Will the Vatican shield the Pope from potential arrest over the Catholic church sexual abuse scandal?

Will the Vatican shield the Pope from potential arrest over the Catholic church sexual abuse scandal?

By Dark Politricks

Question: Why is the Pope going to stay living in the Vatican after he retires?

Answer: Because he is wanted for questioning over his role in covering up the huge sexual abuse of children by Catholic Priests during his time before becoming Pope and could be arrested and charged with crimes regarding these events if he leaves the safety of the Vatican.

According to Reuters it seems that the Vatican is allowing the Pope to remain living inside the Vatican City because of the risk that he will be arrested by any one of the many independent investigative magistrates in Europe over allegations that he deliberately covered up the massive paedophilia scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church for the past decade.

In Europe many countries have a system of law which allows magistrates and judges to bring their own charges against people from any nation if they have broken international law or committed crimes that break the law of their country even if the crime was committed from within another country.

This is why Dick Cheney and many Israeli politicians cannot visit various places around the world. They face the threat of arrest for war crimes and other breaches of international law such as torture or the illegal renditioning of citizens from the streets of european cities.

Therefore once the pope leaves the comfort of the Vatican City, which is basically it’s own country in the centre of Rome (also called the Holy See), he could face arrest and even imprisonment by any number of activist judges and lawyers who want to bring justice to the thousands of children that were raped and sexually assaulted by Roman Catholic priests across the world.

The child abuse scandal in the Catholic church covers 65 countries, with the amount of victims estimated to be in the tens of thousands. That is only the amount that have gone public so far.

In fact just one survivors’ group has over 12,000 members! Imagine all the people who have been sexually assaulted or raped by their local Priest who are yet to make that huge step and go public with their own tale of tragedy and injustice.

The Catholic Church has not been exactly forthcoming when it has come to this scandal even attacking those who have accussed it of a cover up. When the Belgian police started digging around the sexual abuse in their own country the Vatican attacked the tactics used by the Belgian police as “deplorable methods” when they raided a bishops’ meeting.

They also dared to compare the investigation of child sex abuse with the practices of communist regimes and called the raid “serious and unbelievable”. The Vatican dared trying to play the victim in one of the most widespread sex scandals to hit the modern world.

Pope Benedict XVI was named as a defendant in a 2010 law suit alleging that he failed to take action as a cardinal in 1995 when he was allegedly told about a priest who had abused boys at a U.S. school for the deaf decades earlier.

The lawyers withdrew the case last year and the Vatican said it was a major victory that proved the pope could not be held liable for the actions of abusive priests. However whilst he remains Pope he also remains a head of state as well as the head of the Catholic church which offers protection in the eyes of many countries.

Once he steps down from this position it leaves him vulnerable to any law suit that may be filled against him.

Could this be the reason that the Pope plans to remain living within the Vatican after stepping down?

Although the pope is not currently named in other cases the Vatican is not ruling out the possibility that new charges could be brought once he leaves his position as head of the Church.

The Vatican said:

“If he lived anywhere else then we might have those crazies who are filing lawsuits, or some magistrate might arrest him like other (former) heads of state have been for alleged acts while he was head of state.”

Even if he leaves the Vatican he is still safe within Italy as the 1929 Lateran Pacts between Italy and the Holy See created the Vatican City as it’s own sovereign state and has said the smallest country in the world would be “invariably and in every event considered as neutral and inviolable territory”. Therefore the only risk seems to be if the Pope, once de-throned, leaves the safety of the Italian shores.

Since the revelations of a massive cover up of sexual abuse and paedophilia across the world by roman Catholic priests, from the massive amounts of abuse in Ireland to the claims from America and other European nations, there have been constant calls for the Popes arrest over his involvement in a cover up which involved moving priests accused of sex crimes to new dioceses instead of having them arrested.

In fact before he became the current Pope, he was serving as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer he is accused of covering up for Priests accused of sex crimes and that not only did those Priests not face internal discipline the relevant information was not passed to civilian authorities so that they could deal with the accusations properly.

These claims are not exactly based on flimsy evidence. In fact before taking the role of the Pope, Benedict Ratzinger was head of the Vatican’s main doctrinal arm called “the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”. This was the department within the Vatican which was in charge of all investigations by the church into claims of abuse by Priests worldwide.

Senior church official’s have already admitted in 2010 that a German archdiocese had made “serious mistakes” in handling an abuse case whilst the current Pope was serving as its archbishop.

A priest who was accused of molesting boys was given therapy instead of being arrested and later was allowed to resume pastoral duties before committing further abuse and finally being prosecuted for his sexual crimes.

He is also accused of failing to act over complaints during the 1990s about a priest in the USA who is thought to have abused almost 200 deaf boys!

According to Church and Vatican documents an archbishop wrote letters to Cardinal Ratzinger in 1996 calling for disciplinary proceedings against Fr Lawrence Murphy who is believed to have molested some 200 boys at St John’s School for the Deaf in St Francis, Wisconsin, between 1950 and 1974.

Apparently he assaulted the boys whilst hearing their confessions, in his office, in his car, in their dormitory beds and even at his mother’s house!

An internal trial authorised by Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy was halted after the accused priest asked the future pope to halt proceedings and to allow him live out the remainder of his time in the “dignity of my priesthood”. Despite objections from a second archbishop the head of the Catholic church agreed and the priest was moved to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes and schools.

He apparently cared more for the sexual  pervesions of his priests than the torn souls of his flock!

Then there was also the massive cover up of sexual abuse by Irish priests over decades which has recently come to light. The Pope condemned these abuses as a “heinous crime” as well as a “grave sin” however one Irish priest has admitted to abusing more than 100 children, while another confessed that he had abused minors systematically and regularly over a period of 25 years.

Therefore the Pope has a lot to answer for and he currently heads the worlds most organised and powerful paedophilia ring which seems to be able to sit above international law through the Vatican basically being it’s own country.

So it doesn’t take too much brain power to work out that the aging Pope might be scared of being arrested by an activist judge somewhere in Europe. An activist who could already be sitting at an airport waiting for George W Bush to land so he can pounce on him and arrest him for the war in Iraq which many people still consider an illegal crime.

If international law is to mean anything then just as the heads of state from Bosnia are currently facing criminal charges in the International Criminal Court for war crimes during the break up of Yugoslavia. And the ex President of Liberia, Charles Taylor, has proved that being a head of state does not grant you immunity from international justice.

It is only logical that once the Pope resumes life as a normal citizen he will become a target for those looking to add international sex rings to the list of crimes that leaders of states can be charged with at the Hague.

View the original article “Why is the Vatican shielding the Pope from arrests over sexual abuse?” at www.darkpolitricks.com.

When is a cult a religion and when is a religion a cult?

By Dark Politricks

Watching The Big Questions this morning (2 articles this show has now spawmed) there was only one question which was “What’s the difference between a Cult and Organised Religion”

On one side were the standard old age religionis, Christians, Catholics, Rabbis and Muslims and on the other side we had members of existing “new” religions such as Raelians, Moonies – or as they are called now members of the “Unification Church”, an ex member of the Branch Davidians which if you remember was the target of the ATF and FBI ended up in a state sanctioned massacre of 82 religious people.

The audience was also filled with ex members of cults, physchologists who have studied the “brainwashing” techinques used by such called groups and other affected by these groups in one way of another.

In my mind it is quite simple but lets look at a definition of a Cult

• a particular system of religious worship, especially with reference to its rites and ceremonies.
• an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, especially as manifested by a body of admirers: the physical fitness cult.
• the object of such devotion.
• a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.
• Sociology . a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.

Lets look at the definition of a Religion

• a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
• a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects: the Christian religion; the Buddhist religion.
• the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices: a world council of religions.
• the life or state of a monk, nun, etc. to enter religion.
• the practice of religious beliefs – ritual observance of faith.

In mine and many in the audiences (apart from those belonging to organised religions) not much differece.

Jesus was supposedly a characteristic person who had followers – apparantly a key sign of a cult. The same could be said about Mohammed, Buddha, Hari Krishna and many other “old religions”.

The disagreement seems to be as one person said one of size. The Catholic Chuch is a huge and rich organisation whereas some of the orgainisations called cults such as the Raelians who believe we were created (just as scientisits on this planet are now starting to do with DNA) by human beings from another planet in the universe.

A case of aliens geo-engineering the earth and it’s inhabitants. When compared to some of the stories that the “official” religions believe in such as virgin births, coming back to life after dying and performing miracles not too bizare a belief.

What got my interest though was that one of the audience members said to an ex member of the Branch Davidians asked whether the leader David Koresh sexually abused children at the branch. The member denied this but others of the “scientific” community said that one of the signs of a cult as compared to a religion was the sexual abuse that was endemic within cults which had such charesmatic leaders that the followers did whatever he said due to brain washing techniques as well as the cult of personality. This seemed to be a big difference between living your life by a set of defined values (as Christians, Jews and Muslims supposedly do) whilst cult members didn’t.

There wasn’t any mention of the numerous cases of sexual abuses, pedophilia, cover ups and criminal cases over the years that have been engrained in “old religons” since their conception.

We have just experience a major Catholic cover up over its treatment of pedophile priests which led all the way up to the ex Nazi Youth Pope. Court case after case in Ireland has shown the Catholic Church to be one of the biggest organised pedophole rings in the world – and one of the most well funded and protected.

The same sort of sexual abuse has been endemic in Christian history for a long time. Why a man of breeding age would willingly chose abstinence and the company of little boys over a normal life seems obvious to me but in these times where psychology would give more than one answer it seems like an old excuse to hide ones sexual pedidocs from the community at large.

Islam has always had its critics from those who called the original “cult leader” Mohammed certain terms for the age of some of his wives. However in some states of America where the age in some states it’s 18 you might call the Spannish strange for having an age of consent of only 13 and other European countries from 13, 14 up to 18. Even in some places in Africa and Asia is not uncommon for child weddings where an old man takes a 12 year old as a wife.

From Wikipedia:

Traditionally, across the world, the age of consent for a sexual union was a matter for the family to decide, or a tribal custom. In most cases, this coincided with signs of puberty, menstruation for a woman and pubic hair for a man.

In Ancient Rome, it was very common for girls to marry and have children shortly after the onset of puberty.
The first recorded age-of-consent law dates back 800 years: In 1275, in England, as part of the rape law, a statute, Westminster 1, made it a misdemeanor to “ravish” a “maiden within age,” whether with or without her consent. The phrase “within age” was interpreted by jurist Sir Edward Coke as meaning the age of marriage, which at the time was 12 years of age.

In the 12th century Gratian, the influential founder of Canon law in medieval Europe, accepted age of puberty for marriage to be between 12 and 14 but acknowledged consent to be meaningful if the children were older than 7. There were authorities that said that consent could take place earlier. Marriage would then be valid as long as neither of the two parties annulled the marital agreement before reaching puberty, or if they had already consummated the marriage. It should be noted that Judges honored marriages based on mutual consent at ages younger than 7, in spite of what Gratian had said; there are recorded marriages of 2 and 3 year olds.

And then there is the Jewish Talmud, the book of laws made by Rabbis that is full of teachings that allow Rabbis to have sex with girls of extremley young ages or not consider rape illegal if the man was a rabbi. These Talmudic laws have been known for a long time but are not unique for an age in which rape wasn’t even considered a crime.

Even in England raping your wife wasn’t considered a crime until back in 1990.

So sexual behaviour cannot be considered a sign of cultish behaviour. However when a science fiction writer claims that “the best way to make a million dollars is to start a religion” and then goes on to do exactly that.

Charging people thousands of dollars for learning it’s many steps up to the big reveal, the “ultimate secret” one that wouldn’t be out of place in any science fiction book:

Scientologists believe that 75 million years ago an evil galactic ruler, named Xenu, solved overpopulation by bringing trillions of people to Earth in DC-8 space planes, stacking them around volcanoes and nuking them. Then the souls of these dead space aliens were captured and boxed up and taken to cinemas where they were shown films of what life should be like, false ideas containing God, the devil and Christ and told to get ill.

After that they supposedly clustered together and now inhabit our bodies. Scientologists believe that if they rid themselves of these body Thetans then they will be healthier and will gain special powers like mind-over-matter.

People who try to leave are harassed, treated as traitors and have even had to face legal cases over their revelations of the “big secret” that people like Tom Cruise and John Travolata pay up to $500,000 for this top secret information. No wonder the Church of Scientology wants to keeps it’s big secret secret!

So there seems to be clear cases of made up religions that can be called cults, in which the aim of the organisation is to extract money from the member instead of a pay if you want to bag of donations passed around a Church on a Sunday morning. However it seems that if one were to go back to the start of each off shoot of the Abrahamic faith with today’s knowledge and science each new religion could easily fail into the class of a cult.

In my mind it is up to you what you want to believe but mocking anothers belief using claims that could easily fit your own brand of spiritual belief is stretching rationality at least a little.

When the definition of what is a religion and a cult are so indistinguishable from each other then maybe members of either grouping should stop to consider their beliefs before slagging off their opponents.

I’m right because my religious book says so therefore you must all be wrong is not a logical argument that stands up too long at all.

Why not let kids choose when they are old enough whether or not to be indoctrinated by religion

By Dark Politricks

I have just watched the “Big Questions” on BBC1 which you can watch in a few hours on BBC iPlayer and there are ways to watch it from abroad if you are technical enough or know what a proxy server is.

However the show was about religion and mainly about whether Religion was good for Children. This included faith schools and how child’s brains are formed and can be indoctrinated during their younger years into religion. The debate was full of humanists, evangelical Christians, Muslims and Rabbi’s.

Whilst there is no doubt that in this country at least which has a long history the Christian religion has brought many good things as well as bad things to the overall culture of the country such as original schooling, charitable foundations and people who were moral Christians who went out into the slums to help the poor because of their faith.

However we now live in a multicultural society and “the age of reason” where faith schools are allowed to exist which can create their admission policy around the students religious background. You can help change this by signing this petition.

We have had stories over the years of the Saudi Arabian supported schools that undercover reporters found were teaching things about defamatory things about Jews and Christians and much more.

In my belief faith schools are a bad thing as they teach separation on the lines of indoctrination.

Kids at the age they go to school are likely to follow the beliefs and actions of their parents. If their parents are religious they are likely to unquestionably follow their parents including religion and going to a faith school will re-inforce that belief. They are also less likely to mix with children from outside their faith as friendships are formed within school at that age.

As we know from Northern Ireland and the Protestant and Catholic schooling systems that helped keep the country divided for years schools can be the places where child’s philosophies on life are formed (which is why many religious people take their children out of State schools to home teach as they believe they are too liberal).

For some children the school is the only place they receive any kind of mental stimulation or moral grounding as some parents are just too busy working all the time to pay for food, mortgages, clothes and other things that keep them alive.

Whilst many parent are not like that I have seen personally many children at the age of 5 that you can just tell are going to end up in prison as their parents only talk to them when they shout at them to tell them to shut up or sit down as they are too busy watching TV to play with them.

Therefore schools can be very important places and for some kids they are the only place they receive any kind of information, life skills and for some abused children any form of kindness and even love.

We all know from the statistics that many Church of England or Catholic schools in the UK have some of the top grades in the country for state schools which is why so many parents try to get their kids into them whether they are religious or not.

This is more a damming indictment on our state school system that a sign that faith schools provide a better education and moral grounding.

Our state schools are a mess and I personally can attest to that after being to one and it is through pure luck and my own brain that I didn’t end up in prison like so many others of my peer group.

Through my own thirst for knowledge I went out and taught myself what I now know in this world through reading books many of which were religious (e.g history of religion(s)), studying philosophy and then when the Internet arrived I probably learned more in a couple years of surfing the web than I did in the whole of my state secondary school education.

In places in Southern states of America where religion is supposedly so strong, schools are evangelically christian by nature and children hold “purity rings” to show they won’t have sex until they are married as they are taught by their Christian religion they have some of the highest levels of teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, anal sex and other signs that the kids are breaking the rules or bending the indoctrination to fit in their hormones.

At the time of their life when the urge to have sex suddenly arrives but a moral code forced on them forbids it – what happens? They try to “bend the rules” and end up having anal or oral sex as they see it as not having “real” sex as it doesn’t lead to pro-creation.

As many religious people on all sides claim, morals are linked to religion and without their religion they wouldn’t have a moral grounding. This really annoys humanists and atheists as it signifies that moral behaviour is somehow only available to followers of a certain belief system.

Obviously this is hogwash as not only would it mean that without the religious belief the person would become a murdering, raping, lunatic which is plainly crazy but it would mean that all the millions of people who are not followers of a religion would be non-moral unethical walking anti-christs.

Humanists do what is right because it is right not because an old book or myth handed down Chinese whisper style before it could be written down says so.

What I found interesting from the debate was what one person said about linking a moral code to a belief system, as many religions do. That when, as many do, people leave the religion they are likely to leave the moral code behind as well because the two have become so intrinsically linked together in that persons mind.

In this scenario the person might engage in immoral behaviour to spite the religious teachings they had forced upon them, which might be the root cause of this belief of religion equals  morals.

This could be the “lack of morals” that some religious people see when they talk about the lack of morals in humanists and atheists but it but it is also a good reason why ethics and morals should be taught on their own right at school without any linkage to religion at all. People should be taught that doing good things is good for their own sake not because Jesus or Mohammed said it was good.

Good ethics and morals are something I cannot ever remember being taught at school and it should be a parents jobs to teach right from wrong without indoctrinating the child into a belief system anyway.

The school however should realise that in this day and age, when riots are occurring around the land and the economy is collapsing and whole estates are no-go areas for the Police that they should be a backstop in case of these missing “home lessons” that undoubtedly so many kids today don’t get at all.

I remember my own Religious Education lessons at school and they were just a time for winding up our very religious (Christian obviously) teacher.

I remember one lesson trying to be the critical and questioning child that we should all want our children to be and on the subject of heaven I asked “what happens in heaven”.

The teacher replied that in heaven we were all given jobs to do by God and went around working for him. I replied that it all sounded very boring and I didn’t really want to go to heaven if that was all that happened and that hell sounded a lot more exciting. I was sent out of the lesson in disgrace – no questioning my indoctrination in this class please.

As a book writer on the subject talked about on the show, at the age we are at school our brains are forming and in the “questioning, critical analysis” stage which should be nurtured not stubbed out through indoctrination and blanket yes/no answers to big questions that kids want to know at that age.

Questions we still ask such as “where did I come from” , “why are we here” and “what is the meaning of life and does there even need to be one”. These are all questions that some of us are still trying to find the answer for but through reason, science and logic not fairy tales and ancient stories.

At that time in our lives we undoubtedly live in a mystical age where we are likely to believe anything we are told. This is the reason we believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and read books about magicians, dragons and other Harry Potter style fantasies.

However we all grow up and whilst the myth of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy were dispelled by me either sleepily catching my parents filling my stocking or being told at school at a young age it was all a myth the religious myths continued.

The main reason I suppose was that older people, people in authority were still believing these religious stories and as a child it is hard to disagree with authority (for some at least) when they tell you black is black or God exists. Case closed.

In my opinion, and I cannot see how we could do this unless we banned faith schools, banned home schooling and then countered any home time indoctrination by teaching ethics, morals, philosophy, psychology, sociology and even religion from a historical and cultural point of view. At least this way we ensure our kids get some useful knowledge from the time they spend at school as well as a moral grounding that might be missing at home in all in a non religious way.

Of course if we taught these lessons instead of the mundane and boring lessons that I can remember from my state school education it might even help solve the problem we currently have of parents feeling guilty by not being able to pay for their child to go to a private school and replace the loss of Grammar schools for the clever kids that have to suffer state school teaching. We must churn out those drug dealers and factory line workers…

It would raise state education standards for all pupils and also give our kids a grounding in morals and ethics that are not linked to any belief system they might discard later in life.

I am not against people choosing to believe in religion or the Flying Spaghetti Momster in the sky if they are old enough to make their own decisions.

I am however against children being indoctrinated into any religion at an early and particularly susceptible age in your life.

I am also against little boys and in some regions of the world girls being genitally mutilated by being circumcised when they are too young to make their own decision. Something that would be considered child abuse in any other context.

Remember it is not about religion it is about teaching right from wrong. And neither are linked to the story of Abraham and the 3 faiths that flowed from that story and make up the majority of religious believers today – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

As Ghandi famously said: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ”

Why Religion should stay out of politics – it’s all Hokum

By Dark Politricks

I don’t often write about religion, mainly because I don’t believe in organised religion.

I may have Church of England on my birth certificate but then I didn’t really have much say in that decision at the age of 0. That’s not to say there isn’t something “out there” and maybe there is. I suspect what many scientific people call the big bang is the same thing Deists believe is God starting the universe then leaving it up to itself to become what it may. Semantics.

A personal God that interacts with the human race however is something that holds no water with me. When I look around at evil people getting away with murder, war, rape, kids starving to death of no fault of their own, massive natural disasters and miracles that only happen after the fact. And if they don’t then it’s just a sign of some deeper meaning that we need to decipher to understand God’s will and intent. That good comes out of everything bad, then I know its all hokum.

Show me a Christian solider coming back from the Stan with no legs or arms who prays and then God gives him back his limbs and I might just become a believer but until then the all knowing, all powerful God that can’t logically change his mind (either he isn’t omnipotent or he isn’t omniscient) stays in the same category as Santa and the Tooth Fairy.

However saying that, before my brain was rewired by too much Internet use I used to read books for fun. It is sad but unfortunately true that I believe the web has literally re-programmed my brain to my own detriment.

Instead of the linear though processes required to sit down and read a book from start to finish in one weekend. I now multi-task, flick between my two monitors that each have different items I am working on and most of all click on links within online articles as I read  never finishing the original piece at all.

When I used to read books for fun my main choice – after my days of rebellious youth in which a bookcase full to the brim of autobiographies of every famous gangster and criminal ever to have walked the planet is attests to – was history and mainly religious history.

In fact I have probably read more books on the Christian faith, the history of the Church, Israel, the Jewish Rebellion, Knights Templars and Freemasons and links to Egyptian mythology than any other topic.

In fact I have so much religious history clogging my brain up that when I recently had two Jehovah Witnesses knock on my door trying to convert me with their usual patter of crushed watches being shook back together in a bag explaining evolution and intelligent design I utterly demolished them with facts about their own faith that they had no clue about.

They had no idea about the Council of Trent or Nicaea, the many books of the Bible that were discarded, the gospel of Thomas or Mary, the Jerusalem Church that carried on after Jesus’ death by his siblings including James the Just and the true meaning of the word messiah.

In fact I reckon most Christians don’t even realise that their whole faith is based around one mans interpretation of what he “thought” had happened i.e Saul / Paul.

This was the man who killed Christians and then became leader of the church despite the original Jerusalem Church‘s wishes. He took the word Messiah and twisted it beyond all recognition so that we know believe it to literally mean “the Son of God”.

But I babble too much.

What got me onto this topic was two things.

1. The recent Occupy London protests that have camped outside St Pauls Cathederal in their tent village. People wanted the protesters to leave claiming their protest was a fire hazzard and other health and safety issues as well as being unsightly and demeaning to the Church and their worshippers.

Real nonsensical stuff that made me thing what many others did “What would Jesus do?”.

As Gandhi famously said “If all Christians acted like Christ, the whole world would be Christian.”

The whole world isn’t Christian so what does that tell you.

2. Then there is the recent Republican primary campaign in which many of the contenders are trying to reach out to their evangelical Christian base.

I find it quite ironic that people who are so opposed to abortion and want to give embryos the same rights as people yet cheer and clap when people are murdered by the state in the most grusome way. Isn’t Christianity all about forgiveness and isn’t murder, whether or not it’s carried out by the state, a sin forbidden in the 10 commandments?

What kind of religious person, which many governors claim to be, try and outdo each other on the number of state executions they carry out.

What kind of person cheers on a live TV debate when the question of the number of people condemned to death by Rick Perry in Texas is brought up?

And what about abortion that divisive topic that some people are prepared to kill for?

Why is human life only important and worth saving even at the point where a fetus is indistiguisbale in appearance from other mammals such as a dog or pig fetus.

At various stages throughout a pregnecy, fetuses have eyes on stalks, fish-like gills, tails, downy fur, distorted torsos, spindly legs, giant heads, and alien-looking faces. We don’t see many of these freakish features on pro-life advertisements and videos.

And what about all the wasted sperm and eggs that are discarded either accidentally or manually throughout the life of a person?

Sperm and eggs are actual living entities so why is the point of conception more important than before the two living entities merge?

Up to 65% of all conceptions are spontaneously aborted in the first few days or weeks of a pregnancy, usually without the woman ever knowing she was pregnant and another 10 to 15% of pregnancies are miscarried in the months to come.

Should each miscariage, or spontaneous abortion be investigated by the Police in case the “fetal wastage” was caused by external factors such as a fall or knock. Should the woman be accused of murder in these cases and if not why not – after all the fetus is according to most Republican Presidential candidates a “human being” that should be accorded all the rights of you and me.

Now that would be ironic. A woman put on death row and executed by an inhumane method because she spontaneously aborted a fetus. It’s okay to kill the woman but not the bundle of cells that look like a [insert mammal of choice here].

If you are religious and believe we humans are special creatures bestowed with unique qualities that God has designed for us then why has he left so many mistakes in his creations and so many clues to his bad workmanship and design?

If we are an example of intelligent design I guess God must have been practising for something better to come.

Either that or he was in some sort of remedial human workshop class up in heaven when he designed the human body. There are too many mistakes to list but here are just a tiny fraction.

1. Why is the main pleasure centres of the human body entwined with the sewage and waste department. Was this some kind of sick joke or was he just being economical with the body parts and trying to save space.
2. Why did he design us with such large brains and skull sizes that mean that mothers giving birth have to go through excruciating, life-threatening pain during childbirth because of a womans small pelvis size that “is supposedly designed” to allow us to walk on two feet.
3. Why did he make us with redundant body parts such as the four toes we have no need for or the Coccyx. We even have cases of babies being born with actual tails! Surely a malfunction in the well designed human body. And don’t give me any explanations of what use they have . Just because a body part had a use in the past and is still attached to us providing some kind of minimal benefit despite it’s original purpose having long evolved away does not make it useful.
4. Why are so many babies through no fault of their own born with horrible defects, deformities, parasitic mini twins, diseases and short life expectancies.
5. Etc, etc, etc

And if you are religious and believe we are the only special creatures that God loves in the universe then why has he given the whole planet a best before date of  5 billion years when the Sun dies. He love’s us that much that he gave the whole race an expiration date?

And then there is the ultimate question for believers. What if you are wrong. What if you have picked the wrong God!

Knowing that your religion is basically just one mans interpretation of events that he had no part of (Saul > Paul). Why is it that you have taken his words over the local nutter on the bus or street corner who spends his weekend berating passers by about their sinfulness and the coming end times?

What makes one man’s delusions over two thousand years ago “real” whereas if I claimed to know of a man that lived decades before me, having never met him and declared him to be the Son of God certifiably insane. I would probably end up in the local mental ward if I did what Saul/Paul did all that time back.

Why is your God the true God and all those other peoples Gods just falsehoods, cults and voodoo religions?

There have been literally hundreds of Gods over the years. Who is to say you are following the right one?

What if you die get to the pearly gates and then find out you have wasted your whole life by worshipping Yahweh instead of Zeus or Jupiter or even worse Allah or that multi armed Hindu God. How gutted would you feel.

I guess that this article is not really an attack on anyone’s beliefs, you are entitled to them. However when they start to inflict on my life and my choices as a logical independently minded individual then your religion does become a problem.

I certainly don’t want another evangelical President in the White House who believes the Middle East needs to be conquered because it’s God’s Will.

Personally I have had enough of self fulfilling prophecies and Zionism and the State of Israel are proof that people with enough power and a will to succeed can make any “prophecy” come true and then claim it to be a sign of God’s will.

I could go on but you obviously have the internet so just do a search on Google for Atheism.

9.11 and the clash of civilisations

By Dark Politricks

“There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are.” – Dead Lagoon

The clash of civilisations so aptly predicted by Samuel P. Huntington after the fall of the cold war seems to be approaching very quickly. Those of us who consider ourselves rationalists or atheists can only stand on the sidelines looking on in horror as those groups of people who have a dog in the fight ramp up the differences and stoke the fires that have inflamed many people of the Abrahamic faiths.

Just like the first world war which was basically a family feud between European aristocracy (The Kaiser, Tsar and King of England were all cousins), the current feud is between offshoots of the same religion. This is what makes it all so much more galling for those of us who can see the Bible, Torah and Koran for what they really are, books of allegories, written by people with no scientific perspective on the world who if they lived today would all be locked up in loony bins.

Why is it we can see the mad pastor Terry Jones for what he is really is, a fruit loop for claiming he has regular conversations with God and yet billions of people are happy to take as a literal truth the same claims from those who lived thousands of years ago. Why is Terry Jones just a nutter whereas Mohammad, Jesus, Issac and all the other prophets of lore who regularly claimed to converse with the almighty people to believe in?

In reality there is little difference between the ferocity of belief in those who make up the Phelps family or Iranian Mullahs dishing out Sharia justice by stoning adulterers to death.

There is no difference between Terry Jones burning Korans and the Taliban blowing up Buddhist statues.

There is no difference between the Muslims across the world who believe that the Christian West is on another crusade against Islam and those New Yorkers who believe that revamping a Muslim community center is on par with Hitler opening a Nazi Theme park next door to Auschwitz or those people who believe that Islam and not Al Qaeda attacked them on 9.11.

To me it’s the same ignorance and bull shit just a different face on the packaging.

It’s because of this dogma and refusal to think outside ones own narrow train of thought that makes religion so scary for those of us who put belief of fairies, Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy to bed forever at the age of 8 or 10. In fact when one thinks about it there is actually more reason to believe in the Tooth Fairy than there is God for at least we are left
with a physical sign of their presence in the morning when our tooth has gone only to be replaced with money!

What is clear though is that this rise in religiosity is being brilliantly exploited by those who have political aims. The two sides are being played off against each other by design and it is only going to get worse.

A western world that hates Muslims is one that goes to war without thinking first. They are armies that engage in the sort of rampant and wanton rape and destruction that only serves to drive up hatred on the other side ensuring that an eye for eye turns into an arm for an arm and a leg for a leg until there is nothing left to fight over.

An America that believe it was Muslims in general that attacked the USA on 9.11 is one that dismisses Wik iLeaked tapes of mass murder of civilians and the killing for fun attitude of their soldiers as nothing more than the excesses of war.

An America that believes Islam is the devils work, a cult of moon god worshippers whilst their country was the pinnacle of God’s creation is one that sees nothing wrong with the torture of prisoners, the suspension of the rule of law and the kidnap and indefinite detention of those considered enemies of the state.

On the anniversary of 9.11 it is clear that the intention of the attack has largely succeeded. If Bin Laden was behind the attack and thought that by striking at the heart of America he would help free Muslims from Zionist and American oppression around the world he was sorely mistaken for the exact opposite has occurred.

If however the intention was to enrage America so much that they would basically give carte blanche approval to a never ending war of imperialism and manufactured anti-Islamic rage across the Middle East then the act succeeded as planned.

The clear losers from 9.11 apart from those who died that day have been people of Islamic faith whether they be Afghanis, Iraqis, Palestinians or Americans.

More Muslims have died in the last 9 years than could possibly be known and because of the war on terror these deaths are somehow justified. Because we are supposedly doing good deeds by expanding the western sphere of influence, installing puppet dictators and propping up narco regimes the counting of “collateral damage” is not a necessity and the total figure is only ever mentioned as an after thought whilst every one of our own troops death is mourned as much as the last.

9.11 is already a date that will be enshrined in history forever for a number of reasons. Not only was it the catalyst to the war on terror it was the straw that broke the camels back in terms of wakening people up all around the world for a number of reasons. Not only did it show the facade that liberal democracy was, how easily all our rights and civil liberties can be discarded when the government clicks its fingers it also woke many people up to the lengths supposedly free democratic governments will go to when it wants to go to war.

The original Pearl Harbour attack that brought the USA into World War Two led to eight investigations within the following four years to determine the events of that day. The New Pearl Harbour attack that seems to have led the USA into starting the war of civilisations was investigated once and very poorly at that.

Not only did 6 of the 10 commissioners complain about the Bush government withholding evidence, limiting the terms of inquiry and blocking legitimate questions it failed to answer the key questions that still remain to this day. Questions which must be answered if the government ever wishes to absolve itself of blame and remove the cloud of suspicion that has rightly fell upon it for refusing to investigate the matter properly.

Questions such as:

Why did NIST seemingly falsify their report into the collapse of WTC-7. The tower that wasn’t hit by a plane yet fell at breakneck speed into its own footprint later on that day. A collapse that for 2.4 seconds was at free fall speeds, a fact admitted by NIST and one which meant that they had to remove the label from their report that had proudly claimed it was “consistent with the basic principles of physics”. A fact that so far can only be explained by the use of controlled demolition of some sort which the NIST refused to even consider as a cause for the buildings collapse having preferred instead to doctor their computer model by overloading parameters that bore no relation to real world events to induce collapse.

Why did the government come out with the poor reasoning for the terrorists attack as “hating us for our freedoms” rather than the real reason which was USA’s support for Israel. Why can they not admit that their unswerving support of a nation that is propped up through their massive military support, financial donations, UN vetoes and their turning of a blind eye to the numerous executions, ethnic cleansing, piracy and aggressive foreign policy was the primary cause for the Al Qaeda attack on that day.

What did our ally Israel know about the attack and what information did they pass on to the Americans beforehand. It is a well known fact that the Israeli’s were engaged in a huge spying operation in the year leading up to 9.11. They were also following the hijackers around the country, living across the road from many and supposedly monitoring them. As the original reporter on this story, which was reported by Fox until it removed the story due to Israeli pressure, said when being interviewed on the matter of Mossad foreknowledge of the attacks “how could they not have known?”

If Israel did know about this terrorist plot, and the circumstantial evidence suggests they did, then why didn’t they tell US intelligence and if they did who did they tell and what was done with this info. It is not implausible to believe that elements of the US intelligence community and maybe some people in government did know about this plot beforehand and chose not to act because they could see the potential “benefit” to their PNAC plans of a successful attack occurring. We know the authors of the PNAC document were now in power and we know how much the neo-cons and their Israeli counterparts wanted a “new pearl harbour” type event to occur so that they could engage their plans for a “clean up” of the Middle East. Considering all the conspiracy theories around this event this is the most plausible and the easiest one to to pull off. It needs to be investigated thoroughly.

We are currently living through times in which rich pro-Israeli groups are deliberatley stoking up anti-Islamic sentiment and if we are going to spend the next decade continuing our current policy of destroying ourselves and most of the Muslim world in a pointless war of civilisations then we need to resolve all unanswered questions over the events that ignited this chain of events.

We need to for our own sakes as well as future generations otherwise school kids in a hundred years or so will be looking back at these times with disdain and horror in the same way as we now look back at 30’s Germany.

Haitian children allegedly abducted by Christian group reunited with parents

AFP
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Three weeks after a massive earthquake, Haitian authorities on Tuesday indefinitely postponed upcoming legislative elections amid rising security concerns in the crippled Caribbean nation.

Aid workers, meanwhile, began to reunite with their families some of the 33 children that a US missionary group tried to sneak out of the country last week without government authorization.

Justice officials said the 10 Americans behind the alleged abductions, who are still to be charged, might have to be tried in the United States because of the post-quake chaos.

The Haitian government has been left largely dysfunctional since the 7.0-magnitude January 12 quake, which killed an estimated 170,000 people and left many official buildings in ruins.

Full article here

Haiti questions Americans over child “kidnapping”

Mica Rosenberg and Joseph Guyler Delva
Reuters
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Haitian authorities questioned a group of 10 American missionaries on Monday who are accused of illegally trying to take children out of the quake-shattered Caribbean country.

A prosecutor met with the Americans at police headquarters in Port-au-Prince, where they have been held since they were arrested late on Friday trying to cross into the Dominican Republic with a busload of 33 children they said were orphaned by the devastating January 12 earthquake.

The Baptist missionaries deny Haitian charges they were engaged in child trafficking and insist they were only trying to help vulnerable orphans left destitute by the quake.

The case could be diplomatically sensitive at a time when the United States is spearheading a huge relief effort to help hundreds of thousands of Haitian quake victims, and as U.S. aid groups pour millions of dollars of donations into Haiti.

Full article here

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Your equality laws are unjust, pope tells UK before visit

Riazat Butt,
London Guardian
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Pope Benedict XVI marked the announcement of his first papal visit to Britain with an unprecedented attack on the ­government’s equality legislation yesterday, claiming it threatened religious freedom and ran contrary to “natural law”.

Speaking at the Vatican to visiting Catholic bishops of England and Wales, he described changes to the law as unjust and urged them to invoke “missionary zeal” to resist them.

The comments came during a five-yearly trip to the Vatican by the bishops, during which they made presentations on their concerns about the place of religion in an increasingly secular society.

The pope’s broadside appeared to be aimed squarely at recent legislation that prevents Catholic adoption agencies from discriminating against gay couples, and the proposed equality bill, which would make it harder for churches to exclude job applications from homosexuals or people who have changed their gender.

Full article here

Santa Claus versus God

By Dark Politricks

This is a good video that discusses the similarities between God and Santa Claus. Most kids at an early age are able to see through the vast global conspiracy that kept Father Christmas alive, seeing through their parents lies, the post office keeping their letters addressed to the North Pole and ignoring the fake grottoes in the local shopping center.

The similarity between this fairy tale and the belief in an almighty powerful god is striking but it seems whereas most people can overcome the Santa conspiracy the God story has much more of a hold over certain peoples lives. I personally reckon this has a lot do with people wanting to believe in God as live after death and the possibility of a miracle to get you out of tight hole is much more appealing than some presents once a year. Add to that the propaganda machine and the millions of otherwise logical and seemingly sane people of all ages that still believe in the God of the bible and its a much harder conspiracy to overcome.

Unintelligent Design

By Dark Politricks

These videos are for all the creationists out there who believe in intelligent design. I have often wondered myself how an all powerful God could be such a crappy designer as half the things he makes break before the expiration date. If you must believe in God and I see no reason to myself then it must be a God that created the universe and then just stayed out of it from then on. There is just too much crap in this dangerous and temperamental world for any justification to believe in a God that designed us in his own image and created everything else from scratch. As these videos show if that is the case we should be asking for our money back as his workmanship is pretty poor!