Wax your surfboard and plug your nose. It’s Friday–and you know what that means. Another Friday Review! (Just like the old Friday Reviews, except…well, new.)
Idour, who would not give specific examples, said he had been subcontracted by a colleague, who he now understood had been hired by a member of the Exclusive Brethren.
He said the pair snooped on Labour MPs. The information had then been passed to sect members, who decided on how to reveal it to the media.
But he also claimed to have reliable information that Labour supporters had hired their own private eyes to tail National leader Don Brash and to go through his rubbish and that of his finance spokesman John Key.
Personality politics reached new lows in New Zealand this week, with Clark saying she’d been told the Exclusive Brethren religious sect had hired a private detective to follow the couple in an effort to dig up personal dirt.
She also linked the sect to false rumours being spread about the sexuality of her husband.
Clark has been forced to defend Davis against claims he’s gay, after some media outlets published a photo of him being hugged and apparently kissed by the couple’s close friend Ian Scott.
The picture was not new and was taken out of context from election night coverage. (TheAge.com)
* Channel 4 is going to air the crucifixion of a corpse, just to show what a nasty horrid death crucifixion is. Christians, predictably, are very outraged.
But Christian groups accused the 90-minute Channel 4 show of exploiting one of their faith’s most sacred cornerstones. Church of England spokesman Steve Jenkins said: “This will upset and offend lots of Christians as it seems he’s using the crucifixion simply to grab attention.”
Christian Voice, which tried to axe Jerry Springer The Opera, threatened to sue. Director Stephen Green said: “This sounds gratuitously offensive and blasphemous.
“It could well be we’d want to take action.” Mr von Hagens preserves corpses by plastination, in which body fat and fluids are replaced by plastic. In 2002 he performed the UK’s first public autopsy in 170 years, broadcast on Channel 4.
Its digital station More4 will air his new show, Crucifixion, at a date yet to be fixed. Producers Firefly called it “a 90-minute film in which Gunther plastinates ‘Jesus’.”
However, Channel 4 last night tried to play down the storm. A spokeswoman claimed: “This is a science and history documentary on the anatomy after crucifixion. It will not be a specific representation of Christ.” Mirror.co.uk
Question: isn’t “using the crucifixion merely to grab attention” one of Christianity’s biggest proselytizing tools?
* The furor over Pope Benedict’s slamming of Islam continues apace.
The Pope has said he is “deeply sorry” that his words, quoting a 14th Century Christian emperor, had upset Muslims.
But his apology was rejected by the Muslims meeting in Lahore, Pakistan.
“The Pope, and all infidels, should know that no Muslim, under any circumstances, can tolerate an insult to the Prophet [Muhammad]. If the West does not change its stance regarding Islam, it will face severe consequences,” said the joint statement.
The group behind the meeting, Jamaat al-Dawat, has been listed by the US government as a “terrorist” group for its alleged links with Kashmiri militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba.
“The Pope’s statement against Prophet Muhammad was not unintentional,” said Sajid Mir, a religious scholar and MP who took part in the meeting.
“He has opened a new and an organised front against Islam and Muslims should prepare themselves for jihad because the Pope’s insulting remarks against Islam follow President George W Bush’s statement on crusades,” he said. (BBC)
Plenty of people are saying, “Look, the dude apologized, and Muslims bombing and screaming isn’t making you look good.” Plenty of other people are saying, “What kind of apology is it when dude doesn’t take responsibility for slamming another faith, just says he’s sorry for ‘the reaction’ it caused?” Yours truly saw a video of Irshad Manji telling Muslims to get over it and leave the frickin’ Pope alone.
We already know my opinion. This probably isn’t over yet, by a long shot.
* The WildHunt Blog’s weekly roundup of news is particularly juicy this week, especially when dude remarks about white-lighters “spouting about “infinite” this and “embodying” that.” Plus there’s Fidel Castro being called a Druid and a bit about Banned Books Week.
* And not quite about religion but still thought provoking: twodifferent posts about race, racism, publishing, and the Universe. Enjoy, discuss, and think.
Go forth and be pluralistic, brethren and sistern.
Here at God & Consequences we firmly believe in books before TV. But then happened the Internet, and Internet videos. So, just to show how up on the times we are, let’s have a little trip down MetaCafe-YouTube Lane.
* First up: Christ wasn’t the first Christ. No, seriously. Dude wasn’t. And he’d probably be offended as a Jew by the notion of pagan gods getting mixed in with his New Testament.
The thing that gets me about this one is how utterly clueless these people seem about the foundations of their faith. The early Church’s propaganda war was evidently well-fought and almost completely won.
* Who could forget the Super Best Friends–Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna, Joseph Smith, Lao Tzu, Jesus, and SeaMan.
Oh, if only all religion was like this…
* One of my favorites–the Evanescence song “Bring Me To Life” set to a montage of clips from Asoka, a movie about the man who laid the foundations for Buddhism to be a world religion. Pretty! And it rocks!
* And just for a few laughs, how about the Greatest Action Story Ever Told? (Note: if you are easily offended by parodies about Christianity, don’t play this one. And what are you doing here anyway?)
Today, the Fabulous Goat Judge took on the issue of Jesus’s pursestrings.
Sometimes when I’ve contemplated the world’s great and fabulous cathedrals, I’ve wondered who paid Jesus’s bills. We all know he preached outdoors (we heartily endorse this practice). At best he might have spoken in some modest synagogues. But even the biggest Bible moron knows that when he went to the fancy Temple in Jerusalem he more or less freaked.
Here was a guy and twelve of his closest friends. Thirteen men needing three hots and a cot every day for three years. I’m a goat judge, not a mathematician, but that adds up to 1095 days. I don’t know if they had leap years then.
Who picked up the tab? Was Jesus like Salieri, with a rich patron, or was he like Mozart, scraping together the rent month to month?
The Bible is strangely silent on this issue. (Gods Are Bored)
I’ve often wondered about this too. Whatever Christ did in the Temple that day was seen by the Romans as an act of political sedition, and we don’t know WHAT it was. The Gospels, frankly, don’t tell us. However, one can suspect from Jesus’s insistence on poverty that building huge edifices for his glory wasn’t quite the result he had in mind when he went a little nutso and laid his life on the line for a principle.
Anne goes on to take the gold in the high dive:
To be brutally frank, I’d rather hold out for worship in the forest on a shoestring with a leader who wants to be there but can’t because he’s now freelance and needs to make ends meet. It has been thus with the Druids, I feel, since the Christian occupation of their lands. And it was probably thus with Jesus, or at least his early followers, back in the day. (Gods Are Bored)
There’s nothing wrong with feeding and housing the people who take talking to the gods and spreading love and joy seriously. But most established religions are mostly engines for the fiscal rape of the poor, not to mention engines for the collection of temporal power (po-TAT-to, po-TAH-to…) Is there a particular point where ecstasy stops and the power-brokering begins? Could a religion find that point and stop just short, or implement means of breaking that vicious cycle?
I suppose there might be, but good luck getting any established religion to take it seriously.
Or, as Anne puts it:
Religion plus harsh reality equals authentic correspondence with the gods. Remember that this fall when you settle into your pew for the annual round of stewardship sermons.
My favorite Brit (next to Michael Palin, that is) takes on the evangelical fad for “prosperity”–i.e., God wants you to be rich, so give me your money as a sign of faith and if you’re not rich in X many days, you don’t believe in God enough. Pay me more money and I’ll teach you how to believe stronger.
Yeah. I have trouble believing people fall for this crap too, but apparently Barnum’s Dictum still rings true.
Poor, poor Pope Benedict. Why won’t the world just slide back into the Dark Ages, when a Pope could run his mouth off about infidels and heretics and then sit back and enjoy the bonfire? Nope, nowadays pesky newspapers get involved, and everything goes to hell.
The former Cardinal Ratzinger (I just like saying that name with a nasal whine) is in hot water over his recent remarks about Islam. He’s taken the unprecedented step of apologizing personally for running his stupid mouth off…but get this, he’s blaming the whole thing on a pesky medieval manuscript that just sort of flung itself from his throat.
Benedict ignited a firestorm of protest last week in a speech he made at Regensburg University in Germany, where he used to teach theology. The speech was largely a scholarly address criticizing the West for submitting itself too much to reason, walling a belief in God out of science and philosophy.
But the pope began by recounting a conversation on the truths of Christianity and Islam that took place between a 14th-century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, and a Persian scholar.
“He said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,’ ” the pope said.
He also briefly discussed the Islamic concept of jihad, which he defined as “holy war,” and said that violence in the name of religion is contrary to God’s nature and to reason.
At the same time, though without mentioning Islam specifically, Benedict suggested reason as the basis for “that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”
In the speech, he did not say whether he agreed with the quotations he cited about violence and Islam. But on Sunday he delivered a rare papal apology putting distance between his views and those he quoted.
“These were in fact quotations from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought,” Benedict said.
“The true meaning of my address,” he said, “in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.” (New York Times)
I must confess to being a little bit mystified. (Translation: It just don’t make no f&*#ing sense to me.) So Benedict’s whole point was reason and faith, how Faith has been shafted by Reason but Reason must be the grounds of discussion–and he just thought he’d throw in a little anti-Islam to liven everything up?
How does this make sense? Even the “apology” makes little to no sense–it was a medieval manuscript, so that should make it okay to dredge up and hurl at Mohammed’s followers? Did the manuscript hold a gun to Benny Ratzie’s head and make him open his big fat mouth?
Hm.
Part of a Vatican apology runs thus:
“The Holy Father thus sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address may have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim faithful. Confirming his respect and esteem for those who profess the Islamic faith, he hopes they will be helped to understand his words in their true sense.”
I kind of think the words were taken in their true sense by anyone with half a brain. When you’re digging up medieval propaganda, how can it be understood as anything other than an insult? There were hundreds of other quotes Benedict could have used, and hundred of other ways for him to express what he now says was his point all the time–the seeming modern triumph of fanaticism over reason.
There are some folks saying that Benedict’s apology should be enough for Muslims who were pissed about his remarks, that his scholarly mumblings were taken out of context and that we should all just relax. To which I say, let Benny dig out the beam in his own eye (and incidentally, face the Catholic Church’s dismal record on human rights, including the betrayal of Liberation Theology) before he starts wanting to do cataract surgery on Muslims. Maybe he should swap scriptwriters with Dubya Bush.
The overall quality of the speeches both ways might even improve…
