Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category
Monday, July 19th, 2010
19/7/10; http://www.theage.com.au/national/letters/only-steps-have-been-backward-20100718-10fwp.html (3 Items)
The Vatican has again excelled itself. Its declaration that paedophilia among priests and religious is a crime is at last one great positive step. But its declaration that it is a similar ”crime” for a priest to ordain a woman must rank as one of the most negative and insensitive steps the Vatican has taken. No doubt the Vatican will hide behind Latin definitions of ”crime” or trot out the usual statement that ordinary people are incapable of understanding the theological philosophy behind it. Nevertheless, for many people in the church, myself included, the attitude to, and treatment of, women in the church by many in the hierarchy is archaic, offensive, anti-social and above all, certainly not Christian. But even within Vatican rules, I would not dare suggest that it is criminal. Ken Browne, Wheelers Hill
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Tags: Australia, Christianity, Pedophilia, USA
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Saturday, May 15th, 2010
15/5/10; A mud-walled village in Iran. Soraya, a 35-year-old mother of seven, is falsely accused of adultery by her violent husband, who wants to be rid of her to marry a 4-year-old girl. He blackmails the local mullah, who sentences Soraya to death by stoning under Sharia law. The crowd cries “Allahu akbar [God is great!]” as Soraya’s two young sons are invited to hurl the first stones. It takes Soraya an agonising three hours to die. The next day an Iranian-French journalist, Freidoune Sahebjam, stops in the village to get his car fixed and is told the horrific story by Soraya’s fearless aunt, Zahra. He makes a narrow escape from the village and goes on to write a book in honour of Soraya that will become an international bestseller in 1994, opening the eyes of the West for the first time to the barbaric practice of stoning in some Islamic countries.
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Tags: Children, Human Rights, Marriage, Religion, Womens Rights
Posted in Gender & Marriage, Health & Children, Human Rights, Religion, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Saturday, May 15th, 2010
15/5/10
A Catholic diocese in the US has agreed to pay more than $US20 million ($22.3m) to victims of predator priests and says it will sell some of its real estate to foot the bill. The diocese of Burlington in the northeastern state of Vermont agreed to pay $US17.65m yesterday to 26 sex abuse victims and settled three appeals cases for undisclosed amounts, Bishop of Burlington Salvatore Matano said in a letter posted on the diocese’s website. Jerry O’Neill, from the legal firm that represented many of the victims, said the diocese’s total payout exceeded $US20m. The amounts awarded on appeal were withheld at the request of the victims, he said. To pay the bill, the diocese had put up for sale its administrative building in Burlington and its 10.5ha leisure facility, Camp Tara Holy Cross on Lake Champlain, and had secured a loan using other diocesan property as collateral, Bishop Matano said.
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Tags: Christianity, Pedophilia, USA
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Saturday, May 15th, 2010
Tony Allen-Mills; 15/5/10
What are these? Why did you choose this place?” asks Ayaan Hirsi Ali, eyebrows arched in feigned alarm. We are in New York’s Algonquin hotel, just a few hundred metres from Times Square, where a Muslim would-be bomber parked a car full of explosives a couple of days earlier. Radical Islamists have been trying for years to kill Hirsi Ali, a softly spoken politician turned intellectual who combines the beauty of a film star with the uncompromising zeal of an Enlightenment crusader. She has been under siege since the ritualised murder in 2004 of her friend, Theo van Gogh, who had helped her make the film Submission, a blistering polemic about Islam’s treatment of women. A letter pinned to Van Gogh’s chest – or, rather, stabbed in place with a butcher’s knife – warned Hirsi Ali that “you will go down”. She went into hiding, exchanging a career as a Dutch MP for exile.
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Tags: Religion, Womens Rights
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Friday, May 14th, 2010
14/5/10
The Pope has condemned gay marriage and abortion as “among the most insidious and dangerous challenges” to society, as Portugal prepares to legalise same-sex partnerships next week. He described abortion as a “tragedy” and said the family was based “on the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman”, receiving a standing ovation from church and lay social workers yesterday. Benedict also criticised Catholics “ashamed” of their faith and too willing to “lend a hand to secularism”. Ninety per cent of Portuguese define themselves as Catholic, but Portugal’s society is increasingly secular, with far fewer than a third saying they attend mass regularly.
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Tags: Christianity, Homosexuality
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Friday, May 14th, 2010
Lex Hall; 14/5/10
In a ceremony not far from the site of the Northern Territory’s 1966 Wave Hill walk-off, Aboriginal traditional owners yesterday became joint managers of the culturally rich Gregory National Park. About 300 traditional owners gathered at Jasper Gorge, where Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin handed over the deeds to the 1300 sq km park in the Territory’s northwest. At the same time the park, home to spectacular gorges and traces of early European and Aboriginal history, was leased back to the NT government for 99 years. The traditional owners welcomed the handback, but insisted that local people had to be given priority in the park’s management.”Contracts should be offered to us first before they go out to tender,” said Narinyman elder Larry Johns. Jasper Gorge traditional owner Kevin Bishop said joint management was a way of empowering future generations.”We wanted to see our young people grow and get knowledge about Aboriginal culture and about land management and tourism,” Mr Bishop said.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Culture
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Friday, May 14th, 2010
John L Allen Jr; 14/5/10;
Few Catholic bishops anywhere in the world have spent more time coping with the fallout from the sexual abuse crisis – pastoral, political, legal, and spiritual – than Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston. When he became bishop of Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1992, he inherited the infamous James Porter case, and ten years later he took over an archdiocese in virtual meltdown when he succeeded Cardinal Bernard Law in Boston. O’Malley sat down with NCR on May 13 in Fatima, Portugal, where he’s participating in the visit of Pope Benedict XVI. He discussed the pope’s comments on the crisis en route to Portugal – insisting that the real problem is not attacks from the outside, but the reality of sin within the church – and other matters.
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Tags: Christianity, Pedophilia, Rome, USA, Women
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Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Carole Landry, 13/5/10
The French parliament has unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the full-face Islamic veil as an affront to the nation’s values, setting the stage for a law banning it. The vote in the National Assembly put France on course to become the second European country after Belgium to declare the wearing of the burqa or the niqab illegal in public places. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-wing UMP party and the opposition Socialists made a rare show of unity in backing the non-binding resolution that declared the veil ”contrary to the values of the republic”.
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Tags: France, Religion, Womens Rights
Posted in Human Rights, Religion, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Thursday, May 13th, 2010
13/5/10
The Pope has admitted for the first time that the Catholic Church must accept responsibility for the child sexual abuse scandal that has engulfed it. Speaking on a visit to Portugal yesterday, Benedict XVI said “sins inside the church” must be blamed, rather than “outside enemies”. He added that “forgiveness is no substitute for justice” and that the church had to “relearn prayer and penance”. His comments were hailed from within the Vatican hierarchy, with one senior figure on the Pope’s staff saying it amounted to a “sea change” in the way that the church is dealing with the scandals.
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Tags: Christianity, Pedophilia
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Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Eugene Cullen Kennedy; 13/5/10
The beleaguered Pope Benedict XVI has dealt with the sex abuse crisis like a shy bachelor who holds back from stepping onto the dance floor at the parish social. A lifetime of dealing abstractly with men and women from the safe perch of a classroom podium did not exactly prepare him for the immersion in the human rhythms of intimacy that define the dance even on church property. He has shifted from one foot to the other, letting others call the tune while he hung back, turning ashen and turning away when he learned, as Paul did of his Corinthian community, that what he remembered as a fox trot had been taken over by a wolf pack. Yes, he promised, I’ll get involved in this soon and then woe betide the wolf pack.
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Tags: Christianity, Pedophilia, USA
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Wednesday, May 12th, 2010
Victoria Laurie; 12/5/10
Last year, archeologist Mike Morwood and rock art specialist June Ross took the ride of their lifetime across the northwest Kimberley. They hired a helicopter and flew across largely trackless territory, their pilot landing periodically in spots where he felt he could get his helicopter down safely and where they believed a good rock art site might lie. Their journey took them from Bigge Island, one of the Kimberley’s largest offshore landmasses, east to inland pastoral stations, and north as far as the rugged Drysdale River National Park, the Kimberley’s largest park that lacks an airstrip, ranger station or even a single road. The pair’s aerial reconnoitre recorded 27 locations in which they documented a total of 54 rock art sites. “It was an absolute revelation,” Ross recalls. “What struck us was how many rock art sites there are, and we developed a great admiration for the artists who made them.” Across the Kimberley, hundreds of thousands of paintings lie in rock overhangs and caves, often behind curtains of tropical vines. Dappled light plays over the surface of hauntingly beautiful images that have made the region famous: Gwion Gwion or Bradshaw paintings depicting slender dancing figures in mulberry coloured ochre or younger images of Wandjina spirits, wide-eyed and startlingly white despite the passage of years.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Culture, Religion
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Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
Victoria Laurie; 11/5/10
Shimmering heat and a dazzling purple-blue sky hang over Burrup Peninsula’s vast rocky landscape, and intense light makes it hard to pick out details in the stony rubble. But once they adjust, the eyes can make out lively images of humans, animals and symbols. In this remote northwest corner, about 1500km north of Perth, a vast array of images is scratched on sun-beaten surfaces and in shadowed crevices. Camera in hand, Mike Donaldson has covered almost all of the Burrup Peninsula and nearby islands of the Dampier Archipelago, off the Pilbara coast. He has encountered thousands of petroglyphs, or rock engravings, scattered across the landscape. It’s thought there are probably a million or more in what is almost certainly the largest concentration of petroglyphs on any continent. Yet there has never been a complete archeological survey and, until now, no book that comprehensively captures its art. Burrup Rock Art is Donaldson’s remedy for the latter oversight, if not the former one. He decided to put together the book after attending a wake for Pat Vinnicombe, an anthropologist who conducted many early site surveys and worked tenaciously to get Burrup art protected. She died in 2003 while visiting the place she loved with politicians and rock art enthusiasts who were trying to halt destruction of Burrup sites to make way for an industrial plant.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Human Rights, Religion, Trade
Posted in Aboriginal, Aid / Trade, Australia, Human Rights, Religion | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
11/5/10
Penny Wong describes Tony Abbott as “irresponsible and disappointing” for encouraging scepticism in the classroom (“Abbott evokes Jesus to teach pupils all about ‘natural’ climate change”, 10/5). I fail to see anything irresponsible in his statements as reported. This is the truth as we know it.In 2007 the UN’s climate change panel advised governments to reduce carbon emissions to avoid dangerous global warming.Since then, scientists have challenged and discredited some of the UN’s findings. Our government should now respond by closing down the Climate Change Department and directing its funding into research and development to find the real facts. Terry Metcalfe, Deniliquin, NSW
Tony Abbott has once again been spouting unsubstantiated rubbish to push his agenda against climate change. Leading scientists say there is no evidence to suggest it was hotter 2000 years ago when Jesus walked the Earth. When is this man going to realise that as a politician he has to be able to substantiate the things he says? Iris Ashton, Kallangur, Qld
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Tags: Australia, Christianity, Environment
Posted in Australia, Christianity, Environment, Human Rights | No Comments »
Monday, May 10th, 2010
Dick Gross;10/5/10, (3 Items)
There is a financial contagion threatening to sweep Europe but another contagion, just as destructive, is going pan European – Islamophobia. The French started it with the prohibition of the veil in schools. It has now extended to prohibitions on Islamic practices in Switzerland and Belgium. Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi in his blog and in The National Times argued that some of the prohibitions should leap the Pacific and come here. Amazingly 81 per cent of National Times readers agreed with him in an (admittedly unscientific) poll of more than 10,000 respondents. Ah one can never go wrong spewing out racial divisiveness. This dog whistle has worked. Bernardi must be rapt.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Religion, Women
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Sunday, May 9th, 2010
Leslie Cannold; 9/5/10
Tony Abott is said to be likeable. I believe it, though I’ve only met him once. Introduced by a Crikey! journalist at Parliament House in Canberra — where I had gone to advocate against Abbott’s continued ministerial control over the fertility control drug RU486 — the then health minister refused to shake my hand. It was an honest move from an un-stage-managed man and I didn’t have a problem with it. He didn’t like me and he let it show. It was as straight and simple as that. The Opposition Leader’s recent attacks on the Prime Minister are designed to highlight this virtue. By accusing Kevin Rudd of waffle-speak, standing for nothing and choosing to “gutless out”, Abbott invites us to brand him in contrasting terms: as a straight-talker with strong values and a willingness to defend them.
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Tags: Australia, Christianity
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Saturday, May 8th, 2010
Samah Hadid & Rayann Bekdache; 8/5/10
A woman gets arrested for wearing a controversial item of clothing that the state deems out of line and is convicted of public indecency. We are not talking about Belgium, Italy or France but, rather, Sudan. However, these days it’s easy to get the countries mixed up. It’s hard not to compare the recent cases of a French woman who was fined while wearing a niqab and driving, a fully veiled Italian woman who was issued with a fine of 500 euros ($A712) while walking in the street and the absurd arrest of a woman for wearing trousers in Sudan last September. The issue came closer to home yesterday when Opposition Leader Tony Abbott responded to calls by Liberal senator Cory Bernardi for a ban on the burqa by saying there is ”understandable community concern” about the attire. The common thread in these cases is the attempt at state intervention in the personal spheres of women’s clothing and expression.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Religion
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