POPE MANIA

We are caught in a tsunami of Pope mania.  It is easy to forget that the Pope represents a religion that imposes a broad cavern between perceived reality and what is actually real. 

We now live in a world where the socio-religious would impose their dogma on all mankind.  The purpose of the Catholic Church (and all religions) is to consolidate ignorance under the banner of immortality.  If life after death doesn’t exist there is no reason for religion; so the Catholic Church deals with death by abolishing it.

Twenty percent of the world in Christian and sixty percent of that world is Catholic; and for that Catholic majority the Pope is the direct, infallible representative of God.

It was Popes that instituted the Inquisition from 1231 to 1820.  Millions were tortured by the Catholic Church and died horrible deaths, including many scientific notables at the hands of the inquisition. 

God has released his wrath and then changed his mind many time with the succession of Popes.   Even in the last century Pope Pius XII supported the Nazi rounding up and imprisonment of Jews.

  

Now this Pope is expounding somewhat limited liberal ideals.  Along with addressing climate change he also states that women who have had abortions and homosexuals may not go to hell if they return to the church and confess their sins – not well received by much of the misogynistic Catholic clergy that believe Eve was responsible for original sin and homosexuality is an abomination. 

The Catholic Church, which this Pope represents, requires blind faith and allegiance.

    

The Churches’ doctrines are:

• A belief in the virgin birth and other outlandish miracles.
• The veneration of human sacrifice and transubstantiation.
• Sexual suppression – opposition to birth control…
• Female phobia – dictating female reproduction policies…
• Censorship.
• A promise of resurrection and an afterlife.
• The repression of logic and suppression of scientific enquiry – stem cell research...
• Intolerance, bigotry and pious outrage – organize opposition to gay rights initiatives.
• Expounding a belief in Gods, angles and demons.   Now, in the twenty-first century, the Catholic Church still has a group priest especially trained to perform exorcisms on the mentally ill.

Religion thrives in the absence of reason.   The greater the absurdity the stronger the beliefs. 

This new Pope is expounding some liberal ideas, but saying that women who have had abortions and gays may return to The Church is the equivalent of the evil witch of fairy tales that eats children sending flowers and candy packages to pregnant women.  He is still the representative of a repressive and indoctrinating religion defending twelfth century dogma in a twenty-first century world.

the Ol’Buzzard

ADAM AND EVE

It is pretty obvious to anyone reading my blog that, like Karl Marx, I consider religions as the Opium of the Masses.

Religion and intellect have knocked heads since the true founding of the Catholic Church at the Council of Nicea held around 350 AD.   From the earliest time through the Dark Ages The Church did everything in its power to discredit and destroy all forms of enlightenment from science to philosophy to mathematics.  

The massive body of knowledge that germinated in early Greece was considered heresy, and those intrepid enough to pursue enlightenment were put to death by The Church. 

Throughout the Dark Ages all accepted truths had to be based on the Bible as the only true knowledge.   And even today, great numbers of our population choose ignorance over knowledge, and insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

The Bible, a loose woven myth disguised as history, begins its story with Adam and Eve. 

Last night, as I lay awake in bed, as I often do, I considered the claim that through DNA we can trace the human race back to one woman somewhere is Africa – and African Eve.

 I don’t dispute that, but the more I considered this claim the more it seemed likely to me that there has to be more than one Eve.  

Now, I know that no one wants to read pages correlating math and history; and even though I spent the morning researching and correlating I won’t bore you with the minutiae. 

But, to give an overview I must start out with an explanation of exponential counting: you have two parents; four grandparents; eight great grandparents; sixteen great-great grandparents – the numbers double from each preceding generation.  

   

If you go back 20 generations (rounding off some numbers for ease of counting) you are directly kin to one million great-great… grandparents.   If you go back thirty generations you would be equally kin to one billion ancestors.

Now the trick is to track the population of the earth and determine the date when you are kin to everyone on earth. 

Using 20 years as the approximate length of a generation I determined that after 29 generations (the first generation is a zero) or 560 years - around the year 1460 -  our ancestors numbered 500 million: the same as the entire population of the earth in at that time.

If we pick any female in 1460 we have to consider her as an EVE for our generation.

Now, selecting that female from 1460 and counting her ancestors back into time we find that around the year 840 she is kin to 250 million ancestors: about the same number as the population of the earth in that year.   Therefore any female from the year of 840 can be considered and the second Eve.   

The population stabilizes to 200 million around the year zero; and the third Eve appears about 220 BC.      After this, approximately every 500 years we have a new Eve. 

Human population slowly decreases, until around 8,000 BC when we have an earth population of 5 million, dropping to 3 million about 10,000 BC.

If we continue backwards, somewhere between three and four million years ago the original Eve of our species walked across the savannas of Africa.  This is our African Eve.  

It is quite possible, if not probable, that someone will shoot holes all through this hypothesis; but that is the way science works.   

My wife gave me five books for Solstice and I probably could have better spent this time reading.

the Ol’Buzzard

A world clock worth checking out - there are many more.

O'B

TROLLS UNDER THE SCHOOL

I was watching the President with Chris Matthews on Hard Ball Thursday night.   Once again, Chris Matthews started to expound on the significance of the Pope and the Catholic Church in society.   I consider Chris Matthews an intelligent man and I marvel at the blind faith and acceptance he seems to attend to the Catholic faith. 

Once you consider the Catholic indoctrination of its parishioners from childhood it is more understandable.   Catholic children are christened at birth.  Families are required to attend church.  Children of Catholics are placed in Catholic schools where religion is constantly reinforced by nuns.  About the age of reason children are instructed for Confirmation and then ceremoniously inducted into the fold.   Young Catholics attend church – take Communion – and participate in Confession.  And then, if they are like Chris Matthews they attend a Catholic College. 

Friends of ours that taught school in an Eskimo Village in Northwestern Alaska related this story:

An elementary school had been built decades before by the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs.)    The school building was built on stilts because of the permafrost (heated buildings on the ground sink into the earth over a period of time.)  The early teachers constantly had problems with children hiding under the school, and one day one of the children was found frozen under the building.  The teachers started telling the kids that there were trolls under the school that would eat them.  As those children became adults they told their children of the trolls under the school.    The story was repeated for generations.  

The teachers told us that the school had burned down and been replaced with a modern facility and that the adults in the village were relived because they no longer had to worry about trolls taking their children. 

Indoctrination is the way that religion protects itself from common sense and logical inquiry.    It starts with children, and the premise is to accept on faith and never question – questioning is a sin against God.  

God religions are plagues on this earth.   The positive things that religions tout are paled by the wars and genocide and hatred and racism and ignorance they spawns.  Christianity can not stand up to scrutiny; so the question is why does it still wield such power in the twenty-first century?

the Ol’Buzzard

THE ABORTION DEBATE

The Republicans war on women

We always blame the Republican Party for their staunch views against women and abortion.   Actually the Republican Party is just an arm – and extension – of the Christian religion. 

From the very beginning the Christian religion has viewed women as lesser beings than men. 

 Eve was responsible for introducing sin into the world.   Women are temptresses that ensnare men with their sex.   Women’s bodies are evil and produce unclean thoughts.  Men’s tits and nipples are fine, but women’s tits should be covered, and a woman’s nipples – are an offence to God…hide the children’s eyes….they will go blind!  

Since Roe vs. Wade women are now considered potential baby killers.    There are fundamentalist churches (and the Catholic Church) that are even opposed to birth control.   The Bible condemns male masturbation – but the churches seem willing to overlook this concept.  

Except for the Catholic Church:  Where every sperm is sacred. 

Women don't have to put up with this: they are over fifty percent of the population - but religion keeps their minds enslaved. 

the Ol'Buzzard

I CAN NOT SAY IT ANY BETTER

AND WITH A BRITISH ACCENT!

the Ol'Buzzard

THE CHURCH OF SAINT PETER

“Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.”,

(25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom, by Alan Moore Abrams.)

You can find no more sexually restrictive culture than the Catholic Church. Its views on women, premarital sex, recreational sex, abortion, homosexuality, sodomy, oral sex, contraception and celibacy for the clergy are straight out of the middle ages.

Lately, the pedophilia scandal that seems to be wide spread throughout the Catholic clergy has begun to surface.

Celibacy is an unnatural state for an adult male, and it begs the question as to the mental state of those willing to commit to the life style; and also asks of the attraction that some must desire for inclusion in an all male community.

It is now known that the Vatican has been knowledgeable and complicit in the cover up of priest pedophiles; and, perhaps we will never know the extent of the problem. Sexual predation by the clergy has undoubtedly gone on, undocumented, for hundreds of years.

Pope Benedict XVI has announced his resignation without any real explanation. Joseph Ratzinger’s involvement as a combatant in the Nazi army during the Second World War was known by the church elders before his selection as Pope and must have been resolved to their satisfaction. We also know that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before becoming Pope Benedict, was charged with collecting and overseeing all accounts of clergy pedophilia and sexual misconduct.

The Vatican has denied that the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI is due to health issues, so the obvious question is: has something surfaced that would be a further embarrassment to The Church?

Notice that the national news media and pundits are avoiding any investigation. This is a hot potato issue that no one wishes to broach.

Bless you
the Ol'Buzzard

A BUZZARD EGG OMELET #11

Happy Easter

All right, I get it.   A twelve year old girl was impregnated by…..  and had a baby that three hundred years later was declared a god at the Council of Nicaeae.    The religion that formed from this following venerates human sacrifice and proudly displays the icons of the event (a human being cruelly tortured to death through crucifixion) as its logo.   Even more disturbing, to me, is that some sects of this religion practice ritual cannibalism, claiming to actually eat the flesh and drink the blood of this two thousand year old dead individual during their communion.  

All of this I have grown up with and, though bizarre, have come to accept as part of the culture.  

But the thing that I don’t understand is the egg laying rabbits.

Really – egg laying rabbits?

   

I’m just asking?

The Ol’Buzzard

SEX EDUCATION IN SCHOOL

I am a staunch proponent of teaching Sex Ed in school (Sunday Schools.)  

I offer this clip for education and enlightenment. 

 

Wanda Sykes could be arrested in fourteen states.

and I could also.

the Ol'Buzzard

MARVELOUS CURES SOON TO BE AVAILABLE

Oops!

During the twelfth century there are records of the Christian church forbidding the practice of medicine.   People who attempted to comfort the sick and the dying were often proclaimed witches or heretics and tortured and killed.   Though opiates were available they were forbidden for the relief of pain for the seriously injured.   It was felt that pain was God given and to interfere with it was heresy.   Priest often administered treatment by touching the infirmed with the bone of a saint, and with prayer. 

This was the teaching drawn from a book that was written by a primitive desert people who considered a wheelbarrow cutting edge technology.

In 1998 biologist James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin cultivated the first line of human embryonic stem cells.   The work was revolutionary and offered potential cures for cancer, Alzheimer, Parkinson, HIV; as well as the ability to grow and replace damaged organs and tissue.   But this curative research required the destruction of human embryos.

When our President George W. Bush, supported by the fundamentalist ignorant still clinging to two thousand year old religious dogma, restricted the use of human embryonic stem cells the genetic advancement in the treatment of human infirmity screeched to a stop.  

In the years since, numerous biologists have attempted to create compatible stem cells by regressing adult human cells back to an embryonic stage.  In every case when these regressed cells were tested they were attacked by the human immune system and destroyed.  

The misconception promulgated by the religious right has been that stem cells would be procured from aborted fetuses and that women would become pregnant in order at sell their fertilized eggs for money; again, stirring up the female phobia of the Republican base.   In actuality the cells would have been produced in a Petri Dish that would never have advanced to a fetus. 

The fetus obsession and scientific ignorance of the Republican base has retarded our medical research and condemned the suffering and dying to new decades without relief. 

But after all, suffering is God’s design, and all advancements of science must be held suspect – or denied if it doesn’t mesh with the teachings of the Primitive Age Tome that should rule all our lives.

  the Ol'Buzzard

GAY MARRIAGE - THE SOLUTION

THE RIGHT OF GAYS TO MARRY AND THEIR INTRENCHED OPPONENTS

The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco, in a 2-1 decision, overturned Proposition-8: a California Constitutional Amendment declaring ‘marriage’ as a union only between one man and one woman; which effectively nullified California’s law allowing gay and lesbian couples to ‘marry’. 

This ‘marriage’ impasse has at its core the goal of Christian churches attempting to impose their moral doctrines on the population at large.   

The Mormon Church heavily funded, in a covert religious movement, California’s Proposition-8.   The Catholic Church has also been a prime mover in de facto-bigotry against the gay and lesbian community.   In Maine, the Catholic Church of Portland was a primary opponent (along with fundamentalist fanatics) in defeating the Equal ‘Marriage’ Amendment proposed by the Maine Legislature. 

I would like to propose my own amendment:

The Ol’Buzzard’s Get Rid of ‘Marriage’ Amendment.

1. The Federal Government should only recognize Domestic Partnership Licenses.

2.  Only Domestic Partnership Licenses can be issued by states, and these licenses have all the rights and legal protection now provided by a ‘Marriage’ License.

3.  After receiving a Domestic Partnership License couples are free to affirm a religious covenant in the faith of their choice where they may receive a Marriage Certificate of affirmation.   However, these religious certificates will have no legal or binding authority outside of the religious institution of their issue.

the Ol’Buzzdar