From the very beginning, I was primed to be a Liberty University student. My upbringing as a dissatisfied fundamentalist Christian had built an aching for a more accepting, understanding religion that focussed less on the semantics and more on the sincerity. Growing up, I was surrounded by people who defined their faith as the drinks they avoided and the movies they skipped, and I longed to find a community that emphasized their personal relationship with Christ over their public acts of piety.
Category Church
The Guardian reports this insanity: Parents fatally whipped teen who wanted to quit church, New York court hears A mother…
Usually, you expect biting satire to come from The Onion, or Private Eye. this unexpected piece of genius comes from the Guardian in response to the meddling of churches and religious organisations recently to the proposed law changes to allow three-parent families relevant to mitochondrial donation. The church was deemed irresponsible for trying to sway politicians on the matter.
This is exactly what the desired outcome was. Brilliant. My last blog entry was a reblogging of my podcast host’s…
Someone with whom I once did teacher training is now a fervent Catholic and blogger at his site. We have had many a strong argument on facebook, and recently he alerted me to this blog post to see what I thought. I am now going to critique his piece on abortion and Dawkins.
Pope Francis has been quoted as saying that reliable data indicates that “about 2%” of clergy in the Catholic Church are paedophiles.
The Pope said that abuse of children was like “leprosy” infecting the Church, according to the Italian La Repubblica newspaper.
If you haven’t seen this, genius. This shit actually happens. Love the priest who ACTUALLY attacks that woman. Mental.
I came across a Catholic poster on facebook recently who posted an article celebrating the present Pope in combatting the Mafia. The Pope was brave in doing so, so it was claimed on this thread.
I have recently had a conversation on facebook that left me truly flabbergasted. I think it qualifies as the most jaw-dropping conversation I have had. It was with someone whom I did teacher-training with (though who chose not to finish the course). Now I wouldn’t normally go into detail about personal matters when evaluating somebody’s claims and positions, but I think it explains so much in terms of cognitive dissonance, and is so relevant to the topic, that it does need mentioning. The person in question has certain tendencies which are deemed sinful to the Catholic Church. He lives in Brighton, ironically a city in Britain known for its diversity and sense of equality.
This is brilliant:
The Vatican has suspended a senior German Church leader dubbed the “bishop of bling” by the media over his alleged lavish spending.
Bishop of Limburg Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst is accused of spending more than 31m euros (£26m; $42m) on renovating his official residence.
Many liberal Catholics have been encouraged by Pope Francis’s comments about sexual ethics in a recent interview. His general point was that these are lesser matters, not to be emphasized at the expense of the church’s essential message of healing and salvation.
This report in The Freethinker details the importance of a robust vaccination programme for the health and wellbeing of citizens across the globe. This is science (bitches – ooh, Dawkins, so rude) and this is how it helps progress.
Or, this is backward church anti-vax thinking, and this is how it hinders progress.
It is no surprise that something like this has happened. In fact, I believe we had a measles outbreak earlier this year in the UK (esp. Wales) due to a lack of vaccination in certain demographics.
Tour comes amid division over how to stem flow of believers, particularly from poor communities, towards evangelism
When Pope Francis returns to his home continent on Monday as the first Latin American pontiff, the world’s attention is likely to focus on the adoration of more than a million worshippers expected at a giant open-air mass on Copacobana beach.
But it is during a lower-key visit to a small favela community on Thursday in the north of Rio de Janeiro that he will address the biggest threat to the pre-eminence of the Catholic church in the region: the exodus of believers to US-style evangelical preachers.
As I am on holiday, I have scheduled a number of easy news repost for your delectation. From the Guardian:
Court-ordered release of documents reveal what Catholic orders knew of sexual abuse by priests, brothers and nuns
In therapy sessions, the priest confessed to shocking details he’d kept hidden for years: he had molested more than 100 boys, including his 5-year-old brother, had sex with male prostitutes, and frequented gay strip clubs.
Well, the Pope is shaking those old cloisters up! The BBC: Pope Francis: Who am I to judge gay people?…
Those of you across the pond may not have heard about the Church of England’s broadside against the seedy world of payday loans. More ‘reputable’ companies have sprung up offering ridiculously high interest and low security loans to desperate people in need. The whole business is spurious and morally dubious at best.
http://youtu.be/ctWj-OV4cI0
Sweet bejesus, this is the weirdest, craziest shit I have ever seen. The Church of England congregations would have coronaries…