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POPSIs the Catholic Church a Force for Good in the World? I saw this debate on BBC yesterday and it was really good. They poll people both before and after the debate about how they see the Catholic Church and the results were a bit surprising, but then again, not. Make up your own mind. (5 parts)
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POPSHell's Angel - A Documentary for the Discerning
I used to be a great admirer of Mother Theresa. I even met her, heard her speak and was kissed by her. It wasn't until fairly recently I started to question the "goodness" of her work - particularly in the arena of abortion and contraception. If I was a young/older mother incapable (financially, physically, emotionally, mentally) of supporting and caring for my about to be born child, would I still choose to have it. If I knew, that by allowing this child to be born, the most likely scenario of life that it had to look forward to was an over crowded orphanage, would I still choose to bring that child into the world? If I genuinely, in my heart of hearts knew I was not the mothering kind and my boyfriend also did not want a baby, but our families were putting pressure on us to have one would I be condemned for wanting to "sell my child for $30 to some utter stranger? (recent newsclip on clipmarks) If I genuinely loved children, would I knowingly bring them into a life where all t
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POPSThe idiocy of claiming non belief is belief This is a common argument presented by the two trolls willhelm and darkeforce. In their world up is down, down is up, and after smearing poop on their own face they point at other people and call them shitheads. It's a world of redefining terms to suit their needs, cherry picking the foundation of their religion (the bible) to shore up their beliefs, and a pathological need to project their own requirements of blind faith on other people. It's the only way they can level the playing field when they know what irrational nuts they sound like when trying to defend their claims. Their only recourse - an ad hominem false equivalency approach in order to appear equal.
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POPSScience, Reason & Religion: Eagleton v 'Ditchkins' <<<Eagleton is not anti-science or reason. He merely points out that science has produced Hiroshima as well as penicillin. And liberal rationalism, in addition to its many undoubted triumphs, has provided the intellectual underpinning for exploitative capitalism and the wanton destruction of the environment on an unprecedented scale. Indeed Eagleton is stronger on reason than Ditchkins, for he thinks carefully about what his opponents say whereas Dawkins & Co prefer knockabout rhetoric to serious engagement with mainstream religious thought. This is, then, a demolition job which is both logically devastating and a magnificently whirling philippic. Ditchkins, he says, makes the error of conflating reason and rationality. Yet much of what seems reasonable in real life turns out not to be true. And much that is true, like quantum physics, seems rationally impossible. >>> (from review)
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POPSPersian Paranoia By Christopher Hitchens
Also try to bear in mind that one day you will have to face the young Iranian democrats who risked their all in the battle and explain to them just what you were doing when they were being beaten and gassed. (Hint: Don't make your sole reference to Iranian dictatorship an allusion to a British-organized coup in 1953; the mullahs think that it proves their main point, and this generation has more immediate enemies to confront.) There is then the larger question of the Iranian theocracy and its continual, arrogant intervention in our affairs: its export of violence and cruelty and lies to Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq and its unashamed defiance of the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the nontrivial matter of nuclear weapons. I am sure that I was as impressed as anybody by our president's decision to quote Martin Luther King"rather late in the week"on the arc of justice and the way in which it eventually bends.
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POPSFascism at Home Means Fascism Abroad Shame on all those media outlets that have been complicit in this dirty lie all last week. And shame also on our pathetic secretary of state, who said that she hoped that “the genuine will and desire” of the people of Iran would be reflected in the outcome. Surely she knows that any such contingency was deliberately forestalled to begin with. Earlier this year, I spent a week with Hitchens in Lebanon, and at one point he wandered off to attend a Hezbollah rally in the suburbs south of Beirut. I thought I had seen enough Hezbollah rallies over the last couple of years and could hardly stand the thought of sitting through yet another one of those bigoted scream fests. I wish now that I had gone, though, because Hitchens witnessed an alarming escalation.
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POPSObama Revisionism, Adams and Jefferson, Friends of Islam . . . hostility to religion. Still, as usual, it's fascinating, especially this bit of history that Obama somehow failed to mention this morning when revisiting (or I should say, revisioning) Adams, Jefferson, and that oh-so-warm relationship between the Morocco and the fledgling United States: I believe on the evidence that it was at this moment that Jefferson decided to make war on the Muslim states of North Africa as soon as the opportunity presented itself. And, even if I am wrong, we can be sure that the dispatch of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to the Barbary shore was the first and most important act of his presidency. It took several years of bombardment before the practice of kidnap and piracy and slavery was put down, but put down it was, Quranic justification or not.
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POPSOh Well! Perhaps folks are more concerned with what's happening in this world!
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POPSUN Backed Shariah Desperately Seeking Obsequiousness The draft also calls "on states to develop, and where appropriate to incorporate, permissible limitations on the exercise of the right to freedom of expression into national legislation." Yes, you read that right. The transparent purpose is to criminalize all criticism of Islam, a.k.a. "Islamophobia." There is also a not-so-sly effort to extract reparations for the long-banned trans-Atlantic slave trade: States that "have not yet condemned, apologized and paid reparations" for the trade are urged "to do so at the earliest." The Obama Administration knows all of this. In its press release, the State Department stressed that its intent in sending a delegation to Geneva is "to try to change the direction in which the Review Conference is heading." State also adds that its involvement "does not indicate -- and should not be misconstrued to indicate -- that the United States will participate" in the formal conference. Wall Street Journal H/T soccerdad.baltiblogs.com
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POPSHow I Learned Not to Fear the Anti-God Squad The clipped section has a ring of reason. He goes on to cast doubt on all surveys, blames Obama for atheism coming out of the closet, and I couldn't go on with his crap. Worth a look, if just to see the working mind of a devious simpleton.
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POPSWhy I'm Not Sorry George W. Bush Beat Gore And Kerry by Christopher Hitchens especially since you are not supposed to "rendition" them. There would have been a nasty prison somewhere or a lot of prisoners un-taken on the battlefield, you can depend on that. We might have avoided the Iraq war, even though both Bill Clinton and Al Gore had repeatedly and publicly said that another and conclusive round with Saddam Hussein was, given his flagrant defiance of all the relevant U.N. resolutions, unavoidably in our future. And the inconvenient downside to avoiding the Iraq intervention is that a choke point of the world economy would still be controlled by a psychopathic crime family that kept a staff of WMD experts on hand and that paid for jihadist suicide bombers around the region. In his farewell interviews, President Bush hasn't been able to find much to say for himself on this point, but I think it's a certainty that historians will not conclude that the removal of Saddam Hussein was something that the international community . . .
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POPSDoes Religion Make You Nice?Does atheism make you mean? It is at this point that the "We need God to be good" case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don't go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don't believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they're nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.
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POPSNovember Surprises In a desperate bid to close the gap, Christopher Hitchens says the McCain camp—whoops, unnamed sources!—are leaking some of their most lurid smears yet. MORE DETAILS AT SOURCE
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POPSHitchens on Palin and Science No comment needed. Hitchins says it all at the source. The poor woman is going to wake up after this and find her world shattered. No True Alaskan Man is going to put up with comments that his woman doesn't listen to him. Mark my words.
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POPSRobert Winston criticises dangerous 'science delusion' Bit like the chook and the egg. Scientists have for centuries been questioned closely by religions and many theories went on hold due to church action. Now that the science world is taking the limelight from religions, they want to do some discussing. The emphasis on trying to prove the big bang theory could be interpreted as a swipe at religion.
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