Category: Faith

Dang, but this one took quite a while to come around, didn’t it? Some of you might remember me piping up waaayy back last August about a guy out in Cowtown by the name of Artur Pawlowski, after he got the cuffed-and-stuffed treatment from the Calgary cops for the unpardonable crime of… wait for it… reading the Bible in public.

No, I’m not making that up.

Now, before you go asking and bleating “how do we know he wasn’t accosting people,” bear this in mind:

On August 16, Artur Pawlowski was arrested for sharing the Gospel with tarot card readers at the Fringe Festival in Calgary. Pawlowski told these practisers of “sorcery” that the Bible condemns these practices. Organizers of the festival asked him not to talk to the vendors and he agreed. But when he stayed in the park praying and reading the Bible, the organizers called police. The police arrested Pawlowski for obstruction and he was taken in a police car in handcuffs. He was also charged with trespassing and causing a disturbance. Amazingly, Pawlowski’s brother videotaped the entire sequence of events.

Well, it has come around now and it looks like the video was rather… ahem… uncomplimentary. Both to the cops who busted Pawlowski and to the credibility of those who complained about him in the first place:

It was clear Pawlowski, his friends and family were jubilant criminal charges of obstruction of justice, resisting arrest and refusing to assist a public/peace officer had been wiped off the docket.

But the people who should be most relieved are the police officers who arrested him last Aug. 16 on 17th Ave. S.W. for reading from the Bible aloud near the Fringe Festival.

Had this case gone to trial, the judge would have seen evidence — a video taken by a Pawlowski supporter — that would have thrown the officers’ reputations into total disrepute.

Case toally dismissed. And before anybody even bothers asking, yes I am going to try and get a copy of that video. Stay tuned.

It never ceases to amaze me, the idiocy that some people will go gallivanting after. The fact that they go for some of this crap in the first place is baffling enough, but just why the hell do they seem to insist on thinking that this is somehow something new that they’ve stumbled onto; over and over and over again…

Anybody with two brain cells to rub together knows that all this shit has been said and done before, some of it hundreds or even thousands of times, but the gullible still fall for it every damned time. Most of these little flash-in-the-pan cults are, while offensive, just plain too dumb to be worth worrying about. Others, however, serve as a good reminder as to why even freedom of religion needs to have at least some limits. One such movement is the so-called “Creciendo en Gracia (Growing in Grace) ministry.”

Those who read here with any frequency may find themselves wondering just where the hell I’m going with this. After all, I’ve always made it quite plain that I have no use for those who would bash away at people of faith, so why the hell do I seem to be doing just that right now??

Well, it’s simple, really. Yes, how a man keeps — or doesn’t keep, for that matter — his company with God is his own business and no one else’s. I do believe that. But I also believe in learning from history; something about those forgetting the follies of the past being condemned to repeat them in the future and all that other bookworm stuff. And that has plenty to do with this bunch of deviant devotees.

You see, the Creciendo en Gracia is the brainfart of, and led by, a dude by the name of Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda. He’s a “62-year-old former Puerto Rican heroin addict and felon now based in the southern U.S.” So far, so what, right? There are two big problems with this guy. The first is that he claims to be the second coming of Christ. No, that’s not a metaphor; this bozo actually seems to believe it.

Now, let me see… where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah; this dude said the same thing. You remember him, don’t you? Of course you do. He’s David Koresh, the leader of the “Branch Davidian” cult that got everybody in North America pronouncing “Waco” as “wacko” after he and his followers barbecued themselves in April of ’93 after holing up against the FBI and BATF for nearly two months. Not a bad ending for a delusional pedophile prick that seemed to think that, while no one else should be having anything resembling sex, he needed a whole harem of underage (even by the Texan standards at the time) girls to keep himself amused. It would have been ok if he had had the common courtesy to croak on his own, but nnooooo; this warped-minded wannabe-messiah had to take over 80 other people with him, including about 25 kids.

Waitaminit, now… He wasn’t the first was he? Nope, he wasn’t. Over a decade before Vernon Wayne Howell started calling himself David Koresh, there was crazy-as-a-shithouse-rat Jim Jones and his “Peoples Temple” down in Guyana. Things didn’t turn out too good for that bunch either, did they? Jimbo also had more than a few sexual bats in his belfry, maybe because of all the dope he was sucking back. After packing up about 1000 people and buggering off to the South American jungle, setting up a commune called “Jonestown” (nope, no ego there) and murdering a US Congressman, Jimmy seems to have decided that he wanted to bug out before the shit hit the fan. But these megalomaniacs can never seem to check out by themselves, can they? Not only did he off himself, he ordered his followers — all 900+ of them — to suck back a few slugs of cyanide- and valium-laced Kool-aid so they could come along for the ride into the afterlife. Those who didn’t like the idea were either shot or had the poison forced down their throats. To this day, the local Guyanese people go nowhere near the grounds of the former Jonestown.

Trying to be Christ doesn’t seem to turn out too well, does it? But hey, De Jesus isn’t stopping there. Hell no. Why settle for being just Christ when you can be the Antichrist, too? No, I’m not making that shit up. But even that isn’t new, is it? Nope; that’s been done before, too. And we all know how well it worked out for that guy, don’t we?

So you’ll just have to excuse me if there are some places where I draw the line on freedom of religion. And don’t give me any of that “slippery slope” bullshit, either. We started down that slope when we decided that idiots like these deserve to have their “civil rights” protected by the power of the state. We’ve been careening down the sonofabitch ever since.

That seems to be CAIR‘s message to the organizers and participants of the recently-held first Secular Islam Summit held in St. Petersburg, Florida and ended on Sunday (and liveblogged by the Jawa Report). It seems that CAIR (militant Islam’s North American PR arm) is in a total snit about even the idea of somebody, especially Muslims, debating the merits or lack thereof, of Jihad. So, naturally, they reacted just like you likely guessed they would. As an article at Investors.com puts it:

The Washington-based group that boycotts airlines and bullies radio personalities and politicians into toeing the Islamist line is clearly worried about the message from Muslim reformers.

It dispatched its henchmen to Florida to shout the reformers down at their confab earlier this week. CAIR also posted on its Web site no fewer than four stories bashing the event and its courageous speakers, many of whom are women calling for an end to inequality and mistreatment under radical Islam.

CAIR declared the summit illegitimate because few of the participants are “practicing Muslims,” and those who are, it claims, are merely pawns playing into the hands of “Islamophobes.”

“In order to have legitimate reform, you need to have the right messengers,” asserted CAIR spokesman Ahmed Bedier.

To give some credit where it’s due, the article then wastes no time asking the obvious questions:

And who might that be? The four CAIR executives who have been successfully prosecuted on terrorism-related charges? The CAIR co-founder who said the Quran should replace the U.S. Constitution as “the highest authority in America”?

Standard Islamonutjob reaction procedure step 1: blame da Jooz…

Yes, Bedier argued, but the summit’s “funding is coming from the neoconservatives.” An article posted by CAIR suggests “Israeli intelligence” is behind the movement.

Step 2: play the islamophobia/race card:

“Islamophobia, the fear of Islam, which we fear is the root of events like this has unfortunately become an increasing concern in our society,” said Rabiah Ahmed, council spokeswoman. “It seems to be evolving into an accepted form of racism.”

Step 3: blame Bush:

Just pick a bloody time, already… 🙄

Those who have been paying attention know that the Canadian version of this terrorists’ apologist organization isn’t any better.

As for me, I say hats off to the organizers and participants of the Secular Islam Summit. I’ve never made any bones about taking the seemingly mythical “moderate Muslim majority” to task for its complicity of silence towards Islamofascism. It’s nice, for a change, to see at least some evidence that I just could be wrong…

Now this right here is a perfect example of why I loathe the so-called “gay rights activists” crowd. It seems that New Brunswick is perhaps on the way to becoming one of the first provinces in the country to take a stand against the politically correct thought police, in favour of freedom of religion. And — gee whiz, who’d’a thunk it? — the SSM Left-wingnuts are totally pissed:

Conservative MLA David Alward said his proposed amendment to the Marriage Act would grant rights to commissioners who are opposed to same-sex “marriage” on religious grounds.

Homosexual activist groups have responded to the proposal with outrage, saying the legislation would grant rights to individuals who “discriminate” and would be an affront to the “equal marriage” movement.

Oh yeah, BIG surprise there. 🙄 They’ve got themselves all affronted, abacked, and probably asidewaysed as well. As usual, the rewriters of human nature assume that, whatever it is, it must be all about them. Surely, it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with people like Scott Brickie, Chris Kempling, Orville Nichols, or any of the other God-knows-how-many people who have been hauled in front of so-called “rights” tribunals and pilloried for nothing more than exercising their own rights.

And by “rights,” I mean real ones — like freedom of religion and speech — that are actually in documents like the CCRF or the USBOR; as opposed to “gay marriage,” which a handful of unelected judges just made up out of thin air.

These assholes try to make it sound like they’re somehow standing up for freedom when in fact, they’re destroying it. Perhaps the most fundamental freedom is the one to say “no, I choose to not participate in this,” and that is exactly what these bastards are trying to eliminate. They say they want “tolerance.” Bullshit. What they want is the whole world up on their little bandwagon with them and if you don’t want to go along with it, that’s tough shit because you’ll be dragged along if that’s what it takes.

Whatever rights you think you have don’t mean shit to them.  They don’t want to be “tolerated,” or just left alone to mind their own business.  They want to tell you what you can and cannot believe and they will bring all the coercive power of the state down on you towards that end.

How long will Canadians allow this cacophonous-but-miniscule minority to run roughshod over traditions and rights that have sustained our society for generations?  And when the oppressed faithful are finally pushed too far, what will the backlash be?

Only time will tell.  But I just can’t shake the feeling that it won’t be pretty…

Some crap really does just boggle the hell out of the mind, doesn’t it? Take, for example, the recent colossal kerfuffle over yet another twit who thinks he’s found the tomb of Christ. 🙄

Here we have some dork — and James Cameron too, it turns out — burbling on like he’s some kind of authority when, in fact, he’s nothing more than just another media hack:

A Canadian filmmaker and author claims to have new scientific evidence that could have profound implications for Christianity.

Simcha Jacobovici, from Toronto, is expected to reveal at a news conference in New York on Monday that a tomb he explored under a Jerusalem apartment building once contained the bones of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.

Further, he suggested that the tomb, stored in a warehouse belonging to the Israel Antiquity Authority outside Jerusalem, may contain microscopic remains of the Christian saviour’s DNA.

[…]

The boxes were inscribed with the names: Jesus son of Joseph, Judah son of Jesus, Maria, Mariamne, Joseph and Matthew.

A quick peek around the net reveals that our little Mr. Jackoffski (pictured at right) is an Israeli-born Canadian, and received a B.A. with Honours in Philosophy and Political Science from McGill University. That’s right, two degrees: one in bullshitology political science and the other in bafflegab philosophy.

Philosophy, of course, is a Greek word that means “why do something about it when you can drone on endlessly about it with needlessly big words” that was best described by Ambrose Bierce as “a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.” Let’s face it, kids; the only thing you can really do with a degree in philosophy is teach philosophy. And I think everybody here already knows what I think about a degree in polisci…

But enough about what he’s got. Let’s see what he hasn’t got. I wonder if he has any degrees in…

Archaeology? Nope.
Anthropology? Nope.
Theology? Nope.
Okay, how about codicology or philology? Nope.
Damn. The guy’s gotta at least have one in history, right?? Nope.

The article could just as easily — and just as accurately — be headlined: “Dude With Camcorder Says Outrageous Shit.” But you just know that the MSM and all the usual loopy Lefty suspects are going to be all over this like maggots on Saddam Hussein. Okay, tell ya what we’re gonna do…

Just for the moment, we’re going to forget that I’m Christian and therefore already know that Christ’s tomb is empty and this dolt is just yapping out of his arse. Let’s just examine his excuse for methodology for a few seconds, shall we?

University of Toronto mathematician Dr. Andrey Feuerverger calculated the odds at one in 600; while Dr. James Tabor, chair of the department of religion at the University of North Carolina, placed the odds at one in 42 million.

“If you took the entire population of Jerusalem at the time and put it in a stadium, and asked everyone named Jesus to stand up, you’d have about 2,700 men,” Tabor said. “Then you’d ask only those with a father named Joseph and a mother named Mary to remain standing. And then those with a brother named Yose and a brother named James. Statistically, you end up with one person.”

So here we are, over two thousand years later, and some twit finds a tomb with the name tags of “Jesus son of Joseph, Judah son of Jesus, Maria, Mariamne, Joseph and Matthew.” All of these were common names at the time. It’s like finding the tomb of “Jim son of John, Rob son of Jim, Linda, Jenny, John and Mike.” It means virtually nothing. The most important thing though, is that this whole theory hinges on one grasping compulsion: if this is, in fact, a tomb containing the remains of Jesus, Mary and Joseph themselves, then the mitochondrial DNA from the “Jesus” remains absolutely must be consistent with mtDNA from the “Mary” remains. There is no way around this whatsoever; NONE.

So, without further ado, allow me to throw in the monkey wrench (from the same article, no less)…

According to Jewish custom, the bones have long since been reburied in unmarked graves in Israel. But tests conducted at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., on DNA obtained from the Jesus and Mary tomb and show that the two individuals were not maternally related.

Not… Maternally… Related… How’s that for lowering the boom? Ah, but what’s a little snag like that when your head’s so far up your ass you chew your food twice? You don’t really think that you let inconvenient little things like a few piddling facts get in your way when you’re a card-carrying kook, now, do you? Hell no; you just decide to pull a Homer Simpson and pull your arms out of the tar with your face. Undaunted by having his little attention-whore balloon popped, he promptly shifted gears and fell back on the same old, tired, predictable, discredited, Gnostic bullshit…

“Perhaps Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married as the DNA results from the Talpiot ossuaries suggest and perhaps their union was kept secret to protect a potential dynasty – a secret hidden through the ages,” narrator Ron White says in the documentary.

“A secret we just may be able to uncover in the holy family tomb.”

Gimme a friggin’ break. Okay… Let’s assume for a minute that “Mary” isn’t genetically related to anybody else in the tomb; marriage would be a reasonable hypothesis to explain her presence. But married to whom? There are four sets of male remains in that tomb, folks, and nary a marriage certificate to be found. It’s an assumption perched on a presupposition built on a conceit. All in all, a pretty rickety affair.

On the bright side though, for a change, the gobsmacking of this idiocy isn’t confined to just folks like me. For example…

“It was an ordinary middle-class Jerusalem burial cave,” Kloner said. “The names on the caskets are the most common names found among Jews at the time.”

Archaeologists also balk at the filmmaker’s claim that the James Ossuary – the center of a famous antiquities fraud in Israel – might have originated from the same cave. In 2005, Israel charged five suspects with forgery in connection with the infamous bone box.

“I don’t think the James Ossuary came from the same cave,” said Dan Bahat, an archaeologist at Bar-Ilan University. “If it were found there, the man who made the forgery would have taken something better. He would have taken Jesus.”

Nice to see scientists being scientists for a change.

A big ol’ tip o’ the chapeau to Sheila Wray Gregoire and the other folks over at PTBC for this one.

We keep hearing over and over ad nauseum about how the “progressives” (code for “loopy liberal Leftoids”) in the world are the paragons of tolerance and all things good, while anyone with the slightest conservative bent is a mean, nasty, intolerant, sexist, bigoted, racist, knuckle-dragging, backward, redneck, bible-thumping, fill-in-the-blank-ophobe who probably tortures and murders kittens in their spare time, just so Dalton McWimpy can go hungry.

Ah, but isn’t it interesting to see just how “tolerant” the guardians of tolerance can be when it comes to anyone who doesn’t gobble down their putrid philosophy hook, line and sinker? And God help you if you disagree with them while committing that ultimate of evils in the “liberal” mind — practicing Christianity. Their little venom spigots will be locked wide open, just for you. Ms Gregoire had one such interesting experience lately after writing a column about her opinions on parenting, wherein she espoused such vile notions as:

A lot of parents have thrown in the towel, many without realizing it, because they’ve forgotten their primary purpose. It is not to be your child’s friend. It is not to make your child like you. It is not to make your child’s life easy. It is to raise your child to behave responsibly, morally, and eventually independently. Often we believe our kids will just develop this by osmosis. Keep them safe and feed them, and they’ll be okay. They may make some mistakes along the way, but everything will turn out fine.

EEk. Terrifying stuff, eh? Curiously enough, I’ve read that whole danged column three times now and I haven’t been able to find a single reference to God, Christ, church or anything else even remotely religious. Check it out for yourself, see if you can find anything, because I sure as heck couldn’t.

Done yet? Did you find anything? Didn’t think so. But guess what? A little paragon of progressiveness by the name of James Callaghan sure as hell found some. Being so much smarter than the rest of us, he was able to see that the whole article is absolutely awash in Christianity.

Hello, I just finished reading your article “to be a parent”. The one thing I loved about the article is that you gave advice on raising other people’s kids, you gave criticism on how other people are raising their children yet you don’t mention how you handle your children. Is it possible that you have no children and feel the need to be self-righteous around other people. Your friend Rick really needs backbone. As you pointed out Rick must be a bad parent to allow his daughter to get to that point, yet you use him as an example of how his words of love are the proper way to go. My son would have a sore jaw if he was to hit me for 4 hours. I’m so tired of seeing advice columns in my local papers from people like you. First of you still believe in god, what right to you have judging others when you believe a fairy tale is gospel, silly christian myths or for kids. I raise my children in an open way, I show them many cultures and worn them to be careful around christians. You people are always pointing out the wrongs everyone is doing, but the amount of murder done in the name of your god is frightening but hey, they didn’t believe the same as you so I guess it’s okay. I let my son where a shirt that says “I get more action then heaven got on 911” as long as it iritates people like you I’ll let him be even more offensive to your kind.

There you have it. Progressive tolerance in action. Some things, I can rant about all the doo-dah day. Other things, though, pretty much speak for themselves. This bozo’s blatant anti-Christian bigotry (not even mentioning his own obviously dubious parenting notions) is one of them.

Oh, before I forget:
Jimmy boy, go back to whatever high school it was that you graduated from. When you get there, find your old English teacher and demand that he or she apologise for sending you, so poorly prepared, out into the world.