyyy God

[Kanada Kev]

http://www.vbs.tv/en-ca/blog/ark-encounter

Kentuckians praying for a miracle to save their state from crushing poverty are looking to the makers of that state’s Creation Museum to bring in a flood of tourism. The museum’s big plan? To build Ark Encounter, a 24 million dollar theme park centered around Noah’s Ark. The state government is so convinced of the plan’s ability to bail Kentucky out of the red that they’re actually subsidizing its construction. If this doesn’t sound crazy to you, please allow me to direct you to the First Amendment of the Constitution.

and another Ark sighting today:

Edited December 6, 2010 by Guest

[Hal Johnson]

Im reading "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. I like it a lot. Not only is it entertaining and informative, its a great bathroom book, as you can just pick it up and start reading from any page you like and not be lost.

Edited December 7, 2010 by Guest

[ollie]

While I don't condone the stalking of anyone this was bound to happen sooner or later and I can't help feel just a *little* bit of schadenfreude about it.

Double-amputee war vet, accused of stalking Westboro Baptist Church members

[Kanada Kev]

[Kanada Kev]

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Pat Robertson favors marijuana legalization

By Stephen C. Webster

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010 -- 3:29 pm

Count this among the 10 things nobody ever expected to see in their lifetimes: 700 Club founder Pat Robertson, one of the cornerstone figures of America's Christian right movement, has come out in favor of legalizing marijuana.

Calling it getting "smart" on crime, Robertson aired a clip on a recent episode of his 700 Club television show that advocated the viewpoint of drug law reformers who run prison outreach ministries.

A narrator even claimed that religious prison outreach has "saved" millions in public funds by helping to reduce the number of prisoners who return shortly after being released.

"It got to be a big deal in campaigns: 'He's tough on crime,' and 'lock 'em up!'" the Christian Coalition founder said. "That's the way these guys ran and, uh, they got elected. But, that wasn't the answer."

His co-host added that the success of religious-run dormitories for drug and alcohol cessation therapy present an "opportunity" for faith-based communities to lead the way on drug law reforms.

"We're locking up people that have taken a couple puffs of marijuana and next thing you know they've got 10 years with mandatory sentences," Robertson continued. "These judges just say, they throw up their hands and say nothing we can do with these mandatory sentences. We've got to take a look at what we're considering crimes and that's one of 'em.

"I'm ... I'm not exactly for the use of drugs, don't get me wrong, but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot, that kinda thing it's just, it's costing us a fortune and it's ruining young people. Young people go into prisons, they go in as youths and come out as hardened criminals. That's not a good thing."

Robertson has in recent years come under fire for increasingly flamboyant comments, such as calling for the assassinations of foreign leaders and blaming gay people for the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

Conservatives signing up for drug policy reform

The segment, while significant for illustrating a key conservative stalwart's shifting opinion on the drug war, was mainly a plug for a new conservative group called "Right on Crime," which parlays the arguments of groups like the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) into conservative-leaning messages.

"Our marijuana prohibition laws, which send people to prison for merely possessing a plant, are clearly immoral," LEAP executive director Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore narcotics officer, told Raw Story.

"As a Christian, and as a former law enforcer who is now working to undo the damage these laws have done to our families and our communities, I'm glad to see Pat Robertson joining the chorus of faith leaders calling for reform."

Some faith-based groups, like the Council of Churches and Church IMPACT, also helped promote California's failed Prop. 19 ballot initiative, which would have legalized marijuana cultivation, sales and consumption by adults over 21-years-old. It failed to gain a majority in the state's 2010 elections.

President Obama has maintained his opposition to the legalization of marijuana, although his Department of Justice has largely taken a hands-off approach to states where voters have approved the drug's use if prescribed by a doctor.

Pat Robertson was a Republican candidate for the presidency in 1980, but saw his political ambitions dashed in the primaries by Ronald Reagan. Though he later earned Robertson's endorsement, President Reagan went on to significantly escalate the war on America's drug users.

[Kanada Kev]

[Kanada Kev]

[Kanada Kev]

In an argument about god and religion, he proclaims that we don't know what causes oceanic tides.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/bill-oreilly-claims-explain-oceanic-tides/

"I'll tell you why [religion is] not a scam," he said. "In my opinion -- alright? Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that. You can't explain why the tide goes in."

Silverman looked befuddled. "Tide goes in, tide goes ... out?" he asked.

"See, the water, the tide-- it comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman," O'Reilly repeated. "It always goes in, then it goes out."

"Maybe it's Thor up on Mount Olympus who's making the tides go in and out," Silverman retorted.

"No-no-no!" the host objected. "You can't explain that. You can't explain it."

[SaggyBalls]

Silverman should have had the decency to remind o'reilly that it was the moon's gravity that makes the tides work

all of that mount olympus crap lost his argument some credibility.

[Kanada Kev]

[bradm]

yayyyyyy Saskatchewan Court of Appeal

A Saskatchewan court has determined that, regardless of personal religious beliefs, civil commissioners in the province must marry gay couples when asked to do so.

Following proposed legislation that would allow provincial officials the right to refuse to perform marriages that conflict with their religious beliefs, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal was asked to rule on whether the very idea of such amendments would be constitutional.

They're not.

The court found that civil ceremonies free of religious implication are exactly that: free of the influence of religion.

The court also found that people who assume roles in public offices are bound to the rules governing those offices.

"Persons who voluntarily choose to assume an office, like that of a marriage commissioner, cannot expect to directly shape the office's intersection with the public so as to make it conform with their personal religious or other beliefs," the court wrote in its decision.

"In our tradition, the apparatus of the state serves everyone equally without providing better, poorer or different services to one individual compared to another by making distinctions on the basis of factors like race, religion or gender."

To allow civil commissioners to refuse to perform marriages solely on their personal religious grounds, the court ruled, "would violate the equality rights of gay and lesbian individuals."

The case stems from three human rights complaints filed by marriage commissioners in the province. They alleged their freedom of religion was being infringed upon every time they were ordered to perform a same-sex marriage.

As a result of that complaint, the province submitted two possible solutions for the court's consideration: 1) that marriage commissioners appointed before Nov. 5, 2004, not be required to perform same-sex marriages if it runs contrary to their beliefs, and 2) No marriage commissioner is required to perform same-sex marriages if it runs contrary to their religious beliefs.

The court ruled that both proposals violate the equality rights of gays and lesbians in greater measure than individual marriage commissioners and "as a result, if put in place, either option would be unconstitutional and of no force or effect."

Aloha,

Brad

[hamilton]

Yayyyyy Saskatchewan!

[Kanada Kev]

[bradm]

Vatican letter on sex abuse from '97 revealed

A newly revealed 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police — a disclosure with the potential to fuel more lawsuits worldwide against the Vatican, which has long denied any involvement in coverups.

The letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican's rejection of an Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests.

The letter's message undermines persistent Vatican claims that the church never instructed bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. Instead, the letter emphasizes the church's right to handle all child-abuse allegations and determine punishments in house rather than hand that power to civil authorities.

Catholic officials in Ireland declined requests for comment on the letter, which RTE said it received from an Irish bishop.

Child-abuse activists in Ireland said the 1997 letter should demonstrate, once and for all, that the protection of pedophile priests from criminal investigation was not only sanctioned by Vatican leaders but ordered by them. A key argument employed by the Vatican in defending dozens of lawsuits over clerical sex abuse in Canada and the United States is that it had no role in ordering local church authorities to suppress evidence of crimes.

"The letter is of huge international significance, because it shows that the Vatican's intention is to prevent reporting of abuse to criminal authorities," said Colm O'Gorman, director of the Irish chapter of human rights watchdog Amnesty International. "And if that instruction applied here, it applied everywhere."

To this day, the Vatican has yet to endorse any of the Irish church's three major policy documents since 1996 on reporting suspected child abuse to civil authorities. In his 2010 pastoral letter to the Irish people condemning pedophiles in the ranks, Pope Benedict XVI faulted Ireland's bishops for failing to follow canon law and offered no explicit endorsement of child-protection efforts by the Irish church or state.

Policy in place for years?

O'Gorman — who was raped repeatedly by an Irish priest when he was an altar boy and was among the first victims to speak out in the mid-1990s — said evidence is mounting that some Irish bishops continued to follow the 1997 Vatican instructions and withheld reports of crimes against children as recently as 2008.

A third major state-ordered investigation into Catholic abuse coverups, concerning the southwest Irish diocese of Cloyne, is expected to be published within the next few months.

Two state-commissioned reports published in 2009 unveiled decades of coverups of abuse involving tens of thousands of children since the 1930s.

Irish church leaders didn't begin telling police about suspected pedophile priests until the mid-1990s. In January 1996, Irish bishops published a groundbreaking policy document spelling out their newfound determination to report all suspected abuse cases to police.

But in the January 1997 letter seen Tuesday by the AP, the Vatican's diplomat in Ireland at the time, Archbishop Luciano Storero, told the bishops a senior church panel in Rome, the Congregation for the Clergy, had decided the Irish church's year-old policy of "mandatory" reporting of abuse claims conflicted with canon law.

Irish church told to follow 'canon law'

Storero emphasized in the letter that the Irish church's policy was not recognized by the Vatican and was "merely a study document." He said canon law, which required abuse allegations to be handled within the church, "must be meticulously followed."

Storero, who died in 2000, wrote, without elaborating, that mandatory reporting of child-abuse claims to police "gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and a canonical nature."

He warned that bishops who followed the Irish child-protection policy and reported a priest's suspected crimes to police ran the risk of having their in-house punishments of the priest overturned by the Congregation for the Clergy.

The letter, originally obtained by the RTE religious affairs program Would You Believe? said the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome was pursuing "a global study" of sexual-abuse policies and would establish worldwide child-protection policies "at the appropriate time."

The Vatican's child-protection policies today remain in legal limbo. It currently advises bishops worldwide to report crimes to police only in a legally non-binding lay guide, but it does not mention this in the official legal document provided by another powerful church body, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which continues to stress the secrecy of canon law.

The central message of Storero's letter was reported second-hand by two priests as part of Ireland's mammoth investigation into the 1975-2004 coverup of hundreds of child-abuse cases in the Dublin Archdiocese. The letter itself, marked "strictly confidential," has never been published before.

Aloha,

Brad

[Kanada Kev]

[Kanada Kev]

[Kanada Kev]

[Kanada Kev]

Cute little British kids asking tough questions about Jesus…

[Thorgnor]

"There's about, like, 5 trillion people in the whole world, and only like, 5 polar bears in the whole entire world..."

so cute.

[Esau.]

:dazed:

http://www.kkmime.com/main.html

[Kanada Kev]

:dazed:

http://www.kkmime.com/main.html

http://www.kkmime.com/video.html

That shit just looks creepy as fuck!

[Esau.]

I never realized this mime church stuff was so popular... :dazed:

[Kanada Kev]

[Esau.]