Year: 2007

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Pagan Easter Greetings

John Howard Easter Tribulations

Lamenting that “God often struggles for media coverage in the modern world”, the unctuous Asstralian Archbishop George Pell gave his beleaguered deity a hand, advertising to his flock to “refocus on their personal faith and morality”.

Apparently, despite the Vatican’s interpretation of the Fifth Commandment “You shall not kill”, Pell doesn’t think war is a personal moral issue. Instead, in his yearly Easter homily, he preached

a preoccupation with issues like the war in Iraq and global warming can distract people from their personal responsibilities.

With a supposed direct connection to his deity through the Vatican on the other side of the planet, Pell assured us

“Jesus calls us to address the challenges in our own hearts, families and communities before we moralise about distant worlds, where we are usually powerless.”

Really. Where did Jesus instruct us to do this? In Matthew 5:16 Jesus is recorded as saying “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works.” Nothing there about quenching this light at the borders.

To avoid hypocrisy and bearing in mind the Second Commandment, Pell must insist the Vatican take his disempowering advice, retreat back inside its Roman walls, and pull its representatives out of other countries where historically it has proven to be one of the most powerful, moralising, interventionary forces.

“Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet.” – Acts 7:48

NB Notes on the Pagan origins of Easter and its political expropriation by the Catholic Church are here. Briefly

Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (“Ecclesiastic History of the English People”) contains a letter from Pope Gregory I to Saint Mellitus, who was then on his way to England to conduct missionary work among the heathen Anglo-Saxons. The Pope suggests that converting heathens is easier if they are allowed to retain the outward forms of their traditional pagan practices and traditions, while recasting those traditions spiritually towards Christianity instead of to their indigenous gods (whom the Pope refers to as “devils”), “to the end that, whilst some gratifications are outwardly permitted them, they may the more easily consent to the inward consolations of the grace of God.” The Pope sanctioned such conversion tactics as biblically acceptable, pointing out that God did much the same thing with the ancient Israelites and their pagan sacrifices.

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Funky Tsunami hits Queensland

Noosa TsunamiThe folks from FunkyPix2 have a series of photos of this week’s tsunami which devastated Queensland doomsayers, rapturites, real estate sharks and other drooling nincompoops. We’re in awe of people’s ability to put natural events in our place as much as the ability of natural events put people in their place.

Before Hastings Street was demolished, we had positioned ourselves to capture the first wave’s impact on Noosa’s trillion dollar vulnerable asset – see right.

Our sympathies of course go out to our neighbours in the South Pacific who were affected by the natural disaster.

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Bin Laden, BEcon, Jeddah

Bin Laden, BEcon, Jeddah

The learned Sun Tzu wrote in “The Art of War” more than 2,000 years ago:

One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be in danger in a hundred battles.

One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes win, sometimes lose.

One who does not know the enemy and does not know himself will be in danger in every battle.

Over recent years, there has been considerable confusion in the West about what university qualifications Osama Bin Laden actually possesses. A firm knowledge of his various expertises would seem to be of great import if his adversaries wished to benefit from Sun Tzu’s dictums.

In this interview with Robert Fisk in 1996, he says “I am a construction engineer and agriculturalist.” At that time, indeed he was. The interview does not, however, mention his educational qualifications.

Wikipedia is currently ambiguous.

Bin Laden may have studied economics and business administration[16] at the Management and Economics School of King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. Some reports suggest bin Laden earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979,[17] or a degree in public administration in 1981.[18]

Continue reading “Bin Laden, BEcon, Jeddah”

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Coalition of the Gobbling vs Iraq 111

This story from the UK Independent, on the 600,000 and more Iraqi casualties slaughtered by the Coalition of the Gobbling, received pathetically little coverage in the dailies.

As it’s such a significant and horrific admission on the part of the United Kooks, we’ll help air the facts some more. The Coalition of the Gobbling is certainly way ahead of Saddam’s efforts at this stage and is not looking like letting up. But what the hell – when the West kills en masse, it’s only collateral damage and a necessary side effect of creating “democracy” – yet when some tinpot dictator created and coddled by the West till he’s served his purpose does it, it’s genocide.

British backtrack on Iraq death toll
By Jill Lawless

British government officials have backed the methods used by scientists who concluded that more than 600,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion, the BBC reported yesterday.

The Government publicly rejected the findings, published in The Lancet in October. But the BBC said documents obtained under freedom of information legislation showed advisers concluded that the much-criticised study had used sound methods.

The study, conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, estimated that 655,000 more Iraqis had died since March 2003 than one would expect without the war. The study estimated that 601,027 of those deaths were from violence.

The researchers, reflecting the inherent uncertainties in such extrapolations, said they were 95 per cent certain that the real number of deaths lay somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636.

The conclusion, based on interviews and not a body count, was disputed by some experts, and rejected by the US and British governments. But the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Roy Anderson, described the methods used in the study as “robust” and “close to best practice”. Another official said it was “a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones”.