Virgin Mary is Bhagavati's younger sister

Sisters and goddesses
From the Guardian UK By William Dalrymple:
Legend has it that it was the apostle, Thomas, the doubting one, who brought Christianity to Southern India - and now, aside from the odd jealous spat, the Virgin Mary and goddess Bhagavati are worshipped with equal fervour

"Yes, yes, the Virgin Mary is Bhagavati's younger sister," explained Vasudeva, the head priest, matter of factly, as if stating the obvious.

"But, for sisters, don't they look rather different from each other?" I asked. A calendar image of the goddess, pinned up behind him, showed Bhagavati as a wizened hag wreathed in skulls and crowned with an umbrella of cobra hoods. In her hand she wielded a giant sickle.

"Sisters are often a little different from each other," he replied. "Mary is another form of the Devi. They have equal power." He paused: "At our annual festival the priests take the goddess around the village on top of an elephant to receive sacrifices from the people. She visits all the places, and one stop is the church. There she sees her sister."

"Mary gets on an elephant too?"

"No," he replied. "But when the goddesses visit each other, the sacrifice in the church is just like the one we have here: we light lamps and make an offering. The priests stay in their church, but the congregation of the church receives us, and makes a donation to the temple."

"So relations are good?"

"The people here always cooperate," he said. "Our Hindus go to the church and the Christians come here and ask the goddess for what they want - for everyone believes the two are sisters."

Aha! We knew it all along

From the TimesOnline

Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'

RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

[...]

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly skeptical world.

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

[...]
The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.

Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”

Pretty sad, but not surprising is it?

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.