Parents, church members charged in death of teen, beating of his brother
Two brothers were severely beaten — one of whom died — inside Word of Life Christian Church Monday afternoon, but the events that led up to 19-year-old Lucas Leonard’s death and the assault of his younger brother Christopher, 17, still are unclear.
The corpse of Saint Maria Goretti is touring the United States just now. This is seriously creepy in multiple respects.
It’s one thing to preserve and display a body in connection with a funeral. It’s another thing entirely to preserve a body as a sacred relic for gawkers to stare at.
Saint Maria was sexually assaulted when she was 11-years old, and died as a consequence of the assault. Her last words, and her chief claim to sainthood, were of forgiveness for her assailant.
More than 100 years ago, an 11-year-old Catholic girl in Italy, stabbed 14 times by a man attempting to rape her, forgave her attacker on her deathbed and said she hoped she would be with him forever in heaven.
The act of mercy by Maria Goretti — and others attributed to her spirit after her death — would lead the Roman Catholic Church to declare her a saint in 1950.
I can understand why the Catholic Church might think it’s a good idea to set before parishioners an example of a positive attitude toward rapists, but am I alone in thinking this reeks of manipulative cynicism?
When prominent Republican lawmakers say publicly that they’re sick of the nihilistic Teavangelical faction that has no ambition but to frustrate governance, you know some serious-minded bloodshed is coming.
“It is bad,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. “We cannot allow 35 or 40 people to hijack the party and blackmail the Congress. We have to get things done.”
Good. The Tea Party has worn-out its always-feeble welcome and won’t be indulged much longer.
Michael Hamar points toward a study which appears to uphold the idea, increasingly gaining acceptance, that sexual orientation varies as an expression of environmentally-triggered genetics.
“To our knowledge, this is the first example of a predictive model for sexual orientation based on molecular markers,” said Tuck C. Ngun, PhD, first author on the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the David Geffen School of Medicine of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Beyond the genetic information contained in DNA, the researchers examined patterns of DNA methylation — a molecular modification to DNA that affects when and how strongly a gene is expressed — across the genome in pairs of identical male twins.
The science of this is w-a-a-a-y over my head, but the gist of it seems to be this: The chemical environment of the womb, estrogen levels especially, influences the way that genes express themselves.
We are all acquainted with the blueprint analogy: “You’re genes are like a blueprint; they govern whether you have blue eyes, or brown or green, and whether you’re tall or short … on and on.” For most purposes, that is a useful way of thinking about it. But the reality is that it’s apparently more like a long chain of IF-THEN-ELSE statements: “IF the environment is like this, THEN that, ELSE the other thing.” (But don’t quote me; that’s merely how I’m understanding what I read.)
Definitely, researchers are closing-in on the secrets of sexual-identity and -orientation, and it’s a lot more complicated than those Bronze Age goatherders thought. Not that it will change the thinking of those people whose entire sense of worth and identity derive from smugly telling themselves that they’re good li’l boys and girls who always do exactly as they’re told, whatever they’re told. But the rest of us can comfortably ignore them.
Theists are essentially the unquestioning gestapo of whatever monster manufactured the universe. Or rather, whatever monster some men made up and duped them into thinking it made the universe. Which means, they are essentially the gestapo of whatever random ignorant madmen wrote their scriptures and now thumps their pulpits with sufficiently fiery claims of special divine communications at bedtime.
I’m sorry to say, but that’s the truth. Theism actually has no moral theory.
Well worth your time.
