Christopher Hitchens revises the Ten Commandments. "The Ten Commandments were set in stone, but it may be time for a re-chisel. With all due humility, the author takes on the job, pruning the ethically dubious, challenging the impossible, and rectifying some serious omissions."
Hitch's article on the subject on vanityfair.com.
Showing posts with label cristian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cristian. Show all posts
3 Oct 2012
The Ten Commandments
19 Sept 2012
Caesar's Messiah
Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus website
Joseph Atwill is an independent scholar who has set the world of New Testament scholarship in a new direction. In his book Caesar's Messiah, Atwill outlines the series of events in Jesus' ministry that are parallels with the events of the battle campaign of Titus Flavius. His research has been made into a documentary. Through interviews with seven controversial Bible scholars, the "Caesar's Messiah" documentary shows that Christianity was invented by the Romans as a political tool to control the masses of the day, and it is still being used this way today. Producer/Director of the film Fritz Heede along with Co-Producer/Writer Nijole Sparkis also join in on this interview. In the first hour, we’ll retrace Joseph’s main thesis, including Caesar’s possible intentions behind the gospels. In the second hour, we’ll discuss literary techniques used by the Romans. Atwill explains Titus typology and reversal of the gospels. He also reveals the logic puzzle of the last four gospels. Later, we talk about the need for new myths. Also, we’ll discuss what method of thought can set us free from doctrine.
Red Ice Radio (with a lot of links for further reading)
18 Sept 2012
24 Aug 2012
23 Aug 2012
Why I'm Not a Christian
Bertrand Russell 1872-1970
British philosopher, logican, mathematician, historian, and social critic.
20 Aug 2012
Pakistani girl (11) accused of Qur'an burning could face death penalty
An 11-year-old Christian Pakistani girl could face the death penalty under the country's notorious blasphemy laws, after she was accused by her neighbours of deliberately burning sacred Islamic texts. Rifta Masih was arrested on Thursday, after complaints against her prompted angry demonstrations. Asif Ali Zardari, the president, has ordered the interior ministry to investigate the case.
As communal tensions continued to rise, about 900 Christians living on the outskirts of Islamabad have been ordered to leave a neighbourhood where they have lived for almost two decades.
Relations between the communities had been simmering for months after complaints were made about the noise coming from three churches in the area during religious services. Two of the landlords who owned the buildings had already ordered an end to worship and some services were forcibly broken up. But there was no indication that all the Christians would be forced out so suddenly until Rifta was accused of the provocative act of burning the sacred words of Islam.
1 Jul 2012
Richard Dawkins on CNN
Richard Dawkins featured on CNN's "Out In The Open" panel, a part of Paula Zahn Now on Monday, February 12, 2007.
21 Jun 2012
"Atheists are immoral!"
"John Smith" from the UK (a.k.a. YouTuber Sunderb00t) called the show twice last year (during episodes #631 and #634), but still doesn't have much intelligent to say. It isn't clear if this caller actually hears voices, or if he just likes to listen to his own voice, but the hosts have now come to the conclusion that he is mentally ill.
7 Jun 2012
Tribute to Christopher Hitchens
The 2012 Global Atheist Convention's moving tribute to Christopher Hitchens. www.atheistconvention.org.au
21 May 2012
2 May 2012
Fox News Says Dan Savage is 'Bullying' Christians
Dan Savage is an American author, media pundit, journalist and newspaper editor. Savage writes the internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column Savage Love. Its tone is frank in its discussion of sexuality, often humorous, and hostile to social conservatives and Rick Santorum's views on homosexuality. As a gay man, Savage has often been the subject of controversy regarding some of his opinions that pointedly clash with cultural conservatives and those put forth by what Savage has been known to call the "gay establishment". In 2010, Savage and his husband Terry Miller began the It Gets Better Project to help prevent suicide among LGBT youth.
Wikipedia - Video from The Young Turks
24 Apr 2012
Was Jesus Gay? Probably
Preaching on Good Friday on the last words of Jesus as he was being executed makes great spiritual demands on the preacher. The Jesuits began this tradition. Many Anglican churches adopted it. Faced with this privilege in New Zealand's capital city, Wellington, my second home, I was painfully aware of the context, a church deeply divided worldwide over issues of gender and sexuality. Suffering was my theme. I felt I could not escape the suffering of gay and lesbian people at the hands of the church, over many centuries. Was that divisive issue a subject for Good Friday?
For the first time in my ministry I felt it had to be. Those last words of Jesus would not let me escape. "When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, 'Woman behold your son!' Then he said to the disciple. 'Behold your mother!' And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home." That disciple was John whom Jesus, the gospels affirm, loved in a special way. All the other disciples had fled in fear. Three women but only one man had the courage to go with Jesus to his execution. That man clearly had a unique place in the affection of Jesus. In all classic depictions of the Last Supper, a favourite subject of Christian art, John is next to Jesus, very often his head resting on Jesus's breast. Dying, Jesus asks John to look after his mother and asks his mother to accept John as her son. John takes Mary home. John becomes unmistakably part of Jesus's family.
Continues on AlterNet – Picture from Jesús Gay: Circus Christi. La Exposición Prohibida De Fernando Bayona
21 Apr 2012
The Three New Commandments
The late Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great, delivers a lecture at the Royal Ontario Museum entitled "The Three New Commandments" in conjunction with the exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Christopher Hitchens' wit and warmth remembered as New York pays tribute (The Guardian)
25 Feb 2012
17 Jan 2012
Chief rabbi and Christian therapists under fire over homosexuality
Young Jewish Amsterdammers are furious that their chief rabbi has signed a statement issued in America by 162 rabbis and Jewish leaders saying homosexuality is a disease which can be cured.
Aryeh Ralbag, who lives in New York and visits the Netherlands once or twice a year to rule on legal matters, signed the statement as chief rabbi of Amsterdam and de facto of the Netherlands, a young gay man wrote to the Volkskrant in an email. Ronnie Eisenmann of the Jewish Community Amsterdam told the paper he has asked Ralbag to delete his Dutch position from the list of signatories. 'Saying he is chief rabbi here gives the impression that the Jewish community in the Netherlands supports his view. That is not the case,' he said.
In a separate report, Trouw says medical organisations and health insurers do not want to pay for a therapy designed to teach homosexuals to repress their 'sinful urges'. The treatment is offered by the orthodox Christian organisation Different, a recognised provider of therapies in mental health care. Because it is officially recognised, health insurers cannot refuse to pay for the treatment, Trouw says. However, doctors and insurers say the treatment is damaging and even dangerous and want the health inspectorate to look into the matter.
Can't Someone Tell Geert Wilders to Stop His Anti-Muslim Diatribes Before Somebody Gets Hurt?
A couple of years ago, a billboard appeared outside Columbia, S.C., looming above Interstate 26. Beady eyes stared out from a black balaclava emblazoned with an inscription from the Quran—clearly the eyes were meant to be those of a terrorist—and next to them were these words: “ISLAM RISING ... BE WARNED.”
Erected by the Virginia-based Christian Action Network, the sign advertised the group’s documentary about a charismatic Dutch politician with dyed-blond hair, a mysterious past, and a platform of paranoid hate. South Carolina seemed to offer a ready audience for Geert Wilders’s dire warnings against the Muslim religion. Today, with the Republican road show encamped in the state for the Jan. 21 presidential primary, the 48-year-old Dutchman is more than ever a man who needs to be watched and listened to carefully. At home in the Netherlands, his explosive theme of unrelenting hostility to Islam has built his xenophobic Party for Freedom, founded in 2005, into the country’s third-largest political party; across the Atlantic his message packs serious resonance in an American heartland still shaken by the 9/11 attacks. Wilders’s name and message have been invoked repeatedly in South Carolina and at least a dozen other state legislatures as they debate measures to ban an imagined threat: Islamic law.
That was then. These days the country’s ruling coalition stands or falls at Wilders’s discretion. And his antipathy toward Islam goes so far that when Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands wore a headscarf during a royal visit to the Gulf monarchies last week, Wilders complained that the Dutch government should have stopped her. “He has to move to the middle,” urges Hirsi Ali. “He has to distinguish between violent Islamists and nonviolent Muslims. You know, there are so many shades of Muslims right now, and he could use some of them as his allies.” But it’s as if the rhetoric has taken control of the speaker. “He has always loved attention and power,” says his largely estranged brother, Paul Wilders. “He has ruled out any sense of doubt.”
Like many politicians who boast of their own candor, Wilders keeps much of his life and work in the shadows. Apart from the boilerplate official biography that says he was raised a Roman Catholic in the town of Venlo, there’s little on the record from him about his family background, and he flatly refuses to talk about it now. According to his brother, some of the family’s roots extend deep into Indonesia, an outpost of the Dutch colonialist empire for nearly three and a half centuries. Long-ago intermarriage between European settlers and native “inlanders” might possibly account for the slightly almond shape of Wilders’s dull-blue eyes.
9 Jan 2012
Archbishop says that it is OK to rape women who had an abortion
Javier Martinez, the archbishop of Grenada, Spain is in hot water after saying during his Christmas speech that it is OK to rape women who had an abortion. According to the Bishop, Hitler’s and Stalin’s acts against humanity are not as bad as a woman who had an abortion and that makes it perfectly alright for any man to abuse such a woman’s body without limitations because she committed sin as if she had the right to do that. The bishop stated that the church will not budge from its decision that abortions are a great sin against God’s will and should not be tolerated.
Pope Benedict XVI was asked to comment on the bishop’s statement but thus far the head of church has remained silent. No word on the church possibly taking sanctions against Archbishop Javier Martinez.
24 Dec 2011
The Caganer figure
The caganer is one of the most characteristic and beloved figures in popular Catalan Christmas imagery. The placement of this uninhibited and controversial figure in the crèche is a counterpoint which adds a human side to the representation of the mystery of Christmas. This down-to-earth symbol makes for a marvellous synthesis which harmonizes its transcendent and supernatural message with material reality and the biological condition of our organism.
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