Church efforts too little too late
The head of the U.S. conference of catholic bishops, bishop Wilton D. Gregory, has said that there has been progress on dealing with the problem of sex abuse by catholic priests and that reports of abuse are down a small percentage this year, which leads me to believe that the criminals are just getting better at covering up and squelching the news of pedophile reports.
Leaving the details to church self policing is tantamount to allowing the wolves to guard the henhouse; the RCC has never been fully forthright about the full extent of this systemic problem of pedophile priests. They say it involves only 4,450 priests between 1950 and 2002, that is about 4 percent of the total number of them serving throughout that time, yet there are many more victims coming forward every day bringing the total number of victims to well over 100,000 with 90 percent of them being young boys between the ages of 11 to 14. How can this have been allowed to continue in light of the fact it has been known to be happening for over 50 years. Many F.B.I. analysts say it is only the tip of the iceberg.
The Vatican itself has been compliant in allowing the horror to go unchecked as recent surfaced documents have shown. In March, 1962 a document was circulated urging heads of dioceses all over the world to keep charges against priests secret if they were caught trying to solicit sex from a parishioner. Although they allege that cannon law was changed in 1963, the documents in question remained in the secret Vatican archives until being exposed recently.
The pattern being followed by diocese all over this country has been to evade responsibility in dealing with their problems either in offering payoffs to victims to keep them quiet, or declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying court ruled settlements, to resignations of church officials that take them out of the center of inquiries of abuse cases. There have been cases of priests upon being accused of sex abuse resorting to suicide, if they are really guilty this can only be a good thing, as children will be safer. Some are killed in prison like John Geoghan who was sentenced in 1991 to life in prison for molestation of young boys. His killer should be commended for saving the state of Mass. the money it would have to pay for keeping Geoghan alive for the rest of his life.
I issue this plea to the rest of you priests who are guilty of these crimes. Don’t wait until you are accused, or charged, or jailed to end your life, do it now! Save the children, save money, get out of here now! Paul Shanley you are next to go, do it now!
When the Milwaukee priest Siegfried Widera learned last May that he would be charged with 42 counts of child molestation in the states of California and Wisconsin he fled and is still a fugitive. Widera if you are reading this, please end your life, it’s not worth a plug nickel anyway, save us time and money. Evidence has shown that therapy doesn’t work on these criminals yet the church still wastes time and money on it thinking it will ameliorate the problem, just more evidence the RCC is not seriously trying to end its abuses.
The German catholic church has recently issued an apology to its victims of abuse by priests by saying, “We failed to deal with the problem adequately” and “when a clergyman abuses a child or youth, he darkens the christian message and the credibility of the church.” I say the church has no credibility, and never will. It is good though that all these other countries like Germany, Australia, Japan, Ireland, England and many others are starting to deal with this systemic problem but really the wrongs can never be fully righted as long as the RCC is allowed to operate in an ongoing fashion. The mandate is written into their main document, the new testament. Even in the Nag Hamadi texts use by old christian Gnostics, which but for a twist of fate remained out of the body of various texts that became part of the bible used by the catholic church. The abuse of women and children is deemed acceptable in many parts of that document, which raises the question ‘why is there so much fervor and validity attached to it in modern times?’, being that it is only after all merely a fevered account of barbaric times laid down by a variety of clearly disturbed individuals from the bronze age agrarian society of Northeast Africa. It has no relevance today other than being an interesting ancient text.
No, the RCC has long ago forfeited its right to operate in this country after having practically institutionalized the criminal behavior it displays. Abuse is too ingrained into the catholic system to continue to allow them to remain. The time has come to take the kid gloves off and not allow them to hide under the cover of religious freedom here. I say ban the RCC in this country, liquidate their assets sell the land they own. Set up a fund for victims to give free counseling, financial aid and set the wrongs right.
Let the other countries deal with the church in their own way, but set the example here that if you break the law as an institution, the rights of the institution no longer exist. Institute the corporate death penalty for the RCC for past and ongoing crimes against women and children it continues to perpetrate. Ban the RCC.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Chiapas and points east, west, north, and south
This is about a few thoughts I’ve been having recently concerning the land and policy struggles being played out by our companeros and companeras down in Chiapas Mexico as well as many other Latin American locales.
There is a very real problem of state sponsored terrorism and genocide being perpetrated upon the poor and indigenous peoples of these lands by the right wing paramilitary groups sponsored by the bad governments of Mexico et al. In Chiapas it all came to a head in 1994 when the Mexican government changed the land policy and signed onto NAFTA which affected the poorest farmers in Southeastern Chiapas which allowed their land to be sold off to big business to be exploited by same, the indigenous get run off their farmland and get their crops stolen, but you can read all about it at these sites.
http://www.lasolidarity.org
http://www.mexicosolidarity.org
http://www.ezln.org
That last one being the official site for info on the Zapatistas down in Chiapas. I urge you to go there and read “The Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona” written by a committee of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN)
Also there is a links page where you can get a world of information on other organizations helping.
http://www.ezln.org/fzln/links.html
The 12 day armed conflict which broke out in 1994 down in Chiapas resulted in the Zapatistas recapturing a big portion of their land back that was stolen from them, since then the Mexican government has been waging a clandestine low intensity war on the poor there. NAFTA was a major cause of the hostilities. The US government set that up, and the Mexican government signs on to it, the indigenous get their rights trampled on while US multinationals run off with the booty. It’s called neoliberalism by the capitalist conglomerates, but the Zapatistas just want their land and rights back with their autonomy to govern their own small areas without being shot at or stolen from by the government goons.
Back in 1994 the zaps cry was “Ya Basta!!!” meaning enough is enough, and their three biggest demands were: Democracy, Liberty, and Justice, but there were 10 or 11 other demands set forth in the first declaration of the Selva Lacandona , and they were these: peace, independence, land, shelter, work, labor, bread, health, education, communication, and culture.
These things are so astoundingly universal to all countries of the world, the US included, and so relevant today that it needs to be said anew, ENOUGH! All the rest of us were not looking close enough when these rights were abrogated by the capitalist systems of the west for the richest of the population. Oh sure they tell us we have them, but when it comes to it they lie to us, only about 10 percent of the population really has them in varying degrees. Now these big corporations who wish to “globalize” “free trade” are working to destroy the spirit and culture of every other country on the globe with slave labor and do it “legally”. This must be curtailed, it only adds to the problems, think about it.
Viva La Otra!
Be a Zapatista where you live!
Thank you.
There is a very real problem of state sponsored terrorism and genocide being perpetrated upon the poor and indigenous peoples of these lands by the right wing paramilitary groups sponsored by the bad governments of Mexico et al. In Chiapas it all came to a head in 1994 when the Mexican government changed the land policy and signed onto NAFTA which affected the poorest farmers in Southeastern Chiapas which allowed their land to be sold off to big business to be exploited by same, the indigenous get run off their farmland and get their crops stolen, but you can read all about it at these sites.
http://www.lasolidarity.org
http://www.mexicosolidarity.org
http://www.ezln.org
That last one being the official site for info on the Zapatistas down in Chiapas. I urge you to go there and read “The Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona” written by a committee of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN)
Also there is a links page where you can get a world of information on other organizations helping.
http://www.ezln.org/fzln/links.html
The 12 day armed conflict which broke out in 1994 down in Chiapas resulted in the Zapatistas recapturing a big portion of their land back that was stolen from them, since then the Mexican government has been waging a clandestine low intensity war on the poor there. NAFTA was a major cause of the hostilities. The US government set that up, and the Mexican government signs on to it, the indigenous get their rights trampled on while US multinationals run off with the booty. It’s called neoliberalism by the capitalist conglomerates, but the Zapatistas just want their land and rights back with their autonomy to govern their own small areas without being shot at or stolen from by the government goons.
Back in 1994 the zaps cry was “Ya Basta!!!” meaning enough is enough, and their three biggest demands were: Democracy, Liberty, and Justice, but there were 10 or 11 other demands set forth in the first declaration of the Selva Lacandona , and they were these: peace, independence, land, shelter, work, labor, bread, health, education, communication, and culture.
These things are so astoundingly universal to all countries of the world, the US included, and so relevant today that it needs to be said anew, ENOUGH! All the rest of us were not looking close enough when these rights were abrogated by the capitalist systems of the west for the richest of the population. Oh sure they tell us we have them, but when it comes to it they lie to us, only about 10 percent of the population really has them in varying degrees. Now these big corporations who wish to “globalize” “free trade” are working to destroy the spirit and culture of every other country on the globe with slave labor and do it “legally”. This must be curtailed, it only adds to the problems, think about it.
Viva La Otra!
Be a Zapatista where you live!
Thank you.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Incredible belief and the vastness of the cosmos
Try to imagine, if you can, what the ancients thought when they looked upon the night sky. Back in the time when there were no street lights to blot out the view and all the colors of the Milky Way shone through a relatively pristine pollution free atmosphere. It had to be a better view than even what you can see out in the desert of Nevada or Arizona today. Imagine those people around just before book writing began, they must have thought ‘who but a god could have made such a thing’ such majestic beauty with an eerie unreal quality about it. You’d think you could almost reach up and grab a star and hold it in your hand. Early Romans thought there was a shell around the world with the stars stuck to the inside of it, or that the stars where just holes in the shell and outside was bright light shining through and if you could build a ladder long enough you could get out there and actually meet the gods.
Yet today we can calculate the positions of all the catalogued stars and major celestial objects and pretty much know their exact distance from the Earth on any given date in the past, and with a few of the more sophisticated home astronomy programs you can enter in a date from the past or distant future and get an accurate look at the sky from a chosen point on the surface of the planet. All this is possible through mathematics, and a lot of hard work on the part of many dedicated scientists and computer programmers of our day. And so we can know what it would look like to some extent (minus the fine detail of gasses and other particles floating in space) at any given time or place. You know it’s not that different looking today than it was around the time of Plato, or Aristotle, or even when the very first symbols or writings were chiseled into a stone or cave wall. The only thing which has really changed is our perception of it, our concept, if you will, of the reasons and causes of what we can perceive today as the Universe.
We have come to know so much of what has happened in the very early formation of the Universe down to minute parts of one second, what is going on now with distant stars and planets, and finally what will likely happen toward the end of time and space as we know it. If the Universe continues to expand at this alarming rate we had calculated, it will eventually spread so thin into the vastness of empty space that proton decay seemed the likely engine of its demise. There would eventually be no galaxies or even light to show them to a living being, if there be any at that point in time anyway. In that epoch the black holes will have sucked up all of the available matter, and they will be the only bodies in the expanding Universe, spreading outward from each other in a dark and unimaginably vast area of space until even they evaporate into nothing, having shed their last decaying proton. Or the expansion slows to a halt after untold billions of years and begins to go the other way for as many more billions of years until the big crunch, the endpoint of time as we know it.
Unfortunately there will not be any sentient beings/humans, or for that matter any living thing at all around to see it or feel it, near the end of a crunch, this is understood. Life will become extinct from mass cataclysmic events caused by gravitational pull as the delicate balance in the galaxies gets stirred up. Yes, it will be a very harsh and violent environment to experience as matter begins to collide and give off tremendous energy, just as it was harsh in the beginning, after all, it took a few billion years here on this average planet for any life to evolve, it should take at least that much, more or less, for it to die out at the end. Current thinking favors the continued expansion, though dark matter needs more evaluation.
The point being that yes, we live in the sweet time, it’s good to be a human being now versus at either extreme point in the formation of this Universe. It’s really a bit of good luck we are here and can ponder these things, but more importantly it is because of all this knowledge we possess we can see there is hardly any room left for the possibility of the supernatural. I give no quarter to silly superstitious belief in Gods or Demons. It is undeniably incredible that any strong belief in the supernatural can exist for anyone possessing access to the full knowledge of the scientific advances in cosmology and quantum physics we have at our fingertips today. Yet there still exists a wide margin of the US population which clings to these wild notions, such as the Earth is only 6500 years old, or to a belief in that UFO’s have been abducting humans for research, or any number of other religious and nonreligious fallacies.
All of this leads me to conclude that we need a national standard for science education in the United States that recognizes the current level of astronomical and scientific knowledge, and enforces it in every state and every school no matter what. This could be accomplished by accepting submissions from every leading university across the country, and forming a scientific governing body which could constantly update and revise teaching standards as new knowledge arises. The governing body could be elected by the universities and monitored by unbiased members of these same universities and other chosen groups of respected scientists within and without the US government. Then let us see if the current level of mass ignorance in this country will decline, I feel that it will if this project is adhered to and administered properly. Of course the question of updating textbooks to reflect new findings seems daunting and costly, but could be overcome with the addition of separate addendums issued in a timely manner in pamphlet form.
Science or anti-science which is it going to be? Something must be done before the next fifty to a hundred years from now, or global warming will decide for us whether we get the luxury of pondering the lofty questions, or merely just surviving against the manmade destruction of the world.
James C. Galli
Yet today we can calculate the positions of all the catalogued stars and major celestial objects and pretty much know their exact distance from the Earth on any given date in the past, and with a few of the more sophisticated home astronomy programs you can enter in a date from the past or distant future and get an accurate look at the sky from a chosen point on the surface of the planet. All this is possible through mathematics, and a lot of hard work on the part of many dedicated scientists and computer programmers of our day. And so we can know what it would look like to some extent (minus the fine detail of gasses and other particles floating in space) at any given time or place. You know it’s not that different looking today than it was around the time of Plato, or Aristotle, or even when the very first symbols or writings were chiseled into a stone or cave wall. The only thing which has really changed is our perception of it, our concept, if you will, of the reasons and causes of what we can perceive today as the Universe.
We have come to know so much of what has happened in the very early formation of the Universe down to minute parts of one second, what is going on now with distant stars and planets, and finally what will likely happen toward the end of time and space as we know it. If the Universe continues to expand at this alarming rate we had calculated, it will eventually spread so thin into the vastness of empty space that proton decay seemed the likely engine of its demise. There would eventually be no galaxies or even light to show them to a living being, if there be any at that point in time anyway. In that epoch the black holes will have sucked up all of the available matter, and they will be the only bodies in the expanding Universe, spreading outward from each other in a dark and unimaginably vast area of space until even they evaporate into nothing, having shed their last decaying proton. Or the expansion slows to a halt after untold billions of years and begins to go the other way for as many more billions of years until the big crunch, the endpoint of time as we know it.
Unfortunately there will not be any sentient beings/humans, or for that matter any living thing at all around to see it or feel it, near the end of a crunch, this is understood. Life will become extinct from mass cataclysmic events caused by gravitational pull as the delicate balance in the galaxies gets stirred up. Yes, it will be a very harsh and violent environment to experience as matter begins to collide and give off tremendous energy, just as it was harsh in the beginning, after all, it took a few billion years here on this average planet for any life to evolve, it should take at least that much, more or less, for it to die out at the end. Current thinking favors the continued expansion, though dark matter needs more evaluation.
The point being that yes, we live in the sweet time, it’s good to be a human being now versus at either extreme point in the formation of this Universe. It’s really a bit of good luck we are here and can ponder these things, but more importantly it is because of all this knowledge we possess we can see there is hardly any room left for the possibility of the supernatural. I give no quarter to silly superstitious belief in Gods or Demons. It is undeniably incredible that any strong belief in the supernatural can exist for anyone possessing access to the full knowledge of the scientific advances in cosmology and quantum physics we have at our fingertips today. Yet there still exists a wide margin of the US population which clings to these wild notions, such as the Earth is only 6500 years old, or to a belief in that UFO’s have been abducting humans for research, or any number of other religious and nonreligious fallacies.
All of this leads me to conclude that we need a national standard for science education in the United States that recognizes the current level of astronomical and scientific knowledge, and enforces it in every state and every school no matter what. This could be accomplished by accepting submissions from every leading university across the country, and forming a scientific governing body which could constantly update and revise teaching standards as new knowledge arises. The governing body could be elected by the universities and monitored by unbiased members of these same universities and other chosen groups of respected scientists within and without the US government. Then let us see if the current level of mass ignorance in this country will decline, I feel that it will if this project is adhered to and administered properly. Of course the question of updating textbooks to reflect new findings seems daunting and costly, but could be overcome with the addition of separate addendums issued in a timely manner in pamphlet form.
Science or anti-science which is it going to be? Something must be done before the next fifty to a hundred years from now, or global warming will decide for us whether we get the luxury of pondering the lofty questions, or merely just surviving against the manmade destruction of the world.
James C. Galli
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