the Pope has complained but that too was ignored.
The United States and most European governments had adopted the attitude that Christians in Iraq have not been singled out for attack but now the growing mountain of evidence has led a growing number of Western governments to at least admit that Christians and other non-Moslems are under heavy attack from ISIL and Iraqi Shia (usually sponsored by Iran) militias. In 2014 ISIL atrocities against religious minorities like the Yazidis and Christians was noticed by the world media but that attention was temporary and the plight of Christians in Syria and Iraq was largely ignored
Now that he met with the Patriarch of Moscow, and praised Russia for defending Christendom, maybe it will get some attention.
This goes back to the pre communist idea that Russia sees itself as the Third Rome...defending Christendom against the errors of the east (aggressive Islam) and west (decadent and anti religious secularists).
Without understanding this mythology, you will not be able to judge Putin's actions, including those that seem imperialistic to it's neighbors (that Russia will take them over for their own good).
however, one is happy that in Mexico the Pope said murdering people and the drug gangs were a bad thing. Duh.
Most of what he said was true, but the secular reports don't mention if he told them what to do about it. Did he tell them them to repent, give their lives to Jesus, and then act accordingly?
nah: Too religious to report so if he did, we won't hear about it.
Related item:
Reuters article on Zika and why it probably will not change the law on abortion. The public opposes, but also the medical problems in diagnosing:
it notes 4000 cases suspected and 400 cases confirmed, but other articles say 700 cases confirmed and 400 cases were false positive.
Now, it it's this hard to diagnose after birth, you see the problem. Of course, you could abort all women, but those 4000 cases would be 0.1% of all pregnancies, so aborting them all would be a case of overkill.
it also notes the opposition of the now large Evangelical community, the "elephant in the room" that could be part of the reason Brazil is becoming more prosperous: Evangelicals tend to stress you have to follow the ten commandments, and don't condemn capitalism per se, but see it as a way to serve God and to make the entire community prosperous. (JPII's encyclical saying this is usually ignored by catholic SJW's).
This is mainly a result of the "liberation theology" types that morphed Catholicism into marxism, replacing Jesus and the saints with marxist platitudes, so people walked away. Some stayed "catholic" but found the emotional satisfaction not in church but in pagan cults that are popular there.
(related item: The "saint death" who is associated with the murderous Mexican drug gangs is one such pagan cult in Mexico that has morphed from being probably harmless back into it's dark side).
I should note that Catholicism uses fiestas and saints and stories for teaching people about Jesus and our relationship to the deity, and the post Vatican II types threw out these intuitive ways of evangelization and replaced them with marxism. Protestants replace the stories behind the fiestas etc with bible verses to teach.
But since stories reach deeper into the heart than memorizing verses, churches that push only the idea of Jesus as a personal savior, (adding implicitly "only for those in our small church") tend to be anti catholic, and will be hijacked to destroy the church (by implication: "we are better than those lousy catholics").
Since this "we are the champions" myth is not a profound myth that encompasses all of reality (what happens when you lose?) often they will fade away when the charismatic preacher passes away, or when the enthusiasm fades in a couple hundred years, you will find us catholics plugging away quietly in the corner to pick up the pieces...
Alas, the Pope is preaching a good message, but he is only scolding, not telling them where God fits into all of this...
if all of this sounds too mushy for secularists, and nothing they need to think about, it is because they forget that the church is an independent source of authority that essentially outranks the state.
So tyranny has to destroy the power of religion if it is to make the state into the new object of worship.
One comment on Bernie Sanders: He is of course a socialist, and maybe the "modern" women supporting him do so because they see the government as guaranteeing them their rights, including social and money support for them when they require it.
In the past, the family and the churches supplied such things, and still do in much of America and in most of the world; ironically, the anti religion bias of the Democratic party sees religion as standing in the way of the "rights", while Republican libertarianism destroys the old rules in the name of letting one pursue one's own concept of the good results in a socialist state that picks up the pieces when the solitary individual can't do it all on their own.
The ultimate result is "euthanasia" when you are old and useless, or suicide for the middle aged when the pursuit of money and self esteem has resulted in divorce and drug addiction to fill the hole in your heart and you now see no reason to live.
One only has to see the outcry of hate on twitter against Judge Scalia to see that anyone who hints that an almighty supreme court should hold back on destroying common law in the name of the latest fad of the elite is now seen as the enemy.
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Fido was first domesticated in South East Asia.
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What does the discovery of gravity waves mean? David Reneke explains
The find gave researchers a completely new tool for studying the universe and its origins, two University at Buffalo physicists say. “Being able to detect gravity waves opens an entirely new window in astronomy,” says Will Kinney, professor of physics in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. “It’s like being able to see a new kind of light. Gravity wave telescopes will allow us to observe directly entirely new phenomena that have been inaccessible to us previously.”.
yes, there is religion behind this as David Warren notes here, and in another essay notes: Lamaitre was ridiculed by calling his theory of the universe the "big bang" theory.
the big question that some are starting to dare to ask in science is actually an old one in philosophy: Why is there something instead of nothing? Why can we comprehend the universe at all? Why does the universe follow laws that we can discover?
The expression “Big Bang” was itself coined by the atheist Fred Hoyle to make fun of it, and has stuck because it still appeals to the craving of materialists for a static Universe, infinite in scale. They can’t handle something that began; there must be something before that “just happened,” to no good end, for no good reason, in the infinite regression of a hall of mirrors. They must absolutely insist on the meaninglessness of it all; a succession of nothings. For otherwise they must face down the very God that they have been avoiding.
Catholics always say God reveals in two books: in the bible and in nature. So for Christians, being a scientist who finds things out about the universe is a way to serve God.
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