Posts Tagged ‘Sarah Palin’

News & Submissions 1/12/2011

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

Haiti one year on: “living in a tent is not really a life”
The angelical voices of a choir dressed in pristine white singing hallelujahs do not match the hellish scenery that surrounds them: piles of debris, an acid stingy smell of rotten rubbish, women crying while waving their hands at the skeleton of what used to be the country’s main Catholic church, Cathédrale Notre Dame de L’Assomption, thanking God for still being alive, but some also blaming him for plunging the Caribbean country into an abyss.

Exactly a year ago the earth grumbled violently, killing 230,000 people and flattening the cities along the centre of an impoverished country that is now no more than a mass of rubble and twisted iron. Today, broken Haitians are commemorating their losses following their hearts and their faiths. Read full story from guardian.co.uk

Faith: Local community responds to hate by celebrating religious freedom day
This year, many in Ann Arbor will celebrate our local religious diversity and freedom through community service, discussion, and learning about other faiths as they mark Religious Freedom Day on Jan. 16. While these activities affirm respect and inclusion, they come in response to bigotry and harassment.

When Bryan Weinert saw the growing anti-Muslim sentiment in September of last year, including the stabbing of a New York cab driver for being Muslim, vandalism of mosques and a burnt Qur’an left outside a mosque in East Lansing, he felt that it was important for the community to respond.

Weinert, who serves as the board president for the Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice (ICPJ), explains, “I saw the hatred, the animosity and the violence, and I thought, ‘This isn’t how we should be treating members of our community.’” So ICPJ began working with local faith leaders, the Ann Arbor City Council and others to respond to the anti-Muslim activities and promote a community that welcomes and respects all. Read full story from annarbor.com

Phelps won’t picket girl’s funeral
Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church won’t picket the funeral of a 9-year-old girl killed in Saturday’s shooting rampage in Tucson, Ariz., in exchange for getting airtime on two radio stations, a church spokeswoman said Wednesday morning.

Church members earlier had announced plans to picket the funeral of the girl, Christina Taylor Green, who was one of six people killed during Saturday’s shooting spree that also wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz.

However, Shirley Phelps-Roper, a spokeswoman for the Westboro church, said KXXT-AM, a 50,000-watt radio station in the Phoenix suburb of Tolleson, Ariz., and Canadian station CFNY-FM, 102.1 “The Edge” in Toronto, offered to give the Topeka church airtime to discuss its views in exchange for its members not picketing the girl’s funeral. Read full story from cjonline.com

Interview with P. Sufenas Virius Lupus, Founder of Ekklesía Antínoou
I was fortunate enough to spend some time this past week with Pagan author P. Sufenas Virius Lupus, a scholar, devotee of Antinous, and author of the book The Phillupic Hymns through Bibliotheca Alexandrina and The Syncretisms of Antinous through The Red Lotus Library. He’s been doing some fascinating work in reviving the cultus of the God Antinous within contemporary Reconstructionist Paganisms, so I was very happy when he agreed to answer a few questions.

This interview took place on November 7, 2010. Read full story from patheos.com

Alcohol poisoning, not avian flu, killed Romanian birds
Birds that were thought to have died from avian flu in Romania instead apparently drank themselves to death.

Residents of Constanta in eastern Romania found dozens of dead starlings on the outskirts of the city on Saturday.

They alerted authorities, fearing the birds had died from avian flu.

But local veterinary officials decided the starlings had died after eating grape ‘marc’ – the leftovers from the wine-making process. Read full story from bbc.co.uk

Casting a spell on the government
THERE’S been a lot of talk about the rising popularity of paganism and witchcraft in Wales.

So here’s their chance to do something about VAT and all those hidden taxes.

Simply consult their Romanian sisters like Bratara Buzea, who, although she sounds like a Mafia hitman, is actually the Queen Witch of that country. For years Romanian witches have gone about their eerie business untaxed. Read full story from walesonline.co.uk

Religion is not needed to teach morality
The question: Should schools require Christian worship?

I asked my nine-year-old son, who attends an ordinary – though high-achieving – primary school in Clapham, what the “collective worship” mandated by English law in his school assemblies consists of. He reports that his assemblies feature a hodgepodge of broad brush-stroke outlines of a variety of religious festivals – Diwali, Eid, harvest festival – mixed in with basic moral messages about things like bullying (bad), being kind (good) and the dangers of Facebook (many). God, he was pretty sure, has never been mentioned and nothing he would describe (within his admittedly limited experience) as “worship” has ever taken place. Read full story from guardian.co.uk

Why people abandon religion
The question of why some people lose their faith and what to do about it has long vexed those who don’t – check the Old Testament for some heated discourse on the topic. Recent polling indicates that the trend toward secularism has increased – even in the United States, one of the most religious countries in the world. The results of the latest American Religious Identification Survey (Aris) reveal that the “nones” – people whose stated religious affiliation is “none” – have grown from 8.1% in 1990, the first year the study was conducted, to 15% in 2008.

A November 2010 article in Christianity Today sought to discover why, and cited “moral compromise” as the first reason, meaning that people leave religion because they want to do things religion forbids, such as have premarital sex. Other reasons include intellectual doubts and being hurt in some way by a church.

Recognising the necessity of understanding specific reasons for specific departures, I propose an overarching reason for why people abandon religion: they leave when the tension becomes too great between what they want and need, and what religion tells them they should want and need. Read full story from guardian.co.uk

Jared Lee Loughner apparently sought community online at Abovetopsecret.com
The Web site Abovetopsecret.com is a place where odd ideas are welcome: Its discussion threads ask questions about UFO sightings, evidence of God, and “How do you kill an alien zombie?”

But it became an unwelcome place for a new user, who joined the site in early 2009 and called himself “Erad3.” Now – based on the language in his postings, and information about where he logged on – the site’s operators believe Erad3 was accused Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner, 22.

“I’d go with 99 percent,” said Bill Irvine, chief executive of the site’s parent company, when asked how certain he was that Erad3 and Loughner were the same person.

The story of those postings – now compiled online at Abovetopsecret.com – adds new detail to the story of Loughner’s apparent unraveling. Read full story from washingtonpost.com

Skull pulled from box renews Bradenton mystery
BRADENTON
– Police here are trying to solve a mystery over how an unidentified human skull sat in a box in their property room for more than 35 years until it was discovered last week.

And they have virtually no records to indicate to whom it belongs or what happened to the person.

In late 1974, someone found a human skull submerged in 4 inches of water in an area vaguely described as “near Bradenton.”

The skull was apparently sent by the Bradenton Police Department to the FBI and back again to the local agency’s evidence room, where it was wrapped in newspaper, put in a box, marked with the word “SKULL” and forgotten.

Until last week. Detectives, sifting through old evidence to see if any of it could be used to crack cold cases, found the box, and the skull, and are now trying to figure out to whom it belongs. Read full story from heraldtribune.com

Authorities handling fallout of breaking up polygamist cult
One year after police raided the Tel Aviv headquarters of a suspected polygamist cult that involved some 40 children and 20 women, welfare authorities say they are still dealing intensely with the fallout and rehabilitation process of the cult members as they return to live a normative life.

According to information published Tuesday by the Welfare and Social Services Ministry, the 20 wives and 40 children of the yet-to-be convicted cult leader Goel Ratzon continue to receive a wide range of welfare services, including constant psychological monitoring.

“The Goel Ratzon affair is a clear sign that we have a policy of zero tolerance to cults and other groups that prey on vulnerable women and children,” Welfare and Social Services Minister Isaac Herzog said in a statement Tuesday. Read full story from jpost.com

Jewish groups respond to Palin’s use of ‘blood libel’
Several Jewish groups are criticizing Sarah Palin’s use of the term “blood libel” in her video statement on the Arizona shootings. The phrase traditionally refers to false anti-Semitic myths about Jews using the blood of Christians, often children, in their rituals.

[Defining terms: What is "blood libel"?] Read full story from yahoo.com

Voodoo priests killed in Haiti (source cnn)

News & Submissions 12/13/2010

Monday, December 13th, 2010

‘I’m Not A Witch’ Picked As Top Quote Of Year
Christine O’Donnell’s TV ad declaration “I’m not a witch” during her U.S. Senate campaign topped this year’s best quotes, according to a Yale University librarian.

O’Donnell’s quote is cited by Fred Shapiro, associate librarian at Yale Law School, who released his fifth annual list of the most notable quotations of the year. In the ad, O’Donnell was responding to reports of her revelations that she had dabbled in witchcraft years ago. Read full story from npr.org

Loch Ness monster ‘seen twice’
Simon Dinsdale, a retired police detective from Essex, insists that the two minute film recorded 50 years ago by his father, a famous Nessie-hunter, is genuine.

The footage, shot by Tim Dinsdale in 1960, is one of the best-known images put forward as evidence by those who insist on the existence of the mysterious creature.

Now the insistence of those who believe in Nessie that the film is genuine has been lent new weight after Mr Dinsdale claimed he had seen the monster with his own eyes on two occasions. Read full story from telegraph.co.uk

BP Gulf Spill the #1 Twitter Trend in 2010
There were 25 billion 140-character tweets sent out in 2010, and more of them were concerned with the BP Gulf Spill than any other topic. Twitter has just released its list of the top 10 tweets for 2010, and it’s a pretty interesting blend of pop culture phenomena, world events, and debuting gadgetry. And seeing as how Twitter has grown to be pretty international in its reach and user base, I was a tad surprised to see that the BP spill took the top slot. Here’s how the top trends broke down: Read full story from treehugger.com

Global Warming Mapped
The world is getting warmer. Whether the cause is human activity or natural variability, thermometer readings all around the world have risen steadily since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

According to an ongoing temperature analysis conducted by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the average global temperature on Earth has increased by about 0.8°Celsius (1.4°Fahrenheit) since 1880. Two-thirds of the warming has occurred since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15-0.20°C per decade. Read full story from nasa.gov

New Da Vinci mystery discovered in Mona Lisa
Leonardo Da Vinci’s 500-year-old Renaissance masterpiece has long been steeped in mystery with even today, the true identity of the woman with the alluring smile still far from certain.

The painting also featured in the Dan Brown blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, which was turned into a 2006 film starring Tom Hanks, in which his character interprets secret messages hidden in the Mona Lisa and some of Da Vinci’s other paintings, including The Last Supper.

Now members of Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage have revealed that by magnifying high resolution images of the Mona Lisa’s eyes letters and numbers can be seen. Read full story from scotsman.com

Jonathan Horwitz Discusses “Shamanic Inheritance” on December 14 “Why Shamanism Now?” Radio Show
Streaming live on the Co-Creator Radio Network on Tuesday, December 14, at 11 a.m. Pacific time/2 p.m. Eastern time, on her show “Why Shamanism Now?: A Practical Path to Authenticity,” shaman and founder of the Last Mask Center for Shamanic Healing Christina Pratt welcomes Jonathan Horwitz, co-founder with Annette Host of the Scandinavian Centre for Shamanic Studies. Horwitz says, “The shaman works by asking for help. We never get anywhere alone. We’re always being helped, although often we do not recognize… The shamanic path is excellent for learning to re-connect with being alive, re-discover the spiritual power we are all born with, and to re-learn what it means to be a part of the whole.” Read full story from pr-canada.net

Lost Civilization May Have Existed Beneath the Persian Gulf
Veiled beneath the Persian Gulf, a once-fertile landmass may have supported some of the earliest humans outside Africa some 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, a new review of research suggests.

At its peak, the floodplain now below the Gulf would have been about the size of Great Britain, and then shrank as water began to flood the area. Then, about 8,000 years ago, the land would have been swallowed up by the Indian Ocean, the review scientist said.

The study, which is detailed in the December issue of the journal Current Anthropology, has broad implications for aspects of human history. For instance, scientists have debated over when early modern humans exited Africa, with dates as early as 125,000 years ago and as recent as 60,000 years ago (the more recent date is the currently accepted paradigm), according to study researcher Jeffrey Rose, an archaeologist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. Read full story from livescience.com

Rooting for swarm intelligence in plants
They’re underfoot and underappreciated. But the roots of a plant may demonstrate the remarkable wisdom of crowds just as swarms of honeybees or humans can.

Three plant scientists now propose that roots growing this way and that in their dark and dangerous soil world may fit a definition for what’s called swarm intelligence. Each tip in a root system acquires information at least partly independently, says plant cell biologist František Baluška of the University of Bonn in Germany. If that information gets processed in interactions with other roots and the whole tangle then solves what might be considered a cognitive problem in a way that a lone root couldn’t, he says, then that would be swarm intelligence. Read full story from sciencenews.org

Now Playing: Geminid Meteor Showers, Year’s Best Sky Show
The annual Geminid shower is about to hit its peak, with anywhere from 60 to 100 meteors zooming across the night sky each hour between midnight tonight and dawn on Tuesday.

The weeklong shower is easily visible to the naked eye and is the best in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Associated Press calls the meteors (or shooting stars) “rocky celestial leftovers.” Earth passes through this stream of debris from 3200 Phaethon, which is considered an extinct comet, every December. Read full story from aolnews.com

Druid leader calls for Judicial Review on excavation of remains
DRUID leader King Arthur Pendragon went to The Royal Courts of Justice in London last week in a bid to see the return of cremated human remains taken from Stonehenge in 2008.

The Senior Druid and Pagan Priest presented a 36-page document asking for a Judicial Review on the decision by the Minister of Justice to grant Sheffield University an extension to retain the remains for five years.

King Arthur said: ‘This is not just a Druid or Pagan issue, and we have the support of thousands of people from all walks of life from nations around the world and all the major faiths, who have signed our petition demanding that the remains be re-interred at what should have been their final resting place. Read full story from salsburyjournal.co.uk

Challenge to Chillicothe council prayer should strengthen, not diminish, faith community
Another year, another civil liberties fight in the Scioto Valley.

Two years ago, a practicing Wiccan who was about to graduate from Southeastern Local Schools asked the district to eliminate the prayer at the graduation ceremony. Prayer went ahead as scheduled, and nothing more was said.

About a month later, it was the city of Greenfield — which had for years begun its city council meetings with a prayer that usually ended with “in Jesus’ name, Amen” — threatened with a lawsuit by The American Civil Liberties Union to stop the prayer. The practice was changed shortly thereafter. Read full story from chillicothegazette.com

Sarah Palin visits Haiti with Christian group (source cnn)

Fox News: Parents Outraged Over School Book Portraying Jesus as a “Socialist”

Fareed Zakaria: Glenn Beck wrong about 10 percent of Muslims being terrorists (source cnn)