Uh huh this is the Church of England, you know the Church formed by Henry the VIII ( and you know him from the wonderful CBC TV series the Tudors) in order to obtain a divorce so he could marry his mistress(es).
'Breakaway' Anglican churches may continue services: judge
National Post -
A judge in Hamilton, Ont., has granted an interim order to two "breakaway" Anglican churches that will allow them to continue to hold services without having to share the facilities with members of the established church.
At core of Anglican conflict, a 1900-year-old traditionToronto Star
Breakaway Anglicans make gainGlobe and Mail Anglicans in Canada, Uganda face splits
Tutu to accept award from LGBT rights group
A new Canadian survey has found that believers are more likely than atheists to place a higher value on love, patience and friendship, in findings the researcher says could be a warning that Canadians need a religious basis to retain civility in society.
In the survey findings, there was only a five percentage-point difference between how theists and atheists valued honesty. But of all the categories, honesty is the value that is least connected to broad emotions such as love and compassion. In other words, someone can be honest and brutal.I stand by that, being a Saggitarian and an ENTJ, I am often brutally honest.
Heck even Satanism has a moral code. Though it is not one of forgiveness. It is modeled on Ayn Rands morality.But in the realm of forgiveness, which is a core value of many major religions, particularly Christianity, the difference - 32 percentage points - is stark.
"That's a pretty explicit value within a large number of religious communities," said Prof. Bibby.
"Look at the culture as a whole and ask yourself: to what extent do we value forgiveness against themes like zero-tolerance? We don't talk very much about what we're going to do for people who fall through the cracks. So I think forgiveness is pretty foreign to a lot of people if they're not involved in religious groups."
He said people who are believers are encouraged - whether by a desire to please God, or because of a fear of God - to adopt these values
Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready.SEE:
History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom.
When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.
Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820), "Preface"
Codex Gigas, also known as the Devil's Bible - a medieval manuscript said to have been written 800 years ago with the devil's help - has returned to Prague after an absence of 359 yearsThe priceless piece, considered the biggest medieval book, was taken from the Prague Castle by Swedish troops at the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. It is in Prague on loan from Sweden's Royal Library in Stockholm. It was put on display last week under high security at the Czech National Library.
According to myth, a Benedictine monk promised to write the book overnight to atone for his sins. When he realized the task was impossible, he asked the devil for help. The page with the illustration of the devil is the one visitors see.
The manuscript was likely written by one monk from the Benedictine monastery in Podlazice located some 100 kilometres east of Prague sometime at the beginning of the 13th century, said Zdenek Uhlir, a specialist on medieval manuscripts at the National Library.
It contains "a sum of the Benedictine order's knowledge" of the time, including the Old and New Testament, "The War of the Jews" by the first-century historian Josephus Flavius, a list of saints, or a guideline how to determine the date of Easter, Uhlir said.
"I would estimate it took him between 10 and 12 years to write," he said about the piece, which weighs 75 kilograms. Originally, it had 640 pages, of which 624 survived in relatively good condition, he said.
With the publication of the War of the Jews in this bible one has to ask if it is the original or the latter Christianized account. For if it is the latter, which I suspect it is, being it was originally of Slavic origin and it was in circulation at the time of writing of this bible. If it is then like the grain of sand in the oyster, this maybe another example of the origin of Antisemitism within Christianity in Medieval Germania and Eastern Europe.
In 93, the Jewish historian Josephus published his work Antiquities of the Jews. The extant copies of this work, which all derive from Christian sources, even the recently recovered Arabic version, contain two passages about Jesus.
"The problem here is that Josephus' account is too good to be true, too confessional to be impartial, too Christian to be Jewish." Three passages stood out: "if it be lawful to call him a man … He was [the] Christ … for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him." To some these seem directly to address Christological debates of the early 4th century. Consequently, some scholars regard at least these parts of the Testimonium as later interpolations.
The entire passage is also found in one manuscript of Josephus' earlier work, The Jewish War, in an Old Russian translation written c.1250. Interestingly, the passage dealing with Jesus is not the only significant difference from the usual collations; Robert Eisler has suggested that it was produced from one of Josephus's drafts (noting that the "Slavonic Version" has Josephus escaping his fellow Jews at Jotapata when "he counted the numbers [of the lot cast in the suicide pact] cunningly and so managed to deceive all the others", which is in striking contrast to the conventional version's account:
- "Without hesitation each man in turn offered his throat for the next man to cut, in the belief that a moment later his commander would die too. Life was sweet, but not so sweet as death if Josephus died with them! But Josephus - shall we put it down to divine providence or just luck - was left with one other man....he used persuasion, they made a pact, and both remained alive.
The fact is that this 'Old Russian translation' coincides with the publication date of the Devils Bible which would have been available for translation from Latin at the time. And Prague was home to many Jews at the time. Thus our Benedictine monk would have been familiar with the Jews of Prague. And at the time of this bibles publication the Jews were being subjected to the Blood Libel campaign across Europe.
With the inclusion of Josephus perhaps it was not Satan who helped the priest but since this versi0n of his text is Anti-Semitic it may be that by including a history of Jews in the bible to prove Jesus existed the author considered that he was making a compact with the Devil. When this bible was written Jews were seen by Medieval Christians as demons, devils, dragons, etc. all in league with the coming Anti-Christ.
During the crusades, Ethiopians, Jews, Muslims, and Mongols were branded enemies of the Christian majority. Illustrated with strikingly imaginative and still disturbing images, this book reveals the outrageously pejorative ways these rejected social groups were represented--often as monsters, demons, or freaks of nature. Such monstrous images of non-Christians were not rare displays but a routine aspect of medieval public and private life. These images, which reached a broad and socially varied audience across western Europe, appeared in virtually all artistic media, including illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, sculpture, metalwork, and tapestry. Debra Higgs Strickland introduces and decodes images of the "monstrous races," from demonlike Jews and man-eating Tartars to Saracens with dog heads or animal bodies. Strickland traces the origins of the negative pictorial code used to portray monsters, demons, and non-Christian peoples to pseudoscientific theories of astrology, climate, and physiognomy, some dating back to classical times. She also considers the code in light of contemporary Christian eschatological beliefs and concepts of monstrosity and rejection. This is the first study to situate representations of the enemies of medieval Christendom within the broader cultural context of literature, theology, and politics. It is also the first to explore the elements of that imagery as a code and to elucidate the artistic means by which boundaries were effectively blurred between imaginary monsters and rejected social groups.
Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. 336 pp.
This book is the history of an imaginary people -- the Red Jews -- in vernacular sources from medieval and early modern Germany. From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, German-language texts repeated and embroidered on an antisemitic tale concerning an epochal threat to Christianity, the Red Jews. This term, which expresses a medieval conflation of three separate traditions (the biblical destroyers Gog and Magog, the 'unclean peoples' enclosed by Alexander, and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), is a hostile designation of wickedness. The Red Jews played a major role in late medieval popular exegesis and literature, and appeared in a hitherto-unnoticed series of sixteenth-century pamphlets, in which they functioned as the medieval 'spectacles' through which contemporaries viewed such events as Turkish advances in the Near and Middle East. The Red Jews disappear from the sources after 1600, and consequently never found their way into historical scholarship.
The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age; 1200-1600.
Blood, Jews and Monsters in Medieval Culture
The Monstrous Middle Ages
Josephus was a reliable historian and historical source so attempts to reinterpret him as a 'Christian' would give veracity to revisionist claims of biblical authors like that of the Codex Gigas. This bible then is probably the original source of the pseudo-Josephus, the so called Christian Jospehus.
Some Biblical literaltists, including followers of St. John of Chrysostom who was revered by the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Church was a notorious anti-Semite, interpret this as being proof that Jesus existed, and that all biblical miracles and prophecies were fulfilled by the fall of the Second Temple. Thus there was no need for the continuation of the Jewish religion it had been superseded by Christianity. Thus if you eliminate their religion you effectively eliminate the Jews.
Thus this Devils Bible is devilish because it includes a historical text by a Jewish historian. It is devilish work because it revises his writings to make him appear as a convert to Christianity.
Recently a tunnel described by Josephus has been discovered in old Jerusalem and earlier this year King Herod's tomb was discovered, as described in the War of the Jews.
Joseph Atwill contends that Josephus proves that the Jesus mythos was developed by the Roman Empire in its dying days to create a new state religion. One that of course was based on divorcing Jesus from his Jewish roots. And thus an attempt to destroy the Jewish Messianic movements, which themselves were militantly anti-Rome.Under threat from Romans ransacking Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, many of the city's Jewish residents crowded into an underground drainage channel to hide and later flee the chaos through Jerusalem's southern end.
The ancient tunnel was recently discovered beneath rubble, a monument to one of the great dramatic scenes of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D.
The tunnel was dug beneath what would become the main road of Jerusalem, the archeology dig's directors, Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said Sunday. Shukron said excavators looking for the road happened upon a small drainage channel that led them to the discovery two weeks ago of the massive tunnel.
As the temple was being destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, people took shelter in the drainage tunnel and lived inside it until they fled Jerusalem through its southern end, according to Josephus Flavius, a first century historian who wrote "The War of the Jews."
An Israeli archeologist walked in a tunnel discovered near Jerusalem's Old City. (emilio morenatti/associated press)
Lost, Then Found: Herod’s Tomb
By Mike NizzaFor decades, archaeologists looking for the tomb of King Herod have focused on one site in particular, based on an account in the first volume of “The Wars of the Jews,” written by the first-century historian Flavius Josephus.
Josephus wrote that a 25-mile funeral procession for the Roman Empire’s man in Judea and the great builder of Jerusalem ended at “Herodium, where he had given order to be buried,” according to a translation at The Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
Instead of continuing on about the procession’s final steps, and perhaps revealing further clues about the tomb’s location, the historian evidently considered the chapter done with the next sentence.
“And this shall suffice for the conclusion of the life of Herod,” he wrote.
The omission sets up what The Los Angeles Times has called “one of the Holy Land’s greatest archeological mysteries.”Chasing that mystery and others for the past 35 years has been Professor Ehud Netzer of Hebrew University.
Today, he was finally able to announce an answer: The tomb was on the northeastern slope of Mount Herodium, a site that his team has been excavating since last summer.
Herodium, which Mr. Netzer called “the most outstanding among King Herod’s building projects,” may have been best described by Josephus in an earlier section of “the War of the Jews:”
SEE:
Caesar's Messiah - The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus
Joseph Atwill makes the incredibly compelling case that the Christian Gospels were actually written under the direction of first-century Roman emperors. The purpose of these texts was to establish a peaceful Jewish sect to counterbalance the militaristic Jewish forces that had just been defeated by the Roman Emperor Titus in 70 A.D.
Atwill uncovered the secret key to this story in the writings of Josephus, the famed first-century Roman historian. Reading Josephus's chronicle, The War of the Jews, the author found detail after detail that closely paralleled events recounted in the Gospels.
Atwill skillfully demonstrates that the emperors used the Gospels to spark a new religious movement that would aid them in maintaining power and order. What's more, by including hidden literary clues, they took the story of the Emperor Titus's glorious military victory, as recounted by Josephus, and embedded that story in the Gospels - a sly and satirical way of glorifying the emperors through the ages.Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus
Joseph Atwill
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1569754578
Feb. 2005
Condensed blurb:
>>The Christian Gospels were written under the direction of first-century Roman emperors. The purpose of these texts was to establish a peaceful Jewish sect to counterbalance the militaristic Jewish forces that had just been defeated by the Roman Emperor Titus in 70 A.D. The key to this story is in the writings of Josephus, the first-century Roman historian. Josephus's chronicle The War of the Jews parallels events recounted in the Gospels.
>>The emperors used the Gospels to spark a new religious movement that would aid them in maintaining power and order. By including hidden literary clues, they took the story of the Emperor Titus's glorious military victory, as recounted by Josephus, and embedded that story in the Gospels - a sly and satirical way of glorifying the emperors through the ages.
The Roman Origins of Christianity
Book by Joe Atwill
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0974092800
July 2003
Publisher: Joe Atwill
ISBN: 0974092800
http://www.joeatwill.com -- "...the Roman Emperor Titus Flavius created Christianity to replace the Jewish Messianic movement that waged war against the Empire with a pacifistic, pro-Roman religion. Titus also designed the story line of Jesus' ministry in the New Testament as a satire of his military campaign through Judea so that posterity would learn that he had invented Christianity and recognize his genius. Though the New Testament had always been seen as a religious document it is actually a monument to the vanity of a Caesar."
Jul 19th 2007 | ANKARA, DIYARBAKIR AND ISTANBUL
From The Economist print edition
Secular suspicions of the AK government had already been fanned, not least by the controversial education minister, Huseyin Celik. Mr Celik, who is said to have close links to the powerful Islamic Nur fraternity, has been accused of injecting Islam by stealth. He has overseen a revision of textbooks to promote creationism and the recruitment, as teachers, of hundreds of graduates of imam hatip, Islamic clerical-training schools. There has also been “an explosion in enrolment at Koran lessons, especially among girls,” says Alattin Dincer, president of Turkey's largest teachers' union. No wonder Mr Celik had to explain himself in a meeting with the chief of the general staff, Yasar Buyukanit, shortly after the army's e-coup.
Attempts by a few AK mayors to create booze-free zones, as well as Mr Erdogan's own failed effort in 2005 to outlaw adultery, have not helped the party's image with secularists.
"atheists in democratic countries can't conjure up grim tales of the truncheon's midnight thud on the door,"
Richard Carlisle, a "freethinker," opened a lecturing, conversation, and discussion establishment, preached the "only true gospel," hung effigies of bishops outside his shop, and was eventually quieted by nine years' imprisonment, a punishment by no means undeserved.
It is well known that Marx was familiar with Spinoza; indeed, he hand-copied whole passages of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into his notebooks. Less clear is the significance of this fact, and the extent of Spinoza's influence on Marx's thought.
In the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" (1844), Marx said:Once the essence of man and of nature, man as a natural being and nature as a human reality, has become evident in practical life, in sense experience, the quest for an ALIEN being, a being above man and nature (a quest which is an avowal of the unreality of man and nature) becomes impossible in practice. ATHEISM, as a denial of this unreality, is no longer meaningful, for atheism is a NEGATION OF GOD and seeks to assert by this negation the EXISTENCE OF MAN. Socialism no longer requires such a roundabout method; it begins from the THEORETICAL and PRACTICAL SENSE PERCEPTION of man and nature as essential beings. It is positive human SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, no longer a self-consciousness attained through the negation of religion. (Marx 1964A: 166-67)
In the famous Introduction to the Critique of the Hegelian philosophy of public law, Marx gives an even more explicit and elaborate formulation of this outlook. "Religious misery", he writes, "is at once the expression of real misery and a protest against it. Religion is the groan of the oppressed, the sentiment of a heartless world, and at the same time the spirit of a condition deprived of spirituality. It is the opium of the people. The suppression of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the premise of its real happiness. It is first and foremost the task of philosophy, operating in the service of history, to unmask self-alienation in its profane forms, after the sacred form of human self alienation has been discovered. Thus criticism of heaven is transformed into criticism of the earth, criticism of religion into criticism of law, criticism of theology into criticism of politics". And just before: "Religion is the consciousness and awareness of man who has not yet acquired or who has again lost himself. But man is not an abstract being, isolated from the world. Man is the world of man, the State, society. This State and this society produce religion, an upside-down consciousness of the world, just because they are an upside-down world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic epitome, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its fundamental reason of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of human essence, since human essence does not possess a true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world of which religion is the spiritual aroma" (K. Marx, Per la critica della filosofia del diritto di Hegel, Introduzione, Rome 1966, pp. 57-58).
Aggressively marketed grievance has worked for women and gays. The same strategy for brights will doubtless end in a government-funded Status of Atheists Council to undo the iniquities of 10,000 years of theocratic hegemony and repression. After that, we may yet see -- don't laugh until you're sure it can't happen -- demands for reparations payout by churches and synagogues to redress the ignominy and shame now-atheist, former (involuntarily-designated) Christians and Jews suffered as children when force-fed the Ten Commandments in Sunday and Hebrew School. (Somehow, I do not envisage a similar campaign by Muslim atheists directed against the madrassas, not sure why ?)
Fight illegal immigration with procreation
If politicians won't find a way to deport illegals, then it is time for Americans who care to take matters into their own hands. By having lots of babies.
America will have to shoulder the responsibility of being the only Western democracy left; at least the only one big enough to give the remaining "whites" a geographical location to call "home," and – here is the important part – a place relatively free from hostile cultures.
While this is addressed to an American audience in an American publication its author is an influential Canadian Evangelical; Tristan Emmanuel.
A Christian Home. So many precious children are growing up in a home filled with hatred, strife, poverty, and neglect. It is no accident that the devil fights hardest in his attack on the home, using tools such as homosexuality, abortion and divorce. The nuclear family of the 1950's with its working dad, stay at home mom, and 2.3 kids is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. A Christian home, with a loving atmosphere, a happy marriage, a providing father, a teaching mother, and obedient children is even more rare.
Demand for children is affected by four principal classes of factors: "direct economic costs and benefits of children" [(1) P: 766] costs with regard to time, income and wealth, preferences and norms. Modernization has implications for all the factors mentioned above. With modernization, the costs (economic and time) of children increase, the benefits decrease and preferences and norms change. Money tends to be used for the purchase of consumer goods rather than for having and raising more children.See:
Other important factors that determine fertility are the material and non-material costs of regulation. Monetary costs, according to the researchers cited above, do not appear to be a significant barrier to contraceptive use, rather, access to information about contraception and the psychological costs associated with access are more important. Moreover, there is also the fear of incurring health costs (especially in case of abortion).
Besides these, Bulatao and Lee [(1) P: 775] mention the importance of communication between husband and wife regarding contraception. They see this as a determinant of fertility and view it as a psychological cost. Among the various sociocultural factors that affect demand, supply and costs of regulation are the nature of marriage and more generally the "patterns of sexual unions . . . their stability; their composition, including whether they are polygynous or monogamous and whether families are extended or nuclear; and their formation and dissolution" [(1) P: 777].
Education (in particular that of women) and residence (rural or urban) are two additional socioeconomic factors that affect fertility. However, these two factors operate through several channels, making the exact determination of their influence very difficult and allowing many possible explanations. In addition, the mode of production (familial or industrial) is critical in determining the value of children's labour, which in turn affects the demand for children. Moreover, government policies and efforts made by governments to mobilize the mass media, to make access to information regarding contraception easier, to make contraceptive measures available, and to reduce the costs of regulation are also important [(1) P: 784].
Simmons [(2) P: 96] summarizes the effects of the individual variables considered in various research studies. He has found a strong relationship between women's education and fertility. Women's labour-force participation, sex preference, availability of family-planning services, general environment and population programmes and policies were found to have a medium effect on fertility, while infant mortality, per capita income, income distribution and preferred number of children had only a weak effect on fertility.
Samuel de Champlain father of New France, founder of Quebec City, would be considered a pederast by today's Harpocrite government.Huge papier mache statues of the great builders of Quebec were among the flags and marching bands in a boisterous parade Sunday that marked Quebec's Fete nationale provincial holiday. Former premier Rene Levesque was featured along with explorer Samuel de Champlain in the march,
Champlain achieved at the beginning of the winter an important gesture: on December 27, 1610, aged at least 30 years, he signed a marriage contract with a 12-year-old girl, Helene Boullé. Because of her youth, it is specified that the marriage was to be carried out only after two years had elapsed. The engagement took place two days later and, on December 30, the bridal blessing was given in the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, in Paris. Promised a dowry (6 000ª), Champlain received 4.500ª the day before, which is an invaluable supplement for his company.
Bill C-22 was passed by the Justice Committee on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 with one amendment. The government’s original Bill, which raises the age of sexual consent from 14 to16, would have allowed an exemption to the new law if the couple involved in the existing relationship were married, or in a common-law relationship or were in a relationship which had produced or where they were expecting a child. The Bill, as amended by the Committee, proposes to allow relationships between 15 year olds and adults who are more than five years older, to continue to be legal, as long as the people involved are married.
