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Indian Man Charged With Blasphemy For Exposing "Miracle"
bhagwad writes "When a statue in Mumbai began to miraculously drip tears, huge crowds began to gather, pray, and collect the water in vials. Sanal Edamaruku has exposed such bogus miracles before, and when he was called in, his investigations showed that it was nothing more than a nearby drainage. The entire investigation was caught on tape. The priests were outraged and demanded an apology. When he refused, a case of 'blasphemy' was registered at the police station and they now want to have him arrested." In related news, today Kuwait's parliament "passed amendments to the Gulf state's penal code stipulating the death penalty for those who curse God, Islam's Prophet Mohammed or his wives." However, they made no change to the penalty for playing a joke national anthem at a sporting event.
Hopefully the world will start to grow more accepting toward skeptical beliefs(such as atheism, Agnosticism, etc). It makes me sad how often these beliefs are persecuted :(
In more related news, Tennessee just attacked science to make it harder to teach evolution and climatology because theocrats can't handle the truth.
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make install -not war
NO chance anyone would actually get tried for blasphemy against the Catholic Church in Mumbai.
Not only does 98% of the local population not give a shit, but the church leaders in the Vatican will be smacking their foreheads when they see this. They have been trying for the last couple hundred years to undo the massive ill-will they have caused persecuting/prosecuting "heretics" throughout the ages...
"Some religious nutjob wants him arrested" is a far fucking cry from "He's been charged." I want the author of the article headline to be charged with a crime too, doesn't mean it'll happen.
Well, people in my country worship a man who was allegedly tortured to death over 2000 years ago. There are life-sized statues of the man, wearing only a rag, nailed to a cross in every temple. People wear smaller depictions of the torture instrument as a good-luck charm of sorts. Part of the rites involve drinking wine and eating a small piece of bread in the belief that it, in a spiritual sense, is the blood and flesh of this poor man.
Well, I guess it's a lot more intimidating than a jolly elephant man at least? Keeps the unwashed foreign tribes at a distance.
Emotions! In your brain!
labeling someone a hater or fearer because he doesn't like or has a rational reason to not agree with something is not a counter argument, no matter what the political correctness thinktanks say.
Well...
The bible belt is going in this exact same direction. Arabs took like 8 thousand years to fuck up and get religion infested up the wazoo. The US has managed to catch up in insanity much, much faster.
Praise capitalism!
I'm not clear on how instructions from the police to come in and be arrested are "nothing to see here"? Perhaps you could explain?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Eventually you mature and leave the cradle. No guarantees for those who choose to remain behind in the cradle.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
what a dumbass comment. the whole story is a non event. it's not in the mainstream news in india, nor on any channels. nutjobs exist in every country. and oh, are you going to tell me that there are states and universities planning to have creationist museums/ have it taught as a part of curriculum ? KKK and others are fictitious ? are you xenophobic sitting in the USA ?
India is a democracy much like USA. there is space for any lunacy, also, its a developing country just coming to terms with poverty and other issues. I'd bet every advanced / developed nations had such teething issues to deal with. with such a condescending/ sneering attitude... I begin to wonder how perfect is your country ?
Yeah, every religion is going to seem wacky to outsiders, but..
Everyone can clearly see how foolish everyone else's religion is. For some reason not many can turn the same critical eye on their own.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So Christianity is every bit as nutty? You don't say!
The point is that regardless of what the evangelicals might wish, you can't get arrested for calling them out on their shit in the US. This makes the US "better" than India on this score, regardless of how equally ridiculous the respective "common" religion is.
Well there you have it, your new national motto. "The US - currently better than India". You go guys!
What gets me about this is that there ARE a bunch of different faiths in India, and they're trying, officially at least and in parts some better than others, to get along by studiously ignoring each other's mutually exclusive beliefs. So a sceptic comes along and disproves a miracle, IN HIS OPINION, which is rude but within the scope of his unprotected belief system. I don't understand how a Christian system based on faith can really ever take offence at someone poking holes in a local miracle, or the entire canon even. I genuinely mean this - if you're Christian and you're letting someone bamboozle you with logic and facts then it shows a profound lack of faith and a misunderstanding of the teachings of Jesus if your first reaction is anger. If those Indian Christians had simply blessed the sceptic and agreed to disagree there'd be no issue. The people with REAL faith could believe in whatever they want, and the people with actual FACTS can be smug in their knowledge and the impending empty soulless non-existence they have to look forward to when they die. Everybody's happy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_inventions_and_discoveries#Medicine
But luckily, not for very long.
Oxygen by Antoine Lavoisier in 1778.
How can you denounce something when you can't breathe?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ah, it's silly season again, when the astroturfers for products and companies are displaced somewhat by the astroturfers for politicians. I always hated this part of the cycle. But it is what it is.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The Catholic church was fine with evolution, they didn't push for creationism
Catholic Church pushes for creationism? Since when? Got any references?
Indeed - atheism being the classic example of this
"The church isn't anti-evolution. It is anti-critical thinking."
it's anti-thinking, critical thinking is a step too far. Thinking is the danger to faith.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
that is why... http://richarddawkins.net/articles/495770-official-vatican-does-compare-child-abuse-with-ordaining-women
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I grew up in the 60's and 70's, my mum was a sunday school teacher up until I was about 6-7, I still remeber overhearing her saying to dad something like "I'm brainwashing my own kids", after that she quit and started encouraging me to read aboriginal dreamtime stories ( not as fact but to demonstrate there were lots of different 'stories' ). It probably helped that my dad was an engineer.
Anyway, my anectdotal experience over the last 50 odd years, plus a bunch of census stats from the US and around the world, tells me that people have turned their back on religion in droves during my lifetime. I agree it started with the sexual revolution in the 60's, but it has been accelerating ever since. More recently it has been put somewhat unkindly as "the internet, where religions come to die', and I think there is a great deal of truth to that because kids will find a plethora of dreamtime stories all by themselves. From a very young age they no longer have to rely on their parents digging out obscure books from the adult library, which is something even my own 80's era kids could not do until their late teens.
Religion is loud and angry in the US right now but it's losing its power and income base (which is why they still disaprove contraception). After millenia of being at the top of the food chain in all previous civilizations they suddenly find they have to start justifying their previously unquestioned claims of 'moral authority' in society with something more substansive than 'might is right'. They find themselves in a world where more and more of their 'sheep' are no longer affraid to laugh in their face and are willing to hold them to account for their hypocricy and crimes.
I don't think I will live long enough to see it but when governments start taxing what are essentially some of the richest organisations on the planet, then you will know reason has won the day. But reason can only take us so far, at some point you just have to accept an assumption, science has boiled it all down to a handful of very basic assumptions (ie: the fundemantal forces and dimentions exist). It may boil it down further but it will always require the assumption that the real world exists and is not some sort of matrix senario where it's all in our heads.
Of course the alternative to all this social upheaval is for everyone to simply tell the truth and just admit that nethier they nor I know the answer to the existential question (Why am I here?), none of us even know if the question makes any sense in the first place. The closest thing to a rational answer that I've ever found is more a statement of fact than an answer, it's a Sagan sounbite;"We are a way for the universe to know itself".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I've always wondered why an omniescent deity would require open worship. If God knows all then surely it knows how you feel without you having to say anything.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
How is it that as a rule religions seem to think that their creator is so narcissistic that he/she/it would want/need/demand that people worship he/she/it?
My assessment of this has always been that if man was created in God's image, and man requires the worship and admiration of his peers, then God must also.
You forgot his convictions about keeping women barefoot and pregnant at home. That's a key tenet of Mormonism.
Meanwhile, for the benefit of Kuwaitis:
#1 - God is a drunken asshole who starts wars, causes nothing but suffering, and is such a piss poor retarded deity that he "designed" humans with a windpipe crossing the food pipe and a reproductive system crossing the waste elimination system. If God were an engineer he'd have been flunked out in freshman courses and barred from reentry before he REALLY hurt someone... oh crap too late.
#2 - Mohammed was a warmonger, a war criminal, a genocidal fucktard, and a pedophile. Deal with it.
#3 - Mohammed's wives... don't really have much to say about them. For the most part, they were just a part of the society they were living in, and I really feel sorry for Khadija, who started out owning and operating her own business and only married Mohammed because she wanted a young boytoy (kinda like the Demi Moore/Ashton Kutcher deal) and instead wound up with him taking her life, turning her into a virtual slave, and fooling around with as many other women as he could get his hands on.
Everyone can clearly see how foolish everyone else's religion is. For some reason not many can turn the same critical eye on their own.
Indeed - atheism being the classic example of this
Most foolish of all is the belief that opting out of religion is a religion.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You describe Pascal's Wager (That you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by believing in God, while you have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not believing in God). This can be a compelling argument to someone who already believes in God, or is in a culture where there is only really one choice of religion.
However, the argument is a poor one. An unmentioned premise of the argument is that there is only one possible God to choose to believe in or not; of course, we know this is not true. There are countless different Gods that people choose to believe in. There are the major religions, and all of the thousands of offshoots. Many of those beliefs include the idea that God HATES it if you worship the wrong God (think the First Commandment).
Because of this, you have to include in your calculation that you choose the WRONG God to believe in, and in doing so you actually piss him off more than if you had not believed at all. Maybe God exists, but his REAL desire is for no one to worship him, and worshipping him is what pisses him off.
There are infinite possible Gods, so the argument that you should just choose to believe in one of them because you have nothing to lose doesn't hold water.