Two Disagreements
6 days ago
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Friday, January 13, 2012
Oh well, there's good news
Superstitious Canadians needn't fear black cats or ladders this Friday the 13th, says an injury expert.
I guess what we should really fear is the ignorance of Canadians who actually need to be told this. Damn!
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Friday, April 1, 2011
Happy now?
Angry, religious fanatics deliberately pissing off other angry, religious fanatics.
What do you think will happen?
How about 2 beheaded, and 20 murdered. And that's just to-date.
After backing off in September 2010, Terry Jones and his small group of god fearin' christian fanatics put the Koran on trial, found it guilty of crimes against humanity, and set out to make sure more violent crimes would be committed by burning a copy of the Koran and making the video public.
And some people still wonder why I and others like me are so opposed to religion. People causing murder, people committing horrible acts of violence all in the names of nonexistent beings they claim are all loving.
Go fuck yourselves, if you still think religion is harmless.
What do you think will happen?
How about 2 beheaded, and 20 murdered. And that's just to-date.
After backing off in September 2010, Terry Jones and his small group of god fearin' christian fanatics put the Koran on trial, found it guilty of crimes against humanity, and set out to make sure more violent crimes would be committed by burning a copy of the Koran and making the video public.
And some people still wonder why I and others like me are so opposed to religion. People causing murder, people committing horrible acts of violence all in the names of nonexistent beings they claim are all loving.
Go fuck yourselves, if you still think religion is harmless.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
How about getting tough on these crimes?
Remember the video of a woman tossing unwanted puppies into a river? People all over the world were outraged. You just don’t do that to puppies, people said. They are living creatures.
Have you read last week’s high profile article on how bones found near Vimy Ridge in 2003 were identified last month by a research team in Thunder Bay, ON, and now Pte. Thomas Lawless of Calgary, killed at the Ridge in 1917 can receive a proper burial, with honours? Relatives who never met him have been notified by Veterans Affairs and they will attend the service.
Did you read an article published February 17, 2011 about what are likely hundreds of children’s bodies lying unidentified in unmarked graves? You may not have seen it. It appeared in section H of the Winnipeg Free Press.
It is not a new story but it never seems to catch the attention that you would think the mass murder of children would.
You would also think that if researchers in Thunder Bay could use genetic testing to identify a man who died at Vimy Ridge in 1917, they could identify many of these bodies of children who still have living relatives who knew them. You think they would make it a priority.
But it seems that aboriginal children are like those unwanted dogs drowned in a river. Just a nuisance. Worse, even, because being human on paper at least, the deaths have to be covered up, hidden. And our oh so enlightened society has to relegate the knowledge of such murders and unmarked graves of children to the barest, faintest reaches of our peripheral thoughts. Things of nightmare, to be sure. Don’t look, don’t talk about it, and for god’s sake (and here I use the name of that mythical deity intentionally), don’t stir up the dirt that hides the horrors.
No one knows how many children died in residential schools. No one knows how many graves were dug for them.
Chilling. Horrible. So where are the cries of outrage? The demand for justice? The kindly, compassionate folk who understand that living relatives of these murdered children deserve to know what happened and should have the chance to bury their dead?
Research at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is underway to get a grip on the approximate number of missing children and unmarked graves at residential schools in Canada, including on the Prairies.
There is no doubt that many of these children died from neglect, and little doubt that more than a few were murdered. In any event, when dealing with so many bodies lying in unmarked graves, and knowing that many of those responsible for the deaths are walking free right now, these deaths should be investigated as any other deaths would, not handled as an historical dig managed by a Commission that so far has had little support and no authority to enforce.
But hey, it’s not like they’re white kids, right?
"We are, quite frankly, not going to be able to say how many children died in the schools or say where they are all buried, and what happened to them after they died," Sinclair said recently at the commission's downtown Winnipeg offices. Nevertheless, he said it's essential to tackle the issue as part of the residential schools legacy.
Part of the legacy? How about tackling it for what it is - brutal crimes of neglect, rape, and murder of numerous children taken by force from their families?
While residential school deaths may have been reported, there are few death certificates attached to student files in old archives. Finding out what happened to each child would involve matching church and government records to Vital Statistics files.
This tells us a lot about how governments and churches of those decades considered aboriginals to be less entitled to rights than non-natives. That those same churches and governments are treating this matter as a historical event that may eventually require some sort of resolution tells us that little has changed.
The commission hopes to have enough information to suggest further research and ways to commemorate the graves.
A nice plaque or two providing a lovely photo op for some bastard politician to appear somewhat human.
"We've heard stories from survivors that babies were born in the schools to mothers who'd been impregnated by teachers and by priests. They say their babies were taken away. They think their babies were killed," Sinclair said. "We don't know the extent to which that occurred, if at all."
OK. Stop. Enough with the euphemisms. Impregnated? No, these were children. That makes it rape, every damn time.
Teachers and priests. Well, wingnuts, at least they didn’t let the children have abortions, right? They rape the kids, take away the living, crying baby that resulted from their rape crime, and...murder it.
Teachers and priests. God-fearin’ folk to want to take the savage out of The Savage. Drive out the heathen beliefs and insert the holy ghost. You know, civilize them, teach them the good ways of the white, enlightened society, and have them embrace that loving god while following the teachings of christianity.
I realize that atheists also commit child rape and murder, but they are held accountable for their crimes, and they don’t have an entire sheltered religion enabling further crimes and covering up past ones for them.
In a YouTube broadcast posted this month, Favel, now an elderly woman, describes her hard life as a child in residential school. She recalls the day she saw school staff carry a newborn baby wrapped in pink through the kitchen and into the adjacent furnace room.
..."They took that baby into the... furnace room and burned it alive. You could smell the flesh cooking," Favel says, her voice soft but clear.
Gotta protect those priests. Have to protect the name of their god. Can’t have people thinking badly of them because, you know, religion does a lot of good, right? Like bring enlightenment and christianity to aboriginals?
In 1944, a priest levelled the rest of the cemetery, removing all traces of it, according to an elder interviewed by the working group who had attended the school as a child in the 1940s.
That’s the christian way, isn’t it? Just remove all traces of past crimes, move on, and preach to others on morality.
Crimes were committed. That doesn’t suggest we should reconcile a damn thing. It demands we investigate aggressively and hold those responsible for the rapes, deaths, murders, and cover-ups accountable in courts of law.
And all efforts should be made to identify every single child’s remains, determine how that child died, notify families, and provide support for a proper burial which family can attend. Just like was done for Pte. Thomas Lawless of Calgary.
Have you read last week’s high profile article on how bones found near Vimy Ridge in 2003 were identified last month by a research team in Thunder Bay, ON, and now Pte. Thomas Lawless of Calgary, killed at the Ridge in 1917 can receive a proper burial, with honours? Relatives who never met him have been notified by Veterans Affairs and they will attend the service.
Did you read an article published February 17, 2011 about what are likely hundreds of children’s bodies lying unidentified in unmarked graves? You may not have seen it. It appeared in section H of the Winnipeg Free Press.
It is not a new story but it never seems to catch the attention that you would think the mass murder of children would.
You would also think that if researchers in Thunder Bay could use genetic testing to identify a man who died at Vimy Ridge in 1917, they could identify many of these bodies of children who still have living relatives who knew them. You think they would make it a priority.
But it seems that aboriginal children are like those unwanted dogs drowned in a river. Just a nuisance. Worse, even, because being human on paper at least, the deaths have to be covered up, hidden. And our oh so enlightened society has to relegate the knowledge of such murders and unmarked graves of children to the barest, faintest reaches of our peripheral thoughts. Things of nightmare, to be sure. Don’t look, don’t talk about it, and for god’s sake (and here I use the name of that mythical deity intentionally), don’t stir up the dirt that hides the horrors.
No one knows how many children died in residential schools. No one knows how many graves were dug for them.
Research at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is underway to get a grip on the approximate number of missing children and unmarked graves at residential schools in Canada, including on the Prairies.
There is no doubt that many of these children died from neglect, and little doubt that more than a few were murdered. In any event, when dealing with so many bodies lying in unmarked graves, and knowing that many of those responsible for the deaths are walking free right now, these deaths should be investigated as any other deaths would, not handled as an historical dig managed by a Commission that so far has had little support and no authority to enforce.
But hey, it’s not like they’re white kids, right?
"We are, quite frankly, not going to be able to say how many children died in the schools or say where they are all buried, and what happened to them after they died," Sinclair said recently at the commission's downtown Winnipeg offices. Nevertheless, he said it's essential to tackle the issue as part of the residential schools legacy.
Part of the legacy? How about tackling it for what it is - brutal crimes of neglect, rape, and murder of numerous children taken by force from their families?
While residential school deaths may have been reported, there are few death certificates attached to student files in old archives. Finding out what happened to each child would involve matching church and government records to Vital Statistics files.
This tells us a lot about how governments and churches of those decades considered aboriginals to be less entitled to rights than non-natives. That those same churches and governments are treating this matter as a historical event that may eventually require some sort of resolution tells us that little has changed.
The commission hopes to have enough information to suggest further research and ways to commemorate the graves.
A nice plaque or two providing a lovely photo op for some bastard politician to appear somewhat human.
"We've heard stories from survivors that babies were born in the schools to mothers who'd been impregnated by teachers and by priests. They say their babies were taken away. They think their babies were killed," Sinclair said. "We don't know the extent to which that occurred, if at all."
OK. Stop. Enough with the euphemisms. Impregnated? No, these were children. That makes it rape, every damn time.
Teachers and priests. Well, wingnuts, at least they didn’t let the children have abortions, right? They rape the kids, take away the living, crying baby that resulted from their rape crime, and...murder it.
Teachers and priests. God-fearin’ folk to want to take the savage out of The Savage. Drive out the heathen beliefs and insert the holy ghost. You know, civilize them, teach them the good ways of the white, enlightened society, and have them embrace that loving god while following the teachings of christianity.
I realize that atheists also commit child rape and murder, but they are held accountable for their crimes, and they don’t have an entire sheltered religion enabling further crimes and covering up past ones for them.
In a YouTube broadcast posted this month, Favel, now an elderly woman, describes her hard life as a child in residential school. She recalls the day she saw school staff carry a newborn baby wrapped in pink through the kitchen and into the adjacent furnace room.
..."They took that baby into the... furnace room and burned it alive. You could smell the flesh cooking," Favel says, her voice soft but clear.
Gotta protect those priests. Have to protect the name of their god. Can’t have people thinking badly of them because, you know, religion does a lot of good, right? Like bring enlightenment and christianity to aboriginals?
In 1944, a priest levelled the rest of the cemetery, removing all traces of it, according to an elder interviewed by the working group who had attended the school as a child in the 1940s.
That’s the christian way, isn’t it? Just remove all traces of past crimes, move on, and preach to others on morality.
Crimes were committed. That doesn’t suggest we should reconcile a damn thing. It demands we investigate aggressively and hold those responsible for the rapes, deaths, murders, and cover-ups accountable in courts of law.
And all efforts should be made to identify every single child’s remains, determine how that child died, notify families, and provide support for a proper burial which family can attend. Just like was done for Pte. Thomas Lawless of Calgary.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
That’s some magic spell
Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can’t explain why the tide goes in.” - Bill O’Reilly, while declaring that such unexplained, magical events are the basis for his belief in an invisible sky monster.
O’Reilly isn’t alone in his avoidance of reality in favour of grasping at sorcery to spoon feed him answers to everything.
Pope Benedict has asked Catholic priests to do a better job preparing people for marriage, saying that no one has an automatic right to wed.
But a bunch of old guys who have never been married are the best people to decide who is fit to marry, and who isn’t.
Because they have their magic book, their spells, and a direct line of communication with the invisible sky monster. You know, the one who uses magic to make tides go in and tides go out.
That’s some spell they cast over people like O’Reilly who trip over themselves to bow at the feet of these old bachelors in their wizard robes. Despite ongoing reports of child rape committed by the men in funny clothes, some people still hand the most important decisions of their lives over to them.
How can any sane person believe that leaders of a group which claims to have taken vows of celibacy and has no experience of the day to day struggles that married couples face trust such out of touch people to decide whether or not they should marry?
How can they even consider the words of people who preach celibacy as a virtue but rape and shelter rapists in their own group?
That is far more difficult to explain that why tides go in and tides go out.
We are an amazing species, capable of manipulating our environment, able to do long-term planning, capable of spatial/time thinking. We wake up each day knowing we are free to make choices and decisions that will shape our day, our future, yet some of us cheerily hand over this freedom to those old guys in dresses who can’t even follow their own doctrines and laws.
I’ve heard many people try to excuse religion by saying that it gives people strength. I don’t agree. It allows them to avoid making difficult decisions. It stops them from learning how strong and capable they are by facing challenges without a belief in magic. It helps them avoid consequences to their actions.
Religion belittles what we are by giving credit for our strengths to some myth handed down through generations by ancestors who did not have the tools and understanding to explain the world around them and came up instead with explanations based on magical beings and supernatural events.
Now we can explain how tides go in and tides go out, but some of us choose not to. We can also decide on our own whether we are fit to marry. Some societies have fought dearly for that freedom, yet some people still choose to consider the dictates of the old, unmarried pretenders who claim to have some special, magically conveyed wisdom that the rest of us lack.
Benny the Rat does say one thing that carries some truth -
On Friday, Benedict said that public officials must set a good moral example for society.
He was referring obliquely to Premier Silvio Berlusconi and his escapades, feeling the spirit of the ghost bird no doubt inspiring him as to what is moral for a married man, but really, before looking to what married men do what their dicks, he should look to his own group of sorcerers and lecture them on setting good examples.
You know, little things like don’t go around raping kids, and don’t help members of your group cover up such rapes.
O’Reilly isn’t alone in his avoidance of reality in favour of grasping at sorcery to spoon feed him answers to everything.
Pope Benedict has asked Catholic priests to do a better job preparing people for marriage, saying that no one has an automatic right to wed.
But a bunch of old guys who have never been married are the best people to decide who is fit to marry, and who isn’t.
That’s some spell they cast over people like O’Reilly who trip over themselves to bow at the feet of these old bachelors in their wizard robes. Despite ongoing reports of child rape committed by the men in funny clothes, some people still hand the most important decisions of their lives over to them.
How can any sane person believe that leaders of a group which claims to have taken vows of celibacy and has no experience of the day to day struggles that married couples face trust such out of touch people to decide whether or not they should marry?
How can they even consider the words of people who preach celibacy as a virtue but rape and shelter rapists in their own group?
That is far more difficult to explain that why tides go in and tides go out.
We are an amazing species, capable of manipulating our environment, able to do long-term planning, capable of spatial/time thinking. We wake up each day knowing we are free to make choices and decisions that will shape our day, our future, yet some of us cheerily hand over this freedom to those old guys in dresses who can’t even follow their own doctrines and laws.
I’ve heard many people try to excuse religion by saying that it gives people strength. I don’t agree. It allows them to avoid making difficult decisions. It stops them from learning how strong and capable they are by facing challenges without a belief in magic. It helps them avoid consequences to their actions.
Religion belittles what we are by giving credit for our strengths to some myth handed down through generations by ancestors who did not have the tools and understanding to explain the world around them and came up instead with explanations based on magical beings and supernatural events.
Now we can explain how tides go in and tides go out, but some of us choose not to. We can also decide on our own whether we are fit to marry. Some societies have fought dearly for that freedom, yet some people still choose to consider the dictates of the old, unmarried pretenders who claim to have some special, magically conveyed wisdom that the rest of us lack.
Benny the Rat does say one thing that carries some truth -
On Friday, Benedict said that public officials must set a good moral example for society.
He was referring obliquely to Premier Silvio Berlusconi and his escapades, feeling the spirit of the ghost bird no doubt inspiring him as to what is moral for a married man, but really, before looking to what married men do what their dicks, he should look to his own group of sorcerers and lecture them on setting good examples.
You know, little things like don’t go around raping kids, and don’t help members of your group cover up such rapes.
Friday, February 19, 2010
I don't want to fund a god's plan, do you?
Seems Vic Toews doesn’t agree. At least when it comes to Youth For Christ, a religious group passing itself off as a youth centre for troubled kids.
Their own mission statement makes it very clear that their agenda is a religious one, extending to mixing church and state.
With a focus on junior and senior high school ministries, YFC Canada aims to take the gospel to the youth of the nation and trust God to surface leaders for the future who can become part of His plan for our nation.
This group doesn’t just want to take the gospel to the kiddies, it is actively targeting what it views as vulnerable groups.
Strategy - ...Expanding chapter ministries: "YFC will boldly move into areas where we do not now exist, both geographically and culturally. The aboriginal youth community is a prime area for development."
Yeppers. Boldly braving hostile lands and dangerous cultures.
I find it more than a little obscene that the very religion that abused aboriginals and committed cultural genocide now seeks to use them to suppress the rights of all Canadians by imposing their religiously driven morality on all citizens through changing our laws according to a two thousand year old book written by several patriarchal types and loosely interpreted by whoever happens to claim to have insight into the will of a non-existent being. Whew! Long sentence, yes, but that happens when you try to give clarity to something as nonsensical as a god’s will.
We are committed to a journey of faith fully trusting our Lord to supply the resources and strategies to impact the youth of Canada.
I have trouble believing that this group faithfully trusts their lord to supply resources - for two reasons: first off, I don’t believe in gods.
Secondly: I apparently jabbered in my sleep last night, and what one of my co-pilots took to be nonsense must have been in fact, a magic spell because some god or other monster (which I don’t believe in) later directed me to read this article and made me read these very lines:
Toews said Youth For Christ's evangelism was irrelevant to the funding process, although CBC reports one of the group's directors contributed to his political campaign.
So with family values Vic Toews’ palms coincidentally greased,
The Conservative government in Ottawa and Winnipeg's city council are poised to help non-profit Youth For Christ build an $11.7-million, 50,000-square-foot youth centre at the northwest corner of Higgins Avenue and Main Street.
Seems the holy partisan patronage invisible sky monster worked some more magic for his faithful:
That plan, which faces a council vote on Feb. 24, is being lambasted by two opposition councillors and MP Martin, who claim it was rushed through city hall, contravenes Winnipeg's recreation policy and effectively shuts out other inner-city organizations.
"Councillors received one page of information about this. It was walked onto (executive policy committee) a week before we have to vote on this. It didn't go through the proper process," said Gerbasi, who shares Martin's concerns about the evangelistic aims of Youth For Christ.
Transcona Coun. Russ Wyatt said it's unfair to give millions to Youth For Christ without even a report from city staff, when the city makes dozens of small community organizations jump through procedural hoops to obtain small amounts of public funding.
I wonder - had the group had been named Youth For Allah, Boys For Buddha or Kids For Krishna, would it have received such funding as easily, or rather, at all? (Yes, that is a rhetorical question)
I was thinking...for just under 7 mill, I could be persuaded to start a youth group as well.
Been thinking of Kids For Cthulhu.
It would offer extensive challenges:
Cthulhu really has that tough guy image working for him as well. That's very popular, lately.
Best of all, there’s some terrific Cthulhu rock to lure in the youngsters:
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