Muslims and Christians Refuse To Play Ball

Hmm, I wonder if it was because the women priests wouldn't wear hajibs.

A soccer game bringing Muslim imams and Christian priests "shoulder to shoulder" on a field in Norway was cancelled Saturday because the teams could not agree on whether women priests should take part.

See:

Witches Play Mullahs To A Draw

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Religion and the Market

Protestantism is Capitalism

An Economic Analysis of the Protestant Reformation

"This paper seeks to explain the initial successes and failures of Protestantism on economic grounds. It argues that the medieval Roman Catholic Church, through doctrinal manipulation, the exclusion of rivals, and various forms of price discrimination, ultimately placed members seeking the Z good "spiritual services" on the margin of defection. These monopolistic practices encouraged entry by rival firms, some of which were aligned with civil governments. The paper hypothesizes that Protestant entry was facilitated in emergent entrepreneurial societies characterized by the decline of feudalism and relatively unstable distribution of wealth and repressed in more homogeneous, rent-seeking societies that were mostly dissipating rather than creating wealth. In these societies the Roman Church was more able to continue the practice of price discrimination. Informal tests of this proposition are conducted by considering primogeniture and urban growth as proxies for wealth stability."

Protestants explain their religion of capitalism as neo-platonism. The marketplace of vice and virtue, and God gives you free choice. Which is why the Calgary School and the Harpocrites embrace neo-platonism.

Social conservatives want morality to dominate the market while promoting the idea of free choice. Their free choice of course is not for the social good but for oneself, their morality some idealized version of the 1950's as we can see in the debate over child care.

On balance, I conclude that the market economy allows more people more of the time to achieve more of the goals they set for themselves. I think this is not only arguable from economic theory but seems to me to leap from the pages of history. Conversely, I have learnt that, beyond its essential function as policeman, judge and welfare-provider-of-last-resort, the state is a very ineffective means of enabling people to achieve their ends. It lacks the flexibility and tacit knowledge that is needed to coordinate the revolving kaleidoscope of people's valuations, plans and choices. It has great difficulty in replacing profit with another barometer for measuring the quality of its services. A large state attracts undesirables who use its apparatus as an instrument to exploit others for their own selfish ends.

But it is nonetheless true that market capitalism permits the greedy person, the hedonist and other moral reprobates, at least within the basic rules of property and life, to pursue their chosen ends of self-gratification. In a free society, the possibility of making immoral choices is a real possibility. The sun of liberty rises on the evil and the good, as the rain of misfortune falls on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Yet the liberty to make immoral choices allowed by the free society should not lead us to conclude that immorality is the norm in free societies. To draw this conclusion is to commit a logical fallacy. The liberty to commit immoral acts is at the same time a liberty to perform virtuous deeds. So, in a society where people are free to choose their lifestyles, the heedless acquisition or conspicuous consumption of material wealth, or the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, need not be preferred choices. I can choose to live for myself or for a higher principle―to pursue extrinsic or intrinsic goals. Even if I choose to make money, it may be for my own pleasure or I could emulate Andrew Carnegie and earn it for the benefit of others.

So a community of monks or nuns, having embraced voluntary poverty and individual ownership, is just as authentically part of the market economy as is the board of directors of a multinational company. Both ways of living are marked by their respect for the lives, rights and property of others, and are thus distinguished from the lifestyle of the swindling business executive, the petty thief, the mafia boss and the hired killer. We can conclude that, if everyone in our free society renounced the possession of anything beyond the mere essentials, or adopted the technology-free lifestyle of the Amish, our society would nevertheless be just as authentic an example of market capitalism as would a community populated with clones of Gordon Gekko.

Understood in this way, market capitalism cannot be equated-as it so often is-with materialism. Materialism is the genuine foe of Christian morality, rather than market capitalism, which can be both friendly and inimical to Christian morality depending upon the choices people make. As I have already mentioned, the very freedom of the market facilitates all sorts of responsible, even self-denying behaviour, which must be set alongside the irresponsible and selfish actions chosen by others. Some observers discern a greater preponderance of materialist attitudes among the less affluent, non-capitalist societies―their more affluent, capitalist cousins having discovered that, 'All that glitters is not gold' and having the time and resources at hand to pursue non-material ends in life.

But, while market capitalism may provide for and even encourage virtue, it cannot guarantee virtuous behaviour. There is another side to the symbiotic relationship between freedom and virtue. The free society confines its legislation to the enforcement of justice. But in order to survive, the free society requires a critical mass of the community to value virtue and to behave virtuously. There must be more than a minimalist adherence to virtue.

We can begin to reflect on the necessity of virtue for freedom by looking more closely at choices-not from an economic, but from an ethical point of view. Our choices have consequences, not just for our material but also for our moral well-being. Our choices live on in us to shape our characters. Good choices make us virtuous while bad choices make us vicious. In other words, as we continue down a path of good or bad actions, we inevitably become different people, for better or for worse.

The latest endeavour of Christianity. God is your financial counselor.

See

Prince of Peace?

Pauline Origins of Social Conservatism

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Prince of Peace?

While social conservative protestants attack Muslim claims to being a peaceful religion, how come some of these same folks celebrate Jesus not as a prince of peace but as Christ the Warrior King.


Of course with a President that talks to God we are seeing a revival of that old time religion of Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.


Not to be outdone at least one Protestant sect is now proclaiming themselves followers of the Anti-Christ. Which some folks think Bush is too.



See:

Secularism Vs. Fundamentalism

Gnostic Easter

Pauline Origins of Social Conservatism

Pat Robertson Anti-Christ

An Antidote to Bush

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Secularism Vs. Fundamentalism

The so called battle of ideas is not the West against the East it is secularism vs. religious fundamentalism. Secular Turks draw a political line You would never find this kind of political demonstration occurring in Islamic fundamentalist states, nor in Israel or America.

See:

Secular Democracy


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Pauline Origins of Social Conservatism

Paul, the founder of modern Christianity, sounds like David Horowitz or Linda Kimball. After all he was the first born social conservative and historical revisionist. Some arguments never change over time. And when you fail to argue philosophy you can always charge your opponents with being a pagan religion.

The passage in Romans is not an appeal to Pagans, but an attack on them for the benefit of a Christian audience, and in it Paul displays considerably less delicacy. He makes no attempt here to find an ally in Pagan philosophy. Rather, he views philosophy as nothing more than a bankrupt attempt at a rational defense of Paganism. Indeed, Paul seems unhappy with anything resembling complex reasoning. Philosophical reason carries the odor of the sophistry of the Pagan professors who control higher education. Paul insists that the truth about God (that he is creator of the world, and presumably that he resembles no creature) is perfectly obvious, and only a contumacious obstinacy, rooted in pride, can explain how Pagans got it wrong. As a result of their deliberate stupidity, God has abandoned them to their sexual passions, homosexuality, and other vices. But despite his hostility to Pagan philosophy, Paul does insist that Christian beliefs are reasonable, and Pagan beliefs unreasonable, and when he says that the more they call themselves philosophers the more corrupted their reasoning is, he certainly does not mean that they were true philosophers. If a true philosopher followed reason, he would no doubt see the truth of Christianity, or at least so a Christian with an interest in philosophy might conclude.

Postmodern Conservatism and Religious Fundamentalism by Geoff Boucher

Contemporary fundamentalism roots itself in a critique of the postmodern condition and must be considered to be an effort towards the dialectical negation of that condition. Taking aim against epistemological uncertainty, ontological multiplicity, consumerist individualism and moral relativism, religious fundamentalism proposes that faith ground knowledge instead of transcendental rationality, a new version of the chain of being, communitarian forms of belonging and moral absolutism. It is anti-postmodern – yet paradoxically, religious fundamentalists in the United States find themselves in alliance with what we are describing as “postmodern conservatives” and some radical Islamists adopt ideological elements of secular nationalism to produce what can only be described as a clerical fascism. I propose that contemporary fundamentalism is a “post-traditional fundamentalism,” to be distinguished from the fundamentalism of the 1920s because of a major shift, from the defence of tradition to its selective reinvention.

Darwinism and the Religion of Scientific Materialism

Linda Kimball


Enrico Ferri (1856-1926), a prominent socialist of his day, was an Italian criminologist who for many years was the editor of Avanti, a socialist daily. Writing in “Socialism and Religious Beliefs,” he spoke of the all-important connection between Darwin’s theory and socialism:
“I add that not only is Darwinism not contrary to socialism, but that it forms one of its fundamental scientific premises. As Virchow justly remarked, socialism is nothing else than the logical and vital outcome partly of Darwinism and partly of Spencerian evolution.”Enrico frankly discussed how and why Darwinian socialism serves as an alternate religion: “socialism is joined to religious evolution and tends to substitute itself for religion because it desires precisely that humanity should have…its own ‘terrestrial paradise’ without having to wait for it in a ‘something beyond’…the socialist movement has numerous characteristics common…to primitive Christianity, notably its ardent faith in the ideal.” (ibid)

To wit: Darwinian socialism (Marx’s dialectical scientific materialism) is a secularized and distorted mirror image of the Christian teaching of divine providence. In as the Biblical model teaches that man and history are moving towards the Kingdom of God, scientific materialism preaches that man and history are evolving toward a terrestrial paradise created by Promethean humanists. The notion that both history and man are evolving upward through successive stages is what British philosopher Mary Midgley termed the “Escalator Myth.”

David Horowitz had this to say about scientific materialism’s theology and creation account: “The victorious radicals had proclaimed a theology of Reason in which equality of condition was the natural and true order of creation. In their Genesis, the loss of equality was the ultimate source of mankind’s’ suffering and evil…The ownership of private property became a secular version of original sin. Redemption…was possible only through the Revolution that would abolish property and open the gates to the Socialist Eden---to paradise regained.”

See:

Secular Democracy



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Palm Sunday April Fools Day

How appropriate that the Divine Fool is celebrated today both because it is April Fools Day and Palm Sunday.

Radical Theologin Harvey Cox wrote a whole book on the divine fool.

The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (1969),

One of the Protestants who has addressed festivals is Harvey Cox who argued that human beings are “essentially festive and ritual creatures” (1969, 8; cf. Browning 1980). As homo festivus and homo fantasia, human beings express festivity and fantasy through festival as a form of “theatre of the body.” Cox argues that with the march of secularization and the continued rejection of festivity “Christianity has often adjusted too quickly to the categories of modernity” (Ibid. 15), and with this, important facets of what it means to be human are neglected. As a result, Cox believes that there is a real need for Christianity in the West to develop a theology of festivity

An article from that book was published back in the early Seventies in Playboy, I read it for the articles back then, which included an illustration one rarely sees; Jesus Laughing.

And, what else, the symbol of Christ that best symbolizes this theology is "Christ the Harlequin" (as in The Parable, New York World's Fair 1966), who personifies festivity and fantasy in an age that has almost lost both.

Perhaps because as a divine fool he was high.

The Feast of Fools, known also as the festum fatuorum, festum stultorum, festum hypodiaconorum, or fête des fous , are the varying names given to popular medievalfestivals regularly celebrated by the clergy and laity from the fifth century until the sixteenth century in several countries of Europe, principally France, but also Spain, Germany, England, and Scotland. A similar celebration was the Feast of Asses.

The central idea seems always to have been a brief social revolution, in which power, dignity and impunity is briefly conferred on those in a subordinate position. In the view of some, this makes the medieval festival a successor to the Roman Saturnalia.

In the medieval version the young people, who played the chief parts, chose from among their own number a mock pope, archbishop, bishop, or abbot to reign as Lord of Misrule. Participants would then "consecrate" him with many ridiculous ceremonies in the chief church of the place, giving names such as Archbishop of Dolts, Abbot of Unreason, Boy Bishop, or Pope of Fools. The protagonist could be a boy bishop or subdeacon, while at the Abbey of St Gall in the tenth century, a student each December 13 enacted the part of the abbot. In any case the parody tipped dangerously towards the profane. The ceremonies often mocked the performance of the highest offices of the church, while other persons, dressed in different kinds of masks and disguises, engaged in songs and dances and practiced all manner of revelry within the church building.

I highly recommend Harvey Cox's work which in many ways compliments Bakhtin's work on the subversive nature of the Carnival and the role playing of the Fool.

"The carnival was not only liberating because for that short period the church and state had little or no control over the lives of the revellers—although Terry Eagleton points out this would probably be 'licensed' transgression at best—but its true liberating potential can be seen in the fact that set rules and beliefs were not immune to ridicule or reconception at carnival time; it 'cleared the ground' for new ideas to enter into public discourse. Bakhtin goes so far as to suggest that the European Renaissance itself was made possible by the spirit of free thinking and impiety that the carnivals engendered."

The Carnivale and Feast of Fools became recuperated in post Renaissance society as comedie della art, and play festivals like the Fringe, which exists world wide and is a popular summer festival here in Edmonton, reflect the same anarchic festivus that one would see at carnival or the earlier Fool's Feasts.

And we see the modern Carnival not only during Mardi Gras but with Feast of Fools that is the Burning Man festival. As pointed out in this article by John Morehead, whose blog is well worth perusing for it's writings on alternative religious movements..

"Burn, Baby, Burn, Christendom Inferno: Burning Man and the Festive Immolation of Christendom Culture and Modernity"

Second and related to the context of counter-modernity and counter-Christendom, Burning Man expresses itself within a cultural context that exhibits a decidedly post-modern and post-Christendom approach to spirituality. Christianity continues to play a significant role in American culture, and may have been the dominant religion in America and the Western world in the past, but in recent decades there has been a “declining influence of religion – particularly Christianity” (Heelas & Woodhead 2005, 1). This has come about through a secularization of the West which in turn has led to a spiritual re-enchantment[1] process. This re-enchantment involves the preference for spirituality rather than religion, and is characterized by an emphasis upon an individualized, subjective, and eclectic spiritual quest. In this environment of the post-modern spirituality seeker, Christianity is perceived negatively as a dogmatic institution rather than a vibrant spirituality whose adherents have often failed to live up to the moralizing they present to the culture. In reaction, many Burning Man participants have either rejected Christianity outright, or consider it of no consequence as a viable option in creating a spirituality suited for the challenges of the twenty-first century

---

[1] Christopher Partridge explores the ramifications of the re-enchantment thesis in The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 1 (London & New York: T & T Clark International, 2004).

Since the play is the thing, we can see that since the earliest days of Christendom the Easter pageant played a significant role in society, as we know by way of the York Guilds which in a gift economy share their surpluses by holding feasts and a two week series of plays, it comes full circle, with the sacrificed god being the fool king.

If the power of the King/Church/State lay in divine right, the power of the people lay in the fool king whom they crowned. It is why in the movie Andre Rublev, about the icon painter, the opening scene has a village fool crucified for making fun of the priests. It too was produced in 1969 when Cox published his book.

Only by learning to laugh at the hopelessness around us can we touch the hem of hope. Christ the clown signifies our playful appreciation of the past and our comic refusal to accept the spectre of inevitability in the future. He is the incarnation of festivity and fantasy. (Harvey Cox 1969, 142)

Jesus as Fool, is a subversion on the classic church iconography of the slain and resurrected lord. For as Harliquen, fool, clown, he is life giver, alive, part of the meme of a living humanity. Not an icon but a living force. For the truth of his sacrifice is that life goes on.

Thus the religious heresies originating in Gnosticism that arose during the transition from the Catholic and Orthodox Empires to Protest-ism were about this spirit.

What if it is possible to awaken to a profound state of oneness and love, which the Gnostic Christians symbolized by the enigmatic figure of the laughing Jesus?

What the sacrifice originally meant was ironically the end of sacrifice. Which is why the religion of Christianity began with Agape feasts hidden away in caves and grotos, where all could be equal. The slave religion was about the end of sacrifice, the end of all sacrifice, not only of animals, but of people and of freedom.

Godspell: A Musical Based on the Gospel According to St Matthew (1973)

The portrayal of Jesus as a clown may have been offensive to some, however this reviewer found it to be refreshing, the clown communicates joy while communicating the seriousness of the gospel message. He reminds us that the gospel is a message of great joy and humility, love and peace, of triumph and victory. However in saying that there are some aspects that don't fit with our understanding, for instance the betrayal scene, Jesus kisses Judas. Then it does finish with a question hanging over it, that being, why no resurrection scene? Or maybe there was, perhaps the grand finale represents the risen Jesus, carried lifted high into the crowded streets, it gives a sense of inclusiveness, that somehow Jesus lives on in each one of us.

Jesus the fool returns again and again as a radical revolutionary icon for popular spirituality and its heresies, in opposition to the institutions of Christianity.

THE ENIGMA OF SANCTITY
	1950

Still, theologian Harvey Cox saw the Sixties' counterculture as a reclamation of facets of humanity eclipsed by the rise of technological society — essentially, Rossellini's jester side of man. In his book the Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity & Fantasy, Cox idenfied certain aspects of the youth revolt - the recovery of celebration and imagination — not just with a hunger for for wholeness, but vital to both psychological health and, significantly, to being able to have compassion for the oppressed of the world. A capacity for being able to imaginatively "put themselves in other shoes" was prerequisite for the developed nations to be able to have understanding and compassion for those oppressed and different than themselves.

Here we see why Rossellini takes this "jester side" so seriously and so centrally: his offering of St. Francis as a model for conflict-weary Europe isn't a simple-minded Utopian vision, a rejection of private property and reduction to begging (that begs the question "begging from whom?"), but a recovery of that sense of play and imaginative identification with others that makes people more valuable than efficiency, and the "abnormality" of the Other less prone to threaten and result in conflict. The mere existence of the jester is a check on the hubris of power in both ruler and system. In his book, Cox cites an essay by Leszek Kolakowski titled, "The Priest and the Jester":

The philosophy of the jester is a philosophy which in every epoch denounces as doubtful what appears as unshakeable; it points out the contradictions in what seems evident and incontestable; it ridicules common sense into the absurd — in other words, it undertakes the daily toil of the jester's profession along with the inevitable risk of appearing ludicrous.

The jester is the quintessence of the carnival spirit, and just as the jester's cap is pants worn on the head, carnival turns upside-down the values by which the world is typically run. Carnival mocks the pretensions of permanence and power, defies the illusions of the masses. No wonder the faith of Francis has been described as a "carnivalized" Christianity: his topsy-turvy insistence that Perfect Joy is found in suffering, his irrational love for everything and everybody, his scandalous rejection of all the world holds dear — power, property, status, etc. Technically, of course, this is Christianity, for which the adjective "carnivalized" is required only when it forgets its own scandalous identity. Yet the upsidedowness of a faith whose God is born in a stable, the meek inherit the earth, and whose secrets are given to children and fools is all too easily domesticated, and even the court of Christ himself would seem to require its own jester.

was more than a juggler. He was also a poet, singer, all-around entertainer. The Indeed, Francis referred to himself as "the jester of God," and the Italian title of Rossellini's film is Francesco, giullare di Dio — "Francis, God's Jester". The Italian term refers to a French one, jongleur — whence comes "juggler" — but the jongleurjongleur was in fact more earthy than the troubadour: the Latin joculator means "joker", and Francis's joculatores Domini ("ministrels of God") were renowed for putting on a good show when they pulled into a town to preach. Francis's name and terms point to France, home to a Medieval love cult which, though eventually declared heretical and wiped out, left a deep and permanent mark on European culture. So much of what we know as "love in the Western world" finds its source in this flamboyantly romantic vision, including the veneration of an ideal lady — whether Dante and his Beatrice, or St. Francis and his "Lady Poverty."

Today there is the reinvention of the feast of fools, not only in the neo-pagan movement, or the Burning Man festival but in the far left as well. Paul Goodman and other Marxist Freudians talked about humans being playful, that the alienation of work under capitalism was that it meant that it was labour, as in slavery, drudgery rather than fun, playfulness. A Little Eros For Valentine's Day

Since Cox wrote his book in the sixties, the search for this human playful utopia continues.

I was involved with one utopia called Minnesota Experimental City. It was in an era when in the United States there was a lot of utopian thinking. Harvey Cox’s book, The Secular City, was an all time best seller that told us that as soon as we get rid of symbol and myth, get enough guitar players and good architects and civil rights workers, the Kingdom will have come.4 Three years later he was back with a better book called The Feast of Fools.5 These were written just before New York burned and Detroit burned and Watts burned, just before the U.S. committed troops to Vietnam, just before everything went bad. But we were building Minnesota Experimental City. Fifty-eight corporations put up four million dollars for our study. Buckminster Fuller – Mr. Twenty-First Century – was on the panel; Harrison Brown (Lyndon Baines Johnson’s doctor, head of the Mayo Clinic); and then they salted it with a few humanists who would ask the human questions.

We were to build a city – utopia – of two hundred and fifty thousand people. It had to be at least seventy-five miles from any other urban centre. It would be built around a branch of the University of Minnesota; 3M and all the other big firms would have a base there. We thought through everything. It’s cold up there, how are you going to play tennis all year, and how are you going to keep people from arthritis cramps? Well, Buckinster Fuller said, "nothing to it, we build a one mile square plastic dome." How do we get on with pollution? Well, we owe you a ride on an elevator in a building, so we owe you horizontal transportation in our Minnesota Experimental City. You get to the edge, and we’ll take care of you from there.

Situationism was a game of revolution and revolutionaries at play in the Sixties. So it makes sense that the recuperation of their radical politics should, like the surrealists before them, end on the stage. For once the world of 1968 was their stage today they are the play.

The meta-play is an example of Reflectionism through performance. Professor Steve Mann of the University of Toronto, who invented EyeTap to literally mediate monocultural reality, proposes: ﾅReflectionism as a new philosophical framework for questioning social values. The Reflectionist philosophy borrows from the Situationist movement in art and, in particular, an aspect of the Situationist movement called d￩tournement, in which artists often appropriate tools of the "oppressor" and then resituate these tools in a disturbing and disorienting fashion. Reflectionism attempts to take this tradition one step further, not only by appropriating the tools of the oppressor, but by turning those same tools against the oppressor as well. I coined the term "Reflectionism" because of the "mirrorlike" symmetry that is its end goal and because the goal is also to induce deep thought ("reflection") through the construction of this mirror. Reflectionism allows society to confront itself or to see its own absurdity. The participants of the meta-play who do not wish to see themselves in the mirror (thus confronting themselves) quickly turn away, but are left with the lingering image of grotesque ugliness, which will haunt them until a profound internal resolution is reached. Drawing upon traditional folly, but appearing in a disenchanted post-modern society, the concept of The Fool is resurrected, challenging and satirizing oppressors in order to cause reflection on their positions, attitudes, and worldviews. Harvey Cox describes the Foolﾒs perennial message in his 1969 The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy: It is the eternal message of The Fool, who takes the stage whenever greed, arrogance, authority, pride and sycophancy lay claim to the public headspace. These are the acts of real fools, without which The Fool would be useless and mute. The Fool is a looking-glass. She is male and female, he is human and animal, they are one moment immersed in the workaday routine and the next overturning the norms of daily life. When we play The Fool, we are The Other, strangers who are in this world but not entirely of it. The ancient term Narrenfreiheit means "freedom of the fool." That freedom reminds us that in a moment of ecstasy we can sweep away the illusion of so much of what we endure. The Fool breaks the trail; the revolutionaries follow. Those who participate, reflect, and achieve the ﾓmoment of ecstasy,ﾔ will soon realise that playing the Fool is not only one of the most satisfying and liberating experiences they will ever encounter, but is also an urgent direct action to reclaim the public headspace. To counter the oppressive and ubiquitous corporate monoculture that is so prevalent in late capitalist society, culture jamming through performance may well be the only solution to cause reflection, hence shattering a dystopic corporate reality. The idea will, I sincerely hope, spread like a virus until such a time whereby all human beings are free to express and play without fear of reprisal, are free from oppression and exploitation of all sorts, and are truly equal to one another.

See:

Jesus

Gnostic

Paganism

April Fools

Judas the Obscure

For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing

New Age Libertarian Manifesto

Another Prehistoric Woman

My Favorite Muslim

Antinominalist Anarchism

Marxism and Religion

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Abortion Not A Sin

It's Easter.

For just one week, priests in Malta and Gozo will be able to grant forgiveness to sins related to abortion, heresy, apostasy, and schisms.

So Abortion is not a sin but a violation of church doctrine. Glad they cleared that up.

Heresy, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a "theological or religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition, or held to be contrary, to the Roman Catholic or Orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church, or, by extension, to that of any church, creed, or religious system, considered as orthodox. By extension, heresy is an opinion or doctrine in philosophy, politics, science, art, etc., at variance with those generally accepted as authoritative."

One who commits apostasy is an apostate, or one who apostatises literature, the term typically referred to . In older Westernbaptized Christians who left their faith.

A schismatic is a person who creates or incites schism in an organization or who is a member of a splinter group.

You see in Malta abortion is morally and legally not sanctioned. Yet women will still get abortions regardless of male priests and male law makers. Because making abortion illegal is not only stupid it endangers womens health.

Blindness no excuse for abortion - Health Division

A woman who risks suffering blindness by going through with her pregnancy will not be allowed to carry out an abortion in Malta. This puts Malta in the same league as Poland – a country which was this week found guilty of violating the human rights of a 35-year-old mother, refused an abortion despite warnings that having the baby could make her go blind.

“Abortion in Malta is illegal and is not allowed under any circumstance,” Dr Ray Busuttil, Director General of the Health Division, told MaltaToday when asked whether abortion is allowed in cases where a Maltese mother risks blindness if she proceeds with her pregnancy.
On Tuesday, Polish resident Alicja Tysiac, an unemployed single mother of thee, was awarded EURO 25,000 (LM10,500) in damages by the European Court of Justice.

When Alicja Tysiac became pregnant in February 2000, three eye specialists told her having another baby could put her eyesight at serious risk. But neither the specialists nor her GP would authorise an abortion.

After giving birth later that year, Ms Tysiac suffered a retinal haemorrhage and feared she may go blind. She now wears glasses with thick powerful lenses, but still cannot see objects more than a metre and a half away. As a disabled single mother, she struggles to raise her three children on her meagre state pension.

The Strasbourg court ruled that the mother’s human rights had been violated when she was denied an abortion on therapeutic grounds. But the court ruling will not affect Poland’s strict abortion laws, which some right-wing politicians want to make even stricter.

According to Dr Michael Axiaq, the Nationalist MP and Opus Dei member who chairs the National Ethics Board Committee, in such cases one has to choose between “a lesser of two evils” namely the life of the baby and the disability of the mother. “In such cases, our choice should be that of protecting life.”

But priests don't care for the woman only for the product of her womb. She is still the sinful vessel, the child on the other hand is pure. Even if the woman is raped. The child is holy, the mother a harlot, the rapist; probably a priest.

Thank goodness such religious stupidity is against the law in the EU.

See

Abortion

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