In the Garden - Anne Murray

George Pell Defends John Paul II’s Corruption - Australia

I heard about this 95 Theses quality document mentioned in an Easter condemnation of it by the neo-conic, defense of priest pedophiles at any cost ($), George Cardinal Pell of Sydney Australia.

Consider a full read of this historic document. 

The People of God, retake your church from the abomination currently in charge of your hierarchy before it is too late.

Reflections on an Ordination Golden Anniversary

“…Power corrupts. The history of the papacy shows this pre-eminently. Unchecked potentates believe their own propaganda. Taken to the extreme, they claim infallibility. Pius IX bullied Vatican I into institutionalizing such a claim. Since then creeping infallibility has resulted in the pope and his theologically limited curia stealing the term “magisterium” from its real owners – the college of professional theologians. How can you conscientiously give assent of mind and heart to policies formed without theological debate, consultation, transparency or accountability? In contemporary government and business this would be judged unethical.

“ John Paul’s lust for power showed very early and was taken to monumental proportions. Accountable to nobody, John Paul moved against any opinion other than his own and removed many exponents of alternative opinions from teaching and publishing. His most powerful enforcer was the Ratzinger-led Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). Other Roman dicasteries joined the campaign.

“The CDF is the current euphemism for the Inquisition. True to its mediaeval roots, it assumes the pope to be entitled to enforce his views. It conducts its delations and proceedings in secret. In today’s secular world this is a violation of human rights. …

“All of us are abused by this process. The priest at the coal face is not consulted, yet is contemptuously expected to defend policies he and his people do not believe.

“John Paul II also enforced much of his own devotional life on the church at large. Despite Vatican II he effectively stopped the third rite of Penance, reversed a burgeoning dynamic theology of Eucharist by reverting to and re-emphasising devotion to the static Real Presence, reinforced a distorted devotion to Mary based on fundamentalist theology and introduced peculiar devotions such as Sr. Faustina’s Divine Mercy Devotion which undercuts Easter – the climax of our liturgical year.

“A more grievous abuse of power by John Paul II was his appointment of bishops. Appointees were to be clerical, compliant and in total agreement with his personal opinions. This has emasculated the leadership of the Church. The episcopal ranks are now low on creativity, leadership, education and even intelligence. Many are from the ranks of Opus Dei – reactionary, authoritarian and decidedly not creative…. 

“A newly critical laity questions policy but receives no answers. Why can’t women be leaders in the Church? Why do priests have to be celibate? What is wrong with contraception? Why alienate remarried divorcees? Why this salacious preoccupation with sexual mores? Why are scientific advances always suspected of being bad? Why can’t we recognise the reality of homosexual orientation – and the social consequences of that recognition? Have we learnt nothing from the Galileo case – or the treatment of Teilhard de Chardin? Can’t we escape the Syllabus of Errors mentality?

“Benedict XVI has continued the reversal of Vatican II. He is imposing a new English translation of the Sacramentary on a resisting English speaking constituency. This may very well backfire because many priests are not going to implement it. Benedict has received back bishops from the schismatic Society of St Pius X. He has encouraged the Tridentine Mass in Latin. He has reintroduced kneeling for communion on the tongue at his public Masses – all deliberate key pointers to regression from the spirit of Vatican II. To the priests who embraced Vatican II they are iconic insults….”

Happy Birthday Goddess – Aphrodite/Venus

I am told that the earth goddess is hundreds of thousands of years old in human civilization but that the legend of Aphrodite, the Greek name, Venus, the Roman name, of the goddess of love, born off Cyrus, is close to ten thousand years old.


That her real birthday is supposed to be sometime in the month of September, the 8^th or 26^th, 7989 B.C.E.?


Happy ten thousandth plus or minus a few months and or centuries.  


The thing missing with all these johnny come lately monotheistic male only gods is a sense of the eternal feminine.  Aphrodite/Venus is perhaps due for a return as part of the human equation of the new global culture.

Aphrodite/Venus

"Foam-arisen" Aphrodite was born of the sea foam near Paphos, Cyprus after Cronus severed Uranus' genitals and threw them behind him into the sea, while the Erinyes emerged from the drops of blood. Hesiod's Theogony described that the genitals "were carried over the sea a long time, and white foam arose from the immortal flesh; with it a girl grew" to become Aphrodite. Aphrodite floated in on a scallop shell. When she arose, she was hailed as "Cyprian," and is referred to as such often, especially in the poetic works of Sappho. This myth of a fully mature Venus (the Roman name for Aphrodite), Venus Anadyomene ("Venus Rising From the Sea") was one of the iconic representations of Aphrodite, made famous in a much-admired painting by Apelles, now lost, but described in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder…”

Infamous – Do Not Touch the Children!

Here’s a story that never made it to the Lame Stream American Media.  Found it on a  Jehovah Witness site.  Searched around a bit to find a more legitimate looking media source.  Could not believe that this story never made it to these shores.  Oh well, what else is new?

My article title is a translation from Italian of what no doubt angry parishioners wrote on the wall of the pedophile priest’s church. 


Priest Sex-Abuse Case Hits Church of Pope's Adviser 

(GENOA) — The latest sex-abuse case to rock the Catholic Church is unfolding in the archdiocese of an influential Italian Cardinal who has been working with Pope Benedict XVI on reforms to respond to prior scandals of pedophile priests.

Father Riccardo Seppia, a 51-year-old parish priest in the village of Sastri Ponente, near Genoa, was arrested last Friday, May 13, on pedophilia and drug charges. Investigators say that in tapped mobile-phone conversations, Seppia asked a Moroccan drug dealer to arrange sexual encounters with young and vulnerable boys. "I do not want 16-year-old boys but younger. Fourteen-year-olds are O.K. Look for needy boys who have family issues," he allegedly said.

Genoa Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco, who is the head of the Italian Bishops Conference, had been working with Benedict to establish a tough new worldwide policy, released this week, on how bishops should handle accusations of priestly sex abuse. 

Worldwide policy?  How about your own backyard folks?

And so it goes.  Sadly.

Islam is as American as Apple Pie!

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A “Christian” who hates is not a Christian!


Separation of Church, Synagogue, Mosque, Temple and State forever!


God Bless the United States Constitution!


God Bless all the People of America - living here now!


Don't let the fundamentalist Haters over there or sadly here too, as well, divide us! 

Christian Terrorist Reaches Out to Cardinal Pell

From a dying church came words of comfort for a self proclaimed born again Christian Terrorist Anders Breivik of Norway.  Cardinal Pell is quoted in Breivik’s lunatic manifesto along with other Islamophobe Australian politicians. 


“In my own reading of the Koran, I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages.”  Archbishop George Pell, Sydney


There are literally dozens and dozens of blogs and news sites prior to last week’s human tragedy that quote Cardinal Pell’s anti-Islamic words as the basis of articles reinforcing the worldwide corporate political campaign feeding the growing Islamophobia of this dying western culture.


Pell, an arch conservative in the RC church, was until recently in line to be in charge of all the RC bishops worldwide to clean up corruption.  Whispers of Pell’s own brush with sex abuse charges from 1961 are discrediting him behind Vatican closed doors.  Pity?  He may not be guilty on that count.


It is a pity that his hate words against Islam are not the thing that would have kept him from getting the Vatican posting.


I am reminded of a line from the Priest’s Daily Office or Breviary that RC priests are supposed to read everyday under pain of mortal sin for not doing so.


“Happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks!” Psalm 137:9


“Christian violence against any perceived enemy cannot be considered a sin or crime.” (Constantine the Great ?)


Every other paragraph in the bible regarding King David, a supposed ancestor of Jesus, is one long litany of “invocations to violence”. 



Perhaps Cardinal Pell is a hypocrite or is he your typical catholic and has not read his own user manual – the bible?


In any case, I think, George might be a very misunderstood and unappreciated cleric doing his duty to God and himself as he sees fits.


I hereby award George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney Australia, the first annual


Australian Sheep-Shagger Award (2011)


for services performed in the name of humanity and in spite of humanity’s sake for his words of encouragement to all the confused Breiviks of this world. 


You have done more than your share to return the global culture back to the stone age. 


Thanks – but really no thanks dude!


Have a nice day George and a well earned retirement to obscurity.


Love.  Peace.  Brotherhood. (and all that other Islamic jazz)

Jesus Unfriended by his Brother James on Facebook

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Ran into some Cristian blog all big and slick.


They had some big article about this Norweigen Timothy McVeigh type, cannot pronounce and will not write his evil name here. In all charity, he is probably mentally ill and plugged into too much modern technology – and definitely into the inhumanity sound bite hubris of poison dwarf Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdock’s antichrist Fox News.


Does Fox News broadcast in Norway in Norwegian? I have to wonder.


Well anyway, like the reverse against human logic that goes on over at Fox, this Cristian blog site was dissing me indirectly.  Somebody was quoting from the Arian manifesto that Norwegian Crazy-O had supposedly written.


Then here comes the kicker to me.  Something, logic(?), like if the Norwegian Crazy-O had been a “religious Christian” instead of a “cultural Christian”, Crazy-O would not, could not have murdered so many innocent people. 


Bullshit!  Crazy. Crazy. Crazy.


MY CRAZY CHRISTIAN GOD IS BETTER THAN YOUR CRAZY CHRISTIAN GOD etc. 


Some born again moron just unfriended me and my Cultural Christian label.


Hey if you don’t like me, tough shit a-hole. I am a better Christian than you and I can prove it.  I won’t nuke you to prove it.  Which seems to reflect the attitudes and lack of civility that is the undercurrent culture of the High Technology Idol of this new virtual, cold, bloodless, humanless age. 


And without trying to identify myself with any Jesus type, I am like totally far from it - that is what I feel has been going on from the beginning of time with the elevation of tribal gods to the supreme farce of Yahweh, Jesus/god, and Allah -


A lot of bickering over the value of nothing - the so called value of God - the absolute zero (for want, lack of a true number) of all things as we humans try to perceive the universe and our place in it. 


The true value in life is friendship and tolerance.  Instead of talking quietly and friendly over the back fence with our neighbors, many of us are screaming into our cell/mobile phones leaving nasty messages and do not even know the names of our brothers and sisters who literally live right next door to us.


I cannot talk for the people in Norway, but I do know what destroyed the town square of my youth in Philadelphia. It was scared white people running away from black people.  And when sex starved catholic priests should have been preaching love and tolerance and brotherhood and humanity, they were screaming about abortion, starting a jihad, a culture war as an agenda ploy of the Pollack cardinal ’s supreme ambition to be pope.  Oh well, spilled milk.


It has taken me twenty four hours to calm down and realize that the “Christian brand” in America since the seventies is part of some right wing conspiracy, real or imagined, to turn charity and brotherhood back into profit and slavery. Whatever.


James, the supposed brother of Jesus, is mentioned by the Roman/Jewish historian Josephus.  The whole thing of James briefly mentioned in the gospels and or Acts is retrofitted cut and paste to make up a resume for the late great Jesus, whoever and whatever he was.  Too bad the people around him did not bother to pay much attention to him while he was here.


I do believe him great and he lived by the Golden Rule.


I wish some of us could do the same and on a global scale here and now.


Instead of what passes for humanity and or the piles and piles and piles of religion these days:


Dogma, dogma, dogma. 
Godma, godma, godma. 
Blahma. Blahma. Blahma. 
Blah. Blah. Blah. 
(chorus)


Enjoy the day God gave you and me. 


This in spite of all the crazies out there all my dear brothers and sisters in Jesus’ name everywhere.  

Pray for the people of Norway and their tragic loss. 
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Footprints of Jesus - Gay Marriage in New York

On this official first day of New York State’s Equal Rights Marriage Law for same sex couples, I ran into this document, perhaps guided by the great spirit.


Apparently, long before the Christian Right Haters got together with their manufactured  “Christian” Public Relations Sharia document of the Manhattan Declaration, there were some divinely inspired souls out west, ahead of the humanity curve, who came together and write The Phoenix Declaration.


No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice



The Phoenix Declaration

“We stand in solidarity as those who are committed to work and pray for full acceptance and inclusion of GLBT persons in our churches and in our world. GLBT persons are condemned and excluded by individuals and institutions, political and religious, who claim to be speaking the truth of Christian teaching. This leads directly and indirectly to intolerance, discrimination, suffering, and even death. Political and religious rhetoric has monopolized the public perception of the stance of Christian persons on this issue. This stance continues to cripple the spirit of innocent people. The Christian faith compels us to be part of the healing for the souls wounded by this tragic, violent, and destructive hatred. Therefore:

We stand with the countless Christian ministers, scholars, and laity who, from prayerful study of the scriptures and Christian tradition, find no rational biblical or theological basis to condemn or deny the rights of any person based on sexual orientation. The essence of Christian life is not focused on sexual orientation, but how one lives in relationship with God with compassion toward humanity….”

Long before there were words on any paper, there was Jesus in the flesh, preaching and practicing his special humanity. 

You cannot fit Jesus’ heart onto any piece of paper or into any book(s). It is just too big.

(Sadly, the American culture war, or war on humanity, continues.) 

Historic Beginnings of American Culture War – Philadelphia – 1970s

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I had a nightmare last night.  I dreamt that State Senator Martin P. Mullen had come back from hell to inflict more inhumane legislation on not only the people of Pennsylvania but the whole planet.


I don’t know how the culture war in America took shape in various other parts of the country, but like New Hampshire where the shot heard round the world that supposedly started our American Revolution, the culture war in America has no better historic model than Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the 1970s.


I drift back forty years to the point where I, as an eighteen year old, decided that I did not want to hear anymore boiler plate sermons about Satan from the local priest in Philadelphia and I never set foot in that church again.


All around me was a world where the War in Vietnam was wrapped in a flag.  That fucking war was so important to all the middle aged losers who hated their lives and had served so faithfully and or really had no choice but serve in World War Two. 


The basic cultural war in the minds of Philadelphians then, if you were young, was if your draft number would come up and you would have to serve, fight in a war that made absolutely no logical sense. 


On another level, there was the creeping fear that blacks would try to cross the invisible border, south on Lehigh Avenue, and try to invade your beautiful turn of the century row house paradise, built for factory workers. 


Oh there were factories in the neighborhood, and they employed blacks, but in retrospect I can remember all the blacks lined up at the 5 bus stop after work waiting to get back to wherever it was that they lived outside our perfect white lower middle class bubble existence.  In retrospect, the image of Apartheid comes to mind and is superimposed on those distant scenes.


I have seen or heard comments from people who lived there at the same time.  The thing that destroyed Philly, they usually say, was “Section 8” housing, which is of course code talk for racism and welfare.


In a way, the inability of people to recognize and love your neighbor is what destroyed that old Currier & Ives idealized brain image of the slums where I grew up in Kensington - Harrowgate in Philly.


Where was I? Oh yes, the war, the blacks and yeah Vatican II.  Well Vatican II did not change anything in a neighborhood of mixed Irish and I-talian catholics.  Oh there were protestants out there.  We saw their churches dotting the landscape.  Never saw who entered those houses of worship on Sundays.  Didn’t care.  The predominant local culture was of Irish Catholic factory workers and Irish Catholic churches and schools.



In a way, my parents were intelligent, and liberal.  They got into the ideal that blacks should have equal rights.  But somewhere along the timeline, people like my parents got scared about what they saw on the tube with black militant groups, war protestors and the rapid decline of a normal society into chaos around 1968.  They never told me directly but my so called liberal parents voted for George Wallace in 1968,  I figured that out later along the timeline.


I guess I stayed there, going along my own liberal timeline, and did not realize how secular I was and in relation to terms of also being a Catholic from birth.  Did not feel the difference until they shot Martin Luther King.


I can remember to this day, the priest Father Locke, freshly minted from the seminary, stumbling for words, almost apologetically, from the pulpit that next Sunday, stating something to the effect that he did not know if it would be proper but would not forbid personal prayers for a Protestant (after all, only Catholics go to heaven- your prayers are probably wasted on him), for the slain civil rights leader.  Huh?


It was there that I got the clue that maybe Catholics were not really Christians like people like MLK who called themselves Christian.  Christian was not a word I heard often in the first eighteen years of a Catholic life.  I heard the word but in conjunction with other words like Christian Doctrine etc.


(An aside - Reminds me of my own Irish Catholic joke I told to a former boss in the 1980s, also Irish Catholic – “I was twenty-one before I realized that Protestant and bastard were two separate words.” – My boss howled in laughter.)


Oh yeah, getting back to Vatican II, I wrote some thoughts on that in my earliest blogs here, but let me get to the point and back to my nightmare about the late great Martin Mullen of the Pennsylvania State Legislature.


Pennsylvania on a map may look like an east coast type of place.  But like the famous political advisor said and is quoted.  “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”  I have already shared a few thoughts above on my cosmopolitan cultural upbringing in Philly. There was that other thing, the sex thing and the RC church confusion about birth control.


Paul VI brought out his Zero Tolerance document on birth control.  Like all life in general, most of us just stumbled into ways of dealing with our own individual sexuality.  (No user manual necessary.)


The cultural war in Philly and Pennsy had a pie-eyed, drunk on his own arrogance and self importance, fanatic in the form of Martin Mullen who suddenly was on the black and white TV screen, the chosen mouthpiece of John Cardinal Krol and his decision to bring Pennsylvania under the recent Catholic Sharia Law (Humanae Vitae) on human sexuality. 


PENNSYLVANIA: Bitter Abortion Battle

Mullen, backed by equally conservative John Cardinal Krol and his Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, decided that the state, with its 35% Catholic population, was natural terrain to make a stand against the trend to more liberal laws on public morality. The battle was joined over the issue of abortion. To counter a liberal abortion bill, the conservatives proposed a bill of their own that outlawed abortion altogether except when a panel of three physicians certified that the mother's life was endangered. It made no allowance for victims of rape, incest or mental illness. Supporting the conservative bill, the Catholic Conference ran a long and costly campaign that included weekly pictures of truncated fetuses and aborted embryos on Page One of the Cathotic Standard &Times, the official organ of the archdiocese of Philadelphia. Last June the campaign paid off: the liberal bill was easily defeated, and the conservative bill was adopted by both houses and sent to Shapp for his signature. Mullen warned the Governor that if he attempted to stop the bill through veto or pocket veto he would run against him in the Democratic primary next year.  

While Shapp mulled over what to do, the protest and counterprotest boiled on. In an unusual turn, Patricia Arney, 32, a divorcee who is a district Democratic committeewoman, revealed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that State Senator Henry J. Cianfrani, 49, one of the conservative bill's strongest supporters, had paid for her abortion in 1970 while they were having an affair, and produced a receipt for his check to prove it. He did not deny their relationship, but said that he had given her the money to visit her family in Toledo and did not know that there had been an abortion. Though the disclosure caused yowls of protest on the floor of the state senate, letters to the Inquirer ran 10 to 1 in favor of Arney's blow against hypocrites.  

Last week Shapp, calling the bill "unsound, unenforceable and totally unfair," vetoed it. Mullen failed to muster the three-fourths majority necessary to override the veto, leaving the state functionally without an abortion law of any kind, since lower courts have declared the present statute unconstitutionally vague and appeals are pending. With that, Mullen sounded the charge for his race against Shapp next spring, which could be among the bitterest elections in Pennsylvania's history: he called the Governor's veto the result of a "paganistic, atheistic philosophy."

In reality, few states had laws to deal with archaic or non-existent laws to deal with modern technology and recent developments in birth control.

Somewhere along the timeline, the culture war on birth control became the culture war on abortion.  The discussion regarding sexuality was not about choice in the form of birth control methods to prevent pregnancy, it became all about abortion and the strategy and the rhetoric of Krol’s hand puppet to the media in the 1970s has not changed much to this day IMHO.

My leaving my local church, not the People of God, when I was eighteen was also in reaction to archconservative mean spirited types shouting at you on the TV like Martin Mullen as Krol’s in front of the curtain media voice .  It was also the loss of the sermons on Satan, a chance to nod off, that got dropped on Sundays and propaganda spiels from the pulpit that you had to pick up the mimeographed letter to your state legislature in the church lobby, copy it in your own handwriting, and mail it to show that you were in favor of the most current Martin Mullen anti-sexuality law pending in Harrisburg.  Model – Modus Operandi – set for the American future landscape.  Pity.

I have read many a Catholic blog lately and the ones that aren’t praising, drooling on,  the guys in red are the ones that wonder why priests these days don’t bother to deliver a decent homily.  Considering what I know, the truth is that the thought police might hear something like love or tolerance being advocated and send off a letter to the bishop to complain about dogmatic incorrectness that would get back to the priest and rather than get slapped down, why bother to preach anymore. 

After all, isn’t it all just about the ritual and the consecrated bread? (And the collection plate?)

The American culture wars are far from over.  The best, I fear, is yet to come.

Dinosaur Belt – Alabama to Idaho – Women - Disentitlement - Disenfranchisement

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There are places on this planet and in the United States I would not like to live.  They are places here where the local legislatures want to legislate their own regional (?), personal (?), morality (?).


There are places in the USA where dinosaurs never died out it would seem, or at least they have been sighted in living memory, like in the past 6,000 years, places in the center of the continent, places from Texas north to the Canadian border.   It is a place I label as the Dinosaur Belt in geographic terms.


We all know what cokehead Sigmund Freud said about anatomy “being destiny”. But should a drug addict with a PhD. know or have the final word on the evolution of half the human species?


In the spirit of the myth of the gift of “free choice” that the Christians attribute to coming from their mean spirited desert god (with a penis), some recently fallen legislatures in the 2010 election, some holier than thou class of Christian legislators (not all Christians are this insane, including myself), are legislating what you can or cannot do with a women’s vagina. 


The Cultural War in America, to paraphrase cokehead Freud, starts and ends with a woman’s right to choose control over various aspects of her anatomy, and is simply a matter of geography these days.


Don’t know what is in the fracked drinking water in these states but it is more than likely the GOP/Church Party and its race to the past, is somehow mixing metaphors, mixing morality with science, mixing old fashioned common sense with online video games (Grand Theft Women’s Rights)  – whatever – I don’t know.


In any case, some of this legislation to Frack women’s rights with a combination of Geo. Bush (I&II) along with methamphetamine lab residue and a need for a cheap natural Viagra like product - puts some of these new and proposed anti-vagina legislative  laws in a league of their own, out there in the Dinosaur Belt from Alabama to Idaho.


Some of this old time religion mixed with Doctor Frankenstein science scares the shit out of me.  Perhaps I am overly sensitive or just merely human. 


10 States With the Most Shocking Anti-Woman Legislation

Alabama, considered by NARAL to be at the bottom of the list in reproductive rights, has decided that worst isn’t bad enough. The legislature is considering a “personhood” law that would define fertilized eggs as persons. Laws like this not only threaten abortion rights, but could also be used to ban in-vitro fertilization, prevent non-sterilized women from holding certain jobs, be used to prosecute pregnant and potentially pregnant women for drinking and smoking, and be used to deny even life-saving medical care to women. (North Dakota's similar bill bars doctors from killing fertilized eggs, even during medically necessary care.) One of the most likely results of bills like this is that doctors will be forbidden from treating ectopic pregnancies with drugs, and will be forced to wait until a patient’s ovary explodes before administering treatment, putting the patient in danger of death. Anti-choice activists also hope to use misinformation campaigns that claim the birth control pill is “abortion” (actually, it works by suppressing ovulation) in order to use personhood bills to ban the pill.

For people who basically don’t believe, respect or even understand science, these dangerous little men in state legislatures nationwide in the Dinosaur Belt are enough to give sane people nightmares considering the scope and potential of these matters at hand  in the degrading directly the rights of women and indirectly degrading my rights to live in a free and democratic society. 

Bible pages burned - Wales Art Pageant

Church in Wales inquiry after rector burns Bible pages

The Reverend Geraint ap Iorwerth of St Peter ad Vincula Church, Pennal, also cut up pages from the King James Bible to create an artwork. 

Unveiling it at a church event, he said it revealed a "cruel and vile God"… 

Mr ap Iorwerth told BBC Wales he had burnt scraps of cut up the passages at the public event because he had been making a statement as part of an art experiment. 

He said he had had nothing but support from people at the church near Machynlleth, close to the Gwynedd-Powys border.

He revealed his controversial piece of art at an event to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. 

He said: "I find it highly offensive that people would think I have given my life to serving that type of God and that I would regard the words of the King James Bible as sacred truth.

"I cut out all the nasty bits of that Bible, the language of which is being celebrated all over the place this year, because I don't think you can separate that language from the God it is representing. 

I cut out all the nasty bits of that Bible, the language of which is being celebrated all over the place this year” 

"I was gobsmacked no programmes or articles are representing the cruelty, revenge and hatred of this version of God."

Melody Gardot - Les Estoiles - Quiet Fire

Rupert Murdoch also publishes Bibles

Papal Knight Rupert Murdoch apparently owns a large chunk of the Bible market, the largest share worldwide. 

Rupert Murdoch: Bible Mogul

Most people know now that Rupert Murdoch presides over the News Corp media empire, and that he is fighting for his reputation after being forced to sink his scandal-laiden British newspaper News of the World, the most widely read English tabloid in the world. But few people know that Murdoch also owns Zondervan, the world's largest publisher of Bibles. For 23 years, the News Corp family has included the leading seller of the best-selling book in history...

Zondervan, which is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, also sells Precious Princess Bible, Camo Bible (imagine "Holy Bible" on a camouflage cover), Soul Surfer Bible, Holy Bible: Stock Car Racing and 500 other styles of the holy book. The company owns exclusive North American print rights to the popular New International Version of the Bible which it says has sold over 300 million copies worldwide. Zondervan also publishes books by leading Christian authors like Rick Warren (over 30 million copies of his Purpose Driven Life have been sold), Tim LaHaye, Jim Wallis, Eugene Peterson, Brian McLaren and Shane Claiborne...

Mormons more Christian than Catholics

I should perhaps put a question mark next to the above title.  But then no, I am expressing my personal opinion.  That opinion came to mind reading of a Fox News “journalist” expressing her intolerant, perhaps uneducated, opinion on that weird network.

Mormon Mitt Romney not ‘Christian,’ says Fox News host 

Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch’s personal wizard over at Fox News has had Ainsley (I’m a blonde) (yes you are!) Earhardt state that Mitt Romney is not a Christian on the show Fox and Fiends. This when playing up Rick Perry being a better GOP presidential candidate because he is "Christian" and Romney is "obviously not" in her probably prepared and scripted by Ailes response.  (obviously - four syllables - wow - Emmy time) 

Ainsley no doubt already has dreams of giving Rick Perry an exclusive softball interview on FOX with prepared questions from Roger’s “Brain Room”/bunker in the basement over there at 1211 Sixth Ave in NYC. 

Perry may or may not be a Christian, (does he know how to read) but he is a traitor of sorts in that he already has proposed secession of Texas from the union of the United States.  That’s treason in my book IMHO.

From what I have experienced in life from Roman Catholicism is that they don’t read the bible as much as they read their catechism.  From what I have read and have experienced  from knowing Mormons, is that they know more about the bible, old and new testament, than most Christians including god nutter (can he read) Rick Perry or the average Catholic.

Perhaps Ainsley’s bra is on too tight and it is affecting circulation to her brain. Is religion bashing, intolerance, ignorance ( I won’t call a possible slip of her tongue in this instance hate ) - one of her hobbies and or only talents besides reading off cue cards?

Love you Rog!

Ojibwa Prayer - Enya

Isis, Horus, Serapis - IHS - a Pagan Trinity?

I have to wonder when the Mary cult thing in the RC church got started.  It definitely was after Constantine hijacked the faith to suit his military and personal ambitions. 

In a way the mother child icon is thousands of years old.  One has to speculate that maybe all this Mary stuff comes out of Egypt.

There was that church father Cyril of Alexandria who insisted that his coinage of the phrase “Mother of God” was the perfect antidote of whatever flavor of the month heresy was spreading in the young church throughout the superstitious middle east of the time.

“Mother of God” in a way ended the – which came first, the chicken or the egg – Gnostic conundrum of the early church.  It does make Mary an equal of Jesus.  Worthy of equal worship?

A product of a virgin birth has the same DNA as the parent from which it was cloned, though apparently the sex is different.  The spiritual end of the equation or the father or the scientist involved in an experiment of the creation of a child so to speak gets as complicated then in the past, the same as similar real scenarios that exist now in science.  It’s all a matter of labeling and marketing the product, is it not?

But let’s put aside whatever religion bashing you might think that this is.  In terms of modern reality, if Isis was still a viable goddess worthy of worship by the majority of the population, a modern translation would sell better than the ancient myth. 

The modern translation of some future society that will worship Isis again after an atomic apocalypse goes something like this.  The last woman on earth went to a still operating sperm bank and obtained the frozen semen of her dead five star general husband, inseminated herself, and the human race was reborn. 

In terms of ancestor worship alone, a thousand years down the road, the Isis figure would stand out in all human culture and the story with its plausible historical sequences would be accepted as truth. 

“Mother of God” was a term the Egyptians felt comfortable with and in terms of a visual, you have the Isis Horus statue that existed all over the Roman empire from Britain to Alexandria.

In a way I am not sure there was a trinity thing in Egyptian mythology and or religion. 

The assertion by some that I.H.S., a Christogram, really represents the pagan trinity of Isis, Horus and Serapis is probably not true. 

I do find Serapis to be a fascinating god.  He was totally molded by the new Greek rulers of Egypt, the Ptolemies, descendant from Alexander’s conquest of Egypt.  The Greeks did not like the mix of animal with humans in the pantheon of Egyptian gods.  So, they invented the creature known as Serapis, mixing the name Osiris with the name of a bull god Apis.  Serapis was the dominate Egyptian male god for hundreds of years until the last days of paganism at the end of the fourth century.

No doubt when Cyril and his Christian mob took over the last remnants of  the pagan establishment, idols got broken or maybe just chipped a little.  The horns came off of Isis and the measuring cup came off Serapis’ head.  In any case, I have no doubt that the icon of Jesus to this day is really a recycled image of Serapis.  A cultural void left by Isis, mother of Horus and dad Serapis soon got filled in with the icons of the new gods of the eastern church. 

I.H.S. – I Have Suffered – Jesus H. Christ

There is one of those symbols of Christianity that has always confused me.  Nobody ever explained it to me.  I never asked.  The Catholicism of my youth was pretty much “don’t ask, don’t tell” when it came to theology.

Don’t ask and I won’t tell you - embarrass you in front of a crowd - for asking a stupid question.  People with faith or of the faith are not supposed to question anything.  Whatever.

I.H.S.  A Christogram.  From a rather tedious explanation of it from Wikipedia, it is a corrupted or poorly translated, Greek to Latin thing for the name Jesus Christ, first three letters,  in Greek or “IHCOYC XPICTOC”.  IHC though is something like “Jes” – geez.  Sounds more like a street corner nickname for old bro Jees.

Anyway, Latin of the letter I can be represented as a J.  Greek letter sigma can be represented as S or C.  So over the ages you have JHS, JHC, IHS or IHC. 

The JHC is the supposed origin of the Jesus H Christ swear thing.  IHS has always been translated on a peon level of understanding as I Have Suffered, the mantra of all good Constantine dying empire beliefs.  Suffer now and be happy later.  It’s guaranteed.

In other words, ancient and or superstitious symbolisms like Chi-Ro, XP, are iconic symbols hanging around worship places explaining a faith you have but in other languages that you so not necessarily understand. 

This whole IHS thing got a run through the corporate cash register with a medieval mystic named Beradino of Siena who wandering all over Italy stirring up local bailiwicks with his vision of IHS in the middle of  a Sunburst.  (Again, the old sun worship sub-cult of the Roman church going back to the Egyptians). 

Always a good selling point to win over the hierarchy on visions with the question of them being bona fide, if the ancient sun god is involved in the background of the sales spiel.

At least San Bernadino was only interested in selling his worship of the holy name of Jesus.  He wasn’t trying to reform anything like Father Savonarola or Father Luther.

It is remarkable how in a closed system of medieval theology, how you can come up with a way to sell indulgences and or the scraped paint off the wall so long as you have some reasonably holy person having visions and his or her conduct does not greatly interfere with the weekly collection plate thing.  Or “crisis of the purse” as they still in the Roman church discuss the whole matter of the Martin Luther cash flow thingy.

That if you die and people start huddling over your grave and miracles are attributed to you, it is somehow a sign of sainthood of the deceased.  Again, whatever.  So long as it $ells, package it.

In a closed arena of where theology, with its limits, is allowed to go, a vision carefully screened and considered, an image, an abstract of an idea can become an object of worship.  Is this, in a technical sense, just another  idol?

(Wrapping oneself in the “holy name of Jesus” is a sign of respect or just another propaganda tool used by corrupt bishops and clergy to hide crimes behind?)

Scratching an Owl

Nature break.

Philly Crime Boss Rigali Quits Amid Abuse Scandal, GOP Operative Denver Archbishop Brought In to Sway 2012 Election

In a critical move to sway the 2012 election, the cynical monarchists in the Vatican are bringing in a RNC favorite to bring order to the chaos left by crime boss Big Frank Rigali in the Philadelphia archdiocese.

Gay hating Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput is being brought in to tow the church party line of total innocence in face of the massive abuse scandal in Philly.  A man who does not supposedly believe in the separation of church and state except when the state pays his way tax-free.

A bureaucrat, who gets tax free status on his parochial school system but can reject the innocent children of a lesbian couple in his schools, a move by him and Father Bill Breslin of Boulder that is not being Christian but purely Catholic. (Nothing personal you damned to hell souls etc.)

Great going Chuck.  You reek of the redneck Jesus thing!  Who are you going to endorse – god nutter Rick Perry or Opus Dei Rick Santorum?  (Has to be a man you know – women do not have souls – do they?)

Aging Rigali is moving to his newly built retirement Mcmansion in Tennessee (not pictured above but perhaps similar).   Can’t cry poor in the abuse settlements thing and live like a king in Philly anymore in the Bishop’s mansion.

Tennessee next stop for Rigali?

Father Bill Breslin of Boulder is no doubt crying today as Chaput leaves his Colorado archdiocese.  Who can he blame his gay hate on now except himself? His enabler is leaving town. 

Father Bill Breslin and his Cafeteria Dogma 

GOP is delighted that the plan moves forward to turn blue state (2008) Pennsylvania back into RED.  With Chaput in the pulpit ready to get rid of Senator Casey, a tolerant, weak, human being, Rick Santorum, the only good Catholic man on woman left, will gladly deliver the Commonwealth back to Catholic Jesus Sharia Law.


Group of Bishops Using Influence to Oppose Kerry 

Galvanized by battles against same-sex marriage and stem cell research and alarmed at the prospect of a President Kerry - who is Catholic but supports abortion rights - these bishops and like-minded Catholic groups are blanketing churches with guides identifying abortion, gay marriage and the stem cell debate as among a handful of "non-negotiable issues." 

To the dismay of liberal Catholics and some other bishops, traditional church concerns about the death penalty or war are often not mentioned. 

Archbishop Chaput has discussed Catholic priorities in the election in 14 of his 28 columns in the free diocesan newspaper this year. His archdiocese has organized voter registration drives in more than 40 of the largest parishes in the state and sent voter guides to churches around the state. Many have committees to help turn out voters and are distributing applications for absentee ballots. 

In an interview in his residence here, Archbishop Chaput said a vote for a candidate like Mr. Kerry who supports abortion rights or embryonic stem cell research would be a sin that must be confessed before receiving Communion. 

"If you vote this way, are you cooperating in evil?" he asked. "And if you know you are cooperating in evil, should you go to confession? The answer is yes."

You may call me nuts!  But you can’t make this crazy religious shit up.  It is too strange for fiction.

And so it goes.