OUCH!.. ethnic sounding names judged out, Texas .. a bit from the story about an inch down ..
That makes no sense. These votes are not based upon the merits of the judge but on partisan affiliation and if its not party affiliation it's the sound of your name. I said that almost all the Republican judges in Harris County lost—well, there were three exceptions. And in each of those cases, the Democratic candidate had an ethnic-sounding name. That's no way to differentiate among candidates. And if it's not partisan affiliation or the sound of your name, it's how much money you can raise—which, as I said, undermines confidence in impartial justice.
from an interview with ex judge Wallace B. Jefferson ..
wow .. on that interview he is a clear winner in any 'care for the social fabric of America' race when seen among the likes of Allen West, Dr. B Carson, Cruz, Bachmann, Bishop EW Jackson, Palin, Santorum, Huckabee, Rick Scarborough (TP leader) Rand Paul, Greg Collett (TP guy with 10 kids on Medicaid), the Duggar family, Louis Gohmert, Tom DeLay, Mike Lee, Rubio, Boehner, GWB, Glenn Beck, and last my age old favorite NOT Jim DeMint .. no apologies to any of the miscreants i missed ..
The Cuccinelli campaign in Virginia has been rough lately. With two weeks to go in the campaign, this may be the least of their worries: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0r556CwE4k [next below]
The Duggars are great in that they are relentlessly on message, as long as that message has no actual content and can be filmed in 35 takes or less. They are Stanley Kubricks of stupid. But man, can they read some cue cards.
The Duggar Family Tour on the Values Bus; Endorse Ken Cuccinelli & E.W. Jackson
Published on Oct 15, 2013 by FRCAction
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Family Research Council Action (FRC Action) and the entire Duggar family of the hit TLC reality TV series "19 Kids and Counting" are launching the "Values Bus Tour" that will travel across the Commonwealth of Virginia next week (Oct. 14-16) mobilizing voters in support of Ken Cuccinelli for governor, E.W. Jackson for lieutenant governor, and Mark Obenshain for attorney general.
Josh Duggar, FRC Action's executive director and the oldest of the 19 Duggar children, made the following comments:
"We are excited to travel across Virginia and express our enthusiastic support for Ken Cuccinelli for governor and E.W. Jackson for lieutenant governor. Both of these men are deeply concerned about the issues impacting the family and our broader culture. FRC Action and the Duggar Family are honored to join grassroots activists and voters across Virginia as we promote the message that this election is vitally important in protecting and defending our rights and freedoms. Virginians have an opportunity to send a message at the ballot box that will be heard across the entire country," concluded Duggar.
Paid for by Planned Parenthood Votes and Planned Parenthood Virginia PAC in support of Terry McAuliffe. Authorized by Terry McAuliffe candidate for Governor.
Planned Parenthood Votes TV ad highlights Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli's dangerous views on women's health and his clear record of interfering in their personal health care decisions.
The more voters learn about Cuccinelli's positions on women's health, the more likely they are to vote against him when they head to the polls in November.
CECILE: Planned Parenthood Votes is responsible for the content of this advertising and Planned Parenthood Votes paid for this ad.
NARRATOR: Three hundred thousand women report being raped in America every year. But Ken Cuccinelli would put his extreme policies ahead of their needs.
He'd force a survivor of rape or incest in Virginia to carry a pregnancy caused by her attacker --
He even opposes the emergency contraception they need to prevent pregnancy.
Ken Cuccinelli: wrong for women. Wrong for Virginia.
A Wife Committed to Cruz’s Ideals, but a Study in Contrasts to Him
Ted Cruz and his wife, Heidi Nelson Cruz, watching election results in Texas last year. Mrs. Cruz, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, keeps a low profile. David J. Phillip/Associated Press
Mrs. Cruz at the Capitol shortly after her husband's election in 2012. Harry Hamburg/Associated Press
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. administered the Senate oath of office to Mr. Cruz as his family stood by. Mrs. Cruz lives in Houston with their daughters, Caroline, 5, and Catherine, 2. Evan Vucci/Associated Press
Mrs. Cruz in 1990 as a freshman at Claremont McKenna College, where she majored in economics and international relations. Office of Sen. Ted Cruz
Mr. Cruz thanked his wife after winning a longshot bid for the Republican Senate nomination in Texas on July 31, 2012 in Houston. Johnny Hanson/Houston Cronicle, via Associated Press
Audios [embedded] Heidi Cruz, in Her Own Words Heidi Cruz and her husband, Senator Ted Cruz, spoke to The Times's Ashley Parker. What's It Like Being Married to Ted Cruz? (0:48) Morning Routine With Daughters (0:39) The $1.2 Million Question (1:12)
By ASHLEY PARKER Published: October 23, 2013
WASHINGTON — At first glance, Senator Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi Nelson Cruz, seems to be just the sort of person the Tea Party supporters who celebrate her husband’s anti-establishment positions love to hate.
A vegetarian with a Harvard M.B.A., Mrs. Cruz is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, one of the Wall Street firms that helped set off the populist rage that ushered Mr. Cruz into the Senate in 2012. She works for Goldman in Houston, where she lives with the couple’s two young children, and as her husband’s fame has increased — depending on the audience, he is among the most pilloried or revered members of the Senate — she has maintained a low profile.
“I think it works really well for our family for us both to have careers, and I know what my commitments are to Goldman,” Mrs. Cruz, 41, said in an interview last week in her husband’s Senate office. “I think it’s also really good for our girls to have me at home with them.”
Yet the fallout from her husband’s role in the Congressional fiscal showdown this month did not spare Mrs. Cruz, one half of what she calls “a great team.” And it was the Democrats who seemed to be making her background an issue.
As her husband helped force a government shutdown over his opposition to President Obama’s health care law and argued that members of Congress and their staffs should be forced to buy insurance without any government contribution, the Democrats sensed an opening.
Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, tried to push Mr. Cruz into admitting that he was on his wife’s blue-chip Goldman health plan — a sign of hypocrisy, he implied. And then Mrs. Cruz’s boss, Goldman’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, turned up at the White House to urge against a devastating debt default, one of the issues with which Mr. Cruz had become closely associated.
“I have to say, honestly, I’m not involved with any of those issues at our firm,” Mrs. Cruz said. And if her husband was evasive about where he got his health coverage, Mrs. Cruz was blunt.
“Ted is on my health care plan,” said Mrs. Cruz, who has worked in Goldman’s investment management division for eight years.
Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for the senator, confirmed the coverage, which Goldman said was worth at least $20,000 a year. “The senator is on his wife’s plan, which comes at no cost to the taxpayer and reflects a personal decision about what works best for their family,” she said.
Mrs. Cruz, both personally and professionally, is a complex study in contrasts to her husband. She describes herself as instinctively collaborative, and her husband as a man of big, fearless ideas — a seemingly polite way of saying that, yes, Mr. Cruz breaks a few pieces of china every now and then.
“Ted is very much a visionary,” she said. “He is very strategic, and he’s very practical, and he does what needs to be done, not what everybody wants him to do.”
Of herself, she said: “I want to make sure that everybody is comfortable. I want to make sure that everybody is talking to each other.”
Those who know Mrs. Cruz say that she is less ideological than her husband. During the Bush administration, where she worked first in the United States trade representative’s office and later in the Treasury Department and on the National Security Council, she was known as more of an analytical thinker than a partisan zealot.
“Nothing in her background remotely approached Ted’s Scalia-like conservatism,” said P. Edward Haley, a professor of international strategic studies at Claremont McKenna College and one of Mrs. Cruz’s mentors, referring to Justice Antonin Scalia. “They’re alike in intensity — and they’re both extremely bright — and in conservative principles and ambition, but absent Ted, I don’t think Heidi would be moving in that particular branch of the Republican Party.”
Mrs. Cruz first met her husband in Austin, Tex., in 2000. He had his own elite academic credentials — Princeton and Harvard Law School — and both were young policy aides (she on the economic side, he on the domestic side) on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign.
Their first date was at a bar called the Bitter End, and it lasted for hours as her young suitor, Mrs. Cruz recalled with a laugh, “asked me a lot of questions about my background, my goals in life, my 10-year plan, my 20-year plan.
In Mr. Cruz’s telling, they met on Jan. 3 and began dating on Jan. 5. “I’m embarrassed it took me two days to ask her out to dinner,” he said.
They married the following May.
Mrs. Cruz was born in San Luis Obispo, Calif., to parents who were Seventh-day Adventist [ http://www.adventist.org/beliefs/ ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh-day_Adventist_Church ] missionaries. She and her brother spent brief parts of their childhood in places like Nigeria and Kenya. But her own mission, she said, involved public service. She fell in love with politics on a family trip to Washington during the Reagan administration.
Julie Sweet, the general counsel at the consulting firm Accenture, who is a close friend of the Cruzes, said that “the way she always phrased it was people are called in different ways to serve.”
By the time she arrived at Claremont McKenna College in California, friends and professors knew her as a whip-smart economics and international relations double-major — she later graduated Phi Beta Kappa — and a driven and ambitious young woman who was already planning a professional career.
In Mr. Cruz, friends and colleagues say, she met not just her match, but also her intellectual equal.
“Heidi is a synthesizer, whereas Ted tends to blow ahead on one line of reasoning,” said Lawrence B. Lindsey, the chief economic adviser on Mr. Bush’s 2000 campaign. Mrs. Cruz pulled together “different points of view,” he said, and Mr. Cruz is “more of a hard-charger on one point of view.”
While Mrs. Cruz comes across as confident but gracious — she disarms by asking personal questions, and answers those put to her directly and candidly — her husband tends to filibuster. Still, when Mr. Cruz stopped by last week for the final 15 minutes of the interview, he often listened attentively, resting his cheek on his clasped hands as he gazed at his wife. She, meanwhile, occasionally cut him off with a joke or a quip.
When Mr. Cruz began talking about the early days of his long-shot Senate bid, recalling that he was polling at about 2 percent, Mrs. Cruz interjected, “Ted likes to say the margin of error was 3 percent!”
Although Mrs. Cruz said that she was less “issue driven” than her husband, she added that she was committed to him and his ideals.
“It’s allowed me to really support what he does, even politically,” she said, “because I know he’s doing it because he truly believes in it.”
On the night of her husband’s 21-hour speech on the president’s health care plan, she was out of town for work. (Though Mrs. Cruz says she is home most nights, the couple have a live-in nanny). But when Mr. Cruz’s chief of staff called and asked if she had any suggestions for a bedtime story he could read to their girls — Caroline, 5, and Catherine, 2 — from the Senate floor, she suggested “Green Eggs and Ham,” knowing it was her husband’s favorite.
After Mr. Cruz read the book, supporters of the health care law said Dr. Seuss had the same message as they did: that if you try something, you just might like it.
In a glimpse into their marriage that Mr. Cruz called “illustrative,” he recalled saying to his wife in the weeks before his Senate primary, when he was still behind in the polls, “Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign.”
“What astonished me, then and now, was Heidi within 60 seconds said, ‘Absolutely,’ with no hesitation,” said Mr. Cruz, who invested about $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” he added — into his campaign.
Mrs. Cruz’s Goldman colleagues and the company’s political action committee also did their part, giving more than $65,000, making them the campaign’s second-largest source of contributions.
Now, less than a year into his Senate term, the junior senator from Texas is prompting speculation about a possible White House run. His wife, meanwhile, seems to be well trained in the ways of message discipline.
Asked if she could see herself as first lady, Mrs. Cruz laughed.
“Um, I don’t think I should answer that,” she said.
Or, in shorthand, she tells them the Bob Zoellick story.
In 2000, fresh from working on George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign, Mrs. Cruz arrived in Florida to help out with the recount. A newly minted Harvard M.B.A. and eager to make herself useful, she approached Robert B. Zoellick, whom she knew slightly from the campaign, and asked what she could do to help.
“And he very seriously looked up from his desk and said that he wanted some grapefruit — grapefruit juice,” Mrs. Cruz recounted in an interview last week in her husband’s Senate office.
A bit miffed but undaunted, she grabbed the keys to the rental car from Mr. Cruz, then her boyfriend, and headed to the grocery store. “And I’ll admit, she was ticked,” Mr. Cruz said.
Mrs. Cruz bought the grapefruit juice, arranged it in an ice chest — “and it was beautiful,” she said — and left it on Mr. Zoellick’s desk with a Post-It note that read: “Per your request.”
“So the next day, I thought, O.K., you’ve got to prove yourself, he needed grapefruit juice, fine,” she remembered. “So I said, ‘Mr. Zoellick, if there’s anything that you need today, I’m here and I’d love to help, there’s a lot going on.’ ”
Mr. Zoellick’s next request was equally simple: “Raisin bread.”
“And I was not deterred,” Mrs. Cruz said. “I was like, Got it! Ran and got the key, do-do-do-do-do. Got it, put it on his desk.”
The next thing he asked her for was help with some talking points. And later, when he was appointed as the United States Trade Representative in Mr. Bush’s new administration, Mrs. Cruz received a late-night phone call: “He said, ‘You’re the first person I’m calling and I want you on my team,’ ” she said.
So why, exactly, was Mrs. Cruz considered for the job? “The reason he said why is, he said, ‘Do you know for a week, I had been asking people for grapefruit juice and no one would get it for me?’,” Mr. Cruz recalled.
How Much Does Ted Cruz's Goldman Sachs Health Care Plan Cost Taxpayers?
By Dave Jamieson Posted: 10/24/2013 3:27 pm EDT | Updated: 10/24/2013 3:41 pm EDT
WASHINGTON -- In an interview with The New York Times published Wednesday, Heidi Nelson Cruz, the wife of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), confirmed that the Senate's most famous Obamacare foe receives his health coverage through her job at Goldman Sachs [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/us/politics/a-wife-committed-to-cruzs-ideals-but-a-study-in-contrasts-to-him.html (first item this post)]. The value of the coverage, according to Goldman, is at least $20,000 per year.
"Instead of getting compensation in cash and then shopping for insurance, they're getting an $8,500 federal subsidy," Kleinbard said. "If Goldman said, 'Here's cash, go buy your own policy,' that would cost them $8,500 in federal taxes. By structuring it this way, Goldman has saved them $8,500."
"If we didn't allow the health care deduction they would get it in pay and then pay the top rate, plus Medicare tax on it," Baker noted in an email.
As Kleinbard has noted [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/15/the-huge-health-care-subsidy-everyone-is-ignoring/ ] before in his writings on the health care law, the Cruz family's windfall here is not unique. The same subsidy applies to anyone on employer-sponsored coverage -- whether it's Kleinbard himself or Huffington Post reporters like this one -- though the subsidy is larger with the gold-plated health plans commonly found on Wall Street.
"For most people, in the Affordable Care Act, they're not getting federal subsidies as large as this," he said. "[Cruz] is the beneficiary of a large federal subsidy today, and while he's obtaining this he's not willing to make that available to lower-income, hard-working Americans who don't get health care."
Cruz's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Catholic Church Has Been 'Outmarketed' On Gay Marriage, Says New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan
Associated Press
11/29/13 01:10 PM ET EST
NEW YORK (AP) — New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan says the Roman Catholic Church has been "outmarketed" on the issue of gay marriage and has been "caricatured as being anti-gay."
Dolan's conversation with "Meet the Press" moderator David Gregory will air Sunday on NBC.
Asked why the church is losing the argument on gay marriage, Dolan says it's a tough battle when forces like Hollywood, politicians and "some opinion-molders" are on the other side.
But he said the gay marriage debate is not over and the church will not give up on it.
On another divisive issue, Dolan said the Catholic Church has long championed comprehensive health care.
But he indicated that U.S. Catholic bishops cannot support the Affordable Care Act as long as it includes coverage for abortion.
U.S. justices decline to hear another Obamacare challenge
U.S. President Barack Obama meets with health insurance chief executives at the White House in Washington November 15, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque
By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON Mon Dec 2, 2013 10:03am EST
(Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a broad new legal challenge to President Barack Obama's 2010 healthcare law.
The court rejected a petition filed by Liberty University, a Christian college in Virginia, which had raised various objections to the law, including to the key provision that requires individuals to obtain health insurance.
The justices upheld the constitutionality of a the individual mandate in a 5-4 ruling in June 2012.
Last week, the court agreed to hear two new cases in which employers have made religious objections to regulations implemented under Obamacare that require employers to provide health insurance that includes contraception for women. The case will be heard this term and decided by the end of June.
By rejecting the Liberty University case, the justices left intact a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals of a May 2013 decision that dismissed the claims made by the college and two individuals, Michele Waddell and Joanne Merrill.
The case is Liberty University v. Lew, U.S. Supreme Court, 13-306.
(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Howard Goller and Bill Trott)
The allegations surfaced last week when a woman suspected of embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the church filed a claim against the church alleging sexual harassment.
Jhona Mathews, 33, worked for the church as an administrative assistant. She says she was fired after breaking off her relationship with McLaughlin, who is in his 60s.
Mathews has a history of credit card fraud, the church alleges.
Mathews first met McLaughlin when she was working for a carpet company brought into the church for renovations.
Soon after being offered a job at the church in February 2012, McLaughlin started sending Mathews sexually explicit photos and emails, her complaint alleges.
Mathews has denied the embezzlement accusations through her attorney, Sandra Ribera, who acknowledged her client has a “checkered past.”
Ribera said McLaughlin took advantage of her client, a single mom with a 2-year-old daughter, telling the Chronicle "She felt she had no choice.”
"He was dangling her livelihood over her head, and she had a daughter to feed."
"Paddling with the wooden paddle, getting spanked in the sacristy of the shrine of St. Francis, which Catholics know, it's just appalling to hear as a Catholic and having sexual intercourse in the shrine of St. Francis," Ribera said.
McLaughlin, an animal rights activist, led a 2005 effort to airlift stranded pets in of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
What if original sin had never occurred? I think you'll find that the fantasy concept known as "sin" is actually quite integral to our physical structure and success as a species. So, whether you take Genesis literally or not - if you believe we were designed by God - who is truly to blame for our "nature"?
After Pat Robertson explained that the earth is more than 6000 years old, using dinosaur bones as evidence, Ian Juby responded by explaining how that can't be true because death didn't exist before Adam. "So, Mr. Robertson, was there death before Adam or not? Is the bible true or not? Jesus was supposed to bear the consequences of our sins, which is why he died on the cross; it was a consequence of sin. You have just nullified the reason for Christ's death." ~ Ian Juby This exchange occurs at 8:20 in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URP2WJ6st-E
The premise of this video was suggested to me by DaithiDublin and his wonderful video: "Re-Imagining Paradise (Poem)" Check it out and send him my best! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82RDXjIcysg
There's a "War on Christmas" being waged. At least that's what Republicans would like us to believe. There's even a new book about it, Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas [ http://www.amazon.com/Good-Tidings-Great-Joy-Protecting/dp/0062292889 ], written by that great arbiter of social injustice, Sarah Palin.
Palin writes: "Amidst the fragility of this politically correct era it is imperative that we stand up for our beliefs before the element of faith in a glorious and traditional holiday like Christmas is marginalized and ignored."
She continues: "The war on Christmas is the tip of the spear in a larger battle to secularize our culture, and make true religious freedom a thing of America's past. The logical result of atheism, a result we have seen right in front of our eyes in one of the world's oldest and proudest nations, is severe moral decay."
Of course, Palin is widely known for her intellectual curiosity, her objectivity, her distaste for inflammatory rhetoric and her adherence to facts. So we must ask, is The Wasilla Wonder onto something here?
On this eve of 'Thanksgivukkah,' a rare Hallmark phenomenon that won't occur again for another 70,000 years, I thought I'd give my personal perspective of what it's like being a Jew, surrounded by millions of allegedly battle-scarred Christians, during the mythical war-torn month of December.
If there's a war on Christmas it's certainly news to me. I live in New York, a city with more Jews per square inch than anywhere in the world except Israel. Yet this time of year it might as well be Vatican City given the sheer volume of Christmas zeal and excess. There are Christmas tree stands everywhere. Wreaths. Tinsel. Bells. Christmas music. We're inundated with red and green. With people beaming "Merry Christmas!" Asking "what are you doing for Christmas?" And, "what did you get your kids for Christmas?"
It's rare to find blue and white, the colors of Hanukkah. Strain the eyes and you might find a small menorah somewhere. No one wanders the streets, the office, retail shops wishing strangers a "Happy Hanukkah!" Strangers don't ask me what I'm doing for Hanukkah, or what I'm getting the kids for Hanukkah. What's even worse than the relative obscurity of Hanukkah is the almost non-existence of Kwanzaa-related paraphernalia. It's all Christmas, all the time. If there's a "war on Christmas" taking place, it's the most lame war in the history of wars.
I dread this time of year. I dread it because I'm a Jew floating in a sea of religious insensitivity. I live in a country where many fight for school prayer, provided it's their religion's scripture. Where people fight to allow religious symbols in public spaces, provided the symbols belong to their chosen faith. Where people ask "what's wrong with retailers posting 'Merry Christmas' signs in their windows?" But can they imagine how Jews feel then? If Christians are uncomfortable with the generic "Happy Holidays," guess how Jews feel seeing the very non-secular "Merry Christmas" everywhere we turn. And this is New York I'm referring to. Imagine how Jews feel this time of year in remote places like Laurel, Mississippi. Or Butte, Montana. Or Amarillo, Texas.
To be perfectly honest, I love Christmas. Always have. Ever since I was a 10-year-old racing to my pal Phil's building to open his presents with him and his family. I do not hate or resent this beautiful holiday. What I resent is being told that, unless I want it incessantly crammed down my Jewish throat for 30+ days each year, that I'm waging a war against it. That because I want Christians to respect me and my beliefs it is somehow disrespectful, confrontational and offensive to pious folks like Palin.
To be sure, there are millions of Jews who secretly wish they could celebrate Christmas, and perhaps millions more who've actually crossed the line of assimilation to buy trees, "do their Christmas shopping" for their Jewish friends and family, and pretend for a few days that they're no different than the 99% of the rest of the world. They want to "belong."
And the truth is, Christmas is a much sexier holiday than Hanukkah. Gentiles have Santa Claus, Rudolph, trimmed trees and apple pie. We have a menorah, a dreidel and latkes. They have White Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street and A Charlie Brown Christmas. We have Shalom Sesame: Chanukah Special, Chanukah on Planet Matzoh Ball and Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights. They have the most celebrated holiday in the world, where an estimated $3-trillion is spent on shopping, and we have, well, our little Hanukkah.
So to my Christian friends, and especially to the war-weary Mama Grizzly up in Alaska, I assure you that no one wants to take away Christmas. And no one certainly is waging a war against it. Those of us who happen to be Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist or atheist simply want you to enjoy your holiday merriment while accepting and respecting our chosen faith (or lack thereof) and realize that celebration this time of year comes in many colors, or perhaps no color at all.
*
Related
NBC Broadcast of 'Kinky Boots' Performance At Macy's Day Parade Provokes Right-Wing Outrage
Theists, when you make this argument, do you not realize that you're trampling all over your god's omnipotence? If the universe was made for life, with all the universe's dangers and inefficiencies, then to say that it could be no other way is to say your god couldn't do it any other way - and obviously, a way less hostile and more conducive to life would have been a better way.
A couple questions for creationists: Was Adam flesh and bone? If you dropped him off a 100 foot cliff before he ate the fruit, would he have died? If lions weren't carnivorous before the fall of man, then please explain how a man eating a piece of fruit would cause the digestive systems of large cats to be permanently altered, and why we've never found the fossils of such cats. What is the purpose of an extinct species? Why did God condemn 99% of all species that have existed thus far to extinction? Why did he design them in the first place if He knew that they were going to be unsuccessful (though, humans aren't yet nearly as successful as some species that have survived for many millions of years before their extinction)?
My contribution to Intelligent Design: "The Wasted Theory".
Most life is antagonistic to other forms of life. That is illogical if life was designed by a single, perfect, all-knowing creator. For example, why would God design something if He knew it was going to be unsuccessful (go extinct)? Why would God design his creation to be in constant conflict with itself?
There are two possible solutions: 1. The Wasted Theory 2. Evolution
Of course, evolution solves the problem perfectly: adaptation, natural selection, etc.
For religious people, my "Wasted Theory" also solves the problem. You're welcome, religious people; and you may freely use my theory at your discretion.
That pesky First Amendment is always gettin' in the gosh darn way! For many folks, being free to practice their religion just isn't enough. Nope. They want to be able to force other people to observe and practice their religion as well. Now that's freedom! ...or maybe not.
I can do something that the mythological Abrahamic God can't: I can forgive someone without giving them an ultimatum. Omnipotent my ass. Love is unconditional...God is not.
The church's image of the Virgin Mary and Christ child and a wooden cross both are said to produce myrrh, an oily resin that Father Lyovin describes as "drops that are like dew, dew on grass."
The myrrh is said to smell sweet, like roses, and hold miraculous healing powers. It's credited with healing a young girl who was diagnosed with a brain tumor and for restoring sight to a man who was mostly blind from a football accident.
"Before he had the accident," Father Lyovin told KITV of the latter miracle, "he was not 20/20. But now he became 20/20."
The Honolulu image of the Virgin Mary started producing myrrh five years ago. While the icon is taken on tours around the country, its existence is little known outside of the Russian Orthodox church. The image is based on the Panagia Portaitissa, or the Iveron Theotokos [ http://orthodoxwiki.org/Panagia_Portaitissa ; image (next below) http://orthodoxwiki.org/File:Portaitissa.jpg ], which was supposedly painted by Luke the Evangelist and is now housed on Mount Athos in Greece. The original prototype and many of its copies are also credited with wonderworking.
The Honolulu icon is an exact replica of a Montreal version, which streamed myrrh for fifteen years (1982-1997) and was cared for by Brother Jose Muñoz-Cortes. On the fifteenth anniversary of Brother Jose's death, the Honolulu icon started producing its myrrh.
Ever since, according to Father Lyovin, "A drop appears here, a drop appears there. And it starts flowing down. So, how can you fake that?"
Father Lyovin doesn't mind skeptics. He quotes the gospel saying that some have eyes but cannot see and have ears but cannot hear.
"I think," he told KITV thoughtfully, "even belief, to some extent, is sometimes a blessing."
Catholic hospitals account for about one in six of the country’s hospital beds and in many regions their influence is spreading as they forge alliances with non-Catholic medical groups.
“This isn’t about religious freedom, it’s about medical care,” said Louise Melling, deputy legal director of the civil liberties union, in a telephone news conference on Monday.
Both the Muskegon hospital and the bishops conference declined to comment.
Tamesha Means, the plaintiff in the lawsuit, said that when she was 18 weeks pregnant her water broke and she rushed to Mercy Health, the only hospital in her county.
Her fetus had virtually no chance of surviving, according to medical experts who reviewed the case, and in these circumstances doctors usually induce labor or surgically remove the fetus to reduce the mother’s chances of infection.
But the doctors at Mercy Health, Ms. Means said, did not tell her that the fetus could not survive or that continuing her pregnancy was risky and did not admit her for observation.
She returned the next morning, bleeding and in pain, and was sent home again. That night she went a third time, feverish and writhing with pain; she miscarried at the hospital and the fetus died soon after.
At the news conference Monday, Dr. Douglas W. Laube [ http://www.obgyn.wisc.edu/directory/detail.aspx?id=25 ], an obstetrician at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, described the care Ms. Means received as “basic neglect.” He added, “It could have turned into a disaster, with both baby and mother dying.”
The A.C.L.U. said it had filed suit against the bishops because there had been several cases in recent years in which Catholic hospital policies on abortion had interfered with medical care.
John M. Haas, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center [ http://ncbcenter.org/ ] in Philadelphia and an adviser to the bishops, said he could not speak about the current suit because he was unfamiliar with it. But he said that the bishops’ directives were more nuanced than critics allege, allowing for actions to treat a woman at risk even if that treatment might result in the loss of the fetus.
He said some hospitals might have misinterpreted the bishops’ rules and added that doctors were required to tell patients of potential risks and alternatives, though they may not provide direct abortion referrals.
ACLU, Michigan woman sue Catholic Bishops over hospital rules
By Dana Ford, CNN updated 7:53 AM EST, Tue December 3, 2013
(CNN) -- Tamesha Means' water broke early on December 1, 2010.
Just 18 weeks pregnant, she called a friend for a ride to Mercy Health Partners, the only hospital in Muskegon County, Michigan.
During that visit, and two others the following day, Means was in excruciating pain.
She was sent home twice -- given pain medication, told to return if her contractions became unbearable -- and was waiting to be discharged for a third time when she started to give birth.
The baby died less than three hours after it was delivered.
That's all according to a lawsuit filed on her behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union last week, which also said that Means' fetus had almost no chance of surviving and continuing the pregnancy posed serious risks to her health.
Health care providers at the hospital knew those facts to be true, the suit alleges, but failed to tell Means about the risks and the option of ending her pregnancy because they follow directives from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which do not permit abortion.
"As a direct result of these religious Directives, Ms. Means suffered severe, unnecessary, and foreseeable physical and emotional pain and suffering," reads the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
It accuses the USCCB and others of negligence "for promulgating and implementing directives that cause pregnant women who are suffering from a miscarriage to be denied appropriate medical care, including information about their condition and treatment options."
It seeks damages and a declaration that the defendants' actions were negligent.
'Abortion ... is never permitted'
At the center of the case is what is known as the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services -- a set of guidelines that advises Catholic health care providers and patients what to do.
Specifically, the lawsuit mentions directives No. 27 and No. 45.
Directive 27 states: "Free and informed consent requires that the person or the person's surrogate receive all reasonable information about the essential nature of the proposed treatment and its benefits; its risks, side-effects, consequences, and cost; and any reasonable and morally legitimate alternatives, including no treatment at all."
The termination of a pregnancy would not be considered "morally legitimate," as outlined in directive 45.
"Abortion (that is, the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus) is never permitted," that directive reads.
Still, the USCCB is not standing by doctors, whispering in their ears, telling them what to do, said Robin Wilson, a law professor at the University of Illinois who focuses on bioethics, health law and religious liberty.
"You would have to show some sort of control, or agency, or direct duty in order to reach up to them. ... What I read didn't seem to make the linkages that I would have wanted to see," she said, adding that she thinks the case will be difficult for the ACLU to argue.
"Creative claims win sometimes. It's just conceptually hard to get my mind around it," Wilson said.
Don Clemmer, a spokesman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, declined to comment on the Michigan case.
A call to Mercy Health Partners was not immediately returned Monday.
'It's about medical care'
Means' lawsuit raises issues similar to a recent case in Ireland.
Seventeen weeks pregnant, Savita Halappanavar, 31, went into a hospital complaining of back pain.
The doctors who examined her told her she was having a miscarriage but refused to do an abortion even though she was in extreme pain, her husband said.
Days later, Halappanavar died from a blood infection, leading lawmakers to call for an investigation into what role abortion laws may have played in her death.
"They knew they couldn't help the baby. Why did they not look at the bigger life?" her husband, Praveen Halappanavar, told the Irish Times.
According to the Michigan lawsuit, Means was diagnosed with preterm premature rupture of membranes. At the time she gave birth, she had acute chorioamnionitis and acute funisitis, infections she developed after her membranes ruptured.
When left untreated, both can result in infertility and cause other problems, the lawsuit states.
It says that Means should have been told about her treatment options, including the termination of her pregnancy.
She also should have been told about the risks associated with continuing the pregnancy and that even if she decided to go ahead with it, there was virtually no chance the fetus would survive, the lawsuit says.
Had Means known the full extent of her condition, she would have opted to end the pregnancy, according to the lawsuit.
The ACLU filed the suit to get relief for Means and to make sure that what happened to her won't happen to other women, said Louise Melling, national deputy legal director at the ACLU.
"We care about the right to practice religion," she said. "But this case isn't about religious freedom. It's about medical care."
Antiabortion demonstrators gather in June outside Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach to celebrate its decision to halt elective abortions at the hospital. Hoag Hospital's decision was announced after it partnered with a Catholic healthcare provider, though administrators said the policy change on abortion was a business move by a hospital that performs fewer than 100 abortions a year. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times / June 20, 2013)
Robin Abcarian December 3, 2013, 10:04 a.m.
Everyone knows that Catholic hospitals don’t perform elective abortions. Incomprehensibly, Catholic hospitals even fall afoul of the church if they perform an abortion [ http://www.latimes.com/topic/health/abortion-HEPAS000029.topic ] to save a mother’s life.
But are they negligent if they fail to merely inform a pregnant woman that abortion is the safest option when her health is in danger and her fetus faces certain death? And that if she wants an abortion, she should seek help elsewhere?
That’s the crux of the issue in a negligence lawsuit filed by the ACLU [ https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/complaint_final_1.pdf ] on behalf of Tamesha Means, a Michigan woman whose local hospital treated her with Tylenol and sent her home twice after her water broke 18 weeks into her pregnancy. The suit alleges that the hospital, the only one within 30 miles of Means' home, did not tell her that her fetus was doomed, nor that inducing labor and terminating the pregnancy was the only way to reduce the risk of a dangerous infection.
The case, which was filed in federal court Friday, comes at a moment when the clash between religious beliefs and healthcare is playing out in courts across the country.
“The lawsuit is not about abortion or contraception,” said Kary L. Moss, executive director of the Michigan ACLU in a conference call with reporters Monday. “It involves access to adequate emergency medical care.” The bishops, she said, are “ultimately responsible because of the directives.”
The plaintiff in the lawsuit, Means, a 30-year-old mother of four, said she suffered “severe, unnecessary, and foreseeable physical and emotional pain and suffering” when she was treated over a three-day period in December 2010. On her third visit to the hospital, suffering from two acute infections and in extreme pain, she delivered a premature baby, in the breech, or feet-first, position. The baby died 2-1/2 hours later.
The hospital, she said, never told her the baby’s life was in jeopardy after her water broke, and as a result, the suit contends, she was unprepared for the turn of events, and devastated. Means is seeking damages, said Moss, and an admission that the bishops’ actions were negligent.
Neither the bishops nor the hospital have responded to the lawsuit.
“The case is in many ways simple and strikes at basic values…and a super simple proposition,” said ACLU National Deputy Legal Director Louise Melling. “You expect medical professionals to provide care appropriate to your condition and offer information about your alternatives. That’s not what happened to Tamesha Means.”
The Catholic heirarchy can extract a heavy price from hospitals that disobey the rules. In 2010, St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix was stripped of its affiliation with the church after doctors performed an abortion on a woman who was 11 weeks pregnant in order to save her life. She had a condition, pulmonary hypertension, that had a nearly 100% chance of killing her had her pregnancy continued.
The hospital's president, Linda Hunt, was unrepentant: "If we are presented with a situation in which a pregnancy threatens a woman's life, our first priority is to save both patients. If that is not possible, we will always save the life we can save, and that is what we did in this case. Morally, ethically, and legally, we simply cannot stand by and let someone die whose life we might be able to save."
There appears to be only one situation where putting a mother’s life above her unborn child’s is permissible, according to the directives: “Operations, treatments, and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable, even if they will result in the death of the unborn child.”
I guess that means if a pregnant woman has cancer and needs lifesaving treatment that is incompatible with pregnancy, she can have her treatment. But if her life is at risk from a complication of the pregnancy itself, too bad for her. She can die with the baby.
Last year in Ireland, where abortion remains illegal in almost all cases, this exact scenario played out. Savita Halappanar, a 31-year-old dentist, began miscarrying 17 weeks into her pregnancy. She and her husband pleaded with doctors at Galway University Hospital to induce an abortion, but they refused, telling the couple “this is a Catholic country.” (Halappanar was Hindu, of Indian origin.) She developed a raging infection. Rather than terminate the pregnancy, her doctors allowed her to die of multiple organ failure.
How very life-affirming.
Could that happen here? Means, it turns out, was not the only miscarrying woman who did not receive the normal standard of care at Mercy Health Partners. Her case was discovered by a public health educator working on a federally funded infant and fetal mortality project, who also found four other, similar cases where the hospital failed to induce labor in pregnant women whose membranes had broken before their fetuses were viable.
According to the lawsuit, when the educator brought the cases to the attention of Mercy Health Partners' vice president of mission services, Joseph O'Meara, he said the decision not to induce labor was proper because the bishops’ directives prohibit such a thing.
“While we are all entitled to our religious beliefs,” said Dr. Douglas Laube, a past president of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists who was on the ACLU conference call, “hospitals should not be allowed to impose them on patients and staff who do not share them.”
At the very least, a pregnant woman in danger must be told what her condition is and what her options are. What the bishops think is beside the point.
What if we solved all our problems this way? Late paying the rent? Just tell your landlord that you paid him with supermoney, which is better than money, but he just can't see it right now.
The paradox and the supernatural are symbiotic. "Beyond" space and time, omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipotence, omnipresence, freewill, a grand plan, divine intervention, heaven, hell, souls, miracles, and life after death are completely invented concepts that have severe logical problems that are explained away by the word "supernatural", which is also completely made up.
Lightning and rainbows were once obviously supernatural. Those claims failed when they became testable, as will any claim attributed to the supernatural - no matter how obvious they seem to you.
We believe that behind all these big and structural evils there is a dark agent and his name is The Demon. That is why the Lord wants to have here a ministry of exorcism and liberation, for the fight against the Devil. As much as we believe that the Devil was behind Adolf Hitler [see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53353948 and preceding and following], possessing and directing him, we also believe that he (the Devil) is here behind the drug cartels.
And there was silly me thinking that the Catholic Church played a major role in supporting the Great Dictator’s ambitions and the atrocities that flowed from them [id.].
At any rate, Mexico’s exorcists say they can’t barge in mob-handed and all gung-ho, like them geezers in Ghostbusters.
The Church is not going to go on TV and say: ‘Look, we think that Mexico is going to get better and be saved if we do exorcisms because the Devil is behind all of this.’ We have to be discreet [with exorcisms] or else we may be ridiculed, even by our own followers.
Another Mexico City exorcist, Father Francisco Bautista, chimed in with the suggestion that things are being made far worse by large numbers of Mexicans joining the cult of Saint Death, or Santa Muerte.
It is estimated that the cult, whose followers worship a skull in a wedding dress carrying a scythe, has some eight million followers in Mexico – and more among Mexican migrants in Central America, the US and Canada.
Said Bautista:
It has also been adopted by the drug traffickers who ask her for help to avoid arrest and to make money. In exchange they offer human sacrifices. And this has increased the violence in Mexico.
Another reason for an exorcism offensive, he argues, is to fend off the evils that arose through the decriminalisation of abortions in Mexico City, in 2007. Both the cult and abortion have given evil spirits a foothold in the country, he insists.
Both things are closely related. There is an infestation of demons in Mexico because we have opened our doors to Death.
One of the biggest San Muerta sanctuaries was established by a woman in her 60s, Enriqueta Romero, who says the church itself bears responsibility for the rise of the cult, having shot itself in the foot with the worldwide child abuse scandal.
They finished off our faith with the things that the priests did. What can they criticise? That we believe in Death? That is not bad. What’s bad is what they did.
Says journalist Jose Gil Olmos, who has published two books on Saint Death.
The biggest presence is in the poorest sectors of Mexican society. In modern times the numbers of followers exploded, especially after the early 1990s economic meltdown.
Many middle-class Mexicans found themselves in misery. In despair they searched for hope, and some turned to Saint Death, Olmos says.
From approximately eight years ago we have seen Santa Muerte having a big presence with drug cartel members, from the bosses all the way down. Why? Because these people say that Jesus or the Virgin Mary can’t provide what they ask for, which is to be protected from soldiers, police and their enemies.
Condemning Homosexuality As Sinful Is Not “Hateful”:
It is not hateful to say that an immoral action is sinful. On the contrary, the most compassionate thing we can do is help people to turn away from sin… It is not the Church that must change to conform its teachings to the views of the world, but it is each individual who is called to be configured to Christ.
This Is Just A “Minor Exorcism”:
Perhaps a large part of the negative reaction is because most people don’t know what the Church teaches about exorcism, since they get their misleading information and sensational ideas on this mainly from Hollywood. The fact is that a “minor exorcism” takes place in every Baptism and Confirmation ceremony when we renounce Satan and all his works and empty promises. This prayer service will be along those lines. I’m not saying that anyone involved in the redefinition of marriage is possessed by the devil, which, if that were the case, would require the remedy of a “Major Exorcism,” but all of us are certainly subject to the devil’s evil influences and in need of protection and deliverance from evil.
The Devil Is Responsible For Promoting Same-Sex Marriage:
Our prayer service today and my words are not meant to demonize anyone, but are intended to call attention to the diabolical influences of the devil that have penetrated our culture, both in the state and in the Church. These demonic influences are not readily apparent to the undiscerning eye, which is why they are so deceptive. A helpful resource in this regard is a recent book by Father Louis J. Cameli, a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, called The Devil You Don’t Know: Recognizing and Resisting Evil in Everyday Life. While the popular tendency may be to identify the devil only with his extraordinary activity, which is diabolical possession, Father Cameli writes about the ordinary work of the devil: deception, division, diversion and discouragement.
Paprocki proceeded to quote Pope Francis from back in 2010, when then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio wrote that allowing same-sex marriage in Argentina was a product of the “father of lies [ http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2010/07/may-holy-family-join-us-in-this-war-of.html ]” that was “destructive to the plan of God” and would “gravely harm the family.” The Illinois bishop concludes, “Pope Francis is saying that same-sex ‘marriage’ comes from the devil and should be condemned as such.”
Marriage’s Sole Purpose Is Reproduction:
Another major deception or distortion of marriage is the view that it is not ultimately about generating life, but rather is mainly about a romantic relationship designed for individual (not even mutual) fulfillment. That distorted understanding cuts across opposite-sex marriage and same-sex marriage proponents in our culture. We are all summoned to reflect more deeply on the truth of marriage.
The Devil Uses Same-Sex Marriage To Divide People And Waste Resources:
The division brought about by the Devil due to same-sex marriage may be seen in the way our society, our families and our friendships have become so divided and polarized over this issue.
The diversion of the Devil in same-sex marriage may be seen in the fact that so much of our time, energy and resources are being spent in addressing this issue, when there are more pressing needs facing our state and our Church.
The Only Way To Help Gay People Is To Tell Them To Be Chaste:
The Church loves homosexual persons and looks upon them with compassion, offering assistance through support groups such as the Courage Apostolate to live in accord with the virtue of chastity. Indeed, all people all called to chastity, which for a man and woman united in matrimony means for the husband and wife to be faithful to each other.
The Courage ministry borrows the same shame-counseling tactics that ex-gay therapy uses to convince gay people to never have a loving sexual relationship, and even invites ex-gay therapists to help train Courage counselors [ http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/07/15/2303331/catholic-courage-ex-gay/ ].
This Is For Your Own Good, Gay Community:
In conclusion, I quote from a homily given in the second century: “Let me say also that when we are given a warning and corrected for doing something wrong, we should not be so foolish as to take offense and be angry. There are times when we are unconscious of the sins we commit because our hearts are fickle, lacking in faith. Futile desires becloud our minds. We need to pull ourselves up, therefore, because our very salvation is at stake. Those who keep God’s commandments will have reason to rejoice. For a short time in this world they may have to suffer, but they will rise again and their reward will endure for ever. No one who holds God in reverence should grieve over the hardships of this present time, for a time of blessedness awaits him. He will live again in heaven in the company of all those who have gone before him; for all eternity he will rejoice, never to know sorrow again.”
May God give us this grace. Amen.
It’s unclear if Paprocki had a clear goal for the outcome of this exorcism. It does nothing to undo Gov. Quinn’s signature, nor is it likely to inhibit public opinion’s momentum in favor of same-sex marriage — either among Catholics or otherwise.
Which can be really annoying when you have zero interest in going to church, maybe that's why you're reading this. You may even be reading this thinking some version of "Anyone who would believe in some all-powerful man, who watches every little thing that every single person does, telling us to love each other, while he lets whole nations suffer from starvation and genocide, is out of their mind." That's what I used to think.
But I don't anymore.
Just over two years ago, I picked up a free bible [ http://biblesforamerica.org/free-bible-and-christian-books/ ], I had read it before but, this time, almost instantly, in a wave of emotions and realizations and revelations and a wide variety of indescribable sensations, I became a Christian. It happened. It was not deliberate and it was not a choice. It was what I thought never happened to anyone, it was what I had been so sure did not exist the way any of these nut jobs described it, but I'll be damned (pun intended) if it didn't happen to me. I got saved.
In any movie centered around a coming of age love triangle, the title character will ask "Dad, how did you know you loved mom?" or, if our lead is female, "Mom, how did you know you loved dad?" and whether mom or dad are answering, the answer is always the same, "I just knew."
It was like that. I just knew.
That's what they want for you. That's what the person that has sent you countless emails and texts about next Sunday, or called you every Saturday night asking to pick you up in the morning, wants for you. Every card from your grandma with bible passages written on it means she wants this for you. Every flyer from your neighbor, or old high school friend, about another church event means they want this for you. Every invitation to church is an "I love you and I want this indescribable love, peace, and joy for you because I genuinely care about you."
The people that invite you to church are just like that friend that insists that you try the new Puerto Rican restaurant downtown, they have experienced something amazing and they want it for you too. It's like that, but on almighty steroids. When a friend or a kindly stranger, a relative or a playgroup parent, says "Hey, why don't you come to church with me on Sunday?" what they mean is "I love you so much, I cannot describe what I know you can get from this because I can't even put into words what it has done for me." We understand that when you live in a world of sneaky advertising and suspicious sales scams, this sounds like just another one. But, it isn't.
On behalf of Christians everywhere, I would like you to know that we really, just whole-heartedly, love you. And, we want to share this infinite and ultimate love and acceptance with you. Whoever you are, whoever you love, and whoever you see yourself as or becoming or voting for, we love you. We want you to know Christ loves you, that's why we do that thing that used to annoy me so much and we remind you (and each other) in every way possible, through music and bumper stickers and even, well-intentioned but misguided, "Jesus Saves" graffiti. We apologize, collectively, for anyone who may have hurt you or wounded you in the name of a God they obviously needed more time getting to know, they had no right to do that, and we pray for the healing of those wounds.
It's hard to believe that people think our laws are based on the bible. It is quite clear that the commandments, especially the revised ones (NONE of which are laws today), are the meaningless traditions of an ancient, superstitious people - not an objective moral code sent down by some mysterious, all-powerful, never-seen being.
Why do bad things happen to good people? Well, we're actually made privy of God's "mysterious" reason in this particular case, and we find out that it isn't so mysterious after all. Historically, Job has been revered as a great work of literature. Nobody really knows who wrote it, but the powers that be figured it had to be God-breathed. This book disgusts me mainly because it values material possessions over sons and daughters. Job's children were killed, and he's supposed to be fine with that because God returned twice the amount of his possessions. Sorry, not good enough. Yeah, Job had ten more kids, but as any parent who has lost a child can tell you: ONE CHILD DOES NOT REPLACE ANOTHER. This book touts an immoral message, and it's paraded by many as deep and insightful. Many religious folk are told what this book is about, but don't actually read it for themselves, or they squirm with inaccurate interpretations that are directly contrary to the actual literature. They're almost forced to, because they've devoted themselves to the bible, and this immoral message is in the bible. But the message is quite easy to understand. Fuck this book.
9 people die and God must sort them out. Who will frolic in Heaven? Who will roast in hell? The only criterion for getting into Heaven is accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Are you good? Doesn't matter. Bad? Ditto. Morality from the Bible? How?
Thanking God and saying prayers for yourself is arrogant and selfish. There are people in much worse situations than you. Why should you be a higher priority? Why are you so special? WHY? I'll tell you why. It's because your god is really nothing more than an extension of your own ego.
If the Abrahamic God is real, then He cares more about the rapist's freedom to rape, and the murderer's freedom to murder, than He cares about the lives of their victims.
People accept certain behaviors from their god that they'd never accept from their fellow humans.
They ask God for "things and stuff" (right, Bill O'Reilly?), and God provides (even though perfectly natural explanations abound), while ignoring those in true need. What about you? Did you stand idly by while a baby drowned in a puddle? If you did, then you're evil. God stood idly by while a baby drowned? Well, that baby needed to feel the horrifying pain and panic of fluid filling his lungs and suffocating him in order for "God's plan" to play out. What?! Or maybe there is no God - or no omnipotent god - and nature is indifferent to our suffering. People will jump through some terrible hoops just to maintain the beliefs they like.
Gags pertaining to this video: Mormons are supposed to believe that after they die, they'll reign over an entire planet. Mitt Romney has said that Jesus will reign from Missouri and Jerusalem when he returns (interesting choices, JC...not MY first, but what the hell...JC does what JC wants). Mormons are also supposed to wear "sacred" undergarments (magic underwear).
Hostess has gone out of business due to labor disputes. Some ultra right wing Conservative pundits have actually tried to blame Michelle Obama, as she has been so outspoken and active in advocating healthy eating habits for children. In no way do I believe Michelle Obama had anything to do with it. I'm just poking fun.
Gap in Chemo Makes Amish Girl's Leukemia More Difficult to Treat, Say Doctors
This Oct. 6, 2006 file photo shows a horse draws an Amish carriage through Georgetown in Bart Township Pennsylvania. Chris Hondros/Getty Images
By GILLIAN MOHNEY via Good Morning America Nov. 28, 2013
A 10-year-old Amish girl whose family stopped chemotherapy treatments for her leukemia faces severe health risks even if she restarts treatment, according to doctors.
Sarah Hershberger and her family fled their home in northeast Ohio days before a state appeals court appointed a guardian to take over medical decisions for Sarah's parents.
The family has left the country to find alternative treatments and has no plans to return to Ohio anytime soon, according to the family's lawyer, Maurice Thompson.
"It's the constitutional right, but [there's a] moral right to refuse conventional medical treatment," Thompson told ABC News Wednesday.
Sarah was diagnosed last April with stage III lymphoblastic lymphoma, which is the most common type of leukemia found in children. According to court documents, the cancer produced tumors in Sarah's neck, chest and kidneys.
Although Sarah was initially treated with chemotherapy, her parents abruptly stopped treatment in June after the drugs made their daughter sick and she begged her parents to take her off the treatment.
Doctors said that by stopping the chemotherapy even temporarily, Sarah's leukemia could become even more difficult to treat.
Dr. Howard Weinstein, chief of pediatric hematology oncology at the Massachusetts General Hospital for Children in Boston, said the gap in treatment would likely mean that Sarah would need a more intense round of chemo if she resumed treatment.
"We don't want any gap, because the leukemia cells can multiply and become resistant to chemotherapy," said Weinstein
Weinstein explained that stopping Sarah's chemo for just a few months was long enough that if she returned for chemotherapy, "it would be pretty much starting again, but not with the same likelihood of cure. But definitely with a reasonable chance."
After the Hershbergers stopped chemotherapy for Sarah, they said they planned to treat her with unconventional and "natural" medications instead.
"We've seen how sick it makes her," Andy Hershberger told ABC News last August. "Our belief is the natural stuff will do just as much as that stuff if it's God's will. She would have more suffering doing chemo than not."
Weinstein said for many parents the first few months of chemotherapy could be very difficult as they watch their children becoming sick from the drugs.
"Both parents and children sometime think the therapy is worse than the disease if they were not terribly symptomatic when diagnosed," said Weinstein. "But the majority of families realize in order to cure the leukemia you have to go through difficulties."
Weinstein said many pediatric leukemia patients can "appear" to be cured after one month of chemotherapy but said previous studies had found that the leukemia would return if the treatment was not extended, because the cancerous cells can "hide" in the body.
Weinstein warned that if people quit chemotherapy early and switched to natural remedies, they might believe the new treatments were working.
"If you're taking natural, nonconventional therapy you might say, 'Oh my god it's working,'" said Weinstein. "But really, the first month of chemotherapy did all the work."
Weinstein said that without conventional long-term treatment, the type of leukemia that Sarah had would virtually always return in pediatric patients.
The Hershberger family was initially taken to court by the Akron Children's Hospital after it stopped chemotherapy treatment in June.
In October, an Ohio appeals court granted an attorney, who's also a registered nurse, limited guardianship over Sarah and the power to make medical decisions for her.
The court said the beliefs and convictions of her parents couldn't outweigh the rights of the state to protect the child.
ABC News' Anthony Castellano and Alex Perez contributed to this report.
An appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court regarding a 10-year-old Amish girl, who was forced by a court order to continue chemotherapy to treat her cancer, has drawn the attention of an Ohio nonprofit.
The 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, headquartered in Columbus, has filed a brief in support of the family, who stopped treatments for their daughter in favor of alternative medicine — like herbs and vitamins — after seeing the negative side effects of chemotherapy.
The center urged the court to take the case, arguing the lower court’s ruling was unconstitutional.
“The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution clearly provides protection to parents in the ‘care, custody and control’ of their children,” center attorney Maurice Thompson wrote in a Nov. 15 brief, “including the right ‘to direct the upbringing … of children under their control.’ “
The girl, Sarah Hershberger, was ordered in October to continue treatments at no cost to the family after a back-and-forth legal struggle between Medina County Probate Court and the 9th District Court of Appeals.
She and her parents, Andy and Anna Hershberger, of Homer Township, oppose the chemotherapy because they believe it will kill the girl, according to court records. They have not been seen by authorities since at least Oct. 30.
Attorneys said the girl hasn’t had treatments since June, and physicians warned she will die within a year if she is not treated.
Thompson, in his brief, argued that Ohio law forbids the state from forcing medical treatment on someone who doesn’t want it.
“The family was asserting their rights under the Ohio Constitution in choosing to pursue other treatments,” Thompson wrote, “instead of continuing with invasive, debilitating chemotherapy for their daughter.”
Sarah Hershberger’s case began in April, when she was admitted to Akron Children’s Hospital. The hospital sued after she stopped treatments, asking a court to appoint attorney and nurse Maria Schimer as the girl’s “limited guardian,” which would grant Schimer sole authority to make the girl’s medical decisions.
In the October ruling, Schimer was appointed as guardian.
Akron Children’s Hospital representatives declined to comment.
Thompson said in his brief that the Supreme Court should step in because the case sets serious precedent.
“The outcome of this case will affect many Ohioans and their families,” he wrote. “Parents make decisions on behalf of their children each and every day without considering whether the state or a third party will assert an interest in their decision.”
The bible...it's not for kids. Is it tantamount to exposing a child to pornography or violence? I think so. It should be age restricted. The four sentences you just read came under some criticism for comparing the bible to porn, as porn is intended of sexual gratification, whereas the bible is not meant for that and has plenty of pleasant bits mixed in with all the nastiness. So does a movie that's rated R or NC17, but I'm still not going to take a child to see them. The bible is a mature book that should be age restricted. The only reason for religious people to fight that is because it would hinder their child's brainwashing regimen.
The Root of All Evil?, later retitled The God Delusion, is a television documentary written and presented by Richard Dawkins in which he argues that humanity would be better off without religion or belief in God.
The documentary was first broadcast in January 2006, in the form of two 45-minute episodes (excluding advertisement breaks), on Channel 4 in the UK.
Dawkins has said that the title The Root of All Evil? was not his preferred choice, but that Channel 4 had insisted on it to create controversy. The sole concession from the producers on the title was the addition of the question mark. Dawkins has stated that the notion of anything being the root of all evil is ridiculous. Dawkins' book The God Delusion, released in September 2006, goes on to examine the topics raised in the documentary in greater detail. The documentary was rebroadcast on the More4 channel on the 25th August 2010 under the title of The God Delusion. (Wikipedia [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion ])
Because I was constantly being told that I'm rejecting God, and I knew that wasn't true, I decided to research rejection, which made me aware of its effects. My studies took me in a completely unexpected direction. The epiphany (pun intended) was rather shocking. The evidence indicates that the personal god is a manifestation of the ego, which explains a plethora of theistic tendencies, including their typical dislike of atheists, who theists subconsciously perceive to be rejecting a part of themselves. God is Tyler Durden; and the first rule of Jesus Club is you have to talk about Jesus Club. The second rule of Jesus Club is you have to talk about Jesus Club.
God does have a creator, but it might not be who you think it is. Ironically, it was God who was intelligently designed - not us. A special thank you to GrapplingIgnorance and True, who both gave me suggestions when I had writer's block.
For more on the argument I used against God's omniscience, watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vauFcJAnnTY Sub to Noelplum99 for interesting arguments like that. He's worthwhile.
Ted Cruz crowd loves blogger’s jokes about opening fire on cars with California plates
By Travis Gettys Monday, January 13, 2014 14:03 EST
A conservative blogger drew big laughs at a rally for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) when he suggested that Texans open fire on cars bearing California license plates.
“I’ve said this several times in Texas before and I’ve said it to Mr. Cruz as a representative of the Texas government, I’ve said it to Gov. (Rick) Perry directly, and now I’m going to say it to you as individual Texas citizens,” said Bill Whittle, a Fox News guest, Pajamas Media commentator and former National Review Online contributor.
Whittle told the crowd at Saturday’s “Freedom Rally [ https://www.txfl.org/ ],” sponsored by Texans for Freedom and Liberty, that the issue he wanted to discuss should involve the state Highway Patrol, the National Guard and private citizens.
“You will see a lot of cars coming west heading east on Interstate 10, and they’re going to have California license plates on them,” Whittle said, as the crowd begins to laugh. “Now, if you see these cars pull into rest areas or hotels or restaurants, that’s fine; wave goodbye, make sure they go out on the Louisiana end.”
“But if you see them pull off into residential areas, you need to open fire on these vehicles immediately,” Whittle said, as the crowd laughs appreciatively and applauds loudly. “Immediately. Not with 9mm or AR rounds; you need to put mortars on those things, you cannot take any chances.”
After the crowd quiets down, Whittle reminds them that he is from Los Angeles and says that Californians are trying desperately to move to Texas to enjoy its “awesome job opportunities, the incredible economy and the conservative government.”
“They will change it and mess it up,” Whittle said. “Don’t let that happen. Just start shooting.”
He suggested that no judge would convict them of opening fire on California residents.
“What’s the worst that could happen to you?” Whittle said. “I mean, honestly, this is Texas, right? You’ll stand in front of a Texas judge, (and) he’ll say, ‘Did you shoot up that car full of Californians?’ You’ll say yes, he’ll say why. You’ll say, ‘Well, your honor, they needed killing.’ And he’ll say, ‘We’ll strike a medal in your honor,’ and off you go.”
The crowd applauded, and Whittle said he was warning them about California residents because they would someday come to Texas as refugees from a potential financial crisis or “zombie apocalypse.”
“I know many of you kindhearted Texans will walk up to some of those starving California families, and maybe you’ll offer a crust of bread to some of those hopeless-looking California children, and the California parents will say ‘thank you, but is this crust of bread gluten-free?’” Whittle said. “’Because, you know, Enoch and Mia have an intolerance and they’re indigo aura children, and they really don’t react well to gluten.’”
Whittle said he would be among those refugees, offering to earn his keep in his adopted home.
“I’ll be 500 yards off to the side with a long-handled spade and my AR 15, and I’m going to say, ‘Texans, I can shoot and I can shovel, please let me in,’” Whittle said to more applause and laughter. “’I promise I’ll do more good than harm.’”
Watch video of the event posted online by Michael Openshaw:
[a non-YouTube excerpt from the beginning of Whittle's full-speech YouTube second below, with the referenced comments, embedded]
Michael Quinn Sullivan MCing the Ted Cruz event in Allen, TX on Jan.11th, 2014. He Also introduces Scott Turner for the invocation a deay after Scott Turner declared for Texas Speaker.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpEldGFwLIo [with comments] [skip to the next video once Cruz's speech begins following the 28:00 mark (the beginning of Cruz's speech cut off in this one)]
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Ted Chuz Speaking to 1500 in Allen Texas Ja. 11, 2014
Rachel Maddow: PALIN, McDaniel &TEA Party Threaten a "Freedom" 3rd Party SPLIT!
Published on Jun 25, 2014
Rachel talks with Steve Kornacki about the anger of TEA Party supporters with the Republican Party. Will relations with the GOP establishment degrade to the point of creation of a separate conservative "Freedom Party"??? - From TRMS, MSNBC
dang blast de dum dub dum dumb .. change sucks .. lol .. drumbeats reverberate through the GOP jungle, so many conservatives wail with the 'good ol' days' fever ..