For the world to tackle truly important problems, people have to stop looking to religion to guide their moral compasses. Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can — and should — be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life. Video after the cut.
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A secret document which sets out a procedure for dealing with child sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church is examined by Panorama. Crimen Sollicitationis was enforced for 20 years by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became the Pope. It instructs bishops on how to deal with allegations of child abuse against priests and has been seen by few outsiders. Critics say the document has been used to evade prosecution for sex crimes. It instructs them how to deal with priests who solicit sex from the confessional. It also deals with “any obscene external act … with youths of either sex.” It imposes an oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest dealing with the allegation and any witnesses. Breaking that oath means excommunication from the Catholic Church. Watch the documentary:
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Skepchick zero’s it down: But please stop believing that you need to give money, time, trust, and love to this vile organization of real-life demons and monsters. You might think your parish is different, that your priest is better, but please remember that that’s what everybody else thought, too. They don’t care about your soul. They don’t care about your life. They don’t care about your kids. They will take your money to buy more gold crosses, and they will rape you and hide the evidence.
Skepchick » The Pope Ignored Child Rape.
Video after the cut…
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“Dark flow” is no fluke, suggests a new study that strengthens the case for unknown, unseen “structures” lurking on the outskirts of creation. In 2008 scientists reported the discovery of hundreds of galaxy clusters streaming in the same direction at more than 2.2 million miles (3.6 million kilometers) an hour.
This mysterious motion can’t be explained by current models for distribution of mass in the universe. So the researchers made the controversial suggestion that the clusters are being tugged on by the gravity of matter outside the known universe.
Now the same team has found that the dark flow extends even deeper into the universe than previously reported: out to at least 2.5 billion light-years from Earth.
Via: National Geographics
Interresting BBC (?) documentory about the great William S. Burroughs (1914-1997).
Via U B U W E B – Film & Video: William S. Burroughs – Burroughs The Movie (1985).
Kenneth Anger: No, I am not a Satanist
Kenneth Anger’s crazy, gorgeous, disturbing films almost landed him in jail. The avant-garde pioneer talks Simon Hattenstone through all his demons.
via the The Guardian: Kenneth Anger: ‘No, I am not a Satanist’
“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn.”
Evolution is a term to define only one organism and that’s the self. The self is the universe, the self is the alpha and omega, god, and infinity, and that’s the only thing that evolves because we are all part of the self. Nothing goes through an evolutionary process alone or without direct benefit to the whole. So when you begin to think that there’s this controlling elite, this controlling hand behind the curtains leading the planet to destruction…
When you think the end is near, the apocalypse, Armageddon, and when you think we as a species are doomed, it is not they, it is you that brought this about, and for a very good reason. You are evolving. Stop blaming everybody and everything else. Quit panicking about global tyranny and natural disaster and pay attention, because the world is telling you something; it’s tell you exactly what is wrong with you and how to fix it. (Excerpt from the film)
A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving. Scientists supersize quantum mechanics : Nature News.
The entire star explodes, the largest explosion ever recorded: a supergiant star two hundred times bigger than the sun utterly obliterated by runaway thermonuclear reactions triggered by gamma ray-driven antimatter production. The resulting blast was visible for months because it unleashed a cloud of radioactive material over fifty times the size of our own star, giving off a nuclear fission glow visible from galaxies away.
Read More http://www.dailygalaxy.com
The Shooting War: Images from the World’s Most Acclaimed Conflict Photographers
The Devil is living in the Vatican, says the Pope’s chief exorcist. Well if that’s the case, burn down the Vatican and burn the hypocrits that live there. Problem solved.
Let us strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest – Denis Diderot
1917: Promotional portrait of American actor Theda Bara (1885 – 1955) wearing an Egyptian headdress and breast plates with a snake design for director J Gordon Edwards’ film, ‘Cleopatra’.
(Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Winter pruritis can be quite uncomfortable and annoying, since it is often accompanied by chronic itching and, sometimes, inflammation and swelling….
Michael Hutchence
David Carradine
Kristian Digby
Frantisek Kotzwara
Erotic asphyxiation @ wikipedia
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.” – Henry David Thoreau
Apart from a tsunami, there is another effect of this weekend’s earthquake in Chile. NASA says that days will now be shorter because the quake shifted Earth’s axis by three inches.
The change will result in days that are 1.26 microseconds shorter than before. That’s 0.00000126 seconds shorter.
Via: Chilean Quake Likely Shifted Earth’s Axis, NASA Scientist Says – BusinessWeek.