fatima

Conspiracy theory of the day

CNN on the implications of the butler story coming out of the Vatican...

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, is involved in a power struggle with his predecessor, experts say.
"The reason for this fight is that the secretary of state will have a strong influence over the next conclave which will choose the next pope," said Giacomo Galeazzi, a journalist at the Italian daily La Stampa.

 if this sounds familiar, it was the plot behind Windswept House
from Wikipedia

The book gives a scary depiction of high ranking churchmen, cardinals, archbishops and prelatees of the Roman curia, taking oaths signed with their own blood, plotting to destroy the Church from within. It tells the story of an international organized attempt by these Vatican insiders and secular internationalists to force a pope of the Catholic Church to abdicate, so that a successor may be chosen that will fundamentally change orthodox faith and establish a New World Order.

This old article on FR website from the Wanderer has comments on this conspiracy LINK

and the really really scary part is that Father Amroth, the exorcist, says that the "unsolved" murder of the girl is related to this devil worshipping cabal...from the CNN story:

Two days after that, hundreds of people chanted "Truth, truth!" in St. Peter's Square, holding pictures of Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee who disappeared at the age of 15 and has not been seen in the past 29 years.


No less a figure than the Vatican's chief exorcist said he suspected the girl had been abducted for sexual reasons, adding: "The investigation should be carried out inside the Vatican and not outside."

 
Father Malachi Martin sort of went off the deep end with paranoia at the end of his life, but there are lots of long interview on YOUTUBE which attests to these sort of shennanigans.

More worrisome is Michael O'Brien's series of novels on the end times, the most basic one being "Father Elijah", about Vatican intrigues (the others tend to be about ordinary folks with the Father Elijah scenerio being on the edge of the various plots).

The difference is that when I read Windswept house, I get paranoid and fearful, whereas when I read O'Brien's books, I get prayerful.

Trivia of the day

From AveMaria on why some crucifixes have a skull and bones at the base of the cross:

The bones of Adam at the base of the Crucifix – tradition (that’s tradition with a small ‘t’) has it that the Crucifix was planted in the spot where Adam was buried, hence on many older style Crucifixes you’ll see the skull and crossbones at the base of the Crucifix.

The Pain of Abortion

A new book review about the pain of abortion, and the healing of the pain of losing a child...

 

“Poor Baby,” King said, isn’t taking a political side on the abortion issue, but just telling it like it is—for her and, in many respects, for the millions of other women who’ve had abortions but aren’t able to talk about it due to shame, stigma, and the breach in understanding just how much grief surrounds the decision—and lingers well after. Scare tactics and feel-good stories of women who "chose life" don't always quite get at it, she said, neither does the knee-jerk rationale for its benefits. The implications are so much bigger.

headsup Tea At Trianon:

NFP

Get religion blog links to two positive stories on natural family planning.

dryness in prayer

from Castle in the sea blog: A quote from Edwin O'Connor's book the Edge of Sadness.

For I discovered . . . that the one way I can pray is with patience. We all approach God differently, and I know that there are those who can do so devoutly, totally, immediately, who can, in a sense, fling themselves into prayer. I can't. I wish I could, but I can't. I've said before that prayer doesn't come easily to me -- it probably doesn't to most of us -- and the only thing I can do is to start to pray and to wait -- to wait at night, for example, until the day runs down and dies. As it always does now;  as it did tonight. But there's always the prologue of innumerable false starts -- I suppose this is, for me, the preparation for prayer. Sometimes it takes a long time;  sometimes not long at all. But however long or short, it's always there, until finally it goes, and then there comes a calm, a quiet, and at last, prayer . . .

NewYork and death panels

Secondhandsmoke blog links to a New York Magazine article talking about killing grandma.

I do not know how death panels ever got such a bad name. Perhaps they should have been called deliverance panels. What I would not do for a fair-minded body to whom I might plead for my mother’s end. The alternative is nuts: to look forward to paying trillions and to bankrupting the nation as well as our souls as we endure the suffering of our parents and our inability to help them get where they’re going. The single greatest pressure on health care is the disproportionate resources devoted to the elderly, to not just the old, but to the old old, and yet no one says what all old children of old parents know: This is not just wrongheaded but steals the life from everyone involved.
And it seems all the more savage because there is such a simple fix: Give us the right to make provisions for when we want to go. Give families the ability to make a fair case of enough being enough, of the end’s, de facto, having come…My bet is that, even in America, even as screwed up as our health care is, we baby-boomers watching our parents’ long and agonizing deaths won’t do this to ourselves. We will surely, we must surely, find a better, cheaper, quicker, kinder way out.

yes, kinder gentler euthanasia.

And the bunk about the "old old" is nonsense: My aunt sacrificed her chance to marry and have a family to care for my grandmother, who died at 62 of hypertension.

In the olden days, we had more cripples and brain damaged folks but never mind.

ESPN anti Catholic rant shows us the future

I wrote an essay on how ESPN somehow found an American to write a smear of Catholics and our boxer Pacquiao. LINK

the problem: The writer, who is of mixed Filipina and Italian parents and was brought up in California, says she is a "Filipina". No, she is a "FilAm". She wasn't brought up here and elsewhere admits she doesn't know the language.

I point out that the PC need to blame Confucius more than Catholics, but it didn't stop the inevitable comment saying if you are against gay marriage you are a bigot.

Never mind that gays are tolerated and accepted here in the Philippines, because the Americans and American influenced gay brownshirts are trying to say that the "rough trade" in Manila with it's occasional deaths from lovers' quarrels are due to homophobia.

Yes, remember this.

Catholics are bigots.
Believing Protestants are Bigots.
Good Muslims are bigots
Good Chinese atheists who follow Confucian ethics are bigots.
Africans who follow traditional morality are bigots.
Native Americans who frown on same sex marriage are bigots.

The Hunger games

LeFemmes has a movie review here (with spoilers).

My granddaughter loved the movie but said it was "shaky" and dark (video darkness) But Orson Scott Card (a sci fi writer) points out that the "hand held" blurry way of photographing it was actually the way they could show everything yet not be graphic.

The books are even better, because the triology balances out the story.

eugenics cont

False Expectations: politics and the pursuit of the Saskatchuan myth

check page 109 and the following pages...Doublas "broke" with the communists, associated with someone who used to be in the KKK, his paper on eugenics, and his admiration for how the Nazis improved the economy....

Eugenics continued

I'm still googling around about the eugenics post (sorry that I moved the essay to another site).

Here is a pdf article on the mental health reforms.

In some ways it is a whitewash: it notes Douglas' eugenic background but insists he changed his mind.

And it insists that Sigurst "toured the province" before writing the report on how to reform medicine, but as I pointed out, the tour/meetings and writing of the report took less than 30 days. This is impossible, and suggests what was done is that there was already a plan, and the tour/meetings were merely to confirm the report or maybe adjust it a tad.

Finally, it includes a report on the LDS experiments.

a CBS article on the California sterilization program.

a google book on eugenics in psychiatry Keeping America sane...there is a section on how the immigrants were feebleminded and filling up jails and asylums...that might be why Mrs. Caswell and others note all those immgrants from eastern europe being sterilized. check before and after page 179.

long discussion on how immigrants, especially Jewish immigrants with marxist beliefs, were called mental defective.

so what about the Indians and Metis?

try the oxford handbook of the history of Eugenics LINK

Eugenics

At Hathi trust we find Sigerist's book
Civilization and disease, by Henry E. Sigerist

the book was listed as based on lectures givein in 1915 but here is an outtake:

SE AND THE LAW
psychiatrist, sterilized a woman who was suffering from a sexual
neurosis. In 1892 he castrated individuals for purely eugenic
reasons. Castration, however, was a serious matter because the op-
eration upsets the endocrine balance. The new methods of steriliza-
tion inaugurated in 1897 and 1898 by Kehrer in Heidelberg and
Ochsner in Chicago, namely, the severing, tying, or occlusion of
the Fallopian tubes in the woman, of the vas deferens in the man,
represented a great advance because they are relatively minor
operations which have no ill after-effects.
As soon as sterilization began to be practised by physicians as
a measure of preventing hereditary diseases, the legal question
arose. Sterilization , obviously, could be abused. If society was to
be protected, some legal regulation was necessary. The Catholic
Church has always taken a very drastic stand against all forms of
sterilization , finding its strongest sanction in the papal bull Casti
connubii of 1930. Legislation, therefore, was enacted primarily in
Protestant countries and, in Europe, first in the Swiss canton of
Vaud in 1921. An amendment to the Public Health Act declared
that an individual suffering from an incurable mental disease or
from feeble-mindedness could be sterilized. The operation had
to be authorized by the Public Health Council, which in turn
would act after having sought the expert advice of two physicians.
In the United States Indiana enacted a sterilization law as early
as 1907. It was declared unconstitutional in 1921, but new laws
were passed in 1927 and 1931. The situation was similar in other
states, and the question came before the Supreme Court in 1926.
Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' opinion was very important.
He said: 2*
It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute de-
generate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their im-
becility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from
continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vac-
cination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.
105

alas, when I tried to get the text for the following pages, the OCR wasn't working. so here are images of the pages

eugenics take two

sorry....I put an early draft with links and published them instead of saving them, by mistake. I often rewrite two or three times before posting but got interrupted.

The essay is here

Airbrushing Eugenics

Posted on May 21st, 2012

by Nancy Reyes in All News, Blogosphere News, Breaking News, Business News, Canada News, Country News, Economic News, Government News, History News, Medical News, North American News, Regional News, Research News, Society and Culture, UK News, US News, crime, health

Read 162 times.

Should folks name a high school after a man who supported Eugenics?
No, say the Canadian Metis blogger, ex-politician, and all around troublemaker Mrs. Gay Caswell on her blog.
So who is she complaining about now? A Canadian bigshot who implemented socialized medicine in that country. Complains Mrs C:

He followed the Regina Manifesto, a doctrinaire communist platform ….  As Premier he made himself Minister of Health.
He called in Dr.Sigurist, a Communist from John Hopkins University to write a report. The  Sigurist Report included everything and more that Tommy Douglas believed by his Masters’ Thesis.  Sigurist was appalled that the natives  were not segregated to die without tainting and infecting the superior  whites. It is said in McLeod and McLeod that Douglas accepted  the report and said “ great!” and went on to apply it.

Is she paranoid? Let’s google a bit to find out. The politician she is railing against is Tommy Douglas, a hero to Canadians for his pioneering of socialized medicine in that country.
A quick google will reveal that the politician in question and his party did support the Regina Manifesto which supported replacing capitalism with a socialist government run economy. (later they changed their mind in 1956).
And the (Canadian) National Post confirms that this leader did his his college thesis in eugenics, and that paper is honest enough to admit that this fact is being airbrushed from history, but the article insists that he did not push eugenics when he became premier. Similarly, Wikipedia confirms that he wrote his college thesis on eugenics, but denies he ever enacted legislation on these ideas.
Actually, Douglas didn’t have to implement eugenic sterilizations in western Canada: The Alberta Sexual Sterilization act was already in place, being passed in 1928 (and not repealed until 1972)

the Act was disproportionately applied to those in socially vulnerable positions, including: females, children, unemployed persons, domestics, rural citizens, unmarried, institutionalized persons, Roman and Greek Catholics, persons of Ukrainian, Native and Métis ethnicity.

But what about Saskatchewan? Their Sterilization act was almost passed in 1945, but ran into opposition. From Time Magazine:

… Last week neighboring Saskatchewan was debating whether it should follow suit. The controversy was touched off by a report on mental ills by Dr. C. M. Hincks, general director of the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene.
Among the report’s recommendations: “There is a special indication for  sterilization in connection with physically attractive moron girls prior to discharge from residential school [for mental defectives].”
Then came the reaction. In all Roman Catholic churches in Regina the Casti Connubü encyclical of Pope Pius XI…

Yup…opposition from those troublesome Catholics, not to mention reports of the eugenics experiment in Germany being a bit, how would one say it, a bit enthusiastic stopped the official program from spreading throughout Canada.
So who is Dr. Sigerist who helped Mr. Douglas implement the local provincial medical reform in 1944? A medical historian at Johns Hopkins who pushed for socialized medicine in the USA. He was a big shot in the US at one point, who even got on the cover of Time Magazine,(the glowing Time article is posted HERE).
What is Sigerist’s relationship to Canadian medical care? 

One of Premier T.C. Douglas’s priorities, within two days of his election on June 15, 1944, was to contact Dr. Henry Sigerist, professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, and author of Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union to head a health study commission.
Sigerist began work on September 6, 1944; completed visits and hearings on September 23; finished the report at five minutes after midnight on October 1; and presented his formal report on October 4.

Also check out  “Steps on the Road to Medicare: Why Saskatchewan Led the Way, byClarence Stuart Houston.GOOGLE BOOK LINK.
Yes, Douglas did ask for a restructuring of medicine in Saskatchewan, and there was a ” report” that outlined how to do it, and it was written so quickly (in one month?!) with no grassroots input that I suspect it was written according to a previously thought out idea that they wanted to implement.
In other words, it was a theory he wanted to implement, without bothering to ask local docs or citizens what they wanted.
Alas, Dr. Siegarist’s pioneering work has usually been ignored in the modern day health care discussion. Why? This Johns Hopkins article notes what got him in trouble was that he went overboard in praising Stalin’s policies while ignoring his atrocities.

“Enamored of the Soviet experiment, he was unwilling to see or believe the hideous purges, which he dismissed as part of a necessary transition period,” writes his daughter, Nora Sigerist Beeson,

No, he wasn’t a communist, just one of Stalin’s “useful idiots”….But his policies sound disturbingly prophetic:

Sigerist, writes Hutchinson, “shared with the architects of Soviet health policy under Stalin an outlook best described as medical totalitarianism. He really believed that humanity would be better off if every individual were under the medical supervision of the state from the cradle to the grave

And he ended up out of favor, not from the McCarthy keruffle of  the mid 1950’s, but much earlier: he started losing support after he supportedthe Soviet invasion of Finland in 1941.
Yet today, the airbrush is almost complete, and we will again see heroes made out of these people. For example, we are now seeing a resurrection of Siegerist the hero, whose  ideas have influenced many countries, including the UK.

He was therefore able to see the relationship between medicine and society in a historical context that is noteably absent from present debates about healthcare reform.

“He had spent years conducting comparative studies of ancient and modern medical cultures, and eventually concluded that medicine must undergo an evolutionary process that ends–by necessity–in socialized medicine. As a society became more complex, contended Sigerist, the medical care of its citizens could not successfully be left up to the individual.” John Hopkins University

Italics mine.
Ah, yes. Must have Doctors follow Health Care guidelines that dole out medicine according to the opinions of experts.  Death panels, anyone?
So why was such a great humanitarian like Sigerist, or a great progressive leaders like Doublas, involved in eugenics, and only changing their mind when the reports of Nazi implemention of similar policies caused the subject to be taboo?
Like most of their fellow elites, they saw it as an acceptiable scientific idea, but the Nazis just didn’t implement their eugenic policies correctly.

as Sigerist put it, eugenics was a “socio-biological experiment that deserves to be watched carefully, even if the present Nazi regime has made it subservient to a thoroughly reactionary—and unscientific—politico-racial ideology.”^[8] The German advocates of a racist biology were, in other words, false priests of a true religion. It seemed inconceivable to him that science would, in the long run, not stand with the forces of enlightenment and egalitarianism.

(italics mine).
He shouldn’t be condemned for such evil ideas, because everyone among the elite had the same ideas: As Pat Murphy notes:

So when the early Tommy Douglas adopted a doctrine that would now be considered socially unacceptable, he was in very notable company. With their appeal to expertise and science as a means of beneficially remaking society, they were the kind of people that we are regularly urged to listen to and be guided by today.

What’s wrong with this picture?
Uh, maybe because Alberta’s program didn’t get stopped until the 1972?
Or maybe because the program wasn’t just about the mentally disabled?
This article  admit that most of those forcibly sterilized had disabilities, but that

“many other marginalized groups—single mothers, First Nations and Métis
people, eastern Europeans, and poor people—were also disproportionately
represented amongst those subject to eugenic ideas and practices, such
as sterilization. Precisely why is not known.”

They don’t know why? duh.
Maybe that is why Mrs. Caswell is ranting against naming a high school for Douglas: it was her people who were the brunt of those sterilized in the name of eugenics. And although I can’t find if Douglas implemented sterilization programs, it should be noted he didn’t do much to stop them either. He instituted medical reforms in 1944 but the Time article says that the bill to start the eugenics program in Saskatchewan was proposed in 1945. Coincidence?
Doctors pressuring minorities to be sterilized is not a Canadian issue either: If you think American Indians weren’t pressured into being sterilized, you are kidding yourself. It got so bad that now we require a 30 day waiting period.
The dirty little secret of seeing people as ciphers by experts who only are doing it for the higher good has a long history in the twentieth century, and when you airbrush the truth out of history, you have to be careful, because the people who were harmed by their policies remember.
Mrs. Caswell may be a cranky troublemaking old lady but unlike the history writers of our time, she remembers the Eugenic ideas that have been airbrushed from the history of socialized medicine, and raises her voice in alarm so we don’t make such mistakes again.
—————————————————–
yes, I know I spelled Sigerist three different ways. His name is spelled differently in different articles.
Nancy Reyes is a retired physician living in the rural Philippines.

Methodists

Rev Sensing notes the death throes of the liberal US Methodists.

some excerpts


...More than anything else, what brings down Blue Model organizations is that the money stream starts drying up. This is what has happened in the UMC. Personal giving among Methodist church members has declined markedly. Much of the decline can be attributed to the ongoing recession, yes, but not all. Besides, charitable giving is as much a matter of habit as devotion. Even households that have recuperated from the recession have not, on the whole, returned to the prior level of giving, mainly because it is no longer a habit....



In the UMC, the Old Guard are the boards and agencies and the spin-off movements and various constituencies of the church. These are 100 percent American and almost all white. The Young Turks are non-U.S. Methodists, mainly Africans, whose numbers are growing rapidly at the same time that domestic American Methodists continue to dwindle. In 2008, 30 percent of delegates came from outside the United States; this year it was 41 percent. No one doubts that in 2020, foreign Methodist delegates will be the majority and that may well happen only four years from now.

With over 4 million and soon to be 5 million members, the African churches are now too large to ignore. A few liberal activists, in their blogs, complained about Africans from impoverished countries who don't contribute dollars into the denomination now having so much power. But disenfranchising the poor is not a successful battle cry for progressives. Some U.S. liberals quietly try to paint the Africans as primitives who reject enlightened Western liberalism. ...

Inevitably the growing African membership will alter these preoccupations with American leftist themes. They believe the church's role is primarily evangelistic, not political.

That last part is important; because the problems here in the third world are corruption and problems due to personal irresponsibility (e.g. HIV).

That is why, at the end of my essay ridiculing the tiny "Lady Gaga" protest here, I noted that the press was missing the really important story:

An evangelical upsurge in Asia that could reform the culture of corruption of East Asia.

Was the Soros crowd hitting Pac man because he might become president?

I have written two articles at my BNN blog that hinge on gay marriage as part of the discussion:

It’s the PacMan vs the PC which tries to explain why gays are part of Pinoy cultures, but gay marriage is not, and that the big fight right now is the US and their UN/EU cronies trying to impose a US type of promiscuity is okay/push contraception even for teens/abortion mindset on a country that is suspicious of this.

Gay marriage here is not an issue, so why the fuss?

Michelle Malkin, a FilAm writer, notes that it was a set up, by the Soros funded progressive groups, and names names.

But I think it goes further than that.

Supsup lost the Miss Universe program for saying she wouldn't marry a man outside her religion.

Manny has recently found Jesus, and is active with the Catholic bishops opposing the RH bill....
The problem? No one in the US press seems to be following the RH bill fight, so why was he targeted?

the answer: Because if he runs for president, like Erap, he will win in a landslide.

The might be a preventive strike against him.

Why does Obama fail to Understand American culture?

that discusses the three views of family life: that of Obama, the isolated "Julia" with a government to help her, the Confucian/Asian variety of extended family that has both obligations and help, and the American communitarian view, where small intermediate organizations help.
Gay marriage, like Obama's health care bill, will destroy the churches that won't go along with him and the intermediate community organizations run by church related groups. However, for Asians, the family is the big issue. There is no place in Confucian family life for gay marriage, and no one would care if the government instituted it because rule of law is weak.

-------------------------------
a good article on forced abortions in China funded by US money can be found at PJMedia.
a report on ex president Fujimora's forced sterilization campaign can be found HERE.
A BBC report on population control that includes information about Indira Gandhi's program of forced sterilizations can be found HERE.
Iran's Islam friendly family planning program is reviewed HERE.
Bengaladesh's grass roots approach is described Here.
Under the present family planning program, that encourages natural family planning, prolonged breast feeding, "traditional methods" and supplemented by private and NGO supplied contraception, over the last 20 years, the Philippines fertility rate has gone down from 7 to 3.1 in 2008 and is probably lower today.  Replacement fertility is 2.0.
When 30 percent of women have no trained birth attendent, the question is if one needs 

China's forced abortions

an article at PJ Media:

The hearing centered around the ongoing case of human-rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who is still being held in a Beijing hospital along with this family.
Smith called Chen “among the bravest defenders of women’s rights in history.”
As a result of trying to defend women against forced abortions and forced sterilizations, Chen, who escaped from house arrest to the U.S. Embassy last month, has suffered “cruel torture, degrading treatment, unjust incarceration, and multiple beatings,” Smith said.
But it was the last woman to testify on today’s panel that painted a picture of the violence from which Chen was trying to rescue Chinese women.
Mei Shunping, born in Tianjin, China, 20 years before the one-child policy was introduced by the People’s Republic, told the committee that she is just one of many women “whose lives were destroyed by the policy — the women that Chen Guangcheng tried to help so courageously.”
Mei was married in 1981, and gave birth to a son two years later. At the time, women were supposed to automatically get an IUD implanted or husbands were to be sterilized after the first child’s birth. Doctors refused to implant the IUD in Mei, though, for medical reasons.
“Without the IUD, I became the prime target for surveillance by the factory’s Family Planning Commission,” Mei said. “From 1983 to 1990, because of the one-child policy, I had to have five abortions.”
Mei noted the workplace surveillance put in place to prevent unapproved births and the corresponding punishments for getting pregnant.
“My factory’s Family Planning Commission used three levels of control: at the factory level, in the factory clinic and on the factory floor. If one worker violated the rules, all would be punished. Workers monitored each other. Women of reproductive age accounted for 60 percent of my factory floor. Colleagues were suspicious and hostile to each other because of the one-child policy. Two of my pregnancies were reported by my colleagues to the Family Planning Commission,” she said.
“When discovered, pregnant women would be dragged to undergo forced abortions—there was no other choice. We had no dignity as potential child-bearers. By order of the factory’s Family Planning Commission, every month during their menstrual period, women had to undress in front of the birth planning doctor for examination. If anyone skipped the examination, she would be forced to take a pregnancy test at the hospital. We were allowed to collect a salary only after it was confirmed that we were not pregnant.”

just thinking

The usually serene Anchoress is worried that Obama is openly attempting to cause a schism in the Catholic church: Key quote comes from a film on her blog:

“Tell President Obama to respect a woman’s choice to practice her beliefs…not his.”

this especially goes for Obama's pushing his sexual mores on countries that still rely on strong family ties and customs to care for each other.

Here, Senator Manny, aka Pacman, who recently found religion, is now under attack. (via Drudge)


 In Paquiao's case, it might backfire.

Right now, the church is being attacked for opposing an RH bill to "control population" by pushing it to the poor ingovernment clinics (as opposed to supplying it via the private sector, as it is now). Along with this is a new "sex ed" course in public schools, and in the wings, legal divorce and abortion.

 PNoy is trying to counter the Catholic opposition to these bills by courting the Evangelicals, a group that includes many businessmen and middle class people and does use birth control.

And everyone, including the Pope, is worried that soon there will be an explosion of abuse or similar charges against the church here in the Philippines, in order to destroy it as was done in Ireland (where 257 cases of abuse over 85 years was blown out of proportion to destroy people's beliefs).

But  when it comes to gays, who are not really discriminated againt here in the sexually easy going Philippines, it is the Evangelicals who also would be more strict.... the result of gay bigotry against the hero of the Philippines might result in his support by that influential group also (like Estrada, he is a populist from the people, not a scion of the rich families, like Arroyo or Aquino and most of those who run the Philippines).

The old Lefty Bishop Cruz comments here pretty well gives the problem: Making population control the cure all, because they see fewer poor people the way to eliminate poverty when corruption and bribery is the real reason for poverty...

I've worked in third world countries, and we provided contraception to space children to protect the lives of the mother and child was part of our outreach. But this was voluntary, and not government mandated, and used local "pill ladies" to supply contraceptives...

But once you get governments involved, you get human rights abuses, since it makes children the enemy to be eliminated....and programs in such diverse places as India and Peru (not to mention China) have resulted in horrific human rights abuses, where the governments, not the women, making the choice.

as for "same sex marriage": the problem with this is that this idea is based on the modern feminist idea that gender is a social construct, and that there is no difference between men and women. And this gender confusion in the US is simply not backed by either custom or biology. To make things worse, many people here are aghast at the promiscuity of our TV shows...what we see on some shows here would make Nero blush...

Societal and religious leaders point to the poor state of  women in the US, who are abandoned to raise their children alone, suggests the modern deconstruction of gender is not a good idea, and indeed, might be working against the stability of the family.

Poor people who have experience know this, which is why Obama's gay rights agenda is so abhorrent to poor countries, that see this as an attack against the family...

----------------------\\

update; I edited the article and tried to make it clearer and posted in on BloggerNews LINK

God and time

Father Z has a discussion on time and eternity: How the early church fathers saw God as outside of time...so he is more than "eternal":

Eternity can be thought of different ways.
First, eternity can be completely independent of time. Something eternal in this sense is entirely outside of time. St. Augustine, who was a Neoplatonist in this sense, thought of God this way....
The Greeks, from Parmeides to Plato to Plotinus all wrote about eternity. Christian ideas of eternity were explored by authors like St. Augustine (+430), Boethius (+c.526), Eriugena (+c.877), St. Anselm (+1109), St. Thomas Aquinas (+1274).
When we say in these prayers that God is sempiternus we do not thereby believe as Catholics that God is “everlasting” in the sense of being in time, that is all points of time, but without beginning or end. God is eternal in the sense of being beyond time, entirely transcending time.

if you say "so what", it is because you aren't an astrophysicist.

God is outside the space/time continuum, and so even if you posit 12 dimensions, he is there...

and interestingly, sci fi author Orson Scott Card mentioned in an essay on a different subject that the God of the LDS is inside time...that figures, since the deity of the LDS resembles Zeus more than Jehovah...

PODCASTS ON THE RESURRECTION

At Hieropraxis: Resurrection myth or fact?

part one part two

(the answer: Both)