The president of the largest Roman Catholic University in America refused a conservative student group's request to post pro-life posters because it would constitute "bigotry ... under the cover of free speech."
Despite the fact that "Black Lives Matter" posters hang on the very windows of the administrative offices at Chicago-based DePaul University, President Reverend Dennis H. Holtschneider banned posters reading "Unborn Lives Matter," a message much more in keeping with Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life, from conception to natural death. ...When po-mo, pc identity politics start infecting the thinking at Catholic universities you know the culture war is being lost. President Holtshneider has defected to the enemy's side. Though it would appear that this has been happening for some time. And considering some of Pope Francis's rhetoric on global warming and capitalism, the entire Catholic Church is lurching in that direction.
...Pope Francis’ climate Encyclical, Laudato Si’ (Praise Be), could have come from any branch of the UN, any environmental NGO, or the World Economic Forum. This is hardly surprising since they all promote Global Salvationism, which is based on projections of doom to be countered by morally-charged, UN-centric, globally-governed sustainable development and corporate social responsibility.
... The Pope appears to be blinded by a moral vision that he shares not just with Strong and Gorbachev but with Naomi Klein, Al Gore and David Suzuki: capitalism is evil, is destroying the earth, and involves oppression of the poor and a zero-sum struggle for resources that promotes war.
... The Encyclical demonizes wicked, heartless and short-sighted straw men. This unnamed “they” are proponents of “throwaway culture” and “compulsive consumerism,” of “rampant individualism” and the “self-centred culture of instant gratification.” They claim “an unlimited right to trample his creation underfoot.” ...
... It is a cruel irony that, while it was science which, more than anything else, was able by its great achievements to establish the age of reason, it is all too many climate scientists and their hangers-on who have become the high priests of a new age of unreason.
... But what moves me most is that the policies invoked in its name are grossly immoral.
Global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked.
... Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change ... is due to land in September to rally climate True Believers ahead of the U.N.’s giant policy shindig in Paris.A message for Pope Francis: Energy restrictions based on climate fears threaten the poor by Paul Driessen.
... This week’s statement, from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PAS/PASS) ... confirms that Vatican not merely has slim or no grasp of economics or history, but is on its knees before tried-and-failed collectivist policies, and committed to a crusade against rich nations.
... The pope, who is an economic ignoramus, has allied himself with forces that would perpetuate poverty, not relieve it.
... Denying humanity the use of still bountiful hydrocarbon energy is thus not simply wrong. It is immoral – and lethal. This is the real reason that climate change is a critical moral issue. No one has a right to tell the world’s poor they cannot use fossil fuels to improve their lives, or to tell others they must reduce their living standards, based on speculation and unfounded fears about a man-made climate crisis.
"Do we respect a gay baker’s right to choose not to bake a cake for the Westboro Baptist Church with icing that reads God Hates Fags?"
There's been lots of talk about religious freedom, but it's all about one issue: the niqab and whether Muslim women can wear one during citizenship ceremonies.
In a far-ranging 50,000 word statement released by Pope Francis on Tuesday, he illustrated that he is sympathetic to the tenets of liberation theology and hostile to capitalism.
... Before the advent of liberation theology, Catholicism hated socialism and communism, regarding them as “godless.” Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) wrote an entire encyclical condemning socialism.
But now Pope Francis seems to be embracing a condemnation of capitalism instead, and an embracing of socialistic principles.Some of the Pope's conservative supporters, like Michael Coren, defend his rhetoric, saying that his critics misunderstand him:
As for those who are angry over the film, Comfort was candid. Non-believers, he claims, are simply frustrated that their worldview is being eroded by what’s exposed in “Evolution vs. God.”Comfort's video is reminiscent of agnostic David Berlinski's "The Devil's Delusion" in which he pokes holes in militant atheists' arguments from science.
... a Pennsylvania-based restaurant ...has been offering a 10 percent discount for individuals who bring in a church bulletin on Sundays."Discriminatory"? Sure the restaurant was being discriminatory. That's its right and no business of the bleeding government.
... Citing this action as discriminatory, John Wolff, a local atheist, filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC). Now, the restaurant will be forced to offer discounts to any individual who brings in a pamphlet involving religious faith — including atheism.
REJECTED!Who knew?
What the NY Times Won't Run: Counter-Jihad Facts
What the NY Times Will Run: Anti-Catholic Smear Ads ...
... We used the same language as the anti-Catholic ad. The only difference is, ours was true and what we describe is true. The anti-Catholic ad was written by fallacious feminazis.More reaction.
... Many such people will describe themselves as "religious" or, better, "spiritual"; they are, they will say, "seekers", pilgrims who journey hopefully but somehow never arrive.
...By and large, the appeal of agnosticism is to the spiritually timid. Its attraction is that it gives the illusion of a safe harbour in a roiling sea when, in fact, it offers no harbour, only more seasickness.
... etc.And today Chris Selley replied ... bollocks. I'm with Selley on this one, a happy "seeker".
... when it comes to demonization, irrationality, apocalyptic visions and dangerous policies, surely no paranoid fantasy of the Birthers or Truthers ranks with the profound quasi-religious conviction that industrial society threatens life on Earth.
What could be more Biblical than projections of the floods, droughts, hurricanes, starvation and conflict that will come if the sinful materialist world does not repent of its free market harlotry and deliver itself over to those severe moralists who would dictate acceptable levels of human consumption and apportion the world’s resources?
...The Antichrist in the climate change morality play is — yet again — capitalism, which has often been presented by its ideological enemies in demonic, dragon-like form.
... It is ironic indeed that the spiritual yearning to smite selfish demons and rule (or consult for) a centrally-guided sustainable Utopia — despite all the horrendous lessons of history — is embraced by many of the same rationalist intellectuals who sneer at Birthers and Truthers. This claque promotes policies that have failed abysmally in the past, and continues to demand ever more-ambitious global schemes despite the utter collapse of the UN-led Kyoto process at Copenhagen.
As Hunter said: "Dear Pope, Butt Out". Unfortunately, he didn’t.... catches the anti-capitalist waves now washing over the globe's political classes.
... sweeping 140-page collection of sound bites and instant quotations that will be used by all and sundry as another authority for condemning free markets, globalization, big business, finance, outsourcing, capitalism, copyright law, greed, climate change, energy consumption, etc.
... In Pope Paul's. encyclical [Paul VI, 1967] written when half the world was under Communist dictatorship, not a word was said of problems with Marxism. Still, Benedict explicitly aims to take up Pope Paul's tedious stereotypical message from Populorum Progressio. ... as foundation for a renewal of the old leftist attacks on business, markets and capitalism.
... 159 [footnotes], but none support the big economic analyses and factual claims that make up most of the encyclical.
... Benedict dashes off .. unsupported statements by the hundreds. ... It dismisses "so-called outsourcing"; ... On the current economic crisis - adopts the idea that Big Government is the answer. ..."The technologically advanced societies can and must lower their domestic energy consumption."; "... excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property ..."
... What Benedict's encyclical betrays, most of all, is a willful disregard for economic history and the massive benefits of free markets and globalization.
... After 40 years of dramatic gains in global wealth expansion, after an explosion of living standards and productivity capability around the world, after four decades of free trade and markets that have turned much of the world into bastions of progress, along comes Benedict with a call to turn the clock back.
... When [Sam Harris] writes that he has been ‘dumbstruck’ by Christian and Moslem intellectual commitments, I believe the word has met the man.Berlinski doesn’t argue in favour of any particular religious beliefs but instead shows how the bellicose proselytizing atheists’ arguments from science are full of logical holes.
... The sciences, many scientists argue, require no criticism because the sciences
comprise a uniquely self-critical institution ... Individual scientists may make mistakes, but like the Communist Party under Lenin, science is infallible because its judgements are collective.
... physicist Victor Stenger scoffs that it is the "last resort of the theist who seeks to argue for the existence of God from science and finds all his other arguments fail". Sheer chutzpah, if I may use the Greek for cheek. It is Stenger who is arguing against the existence of God "from science."
... Having begun with Stenger, I might as well finish him off.... he has completely misunderstood the terms of the problem ... A man must really know his limits, as Clint Eastwood observed.
No less than the doctrines of religious belief, the doctrines of quantum cosmology are what they seem: biased, partial, inconclusive, and largely in the service of passionate but unexamined conviction.
To an editorial in ‘Nature’ that claims: "The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is ‘unassailable fact’ ... With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside." [Berlinski replies:] Those not willing to put such sentiments aside, the scientific community has concluded, are afflicted by a form of intellectual ingratitude. – It is remarkable how widespread ingratitude really is.
I would find Hitchens’s thoughts even more gratifying than I do had he not enlarged them to encompass nonlinear dynamics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, subjects that in his ineptitude he waves like a majestic frond.
On Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg’s nihilism: "The more comprehensible the universe becomes ... the more it also seems pointless." He has a point. The arena of the elementary particles – his arena – is a rather depressing place ... What is it’s point?
