Fad Atheism

Courtyard of the Gentiles to promote dialogue between believers and nonbelievers

From RomeReports.com

Cuba opens first Catholic seminary since the revolution

 4 November 2010. BBC News

Cuban President Raul Castro has attended the inauguration of the first new Catholic building on the communist island in more than half a century.

Mr Castro joined priests, including Vatican officials, at a new seminary outside of the capital, Havana.

Ties between the Roman Catholic Church and state soured in the aftermath of the 1959 Cuban revolution.

Continue reading at BBC News - Cuba opens first Catholic seminary since the revolution

Hollywood and the usual anti-Christian cliches

"GLEE" TACKLES RELIGION

Catholic League, October 6, 2010

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on last night's episode of the Fox show, "Glee":

The producers of "Glee" decided to address religion. A gay atheist was treated with sympathy for his victim status, the victimizer being Christianity, especially Catholicism. Judaism was treated with kid gloves and Islam got a pass. In other words, it was the usual Hollywood stuff.

The show revolved around a football player who sees an image of Jesus in his grilled cheese sandwich, labeling it "Grilled Cheesus." Throughout the show the audience was treated to such lines as "I think God is kind of like Santa Claus for adults. Otherwise, God's kind of a jerk, isn't he?"; "Asking someone to believe in a fantasy [religion]…however comforting, isn't a moral thing to do. It's cruel." References to Catholicism included mocking quips about "Sweet Holy Mother of God Academy."

The pivotal remark, which set the tone, was made by the gay atheist: "The reason I don't go to church is because most churches don't think very much of gay people. Or women. Or science."

The lines mouthed by the characters are a reflection of what Hollywood script writers and producers believe. Back in 1986, S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman and Linda Lichter wrote a landmark book, The Media Elite. The three social scientists, not affiliated with conservative causes, found that the media elite had nothing in common with most Americans on the subject of religion: while 94 percent of Americans identified themselves as religious, only 50 percent of the media elite did. Even more striking, while 86 percent of the public said religion was important to them, 86 percent of the media elite said they seldom or never attend church. Studies since have shown that nothing much has changed.

Homosexuality and atheism are all the rage these days with the cultural elite. As "Glee" showed last night, so is ripping on Christians.

Catholic League: For Religious and Civil Rights

Art depicting Jesus receiving head from another man destroyed

VILE JESUS ARTWORK SMASHED

 Catholic League, October 7, 2010

A Montana truck driver, Kathleen Folden, took a crowbar to the Plexiglass case housing artwork at Colorado's Loveland Museum which depicted a man performing oral sex on Jesus. Folden was arrested after she ripped the artwork to pieces. Commenting is Catholic League president Bill Donohue:

Had the art depicted a man performing fellatio on Muhammad, the museum may have been blown up by now. So it is lucky that Ms. Folden is a Christian.

It is striking to read the responses of those who defended the obscene art. "I am appalled by the violence," says Loveland's director of Cultural Services Susan Ison. But she is not appalled by the portrayal of Jesus having a man perform oral sex on him. Indeed, she justified this obscenity by calling it "very complex." Had the artwork showed her performing oral sex on her father, it's a sure bet it would lose its complexity.

Continue reading at Catholic League: For Religious and Civil Rights

Geoffrey Robertson at Protest the Pope

Another elitist Atheist demonstrates he doesn't know what he's talking about.
The video shows the lies preached by Roberston:


Geoffrey Robertson speech at Protest The Pope march


And below, the facts Roberston chooses to ignore:

The Pope demeaning women? Demonising homosexuals? Wishing that IVF children had never been born? Maybe Robertson is suffering some mental disorder???

The Pope has never demeaned women. As for as Demonising homosexuals here is what Pope Benedict as Cardinal Ratzinger said to the Catholic Bishops of the world in 1985 on the pastoral care of homosexual persons:

"10. It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law."

And of course the pope never said that he wished IVF children had never been born. What the Church teaches is that most artificial reproductive methods injure the dignity of the person conceived. Once conceived every human being has a right to be protected.

How the New Atheists are abusing the truth | Spiked

Monday 13 September 2010. Brendan O’Neill.

Apparently the British state is about to roll out the red carpet for a seriously evil rape facilitator. Pope Benedict XVI is the boss of a church that acts as a ‘patron, protector and financier of child rape’, says one secularist writer. Last week the UK Independent reported that in America, ‘over 10,000 people have come forward to say they were raped as part of this misery-go-round’ overseen by His Holiness and His Lackeys. In Ireland alone, a tiny country of 4.5million people, ‘Thousands were raped in reform schools’, said a British broadsheet headline last year, ramming home the ugly truth of how many kids have been raped by the Catholic Church’s army of paedophile priests.

But how true is this ugly truth? Were 10,000 children in America and thousands more in Ireland really raped by Catholic priests? In a word, no.

Continue reading - How the New Atheists are abusing the truth | spiked

Anti-Catholic Nutters have their Day in the Sun.

From the Catholic League. September 2010.

The following is a sample of the all-out attack on Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church prior to the pope's visit to the U.K. All quotes appear in original form:

Continue reading at the Catholic League: For Religious and Civil Rights

Has Geoffrey Robertson Lost The Plot?

From a Sydney Morning Herald article 9th September 2010:

THE Vatican should be treated as a kind of ''rogue state'' by the rest of the world until it stops using statehood - and the ancient rules of the canon law - to protect paedophile priests.

So says Geoffrey Robertson, QC, the veteran human rights lawyer and United Nations judge, arguing that the Catholic Church is the only religion permitted under international law to claim the privileges of statehood and its leaders immunity from civil or criminal action.

A response from Austen Ivereigh at America Magazine to similar claims of Geoffery Robertson:

Where to begin? [in addressing the nuttiness of Robertson's claims] (a) the Vatican does not deal with abusive priests, local dioceses or congregations do; (b) Where these have failed to act against abusive priests, it has not been because they have resorted to canon law instead of civil law, but because they failed to resort to either canon OR civil law; (c) the cases which have been referred to the Vatican (since 2001) have been referred precisely in order to ensure appropriate action IS taken; (d) confidentiality is imposed in canonical legal processes in those cases where -- as in solicitation in the confessional -- these are canonical crimes, not civil ones; (e) the canonical process (eg laicisation) only takes place after any civil action (prosecution, trial, sentencing) has taken place; (f) it wasn't the Vatican which back in the 1980s moved priests accused of abuse to other parishes, it was bishops. And so on.

If only Pope Benedict were an ordinary citizen, he could rightly sue Robertson for his wholly untrue and grossly defamatory claim that clerical abuse was allowed to take place because "Joseph Ratzinger, both as head of the CDF and as Pope, has insisted for the past 30 years that all such cases be dealt with in secrecy under canon law." That is a monstrous lie -- and, given Cardinal Ratzingers record in this area, simply laughable.

You have dogmas, but I don’t

11th August – Mercator Net.

The world’s most dangerous idea would have to bear upon its biggest problems; these are not political or economic in nature, but ultimately cultural in origin – which is to say that they are in some way related to religion.  It would be difficult not to include among them the breakdown of the family – the scale and speed of which is hard to imagine without the birth control pill.  Though it promises “control” – an illusion – it has instead delivered discord, demographic disaster, and ultimately deflationary pressures in the economy. A similar frame of mind – “if it works, it is ok” – also justified the unscrupulous financial practices which contributed mightily to our present economic woes.

More precisely, then, our biggest problems can be traced back to moral and intellectual shortcomings which, in our present cultural climate, are no longer recognized as such.  To point them out is to risk giving offense; contemporary life is thus governed by deceptive if fashionable convention rather than by truth.  

Continue reading at MercatorNet: You have dogmas, but I don’t

Being human is no big deal???

11th August 2010 – Mercator Net.

A few years ago, a New York Times reporter celebrated the extension of human rights to nonhuman animals, after the environmental committee of the Spanish Parliament voted to grant great apes the right to life and freedom. In an odd but recurrent pattern of increasing animal rights at the expense of human dignity, the reporter exclaimed that we were kidding ourselves with our belief in unalienable “human” (his quote) rights.

Continue reading at MercatorNet: Being human is no big deal

NORTH KOREA About 23 Christians arrested, 3 executed

6th August 2010 – Asia News

Seoul (AsiaNews) – North Korea’s Stalinist regime has discovered some underground Christians in a house church in Pyongan Province. All 23 who met to celebrate a religious function were arrested. Three were tried and given the death penalty, which was swiftly executed, sources told AsiaNews. Confirmation about the incident also came from the North Korea Intellectual Solidarity, a group of North Korean exiles.

According to the sources, the arrests and executions were carried out in mid-May. “At that time, right after the disastrous currency reform, police discovered 23 Christians in Kuwal-dong, Pyungsung County, in Pyongan Province, who met at an underground church. After their arrest, they were interrogated at length. Eventually, the group’s “ringleaders” were sentenced to death and executed. The others were sent to Kwan-li-so (Penal labour colony) No 15 in Yodŏk.”

These North Koreans discovered underground Christianity when some of them travelled to mainland China for work.

“As the authorities fear the spread of religion, many area residents are rounded up and interrogated for days,” the sources said. However, “they cannot help it because the situation is so desperate that people are going back to religion. Such sentences are meant to scare people.”

North Korea denies freedom of religion absolutely. Officially, the country has three Christian places of worship (one Catholic and two Protestant churches) and four Buddhist temples, but only in the capital Pyongyang. No one has been able to confirm how many exist in the rest of the country. Accounts about their number by foreigners who have travelled around the country vary.

The only cult allowed is that of ‘Eternal President’ Kim Il-sung and his son, the ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong-il.

After the Korean War in 1953, the Stalinist regime ruthlessly proceeded to kill the country’s estimated 200,000 Catholics, and destroy their churches and abbeys.

Sources have told AsiaNews that in North Korea there are “no more than 200 Catholics left, all very old”.

NORTH KOREA About 23 Christians arrested, 3 executed - Asia News

Atheist Guru repeats his lies.

4th August 2010, Damian Thompson, Telegraph.

Vanity Fair have sent me a preview of Christopher Hitchens’s very unpleasant piece about his cancer – unpleasant not just because Hitchens describes in detail the invasion of his body by a monstrous tumour, but also because it contains a despicable slur against the Pope. (And Henry Kissinger, but I don’t care about that.)

He writes: “Will I really not live long enough … to read – if not indeed write – the obituaries of elderly criminals like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?”

This should scarcely need saying, but Pope Benedict XVI is not a criminal: neither Hitchens nor anyone else has produced evidence that he covered up the crimes of paedophile priests. On the contrary, he sought to tighten up canonical procedures against sex abusers. There were plenty of cover-ups; it’s just that the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith didn’t organise them and, indeed, fought battles with some of those prelates who did.

Continue reading Christopher Hitchens: I'm sorry that I probably won't live to see the death of 'elderly criminal' Benedict XVI – Telegraph Blogs

UPDATE
Vanity Fair recants: Pope not an elderly criminal just an elderly villian.

Fr Robert Barron comments on Christopher Hitchens at "Word on Fire".

Science Blog ignores facts to promote hate and misinformation.

PZ Myers, a contributor to Science Blog has decided to contribute some of his time to hate mongering against the Catholic Church and in particular Pope Benedict. He apparently thought Tim Minchin’s rather stupid and factually incorrect ditty on Pope Benedict was truthful enough to put on a science blog. Gee and here I thought scientists deal in facts silly me.

I’m guessing Tim Minchin based his anti-Pope Benedict ditty on the rantings of Christopher HItchens which have been demolished in an article by Sean Murphy complete with 80 footnotes. Which is 80 more than Hitchens provided.

There’s not much difference between the level of factual material found in Tim Minchin’s video and the anti-Catholic videos made by the “God Hates Fags” Westboro Baptist Church.

One wonders why PZ Myers of Science Blog chose to promote Tim Minchin’s bit of hate mongering. It’s interesting to also note just how retarded are many of the comments praising PZ Myers’ post. Hopefully these “science type” people aren’t working in a field of science requiring the use of rational thought.

More information on the role of Pope Benedict in preventing and dealing with sex abuse within the Church.

Give Me That Old Time Atheism

By Fr. Robert Barron – Word on Fire Blog.

Recently, Chicago has been the target market for a campaign of billboards and bus placards sponsored by the Freedom From Religion Foundation which advocate a dismissal of all things religious. Father Barron offers his thoughts on this initiative here:

I have no particular political objection to the recent advertising campaign launched by atheists and agnostics, which involves placards on the side of buses urging religious people to sleep in on Sunday morning and stop wasting their time going to church. I mean, it’s a free country, and people can express their views publicly, even on controversial matters. But what I object to is the stupidity of the view that’s being advocated.

Continue reading at Word On Fire

Hitch-22: Christopher Hitchens’ memoir

By Francis Phillips

Christopher Hitchens hardly needs an introduction; as a journalist, polemicist and “contrarian”, he appears to be a one-man road show in rusting armour, travelling the world to tilt at whatever windmills of folly provoke his wrath. Late in this often engaging, sometimes instructive and occasionally self-regarding memoir, he compiles “hate” and “love” lists: in the hate column he puts “dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation” while in the love column he has “literature, irony, humour, the individual, defence of free expression, friendship.” These lists sum up the passions and themes of this book.

Continue reading at MercatorNet

IS ATHEISM RATIONAL? IS RELIGION? - New Oxford Review

By Carl Sundell, May 2010.

“… perhaps we might begin to suspect that the atheist's position is rooted not in the intellect but in the will. Is it possible that the atheist does not want God to exist, and that he therefore orders his intellect to supply the necessary objections? It certainly seems so. There isn't any reasonable argument why men should choose to live in a purposeless universe and be doomed to eternal death. It becomes all the less reasonable a choice when we remember that there is not and cannot be any shred of proof that God does not exist or that we exist without an ultimate purpose. Then why choose atheism? Why would anybody want God not to exist?”

Read full article at the New Oxford Review

Does Being a Genius in Mathematics Make Hawking Wise?

 From the Catholic League:

HAWKING POSITS FALSE CONFLICT
June 8, 2010

In an interview last night with ABC-News reporter Diane Sawyer, scientist Stephen Hawking opined that human life is "insignificant in the universe," and then went on to say that "There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason." He concluded by saying, "Science will win because it works."

Catholic League president Bill Donohue took exception to Hawking's views today:

How any rational person could belittle the pivotal role that human life plays in the universe is a wonder, but it is just as silly to say that all religions are marked by the absence of reason. While there are some religions which are devoid of reason, there are others, such as Roman Catholicism, which have long assigned it a special place.

It was the Catholic Church that created the first universities, and it was the Catholic Church that played a central role in the Scientific Revolution; these two historical contributions made possible Mr. Hawking's career.

Reason, in pursuit of truth, has been reiterated by the Church fathers for nearly two millennia. That is why Hawking posits a false conflict: in the annals of the Catholic Church, there is no inherent conflict between science and religion. Quite the contrary: science and religion, in Catholic thought, are complementary properties. Ergo, nothing is gained by alleging a "victory" of science over religion.

Religion without reason, Pope Benedict XVI instructed us in his Regensburg address in 2006, leads to fanaticism. That much Hawking seems to understand. What he doesn't get is its contra: science without faith also leads to disaster—the genocidal regimes in Germany, the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia being Exhibits A, B, C and D.

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It’s not uncommon for Hawking to make some fairly bizarre comments:

On taking a weightless flight with Zero Gravity Corporation Hawking said:

“Many people have asked me why I am taking this flight. I am doing it for many reasons. First of all, I believe that life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.”

For a man who has relied so much on the help of other people to deal with his disability he certainly has an very low opinion of humanity. And if humanity is so rotten that they will destroy the Earth, won’t this same humanity just repeat that destruction in space? And which alien planet does Hawking want us to colonise? And how does one transport large numbers of people to this “New Earth”? Remembering how much fuel is required to lift just three men to the Moon.

Apollo 11 using quite a lot of fuel to transport just 3 men to the moon.

Like Cosmologist Carl Sagan, Hawking seems to sometimes let his fantasies get in the way of facts.

Image of Steven Hawking courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Image of Apollo 11 courtesy of NASA.

From Communism to Christianity

 By Thomas Basil at New Oxford Review

The Catholic Church is often portrayed as mankind's foremost oppressor. But all who level such accusations should make a secularist pilgrimage to Latvia's Museum of [Soviet and Nazi] Occupations in the capital city of Riga. The museum has been given a very conspicuous location in the heart of the city. Photos of foreign dignitary guests line the entrance. It looks like every political figure and popular entertainer who sets foot in Latvia is required to make a visit.
Pilgrims are recommended to meditate on Order No. 001223 given by the Soviet Deputy People's Commissar of Public Security. On the night of June 13, 1941, fifteen thousand Latvians were awakened in the night, given one hour to pack a suitcase, then forced into railway cattle cars to ride for weeks to Siberian gulags. Newspapers and police were silent. Relatives received no information. Train tracks were littered with desperate notes dropped by deportees, some now on display as faded testaments on the museum wall.

Continue reading at New Oxford Review

Dawkins preaches to the deluded against the divine.

LIKE revivalists from an alternative universe, 2500 hardcore believers in the absence of religion packed into the Global Atheists Convention in Melbourne last weekend to give a hero's welcome to the high priest of belief in unbelief, Richard Dawkins.

The bestselling author of The God Delusion was similarly fawned over by the Australian media, which uncritically lapped up everything he said.
This was even after (or perhaps because) he referred to the Pope as a Nazi, which managed to combine defamation of the pontiff with implicit Holocaust denial.
By comparison, Family First senator Steve Fielding may feel he got off lightly when Dawkins described him merely as more stupid than an earthworm.

Continue Reading at the Australian March 16th ...

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.