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I've added a little to "The Causes Of Religion: Biological Neuronal Dysfunction", Vexen Crabtree (2007), ending with a tie-in to my page on Christianity's St. Paul.
It is not only chronic neurological dysfunction that can cause religious and supernatural beliefs. Some of the founding experiences can be based on single neurological events such as isolated strokes or seizues. Many types of fit do not involve the motor area of the brain, so do not result in obvious, physical signs of fitting. They can be purely sensory in nature, involving sights, sounds and feelings that range from subtle through to overwhelming.
 “Partial seizures can [...] cause clonic movement of part of a limb [, ... or] may trigger an abnormal sensation, or aura, such as an odd smell or sparkling lights. Most bizarre are the partial seizures that elicit more well-formed auras such as déjá vu (the feeling that something has happened before) or hallucinations.”
"Neuroscience" by Bear, Connors and Paradiso, p464
William James remained convinced that St. Paul was converted to Christianity by a vision that was the result of a lone seizure. Tags: christianity, experiences, fits, irrationality, jesus, neurology, neuroscience, psychology, religion, seizures, st. paul
Current Location: Monchengladbach, Germany
Listening To: "Antichrist (club mix)" by The Retrosic
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I've added text on the gay parents adoption of children, to "Homosexuality" by Vexen Crabtree (2005), here is the majority of it:
New anti-discrimination laws have been passed in the UK (Equality Act 2006), making it illegal for adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex parents. This enforces equality. It will mean that more children are kept out of agencies, and are given stable homes. There is no rational reason to find this offensive or wrong, but many try to give worried-sounding excusees to explain their disguised dislike. Some common and ignorant complaints about gay adoption are iterated below, and countered:
- Gay parents will 'make' their children gay. Sociologists have made keen studies of gay parenting in countries where it is more commonplace and where it has been accepted for longer. The children of gay parents are not more likely to be gay than other children.
- Children of gay parents will get bullied at school. By this logic, children who wear glasses should be banned from school. Also, so should foreigners, and maybe anyone who isn't the same colour as everyone else. Perhaps the children of tax collectors shouldn't be allowed to school either! This is a ridiculous excuse for bigotry.
- It offends some peoples' religious beliefs. Everything offends some religious belief or other... discrimination is wrong, whether or not it is caused by religion, and the government is right to legislate against discrimination, as a democracy's duty is to protect those who cannot protect themselves, and to temper the ignorance of mass rule.
The most vocal opposition of anything that provides equality for gays are always Christians and Muslims. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of the Catholic church in England and Wales, backed by the Church of England and the Muslim Council of Britain, have led a campaign to get the government to give exceptions to Catholic Adoption agencies so that they won't have to give equal rights to gay parents. He says that for reasons of conscience and morality, Catholics cannot be made to comply to the law. Tony Blair is rejecting their case, but has given them extra time to "adjust" to the new laws - they won't have to fully comply until the end of 2008. More later.
There Should be No Exceptions from Anti-Discrimination Laws
Anti-discrimination laws are passed to protect minorities from prejudice actions. The actions of prejudice, are wrong. Exemptions from anti-discrimination laws, therefore, are also wrong. An exception requires exceptional circumstances. That Catholic authorities don't like gays is what the law wants to stop. They they believe gays shouldn't adopt is also not the issue.
“Special religious rights are a travesty of justice [...]. The more special religious rights that exist, the worse society has become and the more democracy is undermined. The government passes laws because it is necessary and because it is for the greater good. The more exceptions there are to those laws, the more democracy is weakened. This seems especially true where religious superstitions replace the rule of law. For example in Islamic states where Sharia law is declared, or during the Dark Ages when Christian superstitions cost many people their lives (not to mention the torture!), society is at its worst. Theocracy is the worst form of government, and special religious rights are exceptional in their ability to uphold discrimination and barbarianism against the face of normal moral legislation. People do not have a right to do anything they wish. Just because something is a persons' religious belief does not give them extra rights to do it.”
"Religious Rights and Religion Specific Legislation" by Vexen Crabtree (2004)
Catholic Adoption Agencies Threaten to Close Rather Than Comply
The seven Catholic adoption agencies account for only 4% of all children placed each year in the UK, and their spokesperson has said that they would rather close than allow gay parents to adopt children. Elsewhere, this is exactly what they have done. Similar legislation has been passed in a number of states in the USA, "with the result that the Catholic Church from Boston to San Francisco has closed down its adoption agencies", especially after the Pope Ratzinger once said that these anti-discrimination laws are "the legalisation of evil".
They would rather allow the continued suffering of homeless and abused children (and discriminate against gays, too) - rather than infringe on their own religious beliefs. Their religion is more important to them than the welfare of children. The government is making plans on how to amalgamate their work into other, non-discriminatory agencies, in order to prevent children being harmed by the Church's refusal to entertain equality.
There is an economic contradiction in granting Catholic Adoption Agencies exemption from the Law of the Government... the fact that in part, such agencies are funded by the government:
“Catholic adoption agencies receive public money for their efforts - both directly, in the form of grants, and indirectly through the tax break that any charity receives. If they are exempted from the law, they should also be relieved of subsidies from the taxpayers whose representatives approved it.”
The Economist
Thankfully, the Government has indeed taken the line emplored by The Economist. At the end of 2007 Jan, Downing Street announced that "Catholic adoption agencies must comply with non-discrimination laws by the end of 2008 or lose all access to public funds, Downing Street said yesterday".
Full references can be found on the original article: http://www.humantruth.info/homosexuality.html Tags: adoption, charity, childhood, christianity, discrimination, homosexuality, prejudice, rcc, religion
Listening To: Strauss, "Death and Transfiguration"
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Sign this petition (you have to be a UK citizen): petitions.pm.gov.uk : We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Abolish all faith schools and prohibit the teaching of creationism...and "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Abolish all faith schools and prohibit the teaching of creationism and other religious mythology in all UK schools"It's worth signing both. This is in the wake of the Vardy Foundation's slowly increasing chain of fundamentalist Christian schools (IN THE UK!!), whose science teachers' teach creationism rather than science, that is, they think the world is 6000 years old, and that most of science is wrong because it contradicts the Bible. Sign these petition and get everyone else to, too! My page on Faith Schools explains many of the issues, the contents of the page are: - Sectarian Schooling
- Sectarian schools breed cultural conflict
- Indoctrination versus Parental discretion
- Do faith schools provide better education?
- Fundamentalist Schools
- The Benefits of Abolishing Sectarian Schools
Tags: children, christianity, creationism, education, fundamentalism, indoctrination, petitions, schooling, science, secularisation, segregation, vardy foundation
Current Location: Germany
Current Mood:  annoyed
Listening To: "Krolok" by Wumpscut
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I've added quotes on The Great Prayer Experiment to my page "Prayer: Scientific Studies of Prayer". The results come after this nifty little quote from Prof. Richard Dawkins:
"Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was the first to analyse scientifically whether praying for people is efficacious. He noted that every Sunday, in churches throughout Britain, entire congregations prayed publicly for the health of the royal family. Shouldn't they, therefore, be unusually fit, compared with the rest of us, who are prayed for only by our nearest and dearest? Galton looked into it, and found no statistical difference. His intention may, in any case, have been satirical, as also when he prayed over randomized plots of land to see if the plants would grow any faster (they didn't)."
Anyway, the results of the 1800-patient scientific double-blind study, was: (the patients were divided into 3 groups): - Group 1: Received prayers, but were not told about them. This tests if prayers helped them recover more than normal patients. Their recovery was average.
- Group 2: Received no prayers, and were not told so. This tested if there was something about the experiment that was affecting the results. Their recovery was also average.
- Group 3: Received prayers and were told so. This tested the psychosomatic effects of knowing that one is being prayed for. This group "suffered significantly more complications".</p>
What amazing results!
The rest of my page on Prayer is my normal blunt arsenal of stark truths! Tags: charles bethea, christianity, health, prayer, praying, psychosomosis, richard dawkins, satanism, science, sociology, templeton foundation
Current Location: Germany
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Added the following text on 1 Chronicles 21:1-2 and 2 Samuel 24:1-2 to "The Biblical Christian God is Evil":
As various authors copied copies of the Hebrew Scriptures, changes accumulated in the stories. Sometimes, the same story appears twice. There are even two accounts of the Creation that contradict each other in the details. One such doubled story shows us clearly that the Old Testament God is evil, and Satan itself is not a separate being, but is actually part of God, a face of God. There is one occasion when David took a census of his men in order to count how many could fight in the armies of Israel. 1 Chronicles 21:2 and 2 Samuel 24:2 both contain a copy of the exact same text:
| “So David said to Joab and the commanders of the troops, "Go and count the Israelites from Beersheba to Dan. Then report back to me so that I may know how many there are."” [1 Chronicles 21:2]
| “So the king said to Joab and the army commanders with him, "Go throughout the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and enroll the fighting men, so that I may know how many there are."” [2 Samuel 24:2] |
What had happened is that God had a rule: That David was not allowed to 'number' Israel. But, for some reason, David went ahead and done so. As a result, God punished them all for breaking his rule. But, it is very telling when we examine the preceding verse: Who inspired David to count Israel's fighting men? | “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel” [1 Chronicles 21:1] | “The anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, "Go and take a census of Israel and Judah."”[2 Samuel 24:1] |
In one copy of the story, we are told Satan told David to do so. In the other, it was God. How can this be? It is because in the Old Testament, Satan and God are the same being. Satan in the old testament is merely the face that God puts on when it is testing it's people. "The anger of the Lord" is Satan. It was common in old religions (Hinduism, Roman religions, etc) for gods to have multiple faces, each associated with different emotions. In the Christian Bible, Satan is God. It is not just the Old Testament that contains such revealing truths, the New Testament tells the same story, God is Evil. Tags: christianity, evil, god, religion, satan
Current Location: Germany
Current Mood:  busy
Listening To: "Dying Freedom" by Paradise Lost
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Christianity Versus Astronomy: [Introduction:] Copernicus (1473-1543) enraged the Church by writing that the Earth might orbit the Sun. Christian theology holds that the great scheme of God revolves around Humankind; God's only son is a human, God created the Earth and all other animals for Mankind (Genesis 1:28 etc), and the destruction of creation centres around events occurring on planet Earth, to Humans. It was deeply challenging to Christians to face the facts that the Earth wasn't the centre of the universe. Also challenging were other basic facts of astrology; that the universe is massive, the Earth only one of many planets, and the likely fact that there is life elsewhere in the universe too. [... Conclusion reads:] Scientists had to suffer torture, silencing, imprisonment and death at the hands of Christians who didn't agree with newly discovered facts about the world. Christianity lost the first battle with astronomers who realized that, contrary to what Christians asserted, the Sun did not orbit the Earth, and that the Universe doesn't seem to be designed specifically for humankind. Copernicus (1473-1543), Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo (1564-1642), Newton (1643-1727) and Laplace (1749-1827) all fought battles against the Church when they published scientific papers challenging religious orthodoxy. Bible verses were all the theories Christians needed; and Joshua 10:12-13, 2 Kings 20:11, Isaiah 38:8 and Isaiah 30:26 all contradicted astronomers. But through intelligence and clever politics, truth gradually won out over dogma, and the Church retreated... only to go on to fight similar ignorant battles, and violently impose dogmatic errors, in the arenas of physics, biology and philosophy. Without such interference from theists, science would have been more than a thousand years more advanced! Kepler in the 17th century only revived Greek astronomical knowledge that was condemned and hidden by Christians (Ptolemy et al) in the second century. Tags: anthrocentrism, astronomy, christianity, copernicus, earth, galileo, gravity, kepler, laplace, newton, physics, ptolemy, religion, science
Current Location: Germany
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The Church of England took time out from pressurising the government to pay for the upkeep of its churches to announce that it will be spending an estimated £6 million on restoring a Bishop’s Palace so that Archbishop John Sentamu can have sumptuous new apartments. Mr Sentamu is presently living in a tent to show his solidarity with those displaced by the Middle East conflict. He often speaks out about how sorry he is that most of the world has to live in poverty. The Church of England has £5 billion in the bank. (From http://www.secularism.org.uk ) http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/Tags: christianity, church of england, churches, poverty
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Accusations don't imply guilt, but in the case of the Catholic Church, it's entire history from its foundations, through it's growth, to its domineering violence during the dark ages, and now to its present underground immorality, interference in Africa (etc), etc, anything that harms the Catholic Church is bound to do Humanity an endless good.
"Family members of a Hudson, Wis., man killed by a priest are fed up with what they see as inaction by the Catholic Church and angry that their requests for reform have been ignored. So they're taking the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops to court.
Nearly 200 bishops were named in a civil lawsuit Tuesday by the family of Dan O'Connell, one of two men shot to death at his family's Hudson funeral home in 2002.
The family filed the unprecedented lawsuit, which asks for the names and locations of some 5,000 clergy accused of molesting children, so they can publicize the list. | | |
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