Former Scientologists Speak Out About Abuse
“The Church of Scientology is expected to come under closer scrutiny over the coming days.
The Senate is preparing to vote on a possible inquiry into alleged abuses against Australians which have occurred within the organisation.
Tonight’s Four Corners program details claims of mistreatment and allegations that some women were pressured to have abortions.
Former members in Australia and in the United States have spoken openly for the first time about their lives in the Church.
Scientology has denied their claims but their stories raise more questions about whether the Church of Scientology should keep its status as a tax free charity.
Emily Bourke compiled this report.
EMILY BOURKE: The former members of the Church of Scientology who’ve spoken out were members of an elite religious unit known as the Sea Organisation.
One former Sea Org member whose identity will be revealed in tonight’s Four Corners program has detailed allegations of a strict regime of discipline and punishment in place during the 1960s.
SEA ORG MEMBER: I mean looking back I, you know, I deeply regret my, even my fringe participation in some of the things that went on. And I’m ashamed of some of them.
People were thrown overboard. Hands bound and feet bound and blindfolded. You know women of 55-years-old, you know, for, for, for running a process incorrectly. A counselling technique incorrectly in a, in a auditing session, you know.”
Read more at ABC News (thanks, Fosca)
Where Do Atheists Come From?
“HERE’s a fact to flatter the unbelievers among you: the bright young things at the University of Oxford are among the most godless groups ever studied in the UK. Of 728 students surveyed in 2007, 48.9 per cent claimed not to believe in any god, with 49.6 per cent claiming no religious affiliation. And while a very small number of Britons typically label themselves as “atheist” or “agnostic” (most surveys put it at about 5 per cent), an astonishing 57.3 per cent of the Oxford sample did.
This may come as no surprise. After all, atheism is the natural stance of the educated and the informed, is it not? It is only to be expected that Oxford students should be wise to what their own professor Richard Dawkins calls “self-indulgent, thought-denying skyhookery” – and others call “faith”. The old Enlightenment caricature, it seems, is true after all: where Reason reigns, God retires.
Of course, things are never quite that simple. Within the sample, for instance, the postgraduates (that is, the even-better educated) were notably more religious than the undergraduates, in terms of both belief in God and self-description. Although the greater number of non-Europeans in the postgraduate population is almost certainly a significant factor here, evidence from elsewhere backs the idea that there is no straightforward relationship between atheism and education.”
Read more at New Scientist (thanks, Tiram)
Bishops Say Clergy Will Be Sued For Refusing Civil Partnerships
“Church of England bishops argued yesterday that clergy members could be sued for refusing to carry out religious civil partnerships for gay couples.
Earlier this week, the House of Lords approved an amendment to the Equality Bill allowing faiths to hold the ceremonies if they wish.
The Lords vote does not make the change law, as it must be approved by the government and an amendment must be made to the Civil Partnership Act.
Despite the fact that Lord Waheed Alli’s amendment made it clear that churches would have the option of hosting the ceremonies, the Bishop of Winchester Michael Scott-Joynt claimed that gay couples could use human rights legislation to sue vicars who chose not to officiate for them.”
Read more at Pink News
Mars Hill Church Founder Mark Driscoll: “Avatar” Is the Most Satanic Film of All-Time
Mark Driscoll thinks so. In fact, the founder of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church told his congregation last Sunday that the highest grossing movie of all time is “the most demonic, satanic film I’ve ever seen.”
If you follow local theological circles, you know Driscoll is something of a superstar among national evangelical leaders. Or at least, he’s someone to watch.
Driscoll helped build the popular Mars Hill Church into one of the most talked about evangelical mega-churches in the country, despite its home at the heart of a secular stronghold. That distinction, combined with his church’s culturally savvy but socially and theologically conservative views, gives him significant weight in religious debate.
Though his “Avatar” comments made up just a fraction of the Feb. 14 sermon, Driscoll managed to condemn the film in both religious and nonreligious terms. He denounced its “demonic paganism,” but also a message that “primitive is good and advanced is bad.” He resented its portrayal of a “false Jesus” and a “false heaven,” but also the idea of “connecting, literally, with trees and animals and beasts and birds.”
Brain surgery boosts spirituality
Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas.
To investigate the neural basis of spirituality, Cosimo Urgesi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Udine, and his colleagues turned to people with brain tumours to assess the feeling before and after surgery. Three to seven days after the removal of tumours from the posterior part of the brain, in the parietal cortex, patients reported feeling a greater sense of self-transcendence. This was not the case for patients with tumours removed from the frontal regions of the brain.
“Self-transcendence used to be considered just by philosophers and crank new age people,” says co-author Salvatore Aglioti, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Sapienza University of Rome. “This is the first really close-up study on spirituality. We’re dealing with a complex phenomenon that’s close to the essence of being human.”
The authors pinpointed two parts of the brain that, when damaged, led to increases in spirituality: the left inferior parietal lobe and the right angular gyrus. These areas at the back of the brain are involved in how we perceive our bodies in spatial relation to the external world. The authors of the study in the journal Neuron1, say that their findings support the connection between mystic experiences and feeling detached from the body.
“The most surprising part was the rapidity of the change,” says Urgesi. “This discovery shows that some complex personality traits are more malleable than previously thought.”
Archaeological Find Reshaping Human History
“A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution.
They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.”
Read more at Newsweek (thanks, SonOfSam)
Atheistic Billboards Disturb God-Fearing America
“In a country where more than eight in 10 people regard themselves as religious, it takes more than a little guts to preach about a world without God. But that’s the message that is creeping across America, spreading ripples of dissent in its wake.
From Tampa in Florida, to Cincinnati, Ohio, and all the way across to Sacramento in California, billboards have been cropping up with messages that run across the grain of America’s normally devout discourse. “Don’t believe in God? You’re not alone!” were the first posters to be put up, in Arizona, Colorado, Texas and parts of the north-east. “Being a good person doesn’t require God,” read another.
The billboards are the work of a national group of atheists – or nontheists, as they call themselves – called United Coalition of Reason that seeks to encourage nonbelievers throughout America by bringing them together.”
Read more at The Guardian (thanks, KirstyJ)
Atheists are wrong to claim science and religion are incompatible
“General Synod heard that public figures such as Professor Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, use a “crude caricature” of faith to depict worshippers as “blind” and “irrational”.
Clergy and lay members of the Church said it was perfectly possible to believe in God and Darwin’s theory of evolution, and said that religion can explain areas of existence that science cannot.
But they warned against treating the Bible as a scientific textbook, and claimed the “naivety” of some creationists can damage the standing of Christians who work in science and provide ammunition to their enemies.
So-called “young Earth” creationists in the US believe the story of Genesis is literally true and that God made the world in six days.
Peter Capon, a lay member of Synod from Manchester diocese who tabled the Private Member’s Motion on the compatibility of science and religious belief, said that Christians believe the world exists because of the will of God whereas atheists consider this to be a “complete delusion”.
He went on: “We wish to refute the idea promoted by atheist scientists that science is on the side of the atheist in answering these sorts of questions.
“We wish to refute the perception that you have to choose between science and faith.”
Read more at RichardDawkins.net
Futher reading at BBC News
Valentine’s Day – The Science, The History And The Myths
“More than a Hallmark holiday, Valentine’s Day, like Halloween, is rooted in pagan partying.
The lovers’ holiday traces its roots to raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility, said classics professor Noel Lenski of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The annual pagan celebration, called Lupercalia, was held every year on February 15 and remained wildly popular well into the fifth century A.D.—at least 150 years after Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
“It is clearly a very popular thing, even in an environment where the [ancient] Christians are trying to close it down,” Lenski said. “So there’s reason to think that the Christians might instead have said, OK, we’ll just call this a Christian festival.”
The church pegged the festival to the legend of St. Valentine.
According to the story, in the third century A.D. Roman Emperor Claudius II, seeking to bolster his army, forbade young men to marry. Valentine, it is said, flouted the ban, performing marriages in secret.”
Read more at National Geographic (thanks, SuZi)
