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Monday, December 31, 2012

BIBLE CODE (playlist)


REALITY BEYOND MATTER (playlist)


CROSSING OVER (playlist)


CROSSING OVER (playlist)


Obama: GOP's insistence on halting tax hikes for the wealthy is stopping fiscal cliff deal - NBC Politics

Obama: GOP's insistence on halting tax hikes for the wealthy is stopping fiscal cliff deal - NBC Politics

Friday, December 21, 2012

Texas lawmaker: ‘Ping-pongs’ deadlier than guns | The Ticket - Yahoo! News

Texas lawmaker: ‘Ping-pongs’ deadlier than guns | The Ticket - Yahoo! News

The Great Face Of Humility In An Unlikely Place - Forbes

The Great Face Of Humility In An Unlikely Place - Forbes

Inspired to spread the word, man’s #26Acts Facebook effort goes viral

Inspired to spread the word, man’s #26Acts Facebook effort goes viral

National Review writer’s offensive Newtown theory - Salon.com

National Review writer’s offensive Newtown theory - Salon.com

World's Most Mysterious Buildings - Articles | Travel + Leisure

World's Most Mysterious Buildings - Articles | Travel + Leisure

Cops: Teens ask for smoke, then kill woman when she replies, ’Get a job’

Cops: Teens ask for smoke, then kill woman when she replies, ’Get a job’

World’s Worst Cultural Mistakes - Articles | Travel + Leisure

World’s Worst Cultural Mistakes - Articles | Travel + Leisure

Monday, December 3, 2012

SOMETIMES Eureka Dejavo, Assurances plus Reassurance plus REAWAKENING are needed REMINDERS, ALWAYS !

SOMETIMES Eureka Dejavo, Assurances plus Reassurance plus REAWAKENING are needed REMINDERS, ALWAYS ! YES, GET Better Organized just like the ''unique organs'' of the BUTTERFLIES plus the BEES in order to fly plus sting UNIQUELY ! EVIDENTLY WITH God nothing is IMPOSSIBLE, REALLY !

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife - Newsweek and The Daily Beast

Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife - Newsweek and The Daily Beast cont/.. ‘You have nothing to fear.’ ‘There is nothing you can do wrong.’ The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. (Photo illustration by Newsweek; Source: Buena Vista Images-Getty Images)




There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.



But that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.



I’m not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.



All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.



It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but—more importantly—the things that happened during that time. Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky.





Reliving History: The search for the meaning of the afterlife is as old as humanity itself. Over the years Newsweek has run numerous covers about religion, God, and that search. As Dr. Alexander says, it’s unlikely we’ll know the answer in our lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean we won’t keep asking.



Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them.



Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.



A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise—that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet.



Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place where I now was. I could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang. It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of it—without joining with it in some mysterious way. Again, from my present perspective, I would suggest that you couldn’t look at anything in that world at all, for the word “at” itself implies a separation that did not exist there. Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else, like the rich and intermingled designs on a Persian carpet ... or a butterfly’s wing.



It gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again. It was a river of life and color, moving through the air. The woman’s outfit was simple, like a peasant’s, but its colors—powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach—had the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else had. She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for five seconds, would make your whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these, beyond all the different compartments of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger than all of them.



Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.



The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:



“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”



“You have nothing to fear.”



“There is nothing you can do wrong.”



The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.



“We will show you many things here,” the woman said, again, without actually using these words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. “But eventually, you will go back.”



To this, I had only one question.



Back where?



Photos: Patients Draw Life-After-Death Experiences



The universe as I experienced it in my coma is ... the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways. (Ed Morris / Getty Images)



A warm wind blew through, like the kind that spring up on the most perfect summer days, tossing the leaves of the trees and flowing past like heavenly water. A divine breeze. It changed everything, shifting the world around me into an even higher octave, a higher vibration.



Although I still had little language function, at least as we think of it on earth, I began wordlessly putting questions to this wind, and to the divine being that I sensed at work behind or within it.



Where is this place?



Who am I?



Why am I here?



Each time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these blasts was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They answered them, but in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate—hotter than fire and wetter than water—and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.



I continued moving forward and found myself entering an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting. Pitch-black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. The orb was a kind of “interpreter” between me and this vast presence surrounding me. It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb, and the orb (which I sensed was somehow connected with, or even identical to, the woman on the butterfly wing) was guiding me through it.



Later, when I was back, I found a quotation by the 17th-century Christian poet Henry Vaughan that came close to describing this magical place, this vast, inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself.



“There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness ...”



That was it exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.



I know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this sounds. Had someone—even a doctor—told me a story like this in the old days, I would have been quite certain that they were under the spell of some delusion. But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons.



What happened to me demands explanation.



Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided. Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference, physics tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation.



Before my experience these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities. Not only is the universe defined by unity, it is also—I now know—defined by love. The universe as I experienced it in my coma is—I have come to see with both shock and joy—the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.



I’ve spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in our country. I know that many of my peers hold—as I myself did—to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us. But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.



I don’t expect this to be an easy task, for the reasons I described above. When the castle of an old scientific theory begins to show fault lines, no one wants to pay attention at first. The old castle simply took too much work to build in the first place, and if it falls, an entirely new one will have to be constructed in its place.



I learned this firsthand after I was well enough to get back out into the world and talk to others—people, that is, other than my long-suffering wife, Holley, and our two sons—about what had happened to me. The looks of polite disbelief, especially among my medical friends, soon made me realize what a task I would have getting people to understand the enormity of what I had seen and experienced that week while my brain was down.



One of the few places I didn’t have trouble getting my story across was a place I’d seen fairly little of before my experience: church. The first time I entered a church after my coma, I saw everything with fresh eyes. The colors of the stained-glass windows recalled the luminous beauty of the landscapes I’d seen in the world above. The deep bass notes of the organ reminded me of how thoughts and emotions in that world are like waves that move through you. And, most important, a painting of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked the message that lay at the very heart of my journey: that we are loved and accepted unconditionally by a God even more grand and unfathomably glorious than the one I’d learned of as a child in Sunday school.



Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself.



But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth.



Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife - Newsweek and The Daily Beast

Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife - Newsweek and The Daily Beast

Monday, September 17, 2012

Artificial versus real intelligence - CSMonitor.com

Artificial versus real intelligence - CSMonitor.com

The Mormon Church Posthumously Baptized Obama’s Mother | Addicting Info

The Mormon Church Posthumously Baptized Obama’s Mother | Addicting Info

Spite or Solve: A Choice | Thin Difference

Spite or Solve: A Choice | Thin Difference ;,,  as to whether or not we foster an attitude of spite or solution, deadlock or growth, selfishness or humanity.




Maybe the question is, simply, how do we want to be remembered?



•Do we want to be remembered as angry fools or savvy problem solvers?

•Do we want to be remembered for failures or advancements?

•Do we want to be viewed as holding back or moving forward?

It seems to me that we need to make this choice as an individual and as a society. Read the newspapers, where are we heading? Read the faces of the people in your organization, where are you moving? Look into the eyes of your family members and neighbors, what reflection do you see?



Let us not allow this decade to be viewed as one of divisiveness and decay. Let us lift up this decade as the one in which we rose to the challenge and solved problems for the greater good, higher ideals, and betterment of generations to come.



Let this be our work as a nation, a community, an organization, a family, and an individual. It is our responsibility to do better.



Sunday, September 16, 2012

words and ideas, reflection and blame. - 11thtrumpet's column on Newsvine

words and ideas, reflection and blame. - 11thtrumpet's column on Newsvine ; ..   a list of idealist rules and laws in line with that of the new world orderists and the free-masons/skull and bones/bohemians/bilderburgs/etc etc etc.....the monolith is set in an example of what would benefit the 1% the most, after the 1% have pretty much disected and exploited the entire world. it says the earth is not to exceed in population 500 million inhabitants. i have done the math and if we balanced everything we rely upon, water, food, resources, and eliminated the waste, fraud and exploitation, the greed, and unbalanced wealth was eliminated in favor of a balanced and fair and honest system, human beings could sustain a population of 8 billion inhabitants for 1000 years. thats with everyone playing by the rules, with the implementation of all preventative measures in place and regulating. the message from the 1% is, regardless if they and the policies and crimes committed have caused the earth to seem "unsustainable', have contributed through the global corporate conglomerations at destroying the worlds eco--system, for the mass of humanity to be silenced and driven to death. i disagree with them wholeheartedly, they caused the strife and turmoil, the depletion of the earths better resources and we have to pay for it by death. no way....even if they in the illusion find the rest of us to be commons to their nobility, which is bull@!$%# anyway, and that means we are supposed to just abide and die quietly.

BBC News - Pope urges religions to root out fundamentalism

BBC News - Pope urges religions to root out fundamentalism

BBC News - US authorities question anti-Islam film suspect Nakoula

BBC News - US authorities question anti-Islam film suspect Nakoula

Monday, September 3, 2012

#.UEO4TJDD85s

#.UEO4TJDD85s

Religious Israeli government party wary of war with Iran - Yahoo! News

Religious Israeli government party wary of war with Iran - Yahoo! News ;..   "I cannot confirm or not confirm any report about Iran. I think that this chatter is doing us great damage," Yishai told Israel's Army Radio in an interview.




But he indicated that Shas - and the Netanyahu government as a whole - had yet to decide on whether to strike the Islamic republic which it believes is developing nuclear weapons technology that could be a threat to Israel's existence.



Netanyahu's office declined comment.



DECISION PENDING



Monday, August 20, 2012

rayloke@netvibes.com (20023)

rayloke@netvibes.com (20023) ;.. Everybody who cares about why science doesn’t get through to the public should read it.
Basically, it is a powerful treatise on the neglected art of rhetoric, the technique mastered by Shakespeare, Lincoln, and the writers of the King James Bible.

USA TODAY - News, Travel, Weather, Entertainment, Sports, Technology, U.S. & World

USA TODAY - News, Travel, Weather, Entertainment, Sports, Technology, U.S. & World ;..  The groups stand together in opposing abortion, same-sex marriage, and a provision in Obama's health care law. It requires employers, including faith-based institutions, to provide or facilitate employee insurance coverage for contraception. When the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called the rule an affront to religious liberty, Mormons were right with them, Millet says.
The Bishop John Wester of the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City says "we have a healthy relationship and work closely on issues of compassion."
Ultimately, the symbolism of the Romney-Ryan ticket may be that it doesn't matter any more which religion a candidate claims as long as he claims one, says Grant Wacker, professor of Christian history at Duke Divinity School. "It would be much more significant if the candidates had no faith or called themselves agnostics or unbelievers. That is still unimaginable in the USA today," Wacker says.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Fareed Zakaria: Capitalism, not culture, drives economies - The Washington Post

Fareed Zakaria: Capitalism, not culture, drives economies - The Washington Post ;..  “Anyone who publicizes his remark is helping Romney win the election.”
“Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said at a fundraiser in Israel, comparing the country’s economic vitality to Palestinian poverty. Certainly there is a pedigree for this idea. Romney cited David Landes, an economics historian. He could have cited Max Weber, the great German scholar who first made this claim 100 years ago in his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” which argued that Protestant values were the most important fuel for economic progress.

Monday, July 30, 2012

YES, I AM - by Norman Grubb

YES, I AM - by Norman Grubb ;.. And, quite simply, if He is finally to be known by His universe as the All in all, He 
who is .... But we can perceive it through one of its manifested forms - light, heat, 
power. .... A thing is only to be known as a thing because it has an opposite. ... 
Those who have tried to escape to what they conceive as ultimate freedom by 
some ...

True Light Lutheran Church | Page 2

True Light Lutheran Church | Page 2 ;.. Beyond that, “the heart” in just about every culture (including the culture... This is 
so completely true for the people I have met over the course of the ... Yet neither 
is the beginning…neither is the end. ... There was simply no “coming back. .... 
The only reason Christianity exists today is because not only does ...

Berkeley’s central arguments for immaterialism | PhilosoFiles

Berkeley’s central arguments for immaterialism | PhilosoFiles ; .. CONCEIVE plus Perceive such a concept as ...

Berkeley's central arguments for immaterialism | PhilosoFiles

www.philosofiles.com/great.../berkeleys_central_arguments
This position is called 'immaterialism', because it rejects material substance .... is the marking out [of] … things only as they are known and perceived by us”. .... is not perception, properly so-called (even though people often call it just this), ... and whether we have some other concepts which would let us conceive of matter.eive such a CONCEPT ! ...

1. Kant's transcendental reality

1. Kant's transcendental reality ;... REALITY IS ...

1. Kant's transcendental reality

www.thelogician.net/6_reflect/6_Book_2/6b_chapter_01.htm
Hence, we have no true knowledge and can have none. ... Kant attempted to mitigate or overcome such negative conclusions by laying claim to some ... Of course, toconceive of something does not strictly imply that it exists. .... The whole thing seems credible to some people only because they have simply not sufficiently ...

Welcome to True Light Ministries' Blog » Archive for Last Days and Warnings of Apostasy

Welcome to True Light Ministries' Blog » Archive for Last Days and Warnings of ApostaI believe that just
such a day has arrived! Like Jude, I would have loved to write about our common
salvation, but the times are pressing in on biblical believers. We must contend
earnestly for the faith!
New
Testament Apostasy
The English word “apostasy” is a
transliteration of the Greek noun apostasia and is made up of two
smaller Greek words, which are apo and istemiApo
means “from or away from,” while istemi means, “to stand.” Thus, taken
together, the compound word has the idea of “to stand away from,” “depart from,”
or “departure.” The verbal form aphistemi is used in 1 Timothy 4:1 and means, “to cause someone to move from
a reference point, go away, withdraw.” [1] “But the Spirit explicitly says that in
later times some will fall away from the faith . . .” (1 Tim.
4:1a
). Apostasy, as used in this article means to depart from the
faith of biblical Christianity. In other words, to no longer believe what the
Bible teaches about anything.
The following is a list of the seven major
passages that deal with the last days for the
church: 1
Timothy 4:1-3
2
Timothy 3:1-5
4:3-4James
5:1-8
2 Peter
2:1-22
3:3-6Jude
1-25
. Every one of these passages emphasizes over and over again that
the great characteristic of the final time of the church will be that of
apostasy. The New Testament pictures the condition within the professing church
at the end of the age by a system of denials.
sy ;..

People Argue Just to Win, Scholars Assert - NYTimes.com

People Argue Just to Win, Scholars Assert - NYTimes.com ;.. For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth. Rationality allowed a solitary thinker to blaze a path to philosophical, moral and scientific enlightenment.
Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another. Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

USA TODAY - News, Travel, Weather, Entertainment, Sports, Technology, U.S. & World

USA TODAY - News, Travel, Weather, Entertainment, Sports, Technology, U.S. & World ;.. LOGICAL RATIONALITY Does have a reason to hold back THE TRUTH !  Instead, they kept the lid closed tight.
The facts cited by Freeh are familiar by now. Several people had a chance to stop Sandusky. But a failure of personal courage combined with an institutional coverup enabled a child molester to stalk, groom and assault his victims. Sandusky's access to the campus and its locker rooms gave a pedophile the "very currency that enabled him to attract his victims," the report found.
Freeh's report identifies the enablers: Paterno, president Graham Spanier, vice president Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley. And it strips away any excuses.
Could they really be expected to believe that a close friend and associate could do something so heinous? Well, yes, because each of them was alerted not once but twice.

Friday, July 6, 2012

Higgs Boson announcement from CERN: why the god particle is so important. - Slate Magazine

Higgs Boson announcement from CERN: why the god particle is so important. - Slate Magazine ;..  Who would have believed it? Every now and then theoretical speculation anticipates experimental observation in physics. It doesn’t happen often, in spite of the romantic notion of theorists sitting in their rooms alone at night thinking great thoughts. Nature usually surprises us. But today, two separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva reported convincing evidence for the long sought-after “Higgs” particle, first proposed to exist almost 50 years ago and at the heart of the “standard model” of elementary particle physics—the theoretical formalism that describes three of the four known forces in nature, and which to date agrees with every experimental observation done to date.
The LHC is the most complex (and largest) machine that humans have ever built, requiring thousands of physicists from dozens of countries, working full time for a decade to build and operate.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

A Spiritually Transformed Military with Ambassadors for Christ in Uniform « SpeakEasy

A Spiritually Transformed Military with Ambassadors for Christ in Uniform « SpeakEasy ;..  CHANGE as in getting transformed, converted, or TRANSFERED as in ''swapped. shifted, or stirred and shakened'' throughly as in drink or .. EATTING what kind of FOOD ??

Monday, June 11, 2012

Promoting Ignorance to the Masses: Where Science Goes to Die - Grisham's column on Newsvine

Promoting Ignorance to the Masses: Where Science Goes to Die - Grisham's column on Newsvine ;.. The Creation Museum has decided to start up a billboard campaign to improve their visibility. Why you ask?




We do this because the more people who come to the Creation Museum, (1) the more Christians we can equip to defend the Christian faith, and (2) the more non-Christians we can challenge concerning the message of the gospel.



Yep, equip them to defend the Christian faith with nonsense, pseudo-science and ignorance. That’s the grand plan. But then again, about half of America doesn’t believe in evolution.

The Price of Inequality and the Myth of Opportunity | Common Dreams

The Price of Inequality and the Myth of Opportunity | Common Dreams ;.. DREAMS AND MYSTERIOUS MYTH ...

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Atheists Rally on National Mall « naked capitalism

Atheists Rally on National Mall « naked capitalism [..  From theWashington Post:
Long after blacks and Jews have made great strides, and even as homosexuals gain respect, acceptance and new rights, there is still a group that lots of Americans just don’t like much: atheists. Those who don’t believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry. They can’t join the Boy Scouts. Atheist soldiers are rated potentially deficient when they do not score as sufficiently “spiritual” in military psychological evaluations. Surveys find that most Americans refuse or are reluctant to marry or vote for nontheists; in other words, nonbelievers are one minority still commonly denied in practical terms the right to assume office despite the constitutional ban on religious tests…
On basic questions of morality and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.
It’s a bit ironic that fundamentalists insist that America is a Christian nation, when many of the founding fathers were Deists and would have recoiled at these efforts to impose religious doctrine.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Leaks, corruption, intrigue: Cardinal among plotters in Vatican scandal?

Leaks, corruption, intrigue: Cardinal among plotters in Vatican scandal?  ;..   at least one cardinal was among those suspected of leaking sensitive documents as part of a power struggle at the top of the Catholic Church.

Monday, May 28, 2012

Protesters set themselves on fire near temple popular with tourists in Tibet capital

Protesters set themselves on fire near temple popular with tourists in Tibet capital ;.. WHO REALLY is to be BLAMED ?? ...At least 34 Tibetans have set themselves on fire since March 2011 in protest against China's six-decade rule over Tibet, according to Tibetan rights groups. At least 24 have died, Reuters reported.

First Read - Catholic heavyweights challenge Obama rule on contraception

First Read - Catholic heavyweights challenge Obama rule on contraception ;..  The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., and the University of Notre Dame separately filed lawsuits in federal court challenging a Health and Human Services rule that would require them to offer coverage for contraception, the use of which runs contrary to Catholic teaching.
"For the first time in this country’s history, the government’s new definition of religious institutions suggests that some of the very institutions that put our faith into practice — schools, hospitals and social service organizations — are not ‘religious enough,'" said Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, in a statement.
Father John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame, said: "This filing is about the freedom of a religious organization to live its mission, and its significance goes well beyond any debate about contraceptives."

Friday, May 25, 2012

BBC News - Vatican Bank chief Tedeschi dismissed

BBC News - Vatican Bank chief Tedeschi dismissed ;..  The board will now look for a new director to restore relations with the international financial community, "based on mutual respect for accepted international banking standards".
Mr Gotti Tedeschi declined to comment on his dismissal. He told journalists: "I'd rather say nothing, otherwise I'd say ugly things."
Transparency
But in remarks to the Reuters news agency, he said: "I have paid for my transparency."

Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post

Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post ;.. BORN AGAIN

Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post

Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post ;..  his religious message. When he quotes Scripture or wishes people a good night with God's blessings, he has an audience of nearly 2 million public subscribers to his Facebook page and more than 1.5 million followers on Twitter. For average social media users, however, deciding how much of their personal faith to disclose online is not so easy. Will sharing my religious life make me more or less likely to get a date? Make new friends? Expand professional networks? 

Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post

Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post

Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post

Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post ;..  in search of beauty and the inspiration that comes from a rich menu of sacred music. In a world where interfaith dialogue rarely makes headlines and provokes not a few cynical asides, it is heartening to see both large audiences and a forest of cameras and recorders at the Festival's "idea" segment, the Fes Forum. Why? The notion of linking the world's cultural diversity and its challenge meets a strong echo. And the inspiration of music frees people from set patterns of communications, opening the path to fresh exchange and a lively dialogue.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Struggling with diversity? Turn it into an opportunity | New Europe

Struggling with diversity? Turn it into an opportunity | New Europe ;.. OPPORTUNITY within DIVISITY ; is well known or much more ORIENTATION practiced as it is in MALAYSIA ; ...Earlier, leaders of top destination countries like France, Germany and the UK claimed multiculturalism had failed.




The Council of Europe chose to brand it’s response as “interculturalism”. Besides the right of every individual to respect for his own culture, language and religion, the intercultural approach focuses on the need for interaction and dialogue between cultures. In this model, diversity is seen as an advantage for the host societies: migrants bring complimentary skills, potential links to new markets and sources of foreign investment, and new languages.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post

Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post ;..  The ancient world at this time understood the relationship of earth to heaven as one of moving up and down. This is not only directional, as if one is on an escalator -- though the Old Testament patriarch Jacob did have a vision of a ladder that went up to heaven (Genesis 28:10-19) and some tried to build a ziggurat to heaven, known popularly as theTower of Babel (Genesis 11:5-8) -- but also an act of moving from imperfection below toward perfection above.
This perception of the universe lasted for millennia.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Are humans getting better? | New Europe

Are humans getting better? | New Europe ;.. We might think that evolution leads to the selection of individuals who think only of their own interests, and those of their kin, because genes for such traits would be more likely to spread. But, as I argued then, the development of reason could take us in a different direction.




On the one hand, having a capacity to reason confers an obvious evolutionary advantage, because it makes it possible to solve problems and to plan to avoid dangers, thereby increasing the prospects of survival. Yet, on the other hand, reason is more than a neutral problem-solving tool. It is more like an escalator: once we get on it, we are liable to be taken to places that we never expected to reach. In particular, reason enables us to see that others, previously outside the bounds of our moral view, are like us in relevant respects. Excluding them from the sphere of beings to whom we owe moral consideration can then seem arbitrary, or just plain wrong.

World News - Like a Dan Brown book? Vatican allows mobster to be exhumed

World News - Like a Dan Brown book? Vatican allows mobster to be exhumed ;..  Authorities later revealed that the tomb "only contains the remains of a man." 
Pietro Orlandi, Emanuela’s brother, told journalists outside of the church that he believes "cooperation between the Vatican and investigators is an important step to shed some light on what really happened."

Monday, May 14, 2012

Newsvine - Dalai Lama alleges poison plot; China cries foul

Newsvine - Dalai Lama alleges poison plot; China cries foul ;.. The Tibetan Buddhist leader told the Telegraph he had been warned that the Chinese government was training female Tibetan agents to put poison in their hair or scarves and to seek his blessings or touch his hand.
Hundreds of thousands of people take pilgrimages each year to northern Indian town of Dharmsala, where the Dalai Lama lives under tight security. Huge crowds also surround him during his travels abroad. The Tibetan leader usually places his hand over the heads of devotees seeking his blessing.
He told the newspaper he may ending up being the last Dalai Lama because of Chinese interference in finding his reincarnation after his death.