Vatican says will excommunicate women priests

From the story at Yahoo News: The Vatican issued its most explicit decree so far against the ordination of women priests on Thursday, punishing them and the bishops who try to ordain them with automatic excommunication.

"The decree was written by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and published in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, giving it immediate effect.

"A Vatican spokesman said the decree made the Church's existing ban on women priests more explicit by clarifying that excommunication would follow all such ordinations.
[...]

"The Church says it cannot change the rules banning women from the priesthood because Christ chose only men as his apostles. Church law states that only a baptized male can be made a priest."

Two thousand years ago in Palestine, women were not allowed to be seen gallivanting with a group of men, but there is Gospel proof that women were indeed devoted to Jesus and so much so that while the men were behaving like babies after Jesus' crucifixion, the women went out to investigate. Surely they must have been devoted disciples themselves to brave being caught hanging around Jesus' tomb on Sunday morning. And let us not forget the bum rap Mary of Magdala took for centuries- labeled a whore for hanging around with Jesus... and the early church fathers were so anti-women that they had to make Jesus' mother a virgin despite evidence to the contrary.

According to the Gospels, after Jesus was crucified and died, the male apostles went and hid. For they were not brave. (Throughout the Gospel's Jesus has to admonish their chickenheartedness, but that's another post.) The four Gospels differ, but there were definitely women who went to Jesus' grave. John's Gospel has one, Matthew's has two, Mark's has three and Luke's has 5 or more. They arrived on Sunday morning around the break of dawn.

John 20:1
The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.

Matthew 28:1
As it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.

Mark 16:1
And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.

Luke 24:1, 10
Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them.
...
It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.

So basically, if it wasn't for the WOMEN, no one would have known that Jesus was risen from the dead, let alone the "devoted" apostles.

That's enough for now.

see the Skeptic's Annotated Bible

So much for morality

No sooner did California overturn the ban on homosexual marriage when Pope Benedict came out stating that marriage is only moral if between and man and a woman. Catholics worldwide are probably snickering. I am. So much for morality then.

What if one of the parties in a so called "moral" marriage is a closeted homosexual living a lie and makes both parties miserable? I imagine that there are thousands or millions of "holy" marriages like that. Perhaps allowing homosexuals to marry each other will eliminate such unholy alliances.

I can empathize with those married women and mothers whose husbands are outed for having homosexual relationships on the side and perhaps there are thousands more which don't make the news whose lives and families are devastated when it turns out that one of the parents is living a lie and reduced to sneaking out for nookie or even true love on the side with someone of the same sex. I often wonder how many closeted gay parents beat the crap out of or disinherit their openly gay offspring. I doubt that truly heterosexual parents would banish a child from the family for just being gay. You have to really hate yourself to hate your child.

With the millions, if not zillions of dysfunctional and immoral families out there in the world, anyone who speaks of heterosexual families as being so great ought to take their blinders off at once.

The RCC and homophobia back in the news...

One of the things about religion that really gets to me is that we are expected to suspend belief in that which makes sense and that which is rational in modern times in order to accept antiquated notions written by antiquated people in ancient times. Not everyone in the olden days was all that fucking bright... not even those who wrote the bible. They were quite superstitious. Today, people read the bible as if it were teh fucking bible and since they are given license to suspend belief in rational notions, they add to it.

May 17th was International Day Against Homophobia. It sounds like a nice thing to do... to educate people so that they won't hate themselves or others. It sounds like something Jesus would have exhorted his followers to celebrate, but no. Not the Catholics. In Poland someone in the church got the idea to cure homosexuals of their "affliction" instead. Talk about going against nature. And if there is a God, she certainly knew what she was doing when she created people, didn't she? If not, then she wasn't all that bright either.

Catholic Church offers therapy to 'cure' gays in Poland

"The Catholic Church has created rehabilitation centers in Poland to rehabilitate gay people and "get them back on the right path."

"The Odwaga Center uses therapy, prayer and chastity to teach its patients to resist their homosexual impulses. Men at the center are taught to play football and women are taught to cook."

Hey, that's gender bending. How sexist is it to teach men to play football and women to cook? How insane are the insinuations that football is manly and cooking is feminine? Thinking about American football and all those men jumping all over each other certainly wouldn't teach a gay guy not to crave other guys.

Not only that, the Catholic Church hierarchy of all people should know that you can't make men who don't dig chicks, dig them. Sure you can guilt people into not having sex for a while, but it certainly won't cure them of their sexual orientation. Even I know that and I'm not even gay. What the Catholic Church is trying to do is keep homosexuals from having sex, period. They ought to start with themselves, the hypocrites. Quite frankly the Catholic Church would probably like it a lot if no one ever had sex. Misery loves company.

The article goes on to declare that this sort of "therapy" makes people depressed... even suicidal. Well it's certainly no wonder. If someone told me back in my heyday when I was totally boy crazy that it was a sin and they tried to take my mind off my natural hormonal urges through prayer and guilt and cooking, I'd probably have lost my mind. Hell, I'd have signed up for the football just so I could jump on the boys.

Talk about hate speech

With all the hoopla about Rev Wright's so called "hate speech," you oughta take a look at John Hagee's hate speech.

abstinence from flesh diet and strong drink

Here's something I had never learned in the seminary. From TheNazareneWay.com

WHEN St. John Chrysostom (D. 407), in his homily on Matthew xxii, 1-14, tells us that "flesh-meats and wine serve as materials for sensuality, and are a source of danger, sorrow, and disease," he does not stand alone.

Writing, in confutation of Jovinian, a monk of Milan, who abandoned asceticism, St. Jerome (D. A.V. 440) holds up vegetarianism as the Christian ideal and the restoration of the primeval rule of life. The passage may be rendered :--" As to his argument that in God's Second Blessing permission was given to eat flesh- a permission not given in the first Blessing- let him know that just as permission to put away a wife was, according to the words of the Saviour, not given from the beginning, but was granted to the human race by Moses because of the hardness of our hearts. So also in like manner the eating of flesh was unknown until the flood, but after the Flood, just as quails were given to the people when they murmured in the desert, so have sinews and the offensiveness of flesh been given to our teeth. The Apostle, writing to the Ephesians, teaches us that God had purposed that in the fullness of time he would restore all things, and would draw to their beginning, even to Christ Jesus, all things that are in heaven or that are on earth. Whence also, the Saviour Himself, in the Apocalypse of John, says, ' I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.' From the beginning of human nature, we neither fed upon flesh nor did we put away our wives, nor were our foreskins taken away from us for a sign. We kept on in this course until we arrived at the Flood. But after the Flood, together with the giving of the Law, which no man could fulfill, the eating of flesh was brought in; and the putting away of wives was conceded to hardness of heart; and the knife of circumcision is brought into use; as if the hand of God had created in us more than is necessary. But now that Christ has come in the end of time, and has turned, back Omega to Alpha, and drawn back the end to the beginning, neither is it permitted to us to put away our wives, nor are we circumcised, nor do we eat flesh; hence the Apostolic saying, ' It is a good, thing not to drink wine, and not to eat flesh.' For wine also, together with flesh, began to be used after the Flood."

Not less striking is the testimony of St. Basil (D. 379) : " With sober living," he says, " well-being increases in the household, animals are in safety, there is no shedding of blood, nor putting animals to death. The knife of the cook is needless; for the table is spread only with the fruits that Nature gives, and with them they are content. John the Baptist, he continues, "had neither bed, nor table, nor inheritance, nor ox, nor grain, nor baker, nor other things regarded as the necessaries of life; and yet it was to him that the Son of God gave the eulogy that he was the greatest of the children of men."

The Gospel according to the Hebrews was that which was in use amongst the first Christians of Jerusalem, and the Gospel according to the Egyptians is thought to have been in close relation to it. It has been said that there are traces of it in the Talmud before A.D. 130., It has even been conjectured that it was the Hebrew source from which the present Gospel according to Matthew was derived. This Gospel, according to the Nazarenes, was widely. circulated in the early Church, and was held in high esteem by the Jewish Christians.

Hegesippus gives a remarkable account of James, the brother of the Lord, and the first ruler of the Christian Church in Jerusalem. James, we are told was Holy from birth. He drank no wine nor strong liquor, nor ate he any living thing. A razor never went upon his head, and neither used the bath nor anointing with oil. Even his clothes were free from any taint of death for he wore no woolen but linen garments only., " It is a remarkable fact that Instead of being represented as a sectary at the head of a new school of religious thought antagonistic to the ancient Hebrew faith, we are told that he, and he alone, was permitted to enter the sanctuary.

That the physical puritanism of abstainence from intoxicants and flesh-meats was not an ideal foreign to Judaism we know from the examples of the Rechabites, the Nazarites, the Nazarenes, and the Essenes. The accounts that have come down to us of the last named sect are very interesting and suggestive. They lived in a brotherly community, they cultivated the land, they observed the Sabbath strictly, they refused to swear, they abstained from intoxicants and flesh.

There are striking parallelisms between Essenism and Christianity. Seek first the kingdom of God was the aim of the Essenes (Matt, vi, 33, Luke, xii, 31). Sell your possessions and give to the poor (Matt vi, 33)., They despised riches (Matt vi, 19-21). The brotherly spirit amongst them was a wonder to the Jewish people, and a test of Christianity is "we know that we have passed from death to life because we love the brethren" (I John iii, 14). The Essenes and the Christians in Jerusalem lived in communities where each man had a share in the common. No wonder that De Quincey with his love of paradox should declare the Essenes to be "neither more or less than the new-born brotherhood of Christians.

The writer of these few extracts makes acknowledgment the same to E. A.' Axon, LL.D., F.R.S.L.

This contradicts everything in the bible, particularly the New Testament. I need to explore this more.