The Blog of Record

They look like a bunch of happy folks.

Compare this:

and this:

Well, Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”, not “Don’t be a coward”.

(From here and here.)

Another confesses to doing it on a fortnightly basis for over 25 years. Do they teach it in the seminaries?

Another day, another reason to like France: A Paris court has convicted the cult of $$$cientology of fraud, fined it more than half a million euros and given suspended sentences to several of its leaders. The judge stopped short of banning the cult in France, which was the prosecution’s request, but he did cite its “obsession” with financial gain and its shady methods based on bringing members into a “state of subjection”.

For yesterday’s reason to like France, go here.

He’ll fit right in.

India has its own barbaric religious force that kills, rapes, burns alive, bans and prohibits people from doing anything that is against the tradition – the Hindu Khap Panchayats, or Khaps.

The article’s claim that one of the Khaps has decreed “that women should only give birth to sons” seems to be an exaggeration, though. It seems to relate to a decree that

families with less than two sons were not eligible to approach the Khap for property disputes as those ‘unfortunate’ families had ‘lesser scope’ towards carrying forward the father’s name or increasing family assets.

The result, of course, has been abortion of female foetuses and killing of baby girls on a massive scale in the 28 villages “governed” by the Khap.

For all intents and purposes, the Khaps rule sizable swathes of India with fanatical brutality, but the government seems uninterested.

(Via Link Collection.)

Masturbation is pro-life:

Does God want you to masturbate?

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, masturbation is “intrinsically and gravely disordered.” That’s because “sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.” If you aren’t making babies, you can’t play with the equipment.

But what if playing with the equipment helps you make babies?

Research made public last week suggests precisely that. In a paper presented to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, Dr. David Greening, an Australian infertility expert, reports that 81 percent of the men in his study significantly improved their sperm quality, as measured by DNA fragmentation, through a simple one-week program.

The program was so easy that even the average guy could follow it. According to a summary of the study, “The men were instructed to ejaculate daily.”

Sounds like a plan. But what about women? Does God want them to masturbate?

Christian Britain is dead, says the assistant Bishop of Newcastle:

Perhaps the most worrying set of statistics for the Church of England is the decline in baptisms. Out of every 1,000 live births in England in 2006/7 only 128 were baptised as Anglicans.

The figure rises by a small amount if adult baptism and thanksgiving services are included but it is hard to see the Church of England being able to justify its position as the established church on the basis of these numbers.

By way of contrast, out of every 1,000 live births in England in 1900, 609 were baptised in the Church of England. Figures for church marriages show an equally catastrophic decline.

His bizarre vision for the future shows how desperate things are:

We are going to have to invent a new civil religion. Already the process has begun with the observance of Holocaust Day and increasing focus on Human Rights as providing a shared basis for morality.

An “increasing focus on Human Rights” is a convenient thing: it takes the focus away from the government trampling on the people’s real rights – to own firearms, to defend themselves and their homes from criminals, to exercise free speech, and now, it seems, to be judged by a jury of peers, too. If the U.K.’s established church sees potential for a new religion in this, then it’s no wonder that Brits are turning away from it.

A pastor in Louisville, Ky., has invited gun owners to bring their open-carry guns to church to celebrate the Fourth of July and Second Amendment.

I have a feeling that this church will be safe from any lunatics who want to see how many unarmed people they can shoot, and not only on that day.

Scientology leader David Miscavige appears as a sadist from the stories of former top Scientology cultists. Much more here.

Scientology is like PETA: you have no problem believing anything you hear about it, no matter how bizarre, kooky, or even criminal.

The trial is not about semantics like whether Scientology is a church or something else (it’s already considered a sect in France) but about seeing whether crimes have been committed and whether the organization should be disbanded in this country:

The Church of Scientology could be dissolved in France if it is convicted in a trial that opened Monday in a Paris court, where the group and seven of its French leaders stand charged of organized fraud and illegal pharmaceutical activity.

Investigating judge Jean-Christophe Hullin spent years examining the group’s activities, and in his indictment criticized practices he said were aimed at extracting large sums of money from members and plunging them into a “state of subjection.”

The whole and sole purpose of Scientology is to make its leaders rich. I don’t know of any other religion like that.

A feminist Marxist scholar’s research in Colombia leads her to an un-Marxist conclusion: after evangelical conversion, husbands in a society dominated by a macho value system cut down on the drinking, gambling and wife abuse, making life better for their wives and even transforming traditional gender relations.

They don’t forget to say “Hallelujah!” as they de-baptize you.

Via Crucea.ro (Romanian).

For a few bucks a month, you can have a computer pray for you every day using synthesized speech. Any religion is served – including the one that is easily offended by such things. I wonder if they are not playing with fire here.

(Via Marginal Revolution.)

Roger Scruton compares the humanism of his youth and the new humanism of today’s Britain whose greatest achievement is writing “There probably is no God” on city buses. As is often the case, the sequel is hardly an improvement:

Observing the new humanism from my old perspective I am struck not only by its lack of positive belief, but also by its need to compensate for this lack by antagonism toward an imagined enemy. I say “imagined,” since it is obvious that religion is a declining force in Britain. . . . But a weak enemy is precisely what these negative philosophies require. Like so many modern ideologies, the new humanism seeks to define itself through what it is against rather than what it is for. It is for nothing, or at any rate for nothing in particular. Ever since the Enlightenment there has been a tendency to adopt this negative approach to the human condition, rather than to live out the exacting demands of the Enlightenment morality, which tells us to take responsibility for ourselves and to cease our snivelling. Having shaken off their shackles and discovered that they have not obtained contentment, human beings have a lamentable tendency to believe that they are victims of some alien force, be it aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, capitalism, the priesthood, or simply the belief in God. And the feeling arises that they need only destroy this alien force, and happiness will be served up on a plate, in a garden of pleasures. That, in my view, is why the Enlightenment, which promised the reign of freedom and justice, issued in an unending series of wars.

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

News from Florida:

A chaplain at Hospice by the Sea in Boca Raton has resigned, she says, over a ban on use of the words “God” or “Lord” in public settings.

[The Rev. Mirta] Signorelli said that she and other chaplains were told Feb. 23 to “cease and desist from using God in prayers.”

Signorelli said her supervisor recently singled her out for delivering a spiritual reflection in the chapel that included the word “Lord” and had “a Christian connotation.”

“But that was the 23rd Psalm,” Signorelli said — not, strictly speaking, Christian, as it appears in the Old Testament.

“And I am well aware that there were people from the Jewish tradition in attendance. I didn’t say Jesus or Allah or Jehovah. I used ‘Lord’ and ‘God,’ which I think are politically correct. I think that’s as generic as you can get.”

Signorelli resigned Feb. 25.

She should have said Allah. I bet this would’ve been no problem.

America is becoming less Christian:

America is a less Christian nation than it was 20 years ago, and Christianity is not losing out to other religions, but primarily to a rejection of religion altogether, a survey published Monday found.

Three out of four Americans call themselves Christian, according to the American Religious Identification Survey from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1990, the figure was closer to nine out of 10 — 86 percent.

At the same time there has been an increase in the number of people expressing no religious affiliation.

The survey also found that “born-again” or “evangelical” Christianity is on the rise, while the percentage who belong to “mainline” congregations such as the Episcopal or Lutheran churches has fallen.

One in three Americans consider themselves evangelical, and the number of people associated with mega-churches has skyrocketed from less than 200,000 in 1990 to more than 8 million in the latest survey.

CNN somehow manages to blame the decline in the number of Christians on the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the percentage of Muslims has doubled since 1990 – from 0.3 to 0.6 percent.

Competition among churches for worshippers – not only presidential - to the benefit of American religion and individual churchgoers.

Leonid Brezhnev drinks with (R to L): Chief Rabbi of the Moscow Choral Synagogue Yakov Fishman, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Pimen, and future Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II, a KGB agent, who died today. Reception marking an anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, Moscow, 1970s.

Sources: 1, 2.

The Prospect magazine blog (U.K.):

There is, in short, a fairly decent case (without being too flippant about it) for saying that American Mormonism shares much in common with American Judaism: small, wealthy, powerful, and with a history of persecution…. Mormonism is a big, fascinating story, and demands to be taken seriously. On current trend rate of growth, it will within my lifetime become the first new global religion since Islam.