Road to Canossa? The Church's only power has historically been delivered through empty promises [heaven], empty threats [hell], and horrific punishments [burnings at the stake for noncompliance] delivered at the Church's behest. Given the Pedophile Protection Agency's cover-up of pedophilia, its child-abuse in Church institutions, rampant misogyny, anti-condom medical-malpractice in AIDS-rampant nations, and its hypocritical stance on homosexuality it remains a horror that any rational person would remain brainwashed about the non-existence that supposedly loves genuflectors and punishes non-believers.
According to contemporary sources, Henry IV was forced to supplicate himself on his knees waiting for three days and three nights before the entrance gate of the castle, while a blizzard raged. Indeed, the episode has been described as "one of the most dramatic moments of the Middle Ages". It has also spurred much debate among medieval chroniclers as well as modern historians, who argue about whether the walk was a "brilliant masterstroke" or an embarrassing humiliation.
US Catholic bishops are on a potential collision course with President Joe Biden after voting to commission a document that may call for him to be barred from Holy Communion. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) clashed online over whether to draw up a teaching document on politicians who support abortion.
The [utterly empty ritual of] Holy Communion is [touted by ecclesiastical power-mongers as] the most important ritual ritualistic manipulation in the Catholic Christian faith.
[NB Severe, early, prolonged childhood physical and sexual abuse promotes reactive behaviors +/- DID in victims.] A nine-year-old girl has died in Sri Lanka after she was beaten with a cane during a ritual locally believed to drive away "evil spirits". Two people - the child's mother and the woman who performed the ritual - have been arrested, and appeared in court on Monday in connection with the death, Sri Lankan police say. The mother believed her daughter was "possessed by a demon", police said. The girl died in hospital after losing consciousness during the ritual.
Police said that oil was poured on the girl's forehead and she was beaten because her mother claimed a "demon" needed to be "expelled", according to Sri Lanka newspaper Adaderana. Some of the girl's neighbours tried to step in when they heard her cries, but were unable to save her, reports AFP news agency. Police have warned it is not the first time exorcism attempts have been performed in the area, leading to physical injury or death.
[Tragically, ignorant superstition is widespread.]
This is tragic and utterly pointless. All for a silly Abrahamic ritual. If believers feel they must inflict baptism on un-consenting babies, then dampen the poor little mites' heads with "holy" water.
"The Orthodox Church in Romania is facing growing pressure to change baptism rituals after a baby died following a ceremony which involves immersing infants three times in holy water. [Waterboarding newborns? How Christian!]
The six-week-old suffered a cardiac arrest and was rushed to hospital on Monday but he died a few hours later, the autopsy revealing liquid in his lungs. Prosecutors have opened a manslaughter investigation against the priest in the north-eastern city of Suceava."
"Folau, who is [claims to be] a Christian, gave a sermon in his Sydney church on Sunday in which he said Australia's decision to pass abortion and same-sex marriage laws had gone against "God's word", adding the nation needed to "repent".
"Look how rapid, these bushfires, these droughts, all these things have come, in a short period of time. You think it's a coincidence or not?," he said.
His comments sparked outrage from many Australians online, who noted the widespread devastation of the fires."
...
"Rugby Australia (RA) sacked the former Wallabies player in May after he said on social media that "hell awaits" gay people.
The 30-year-old fullback has been widely condemned for those comments and others targeting transgender people, but he has also received vocal support from Christian pseudo-Christian groups."
Folau married in 2017, but that (heterosexism disguised as religiosity) does not rule out the possibility of projected internalized homophobia.
It's no comfort to have confirmation that America is not the only supposedly-developed nation with ignorant bigoted pseudo-Christian zealots.
------ Heterosexism is a system of attitudes, bias, and discrimination in favor of opposite-sex sexuality and relationships. It can include the presumption that other people are heterosexual or that opposite-sex attractions and relationships are the only norm and therefore superior.
Heterosexism as discrimination ranks gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and other sexual minorities as second-class citizens with regard to various legal and civil rights, economic opportunities, and social equality in many of the world's jurisdictions and societies. It is often related to homophobia. ... Other factors that Herek acknowledges to contribute to heterosexism include individual differences, religiosity, conforming to social norms, right-wrong-wing authoritarianism, customs and beliefs regarding cultural tradition, and personal experience with non-heterosexual individuals.
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1996 and many later:Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal?
... The men were exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian videotapes, and changes in penile circumference were monitored. ... Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli. ... Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.
Sorting has occurred on both sides, but the Republican Party RepuGNican Partisanship has tended more toward homogeneity: whiter, more Christian and more conservative CONservative. Democrats are a far more diverse party. So although the term “identity politics” is often wielded to criticize the Democrats for focusing on race and gender, Republicans RepuGNicans are typically more susceptible to appeals based on their shared identity than Democrats, according to research by Julie Wronski and Lilliana Mason, political scientists at the University of Mississippi and the University of Maryland, College Park. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/08/opinion/sunday/party-polarization-quiz.html .
The Long, Cruel History of the Anti-Abortion Crusade: Abortion opponents don’t care what happens to an unwanted child, and they’ve never cared about the mother.
"Amid the anti-abortion measures being pushed through state legislatures, consider the mazy history of abortion in the United States. Women, capable of determining and managing their reproductive rights, have been undermined by men in power before.
Prior to the 1840s, abortion was widespread and not illegal in our country. In the time of the Puritans, America’s deeply religious founding fathers, abortion was allowed until the fetus was “quick” — when the woman could feel the fetus move. Before modern diagnostic ultrasound, abortion was permissible beyond the first trimester — up to four or five months. Our founding fathers got this right; the choice to have an abortion or a child belonged to the woman.
Beginning in the 1840s, and continuing over decades, abortion was outlawed state by state, becoming illegal everywhere in the United States by 1900 — until 1973, when the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision held that a woman had a constitutional right to an abortion. For more than two centuries, after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, abortion was largely permitted. Why was it prohibited for almost a century?"
......
"The “pro-life” term was adopted by anti-abortion crusaders after the Roe v. Wade decision. The anti-abortion cause didn’t promote itself as “pro-life” until the more punitive-sounding “anti-abortion” label failed. In 1976, with the passing of the Hyde Amendment, prohibiting the use of federal funds for most abortions, opposition to abortion gained support among Republicans RepuGNicans. The Christian right wrong was on the rise; their socially conservative conservative policies are inseparable from today’s Republican RepuGNican Party. In 1980, aided by the Baptist minister Jerry Falwell’s Moral[istic] Majority, the pro-life anti-abortion zealots took control of the Republican Party’s platform committee. Four anti-abortion presidents followed — Ronald Reagan, George H. W. and George W. Bush, and DUHnocchio. Isn’t it as clear now as it was in the Reagan years? Aren’t the same people who sacralize the fetus generally opposed to any meaningful welfare for unwanted children and unmarried mothers?
The prevailing impetus to oppose abortion is to punish the woman who doesn’t want the child. The sacralizing of the fetus is a ploy. How can “life” be sacred (and begin at six weeks, or at conception), if a child’s life isn’t sacred after it’s born? Clearly, a woman’s life is never sacred; as clearly, a woman has no reproductive rights. The Roman Catholic Church, and many evangelicalproselytizing fundamentalist and fundamentalist churches, willfully subject women to mandatory childbirth and motherhood — procreation is deemed a woman’s primary purpose and function. I’m not overstating. In his 1951 “Address to Midwives,” Pope Pius XII states that “the procreation and upbringing of a new life” is the primary end of marriage.""
[It would have been demonstrably more accurate if he had said "the protection of pedophile priests is the primary objective of the Catholic Church."]
The purpose of religious tolerance has always been, and remains, to maintain the power and purity of the dominant religion in a given state. Most dominant religions in most states today profess tolerance, but they also seem to feel especially threatened. Religious nationalist movements in the United States, Europe, India, Turkey and Israel all want to strengthen the relationship between state identity and the dominant religion. In each case, democratic elections have reinforced the significance of the majority’s religion to the meaning of state and nation, elevating the power of that religion. We can see a rising chauvinism in the mix of Catholicism and politics in eastern Europe today that portrays liberals and communists (often a code for ‘Jews’) as enemies. We can see a similar dynamic in the Turkish celebration of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. And we can also see it in the reemerging influence of Evangelicals in the US, as defenders of ‘religious liberty’ in their associations and businesses, and against ‘Sharia’ – as they imagine it – in the public sphere.
Even as religious nationalism gains strength, claims to membership in the ‘West’ rest in large part on a political avowal of religious tolerance. When religious nationalists claim the mantle of tolerance based on the legal protections that exist for religious minorities in their states, they are not wrong. Tolerance has indeed historically been a framework for people fundamentally different from one another to live peacefully together. Which is precisely why it is time to dispense once and for all with tolerance as a model for relations between groups.
......
In the 1960s the New Left asked if the idea of tolerance – especially of speech and political diversity – served only to shield governments, corporations and the elite in continuing policies of economic and racial oppression. More recently, a school of international-relations scholarship has emerged emphasising how the foreign policy guiding Western governments now divides the world between the tolerant and the intolerant in much the same way that it has always distinguished between the civilised (whites) and the barbaric (everyone else). Even so, the question of how tolerance – religious tolerance in particular – could be a tool of domination strikes many people as counterintuitive or perverse. Tolerance is deeply rooted in the canon of apparent modern ideals: as an inherent good, a necessary individual ethic, a pillar of Western civilisation and proof of its superiority.
Yet tolerance, as an idea and an ethic, obscures the interaction between individuals and groups on both a daily basis and over the longue durée; the mutually reinforcing exchange of culture and ideas between groups in a society is missing in the idea of tolerance. Groups do not interact in isolation, they share reciprocally, sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently. If it is true that a global society exists, what its best parts embody today is not tolerance, but reciprocity, the vital and dynamic relationship of mutual exchange that occurs every day between individuals and groups within a society. For teachers, journalists and politicians to begin to speak in terms of reciprocity instead of tolerance will not do away with intolerance or prejudice. But words are important and, as much as they reflect our thoughts, they also shape how we think.
Idealising tolerance embeds dominance. Speaking in terms of reciprocity instead of tolerance would both better reflect what peaceful societies look like, and also tune people’s minds to the societal benefits of cultural exchange.
...... Reciprocity is a philosophy, a social ethic, a way of seeing the world, and a psychology. At its most basic distillation, it can serve as a description of both what binds individuals and groups to and within a society, and the mutual exchange of culture that serves as the lifeblood of all prosperous societies. Finding a new framework to approach societal problems is important at a time when ideological differences resting on economic worldview seem to be fading. Because one set of ideals (for diversity, pluralism and exchange) is being challenged by another (for intolerance or, at best, a return to a highly contingent tolerance), a space has opened for a new civic philosophy.
To develop the concept of reciprocity as an individual and collective political ethic we can teach it, study it and write about it. Most of all, we can talk about it, shifting away from a binary vocabulary that counters intolerance with calls for tolerance, and toward a discussion of shared histories and mutual obligations. We must also individually and as groups acknowledge our own civic responsibilities, to our society and to one another, as we respect the contributions of others. In the elected representatives we choose, the policies we support or oppose, and the causes we take on, we can idealise reciprocity as a positive good, and measure ourselves and the progress of our societies against that ideal.
Germany says half of extreme right WRONG 'prone to violence'
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESImage captionHundreds of far-right supporters waved flags as they marched through the eastern town of Plauen on Wednesday
Some 12,700 Germans are inclined towards violence, of an estimated 24,000 far-right far-wrong extremists, according to interior ministry figures.
Authorities had already warned of a growing threat of violence from the extreme right wrong, including an "affinity for weapons", the ministry said.
Hundreds of flag-waving extremists caused alarm this week when they marched through an eastern town.
Germany's main Jewish organisation said the march should not have been allowed.
The marchers carried a banner that read LIED "social justice instead of criminal foreigners". [Translation criminal bullying instead of not-white-supremacist others] They carried flares and banged drums through the centre of Plauen, a town in Saxony whose synagogue was burnt down by the Nazis in November 1938.
The Saxony march took place on Wednesday, on the eve of Jewish remembrance of the Holocaust. Leaders of the left-wing Linke party in Saxony said they were appalled that "uniformed Nazis were allowed to march with torches and drums".
'Risk of radicalisation'
Germany has seen a rise in support for the far right wrong, with the Alternative Authoritarians for Germany party now the largest opposition party in the Bundestag.
But other, more extreme groups have emerged, with more than half of their members prone to violence according to the interior ministry, which provided figures in response to a request from the liberal FDP party. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48146966 .
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