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-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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Thursday, April 05, 2012

Maundy Thursday
Posted by Bob | 10:23 PM
Judge refuses to drop charges against U.S. Catholic bishop


(Reuters) - A Catholic bishop in Kansas City must stand trial on charges that he failed to report a priest found with pornographic pictures of young girls on his Church computer to police, a judge said on Thursday.


Bishop Robert Finn, head of the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, faces one misdemeanor charge that he failed to tell authorities that Church officials had found disturbing pictures of unclothed little girls that appeared to have been taken by a popular local priest, Father Patrick Ratigan.

Finn's defense sums up why we detest these men. With divorce, birth control, abortion, LGBT rights, Catholic moral law takes precedence over civil law. The Church has its own rules. But charged with failure to report to police child pornography found on a priest's computer, this is what Finn claimed:
Missouri statutes requiring clergy, school teachers and others to report suspected child sexual abuse were "vague."
also, Bishop Finn
had no duty to report the situation to authorities, because he was not the "designated reporter" within the diocese and could rely on someone else within the diocese to notify authorities.
The judge tossed out those grounds for dismissal. Finn was trying to claim that  weak civil law took precedence over his Christian moral obligations.   I suppose only  God & The Pope have the power to punish him.

Except for a few isolated, courageous voices among the Bishops, here & recently in Ireland, these clerical executives seem to have little or no sense of the evilness they have permitted & covered up.  It reaches all  the way to  Pope Benedict XVI. Why is that so?  Why are  they not  grief-stricken & shamed? Why are they not engaging in extreme expressions  of atonement? These corrupt & cowardly Bishops  should be crawling on bloody knees & hands to Shrines of the Blessed Virgin,  resign their offices, & retire to austere & silent cloistered monasteries (after they do their prison time), never to show their faces again.

Lawsuits by victims of perverted priests have emptied the coffers of Archdioceses & in some places bankrupted them. Hundreds of schools & parish churches are closed. Some deserve to be shut down, but in no instances does the  Church admit it is due to pedophile priests.  But laity connects the dots, Only ultra-conservative Catholics, like those represented by Rick Santorum,  defend the Bishops. They want to return the Church to the era before Pope John XXIII & Vatican reforms.  For them, if Father O'Malley in Going My Way was raping altar boys, just quietly transfer the Singing Priest from St. Dominic's to St. Mary's, & if Ingrid Bergman notices, she's just a nun, she can be sent to Borneo.

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Thursday, September 04, 2008

How soon they forget
Posted by Jill | 10:34 PM


(If Fran I Am didn't exist, we would have to invent her. Can we please make her the Head Christian of America and turn her loose to smite all those Philistines who only CALL themselves Christians?)

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Monday, September 10, 2007

Susan Werner
Posted by Anonymous | 6:44 PM

Susan Werner is an über-talented artist who plays guitar and piano and sings beautifully, skillfully navigates the genres of jazz, gospel and folk, and writes real songs about real stuff that adults living in the real world care about, but it doesn’t feel like math homework or the leftover brussel sprouts your mom makes you eat. Performing in the margins outside the vapid pop music landscape, this singer/songwriter from the Midwest is deep without being pretentious, funny without being silly, smart without being arrogant, passionate without being strident, and very, very sensual. (Sensual is when "sexy" goes to graduate school.)

At a U2 concert I saw a long time ago, before the band performed the song "Helter Skelter" Bono said, "Charlie Manson stole this from the Beatles and we're here to give it back!" On The Gospel Truth, I think Susan Werner does the same thing with the thorny subject of religion, taking it back from the clutches of bible-carrying bigots and televangelists. It's Faith meeting Skepticism, and finding out they have a lot in common. Not really expecting an answer from God, her heartfelt songs are warm and melodic questions.

She’s good on CD (Last of the Good Straight Girls, Time Between Trains, I Can't Be New, Live at the Tin Angel, New Non-Fiction, Midwestern Saturday Night), and better in concert. Unplugged, Susan sounds refreshingly unscripted. Such a deal. Go see her and feed a starving folkie today.

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Thursday, March 08, 2007

On the so-called Jesus tomb and not pissing off the goyim
Posted by Jill | 9:19 PM
One of the things I've been wanting to read but haven't had time to is the Gnostic gospels. As someone born into a marginally Jewish family, I'm predisposed against buying into the notion that Joshua of Nazareth was the literal son of God in any sense other than that we ALL are "sons and daughters of God" -- if you believe in the Judeo-Christian Great White Alpha Male in the sky model of deity. But I've often wondered what would happen if somehow the resurrection that is the core of Christianity could somehow be disproved.

The new documentary about the ossuaries that were discovered in 1980 probably doesn't answer the question, and the fact that it's James Cameron who made it, along with Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli Jew, doesn't exactly make one inclined to think there's anything to it. The increasingly lunatic Rabbi Marc Gelman seems to think Jews have no business digging into this stuff; that this is some kind of shandeh far di goyim and even if it's true -- ESPECIALLY if it's true, for a Jew to debunk Christianity would provoke a shitstorm:

The first thing that made me feel creepy about the program was the sight of an Orthodox Jew (the filmmaker, Simcha Jacobovici) supposedly discovering a tomb containing the bones of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and their alleged family. Before I go on, let me first say that I do not believe that it is the place of anyone to make other people feel foolish about following their faith. If this was indeed the tomb of Jesus, then not only is the Christian Testament false but, worse, Christianity is a cruel deception, à la “The Da Vinci Code,” foisted on the world by Jesus' panicky followers to help market a faith led by a dead messiah. I don't think that is how Christianity was born, and I don't think interfaith relations are improved when a Jewish filmmaker implies such a thing. At least Dan Brown is not Jewish, and at least he thinly disguised his anti-Christian screed as a novel. For a Jew to produce a documentary film that supposedly disproves both Jesus' celibacy and his resurrection is bad ecumenical business. I feel the same way about Jews defending Nazis who want to march through Jewish neighborhoods. Perhaps somebody should do it, but Jews should not be defending the rights of the killers of Jews. There has been so much blood and suffering, so much venom and so much hatred in past Jewish-Christian relations. How are we helped in our efforts to heal our wounds and the wounds of our world by trying to refute the foundations of the other's faith?


The problem with Gellman's argument, and perhaps his support for the Iraq war makes it more understandable, is that it assumes we have an obligation to allow others to persist in delusion, particularly if said people have a history of mass killings of those who don't believe what they do. But similarly, this brings up the question of whether we are obligated to allow those who still believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, and that George W. Bush is a good, honest, Christian man who would never lie to us to continue to do so. At what point is one obligated to accept empirical truth?

I admit to being twisted enough to want Jacobovici and Cameron to be right and for ossuaries to actually be those of the so-called Holy Family. For one thing, it would bring a historical dimension to a story that is now only known through various versions and translations, and would make for fascinating study. But it would also be interesting to watch how Christians would respond to this test of their faith.

It isn't that Christianity would be completely debunked, though much of it would be. It would, however, mean that some acceptance of the Bible as allegorical and symbolic rather than literal would be required for the faith to be something other than mass delusion. And frankly, the idea of a historical Jesus with the kind of impact on the world that he has had, a Jesus whose words could be studied and followed without the need for divinity, is far more interesting than blind belief in a story that for many of us is just not plausible.

Lynn has some thoughts on the matter:

Long before the DaVinci code, my reading had convinced me that Jesus and Mary of Magdala would have had to be married. Jesus was a nice Jewish boy and a rabbi, and as a Jewish boy with a Jewish mother he would have been under enormous pressure to be married. The whole concept of celibacy among priests did not become a rule until the early fourth century CE; previous to that time the first pope, St. Peter, is known to have been a married man and subsequent popes and bishops were married, many with children. This became a problem as the early church began amassing property since children become heirs and inherited the priestly property. It was only after the early fourth century that church writers began to expound on the horrors of women and their sexuality.

There is no evidence of any celibate Jewish priests during the time of Jesus. Christian writers like to quote Jesus's words as indicating a preference for celibacy when he said, "there are those who have renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." But earlier translations reveal this quote to actually be "some have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 19.12 This is a good example that shows how retranslating the bible has twisted all of the original meaning out of the story in order. The eunuch statement follows a strict teaching about the sanctity of marriage and equates divorce to adultery, after which the followers of Jesus say "then it is better never to marry." Jesus then makes the statement that some are born eunuchs and some become eunuchs by their own hand.

[snip]

One of the more interesting points of the film was the likelihood that Mary of Magdala may have become a respected priestess of Jesus's teachings after his death, a concept that rehabilitates Mary's reputation from the whore of the bible to a woman with spiritual power. Long before the DaVinci Code the Nag Hammadi scrolls included a Gospel of Mary, indicating that she was in fact one of the apostles with her own story to tell. If this is true, it is a major turnabout in the entire Christian epic that forces a question of the story as a whole.


Granted, I don't have a dog in this particular hunt, and the notion of "faith" -- believing something with absolutely no evidence of its truth -- is alien to me, and that may be why I find even the possibility of concrete facts about these people so exciting. But it seems to me that a charismatic leader with the ability to impart a message of hope and peace can be as holy, if not more so, than one to whom people ascribe divinity.

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Saturday, February 03, 2007

Well, it's about damn time
Posted by Jill | 3:06 PM
Senator Obama, take note:

For the third consecutive year, the number of Americans calling for less religious influence in public life exceeded the number of Americans who want more, according to a new Gallup poll.

Most Americans, however, remain "generally satisfied" with organized religion's role in the U.S., the survey round.

Nearly 40 percent of Americans say religion's level of influence "in the nation" should not change, 32 percent would like it to have less influence and 27 percent would like it to have more, according to the survey. Weekly churchgoers are much more likely to agree that religion should have greater influence on government and politics than those who go to church less frequently, the survey found.

Opinions also tended to shift depending on political affiliation.

Some 41 percent of Democrats believed religion should have less impact, while 43 percent of Republicans felt it should have more.

During President Bush's first term, 2001 through 2004, more Americans believed the role of religion should increase than wanted its influence to fade. But by 2003, the numbers began to shift, and by 2005 a greater number of Americans believed religion should have less influence on public life.

The number of Americans who think religion should have less impact has increased 10 percentage points since 2001, according to Gallup.


Perhaps that's because we've seen what happens when religion has more impact on public life. It's not mainstream Christians or Buddhists or reform Jews or mainstream Muslims who want to shove religion down the throats of every living American, it's fundamentalist Christians, the most vociferous of whom are the biggest hypocrites on the planet. Now that Americans have had a taste of what a so-called "Christian Nation" might look like, they want no part of it.

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