LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY seshen)

Sex Crimes Cover-Up By Vatican?

(CBS) For decades, priests in this country abused children in parish after parish while their superiors covered it all up. Now it turns out the orders for this cover up were written in Rome at the highest levels of the Vatican. The confidential Vatican document, obtained by CBS News, lays out a church policy that calls for absolute secrecy when it comes to sexual abuse by priests - anyone who speaks out could be thrown out of the church.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY seshen)

By now it is well known not only that Mel Gibson has invested $25 million to produce a film of Jesus' Passion, but also that a group of Catholic and Jewish New Testament scholars found that a version of its script contained strong anti-Jewish potential. I don't know if the movie is anti-Semitic--I have only seen a version of the script--but the reaction to the scholars' objections could be interpreted as anti-Semitic.

Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion"

Your thoughts?

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

An interesting essay on Alternet suggests that the US has become a religion instead of a nation.

The explanation is wearing a little thin. Are we really expected to believe that the members of the U.S. security services are the only people who cannot see that many Iraqis wish to rid themselves of the U.S. army as fervently as they wished to rid themselves of Saddam Hussein? What is lacking in the Pentagon and the White House is not intelligence (or not, at any rate, of the kind we are considering here), but receptivity. Theirs is not a failure of information, but a failure of ideology.


To understand why this failure persists, we must first grasp a reality which has seldom been discussed in print. The United States is no longer just a nation. It is now a religion. Its soldiers have entered Iraq to liberate its people not only from their dictator, their oil and their sovereignty, but also from their darkness. As George Bush told his troops on the day he announced victory: "Wherever you go, you carry a message of hope – a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, 'To the captives, "come out," and to those in darkness, "be free".'"


So American soldiers are no longer merely terrestrial combatants; they have become missionaries. They are no longer simply killing enemies; they are casting out demons. The people who reconstructed the faces of Uday and Qusay Hussein carelessly forgot to restore the pair of little horns on each brow, but the understanding that these were opponents from a different realm was transmitted nonetheless. Like all those who send missionaries abroad, the high priests of America cannot conceive that the infidels might resist through their own free will; if they refuse to convert, it is the work of the devil, in his current guise as the former dictator of Iraq.