Atheism Corner

Humanity in Progress

Mother Teresa Revisited

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Far From Saint - LIke the Church that created her
Far From Saint – LIke the Church that created her

Researchers from the Canadian university of Montreal have complied a thorough study of Mother Teresa’s life and the conclusions are, well, not the nicest music the saint loving religious types like to hear. In what seems like the biggest “Bravo” ever echoed for Christopher Hitchens work on Mother Teresa these unbiased researchers found it difficult to believe that a person with such cynical cruelty towards the people she was thought to have been “saving” could be made a saint.

Nothing is new here, all is easily archived and you can reach it within 2-3 clicks of your computer mouse, Hitchens has done all the work – years ago.

So we learn again that this woman was nothing more than a radical tool for the church to use, and that a fanatical interpretation of the all might god will has led her to do things to the same people she was supposed to help, things that no one can be proud of. This is not a unique individual that somehow strayed away from the path of good deeds, rather the opposite, this is an obedient follower who was molded into the grotesque figure of the body that created her, and so the desperately ill and those who were passing their last moments of life in one of Mother Teresa’s establishments were given no chance but to fulfill the purpose of these places – to die there.

And the final word belongs to the great man himself, Hitchens –

This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction

The Soccer Riots – Egypt Crumbling Over Soccer?

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Is this really over soccer?
Is this really over soccer?

The new, enhanced wave of protests and violent riots all over Egypt is communicated to the west as a part of the “football verdicts riots”, which is technically true because the reason that the Egyptian street is on fire for the past month is mainly to do with the verdicts of those who are accused (and now convicted) of murdering dozens of a rival team supporters in a game – many months ago.

These riots expose the great lie that is the Egyptian society today, its a fragmented and torn apart society in which every group wants complete and total control over what seems to many a “wild west” country, even though a new government has been established.

Add to this the growing anger and amazingly low trust levels towards the new elected president of Egypt and you have a dangerous mixture. This erupts in popular riots against anything, and so we see thousands of Egyptians protesting in all the “Canal” cities, which are poor and desperately looking to improve their living standards, in a cry out against anything that is labeled “Cairo”.

In Cairo itself the fragmentation of groups is astounding, leading the list is the respectable group of secular Egyptians who led the first wave of the revolution two years ago, they have been pushed out of the picture and they can not live with the idea that their country is turning into a new Iran rather than into a model of a Western country. The radical religious fanatics are not too far behind, claiming that all the religious moves of the past year are not enough – and need to be expanded and enforced even stronger.

A revolution is a long process, there is no doubt that Egypt is going through the turmoils of a rebirth, only that it is still frightfully unclear how the new Egypt will look like, what would it believe and how it would behave towards its citizens.

When Politics and Movies Mix

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First Lady Invades Hollywood
First Lady Invades Hollywood

The first lady made a surprise visit to the Oscars ceremony yesterday, not in person but by a video link to the White House, and as a presenter of an Oscar, not any old Oscar but the one for best movie of the year. The first lady is not an actress, and nor is she a direct politician, so that makes or more or less like anyone else sitting and watching at home, and why exactly would she present the Oscar for best film when the very capable Jack Nicolson is just there and can do a better job at this?.

Is this another move to blur the lines between government and entertainment, or is this some PR stunt who is made to enforce the “cool” factor the president and his wife enjoy?, say whatever you will, time is running short for the American government to fix a leaking economy, which is in dire need of life boosting injections every few weeks so it would not implode, but for some reason the attention is diverted to completely different things – who have no real value.

The Academy award is given by the members of the acting academy, not by friends and relatives of elected members of the public, the idea is to have the award served by those who know the actual craft and can show their appreciation of the work their fellow actors and film makers have made, this is clearly not the case here, lets hope is it not a sign of a desperate “bread and circuses” tactic.

Israel’s Walls

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Screen Shot 2013-02-15 at 3.11.52 PM

 

Israel has many walls, some say too many, one of those walls is also the most ancient one, the west wall of what was believed to be the Jewish temple in ancient times, the sole survivor of the brutal Roman destruction of Jerusalem as a response to the local disloyalty to Rome.

This wall has come to symbolize Jewish faith for many years, but the religious authorities, almost like anywhere else in the world, want to keep this place as their own and dictate to others how the place should be seen and treated. And so last week we witnessed an amazing site, Jewish women who want to pray and sing in the sight of the ancient Jewish temple being aggressively arrested by Israeli police, because this, somehow, offends the feelings of other people – most of them not even present on the site at the time.

The story is short and basic, orthodox Jews do not believe females have any place in public worship, they do not pray and they certainly do not put on them any of the distinctive Jewish clothing reserved for prayer – that is exclusively male. This does not end here, it seems that in Israel it is illegal to hurt the feelings of these people, so women can not dress the way they might want because someone else, living in a whole different place, is offended by that… WHAT?

A piece of religious clothing is restricted for male use only, in Israel, due to the request of religious authorities, and these women get abused for asking to do whatever they want to do for one hour per month, 11 hours annually total, because some people find that too much for their feelings, and they can not deal with it, and somehow the police goes along with this.

Nothing better to demonstrate the unholy grip religious authorities around the world have on normal regular good people, you can not do something because it offends someone who is not even there to be offended by it, they are offended by the idea of it – so your rights are smashed away at the idiotic aggressive back thinking beliefs of others, this can not be a good thing for Israeli society.

Pope Resigns as Catholic Church Last Fig Leaf Drops

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the pope resignsThe pope is old, maybe even pretty sick, and he can not perform his duties the way he would have liked to do, and in a move that should serve as a fine example to politicians all over the world he decided to step down and retire from the papacy.

This is not the kind of idea we have of the pope, or the Catholic church, where we expect to see the pope hanging on to his role as the living version of Christ until he simply dies, much like the original Jesus did in his time. But this is no ordinary pope, and these are no ordinary times, for the Church at least it is a moment of great change.

Did Obama pave the way for an African Pope?

Obama had nothing to do with it, the regression in the Church’s ratings in Europe in the last 50 years has been so serious that the church needs to turn its attention to the places it still carries some authority in, and these are Latin America and Africa, where the bloody history of the church with the natives is so rich it could easily beat the number of words in the Bible. So there will be no surprise as the church will flatter its support base across the sea from Rome and the Vatican, in a move that will signal to those few, still loyal, Europeans that the church is not only not theirs any more, it does not even want to invest efforts in making it look like its theirs.

To us atheists this is all good news, the position of pope is humanized by becoming just another job, like any politician out there, by turning to a non European pope the old believers in the old country might start understanding that the organized religion is nothing more than a suppressive administration, built on lies and fear mongering.

In any event seeing a black toned skin pope on the balcony in Rome will be a small victory to many sides, atheists included, as freedom of religion makes another small step forward and away from the Catholic church.