Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Andrew Darby; 11/3/10
An ancient artefact site that today’s Aborigines are struggling to protect from road building could push human occupation of Tasmania out to 40,000 years ago. Preliminary dating of stone tools from the site beside the Jordan River, north of Hobart, shows people were living on what is now the island state up to 6000 years earlier than previously known. For the first time, evidence of ice-age human habitation in the region has been found in open ground, rather than confined to a cave, consultant archaeologist Rob Paton said yesterday. Thousands, and perhaps millions, of stone artefacts are buried in a 600-metre long bank that gradually built up beside the Jordan through flooding over aeons.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Human Rights
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Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
10/3/10
US judge who sentenced a couple to prison for the death of their son says members of their church must stop relying on faith healing when their children’s lives are at stake. “Too many children have died unnecessarily – a graveyard full,” judge Steven Maurer said yesterday. “This has to stop.” Judge Maurer spoke in a quiet voice as he led to his conclusion: Jeffrey and Marci Beagley each should serve 16 months in prison. Members of the Followers of Christ church who packed the courtroom sobbed. The Beagleys were convicted of criminally negligent homicide in the June 2008 death of their son, Neil, 16, of complications from a congenital urinary tract blockage. The condition normally is easily treated.
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Tags: Children, Christianity, health, USA
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Monday, March 8th, 2010
8/3/10
Is a lifelong Christian and human rights activist, I took exception to Angela Shanahan’s criticism (“Godless politics has gone too far for democracy”, Inquirer, 6-7/3) of “human rightists” as somehow being anti-religious. She is quite correct in pointing to the pressure for social justice changes in society—such as the abolition of slavery and trade union rights which she mentions—coming from religious movements but then glibly ignores the situation today by putting all religious pressure groups in one basket. Progressive religious movements are still working for social justice and human rights just as they always did, but conservative Christians, represented by the likes of Cardinal George Pell, Family First and opposition leader Tony Abbott are quite the opposite, obsessed as they are by issues of private morality mainly related to gender issues.; Peter Jones, Lenah Valley, Tasmania
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Tags: Australia, Christianity
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Monday, March 8th, 2010
8/3/10
A bishop has given new details of sex abuse at a boys’ choir in Germany once headed by the Pope’s brother. Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, bishop of Regensburg, in southern Germany, where the Domspatzen choir is based, said Pope Benedict XVI’s brother Georg Ratzinger, 86, did not head the choir at the time. The two “remembered” cases of sex abuse at Domspatzen dated back to 1958 and therefore “did not coincide with the period where professor Georg Ratzinger was in charge”, Bishop Mueller said in the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano newspaper. Mr Ratzinger headed the choir between 1964 and 1994, he said. The director and composer Franz Wittenbrink, a former pupil of the school attached to Domspatzen, spoke of an “ingenious system of sadistic punishments connected to sexual pleasure” at the school.
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Tags: Christianity, Germany, Sexual Abuse
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Saturday, March 6th, 2010
John Hooper; 6/3/10
The Vatican has been rocked by a sex scandal with links to Pope Benedict’s household after a chorister was sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting. Angelo Balducci, a ceremonial usher, was caught by police on a wiretap allegedly negotiating with Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, a 29-year-old Vatican chorister, over the specific physical details of men he wanted brought to him. According to transcripts, numerous men may have been procured for Balducci, at least one of whom was studying for the priesthood. The explosive claims about Balducci’s private life have caused grave embarrassment to the Vatican, which has yet to publicly comment on the affair.
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Tags: Christianity, Homosexuality
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Saturday, March 6th, 2010
Lindsay Murdoch; 6/3/10
A dispute has erupted over control of the Yothu Yindi Foundation, a non-profit Aboriginal corporation that runs Garma, Australia’s leading cultural exchange festival. Aboriginal leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu narrowly defeated his brother Mandawuy Yunupingu in a bitterly contested vote for chairmanship of the foundation, which also runs projects in Arnhem Land to promote health and wellbeing among Yolngu people. Galarrwuy Yunupingu, who has been unwell, has made no comment yet about his plans for the festival after his takeover of the foundation’s board amid secrecy last month. Mandawuy Yunupingu, the lead singer of the band Yothu Yindi, set up the foundation in 1990 with the leaders of five Arnhem Land clans.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Culture
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Friday, March 5th, 2010
5/3/10
Victims of clerical sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church have reacted angrily to an appeal by an Irish bishop for parishioners to help pay spiralling compensation claims. Bishop Denis Brennan of the diocese of Ferns, in the east of Ireland, said the diocese had paid E8 million ($13.4m) to settle 48 civil actions arising from decades of sexual abuse by priests and that another 13 actions against the diocese were pending. Dr Brennan is the first bishop to give details on how much compensation has been paid to victims. He said his official residence had been remortgaged to cover nearly E2m in legal fees. A request for financial help from parishioners was not about sharing blame, he said, but about “asking for help to fulfil a God-given responsibility”. Eugene Doyle, the chief financial officer of the diocese, said the church had no option but to ask its members to help foot the bill.
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Tags: Christianity, Ireland, Pedophilia
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Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Ian Coates; 4/3/10
Ian Coates is senior curator of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander program at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.
Paintings by Tom Roberts have come to light more than a century after his visit In late 1922 Tom Roberts and his wife, Lillie, were packing up their London home, after a 20-year sojourn in England, for their final return to Australia. Among the artist’s possessions were mementos of a brief trip he made to Torres Strait 30 years before. The small collection included three gouache portraits of Torres Strait Islander men wearing elaborate ceremonial headdresses, a larger gouache work depicting a night-time ceremony on Mer (Murray Island) and 17 ethnographic objects. This remarkable discovery brings to light a significant addition to the known indigenous-themed works credited to Roberts. Although modest in scale, they make an exciting contribution to Australian art history and to the history of encounters in the Torres Strait.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Religion
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Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Justine Ferrari; 4/3/10
Aboriginal Dreamtime stories will be removed from the national science course on the orders of curriculum head Barry McGaw, who said religious and spiritual beliefs had no place in the science classroom. Professor McGaw, chairman of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, said he had not realised the Dreamtime had been included in the science course until it was reported by The Weekend Australian last Saturday. “I’m a science graduate and a former science teacher,” he said. “I think Dreamtime is a religious or spiritual interpretation of the beginnings of life. “For the same reason, we wouldn’t let intelligent design or creationism be included. “It shouldn’t be in the science curriculum, and we’re going to take it out.”
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Religion
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Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
Malcolm Brownl 3/3/10
Australian Christian schools will campaign against what they see as the thin end of the wedge – a decision by the South Australian Non-Government Schools Registration Board to effectively ban the teaching of creationism. Under policies published in December, the board said it required ”teaching of science as an empirical discipline, focusing on inquiry, hypothesis, investigation, experimentation, observation and evidential analysis”. The board said it ”does not accept as satisfactory a science curriculum in a non-government school which is based on, espouses or reflects the literal interpretation of a religious text in its treatment of either creationism or intelligent design”. The chief executive of Christian Schools Australia, Stephen O’Doherty, said the board statement was too strident, removing the right to teach ”biblical perspectives” as part of science.
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Tags: Australia, Christianity, Evangelical
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Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
3/3/10
A pay telephone line for French Catholics to confess their sins has drawn criticism from bishops. ”For advice on confessing, press one. To confess, press two. To listen to some confessions, press three,” says a soothing male voice, welcoming the caller to ”Le Fil du Seigneur”, or ”The Line of the Lord” service. However: ”In the case of serious or mortal sins, that is, sins that have cut you off from Christ our Lord, it is indispensable to confide in a priest,” warns the service. The service has been criticised by the Conference of French Bishops – an assembly of senior clerics – which has warned that the line had ”no approval from the Catholic Church in France”. It was set up this month to mark the beginning of the fasting period of Lent by a group of Catholics working for AABAS, a small Paris company that provides telephone messaging services, said its creator, Camille. (She asked that her second name not be used because she had received threats.)
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Tags: Christianity, France
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Monday, March 1st, 2010
Virginia Haussegger; 1/3/10
If my women friends lived in Malaysia, and we happened to be Muslim, we’d – with a few exceptions – be badly battered and bruised. Our bodies would be red raw from constant thrashing. I wonder if we’d wear those lashing marks with pride. Or would the pain and humiliation of official caning eventually break our spirit, and reduce us to a pitiful submission? The humiliation certainly got to 32-year-old Kartika Shukarno. Last year when the former model and mother of two was sentenced to a flogging for the crime of drinking a beer in a nightclub, she asked them to get on with it. As the judge in the Syariah High Court read out her sentence – six strokes of the rotan and a three-year jail term or hefty fine – he explained that the caning would make the accused ”repent and serves as a lesson to Muslims”. Kartika bowed her head, kept calm, and after withdrawing her appeal said, ”I will accept this earthly punishment, let Allah decide my punishment in the hereafter”.
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Tags: Malaysia, Religion, Womens Rights
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Monday, March 1st, 2010
1/3/10;
At least six Palestinians have reportedly been injured after Israeli police forces stormed a holy site in Jerusalem to disperse Muslim worshippers. Palestinian sources said that Israeli forces fired rubber bullets and tear gas at the worshippers holding protests in the al-Aqsa mosque compound on Sunday. Israel said the situation was calm and denied that rubber bullets had been fired. Micky Rosenfeld, the Israeli police spokesman, said that the police force dispersed about 20 masked protesters who were inside the compound.
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Tags: Human Rights, Israel, Religion
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Sunday, February 28th, 2010
Fr. Ron Rolheiser; 28/2/10
It was on that occasion that the LORD made a covenant with Abram…. (Gn 15:18a). Where is God in the countless tragedies that happen in our world? Where is God when bad things happen to good people? Where was God during the Holocaust? These are timeless questions and, taken together, constitute what is often called the theodicy question, the question of God and human suffering. Every so often this question hits us with a particular poignancy, as it did last week with the earthquake in Haiti. Somewhere between a quarter of a million and half a million people are dead, thousands are injured, hundreds of thousands are homeless, thousands more now face the possibility of disease from lack of proper water, food, housing, and hygiene, its capital city has been almost completely destroyed, and virtually everyone in the country has lost loved ones. And all of this happened to one of the poorest nations in the world – and to a people who have a deep faith in God.
- Where is God in all this?
- How does one find a faith perspective within which to understand this?
Not easily.
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Tags: Christianity, Earthquake, Haiti
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Saturday, February 27th, 2010
Jaquelien Maley; 27/2/10
On friday nights, gay Catholics from across Sydney attend St Joseph’s in Newtown. Like all Catholics, they take Communion during mass and tea after it. They have done so for years, with the quiet support of the deeply conservative Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell. But this week St Joseph’s gay ministry was threatened by a Catholic group set up on Facebook who vowed to stop its ‘’sacrilegious gay masses”. Last night the group protested at the church, bringing attention to this small forum of compromise forged between the doctrine that condemns homosexuals’ sex lives and the faith they love.
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Tags: Australia, Christianity, Homosexuality
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Saturday, February 27th, 2010
Tim Soutphomassane; 27/2/10
While many believe our political leaders shouldn’t let their religious convictions sway their policy decisions, is it realistic to expect politicians to check their faith at the door when they enter the parliamentary chamber? “RENDER unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s.” For a long time this biblical formula made it possible for Christian believers to draw a line between church and state, spiritual and temporal, sacred and profane. The two spheres were not meant to overlap. In modern times it was that seminal liberal, John Locke, who provided the most compelling statement of this fundamental division. In A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), he wrote it is necessary to distinguish between the business of civil government and that of religion.
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Tags: Australia, Politicians, Religion
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