Saturday, September 13, 2014

Stuff around the web

Mainly bookmarked for later reading

Lady Imans? We haz that.

and they go back 300 years.

In Henan, along with a few Hui Muslim enclaves in northwestern China, women-run mosques are counterparts to the houses of worship for men; female mosques serve as community centers for women. Within them, female imams do nearly everything their male equivalents do, apart from officiating over weddings and funerals. Technically, they’re not allowed to stand at the front of the mosque to lead prayers, a symbolic gesture. Instead, the women lead prayers facing in the same direction as their flock, rather than facing out toward them as would the leader of a mosque for men.

Headsup GetReligion.

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Philip Jenkins has a series on Mary in Revealation (the Apocalypse). He is a (non catholic) historian of religion, not a dogmatist.
From today's discussion:
*In the earliest Christian writings, the Epistles and Mark’s gospel, Mary scarcely appears, and certainly not in any leadership role.
*Towards the end of the first century, Mary’s role becomes vastly more important, most dramatically in Luke-Acts. The Magnificat in Luke 1 is a prime example.
so devotion to Mary started 50 years after Jesus's death?
*No later than the mid-second century, devotion to Mary is so intense as to inspire major apocryphal writings like the Protevangelium, which present her almost as a parallel Christ figure. Early Fathers like Justin Martyr and Irenaeus are writing about Mary as a kind of anti-Eve, who reverses the Fall. ...
So why do we have this process of exaltation, which begins relatively late, but which then takes off at amazing speed between say 90 and 150?...
discussion follows (and if you want in depth discussion, check his other posts on the subject).

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Waiting for Godot to leave has two posts discussing the film Calvary. LINK LINK

I can't decide if I like the film, mainly because the parishoners are not real people, although the priest is.
The film is full of the parishoners ridiculing the priest with all sorts of anti church blasphemies while he tries to do his job counseling and helping sinners. My problem? These same folks then go to communion on Sunday. Huh?

The plot is easier to understand if you realize that the press and media in Ireland was spouting anti Catholic propaganda for the last 40 years, because the elites decided that the only thing that stood in the way of Ireland becoming a modern country was the church. So the scandal of "pedophile priests" was a godsend to these folks (albeit a real scandal).

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But it wasn't just priests, and the Rotherham scandal and the BBC scandal in the UK show. But never mind.

I'd be less cynical about the bishops if I didn't remember my medical school classes that suggested that if we removed these hangups we would no longer have mentally ill people, since all mental illness was from sexual repression. ..and the idea in 1970 was that sexual abuse of young kids usually didn't harm them, but taking them to court to testify would be a greater harm to the child, and lead to the jailing or the often gentle and well liked perpetrator who didn't really mean to harm the child.. (he would, of course, get a lot less sympathy from jail inmates than he did from psychiatrists, so why jail him).

I am not defending the bishops: When I worked in Appalachia, the bishop bragged that he had eliminated abuse in the diocese, yet a nurse cried on my shoulder that her husband was asked to intercede with the family of an abused 12 year old not to accuse the nice priest who had raped him. The priest was new in the diocese, and was a very "nice" man, so why put him in jail. Was he a serial rapist? We'll never know. How bad was the diocese? Well when one of the young priests ran away with a catechism teacher, the older, wiser pastor sighed and said cynically: Well, at least it was with a woman.

But abuse occurs all over the place...When I was in a small town practice, I saw about one girl a month for sexual abuse check...half were not real, but some were. Most were simple touching and didn't go to court, but a few were not touching but serial rape, usually by babysitters or mom's boyfriend, but one case by a father.

This doesn't include the cases I didn't treat but know about personally, including incest by a father,abuse in foster homes, and harm by a female baby sitter.

 And when I worked on "The Rez", I only saw a few cases, but one of our nurses said a lot of the men in AA were drinking because of sexual abuse as children. Some might have been in boarding school, but the area didn't use boarding schools, so I suspect relatives being the problem. LINK

To put things into perspective:  CDC survey of US high school kids on health habits, which lists sexual abuse, rape and assault along with not eating your veggies. (must be non judgemental I guess).



Had First Sexual Intercourse Before Age 13 Years
Nationwide, 6.2% of students had had sexual intercourse for the first time before age 13 years (Table 63). Overall, the prevalence of having had sexual intercourse before age 13 years was higher among male (9.0%) than female (3.4%) students; higher among white male (5.2%), black male (21.1%), and Hispanic male (11.1%) than white female (2.6%), black female (7.0%), and Hispanic female (2.9%) students, respectively; and higher among 9th-grade male (13.3%), 10th-grade male (8.6%), 11th-grade male (6.8%), and 12th-grade male (6.2%) than 9th-grade female (4.1%), 10th-grade female (3.9%), 11th-grade female (3.0%), and 12th-grade female (2.2%) students, respectively. Overall, the prevalence of having had sexual intercourse before age 13 years was higher among black (13.9%) and Hispanic (7.1%) than white (3.9%) students; higher among black (13.9%) than Hispanic (7.1%) students; higher hisamong black female (7.0%) than white female (2.6%) and Hispanic female (2.9%) students; higher among black male (21.2%) and Hispanic male (11.1%) than white male (5.2%) students; and higher among black male (21.2%) than Hispanic male (11.1%) students. Overall, the prevalence of having had sexual intercourse before age 13 years was higher among 9th-grade (8.8%) than 10th-grade (6.3%), 11th-grade (4.9%), and 12th-grade (4.2%) students;
 why do the numbers go down when older kids answer the question? Maybe they are in denial. I doubt it's because five years earlier the rates were lower.

end rant
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Some American politician named Cruz got into trouble for giving a speech to Arab Christians in the US saying that they needed also to remember Israel is being persecuted. It didn't go over well, since some Palestinians who fled Israel in 1948 were Christians, but he brought up a point: Keeping hatred alive is not going to stop those who are killing now.

StrategyPage constantly notes how Arab propaganda has brain washed locals into Israel hatred as a scapegoat (to point hatred away from their corruption/ stealing everything in sight which leads to local poverty). Now that propaganda is biting back.

September 12, 2014: Israel was not asked to join the international coalition against ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant). This was because the ten Arab members of this twenty country coalition are still trapped by decades of their own “Israel must be destroyed” propaganda and rhetoric...
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yeah, but the western press don't bother to mention such things.

 Hamas deliberately stored rockets in residential neighborhoods, often in schools, hospitals and mosques. Yet only about half the dead Palestinians could be termed “innocent civilians”. The rest were Hamas men handling the rocket, mortar and gunfire attacks on Israel. Oddly, according to most media Israel gets no credit for minimizing civilian casualties and Hamas no blame for trying to get civilians killed
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  despite this, SP says that most American Muslims are...American. and they go on to explain it in detail.

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A longer essay about the philosophical problem of Islam here

is God beyond good and evil? Is evil bad because it's evil, or because God says so? Catholic christianity insists that man finds god via Faith and reason, but Islam (and some protestant sects) deny this.

 Understanding the differences in belief is essential for Catholics so that we can also use reason to think rightly about God. This has become a real challenge in the West, with many holding that metaphysics is a part of religion instead of philosophy. Pope John Paul II fought against this in his encyclical Fides et Ratio and Pope Benedict had this in mind in his Regensburg Lecture when he spoke of “disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.” He saw this pathology not only in placing violence within God’s nature, but also in the secularized West.
I'll have to read it in detail later, since philosophy is not my strong point.

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water clouds in space.

and a solar flare is due to hit today.

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BBC factoids of the week:

sharks kill more men than women

Pele was named for Thomas Edison

and Noah's ark was a coracle made with a rope?








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