Christina's Thoughts

Latvian entrepeneur offers small loans, with souls as collateral.

"Would you pledge your soul as loan collateral?" Sure, why not? Get real money for imaginary collateral? ^_^ I'll also put up my unicorn for collateral, if you want. ;-)

Current Mood: amused

Ireland's making blasphemy a crime?!

Speaking after an Oireachtas committee meeting, Mr Ahern yesterday defended a fine of up to €100,000 that will be imposed on blasphemers.

The Government moved to revive the crime by placing it onto a fresh statutory footing following advice from the office of the Attorney General.

Gardai will now have the power to seize blasphemous material from the home or any other premises used by a person convicted of blasphemy.

Current Mood: shocked

Wow ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bradlaugh

In 1880 Bradlaugh was elected Member of Parliament for Northampton, and claimed the right to affirm (instead of taking the religious Oath of Allegiance), but this was denied, and he subsequently offered to take the oath "as a matter of form". This offer, too, was rejected by the House. Because a Member must take the oath before being allowed to take their seat, he effectively forfeited his seat in Parliament. He attempted to take his seat regardless and was arrested and briefly imprisoned in the Clock Tower of the Houses of Parliament. His seat fell vacant and a by-election was declared. Bradlaugh was re-elected by Northampton four times in succession as the dispute continued. Supporting Bradlaugh were William Gladstone, George Bernard Shaw, and John Stuart Mill, as well as hundreds of thousands of people who signed a public petition. Opposing his right to sit were the Conservative Party, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other leading figures in the Church of England and Roman Catholic Church.

On at least one occasion, Bradlaugh was escorted from the House by police officers. In 1883 he took his seat and voted three times before being fined £1,500 for voting illegally. A bill allowing him to affirm was defeated in Parliament.

In 1886 Bradlaugh was finally allowed to take the oath, and did so at the risk of prosecution under the Parliamentary Oaths Act. Two years later, in 1888, he secured passage of a new Oaths Act, which enshrined into law the right of affirmation for members of both Houses, as well as extending and clarifying the law as it related to witnesses in civil and criminal trials (the Evidence Amendment Acts of 1869 and 1870 had proved unsatisfactory, though they had given relief to many who would otherwise have been disadvantaged).

Orthodox Israeli newspapers edit out female cabinet members in group photo.

Kosher Cellphones in Israel.

Hundreds of mosques in Saudi Arabia found to be pointing in wrong direction.

Our moral thermostat - why being good can give people license to misbehave. Very interesting study.

What ... the ... hell?

http://www.informationageprayer.com/index.html

Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget.

We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying. Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen.

The morning prayer is meant to be said each morning. A nice, short prayer, it has all the basic essentials important in a daily prayer. Subscribe to tell God that you think of him each morning!

All Muslim prayers are voiced in English, with the computer speakers facing Mecca.

Current Mood: amused

The Catholic Church's views on sin are totally screwed up.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/vaticancityandholysee/4247756/Vatican-reveals-secrets-of-worst-sins.html

GENOCIDE can be handled by lower priests, but DEFILING THE EUCHARIST has to be handled by the Pope himself.

So, let me get this straight. A guy in a funny dress takes a piece of low-quality mass-produced bread, says some hocus-pocus*, and suddenly it becomes more important than the lives of an entire race of human beings?!

And these guys claim to be a moral authority?

While priests and bishops can deal with confessions of sins as grave as murder or even genocide, the tribunal is reserved for crimes which are viewed by the Church as even more serious.

They include attempting to assassinate the Pope, a priest abusing the confidentiality of the confessional by revealing the nature of the sin and the person who admitted to it, or a priest who has sex with someone and then offers forgiveness for the act.

...

Defiling the Eucharist, which Catholics believe is the body and blood of Christ, is also considered a sin of extreme gravity and one which is on the increase, the high-ranking members of the tribunal said.

Muslim Cemetery Refuses To Bury Mumbai Terrorists

( article )

I ... am speechless http://thewomanofvirtue.blogspot.com/2008/08/slavery-is-not-wrong.html

This woman is arguing that slavery is not wrong because the Bible doesn't condemn it.

Yes, it's true that the Bible doesn't condemn slavery, but that's rather an argument against the Bible, isn't it? At least, against taking everything in the Bible at face value.

To make matters worse, look at her profile picture! She's Black and she's making pro-slavery arguments! This isn't some white-supremecist neo-nazi skinhead, this is a Black woman!

It's completely mind-boggling. I wish I could believe that this is a satire, but if it is, she's extraordinarily consistent. I'm afraid that she's genuine.

This is probably the most blatant violation of the 1st amendment I've seen in a great long while.
( Anti-terror law requires God be acknowledged )

Have they never heard of the First Amendment? Seriously?!

*Laughs* This is awesome

Wow ... this is just completely insane http://www.heaventhegame.com/

It's some computer game that's coming out where you play this astronaut who finds himself in heaven ... it doesn't say much about the plot other than that (at least, not that I've seen, I've only checked out a little of that site). It's kind of funny, actually. I don't know what those people were thinking. :-)

Vatican Says Aliens May Exist. And, you know, the Vatican has such a great record when it comes to science, especially astronomy ...

( article )

I love that they're speculating on the possible spiritual condition of aliens ...

Awesome!

( Flying Spaghetti Monster statue at Tennessee courthouse )

Current Mood: amused

Hunh. An agnostic filed a lawsuit against God, as a protest move. And now, "God" has responded to the suit.

( Article )

Mortal Kombat, Bible Style! http://www.adultswim.com/games/biblefight/index.html Choose from one of six Bible characters (Jesus, Eve, Mary, Moses, Noah, and Satan), and one of 7 scenes (the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, the Parted Red Sea, the Manger, Hell, Golgotha, or Heaven), and fight it out! The special moves are great! :-)

*chuckles* And on a related, note, some humor:

http://jesusrpgadventure.ytmnd.com/
http://jesusrpg2.ytmnd.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_Infancy_Gospel

Okay, the idea of a miraculous Diaper of Christ just amuses me far too much.

This article is interesting

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200609290175.html

It's about songs passed down by the Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians) of Japan during the Tokugawa era, when Christianity was banned (largely due to the fears by the shogunate that Christianization was intended as a prelude to conquest - given the history of missionaries in other parts of the world, his fears were well-founded). Anyways, these hymns, taught to Christians by Jesuit missionaries, in Latin, had been passed down from generation to generation, in a Japanified pronunciation of Latin, though the meaning, and even the language had been forgotten. These kakura Kirishitan sang the songs, though they were essentially gibberish to them

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfulfilled_historical_predictions_by_Christians

Near the bottom:
1996
Canadian Civil War (William Kann)

Okay, so I slept over at Bill and Eley's condo last night. Last night was fun. We played around in the pool for a while, goofing around. Heidi joined us for a while. She was "swimming" like a dolphin, so now I've given her the nickname Flipper. :-) Then Adam, Alex, Jacquie and I started a game of Lord of the Rings Risk. We left it halfway done, and went to bed, Jacquie in W&P's condo, Alex, Adam and I in Bill and Eley's. I woke up around 11, when Peggy asked me to watch Heidi for a bit while she went down to the beach. Heidi was napping. So, I just read for a bit, and gave her a call when Heidles woke up, and tried to give her some lunch, but she was more interested in playing. The rest of teh day was pretty lazy. We hung out, finished our game of Risk (I won), and just basically took it easy. For dinner we went to a local restaurant called the Crab Shack. I had a Crab Trap Boil, which had a bunch of crab legs, some shrimp, and sides. I also had, to drink, a Hurricane and a strawberry Daquiri. It was a pretty expensive dinner. After tax and tip, it came out to $47.48! Heidi learned how to drink out of a straw, when Peggy gave her some of her water. At first she just did the holding the finger on the end thing, but then she let Heidi figure out the straw. She's a clever girl. :-) I was surprised at how well she handled the restaurant, considering how late it was and how busy the place was. After we got back to the condos, Adam and Alex and Wayne and Bill (I think that's who all it was) went to this go-kart place, but I chose to stay behind. Jacquie showed us the pictures on her computer from her trip a while back to London. Then I came back to Mom's home to sleep.

My mother likes to listen to contemporary Christian music, and some of it is okay. But, the radio station had a "Creation moment" thing during the commercial break, which made me roll my eyes a bit. Creationism is such a silly doctrine. Faith is belief in the absence of proof, not belief despite the evidence to the contrary. And all the evidence points strongly to a world that's a heck of a lot older than 6,000 years.

The other day, Heidi was dropping things on the ground (quite common, of course), but she played a little trick on daddy. When he was watching, she wouldn't drop her sippy cup, but when he looked away, that's when she'd drop it. :-)

Oh, one other funny thing, Heidi learned to crawl on all fours the day they got into Pensacola. Previously she'd been just pulling herself by her arms, her legs being unco-ordinated, but now she's learned how to co-ordinate her legs and arms, and apparently it's a lot easier. :-)

"That book was what kept me from killing you" - My mom's remark on The Strong-Willed Child :-)