Here we expose the religions of the world for the frauds they really are.
Preying on the gullible and lost, giving them all the answers they want to hear,
and in turn leading them into a world of ignorance and disinformation; religion has got to go.
FLORENCE, South Carolina (AP) — A teen accused of plotting to blow up his high school told police that he wanted to die, go to heaven and kill Jesus, federal authorities said Tuesday.
Prosecutors argued in a federal courtroom that the statements are an indication that 18-year-old Ryan Schallenberger needs a psychological evaluation.
The straight-A Chesterfield High School senior was arrested April 19 and faces several state and federal charges, including attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. That charge carries a possible life sentence if he is convicted.
“His conduct is bizarre,” prosecutor Buddy Bethea told Judge Thomas Rogers III, who did not immediately issue a ruling. “I think it screams out in his conduct that he be evaluated.”
Defense attorney Bill Nettles said the request was premature, and that Schallenberger was competent to help in his defense.
Prosecutors want Schallenberger, currently at Chesterfield County jail, moved to a federal facility because they think he may try to commit suicide. His journal writings have become increasingly violent over the past year, prosecutor Rose Mary Parham said.
An agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives testified that the teen told a sheriff he wanted to die after his arrest.
“He said death was better than life,” Craig Townsend said. “He told the sheriff he wanted to die and go to heaven and once he got there, he wanted to kill Jesus.”
Prosecutors also played a 911 tape of the teen’s mother calling police after he smashed his head into a wall two days before his arrest. On the tape, she says her son threatened to shoot police if they came.
“He’s not going to do it,” Laurie Sittler told the operator. “He’s just got a bad temper.”
The teen left but his mother was scared he would return, she said in the call. “He’s planning to go to college and everything, but I don’t know what to do,” she said.
Droning funnyman Ben Stein monkeys around with evolution with the new documentary, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” a cynical attempt to sucker Christian conservatives into thinking they’re losing the “intelligent design” debate because of academic “prejudice.”
“Expelled” is a full-on, amply budgeted Michael Moore-styled mockery of evolution, a film that dresses creationist crackpottery in an “intelligent design” leisure suit and tries to make the fact that it’s not given credence in schools a matter of “academic freedom.”
Using loaded language and loaded imagery, Stein and Co. (Nathan Frankowski is the credited director) equate evolution with atheism, lay responsibility for the Holocaust at the feet of Charles Darwin, interview and creatively edit biologists and others (scientists “cast” for their eccentric appearance) to make them look foolish for insisting that science, not religion, can explain creation.
Stein and friends use animation (shades of “Bowling for Columbine”), amusing chunks of B-movies and even “The Wizard of Oz” and classic propaganda techniques to undercut 150 years of peer-tested research. Their goal? Create just a sliver of doubt about evolution. It’s a classic Big Tobacco/”Inconvenient Truth” denial tactic.
Who needs to teach kids anything useful when you can teach them garbage instead? That’s right kids, drinking bleach will prevent HIV, because it’ll kill you before the HIV sets in.
ORLANDO, Fla. — A recent survey that found some Florida teens believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy has prompted lawmakers to push for an overhaul of sex education in the state.
The survey showed that Florida teens also believe that smoking marijuana will prevent a person from getting pregnant.
State lawmakers said the myths are spreading because of Florida’s abstinence-only sex education, Local 6 reported. They are proposing a bill that would require a more comprehensive approach, the report said.It would still require teaching abstinence but students would also learn about condoms and other methods of birth control and disease prevention.
City authorities in Munich, southern Germany, have closed down a kindergarten with immediate effect after discovering it was run by the Church of Scientology, the municipality said.
“The wellbeing of the children in the establishment was under threat because the education process was based on the principles of Scientology,” the municipality said in a statement.
The kindergarten opened last summer and had 18 children looked after by two adults.
The Church of Scientology became the subject of intense debate in Germany last year when Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise, one of its most famous followers, was chosen to play the role of a resistance hero in a film about a failed plot to kill Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Cruise was deemed by many Germans to be unsuitable for the part because of his beliefs. In January, German historian Guido Knopp compared a speech the actor made to fellow Scientologists with a call to war by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
Lecturers and students at a prestigious university in Rome want a planned visit by the Pope to be cancelled as they object to his position on Galileo.
Pope Benedict XVI is to make a speech on Thursday at La Sapienza university.
Sixty-seven academics have signed a letter saying the Pope’s views on Galileo “offend and humiliate us”.
They say he condoned the 1633 trial and conviction of Galileo for heresy. The astronomer had argued that the Earth revolved around the Sun.
The academics said it would be inappropriate for the Pope to open their academic year on Thursday.
“In the name of the secular nature of science we hope this incongruous event can be cancelled,” said the letter addressed to the university’s rector, Renato Guarini.
In a separate initiative students at La Sapienza have organised four days of protest this week. The first revolved around an anti-clerical meal of bread, pork and wine, the BBC’s Christian Fraser reports from Rome.
ANNAPOLIS, Mo. — A rural Missouri school district’s long-standing practice of allowing the distribution of Bibles to grade school students is unconstitutional, a federal judge has ruled.
An attorney for the school district said Wednesday he will appeal.For more than three decades, the South Iron School District in Annapolis, 120 miles southwest of St. Louis, allowed representatives of Gideons International to give away Bibles in fifth-grade classrooms.After some parents raised concerns and the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit two years ago, the district altered its policy — the Gideons and others were still welcome to distribute Bibles or other literature before or after school or during lunch break, but not in the classroom.
U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry on Tuesday granted a permanent injunction, ruling both practices were illegal. The district court had previously granted a temporary injunction against the classroom distribution, a ruling upheld in August by a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.The purpose of both practices “is the promotion of Christianity by distributing Bibles to elementary school students,” Perry wrote. “The policy has the principle or primary effect of advancing religion by conveying a message of endorsement to elementary school children.”
JANESVILLE — A Parker High School student tore pages from a Bible in class earlier this month, raising constitutional and ethical issues for school officials and his classmates.
Some students were upset, while others rallied to the cause of free speech.
The student was suspended, his mother said. She was told he couldn’t return to school until he had undergone a psychological evaluation. He was out of school for a week.
“They wanted to make sure he was safe,” the mother said, but she believes he was never a threat to anyone.
In the wake of the suspension, three students wore T-shirts with words supporting the student’s free speech rights.
Parker officials had the three remove the shirts because they could have caused a disruption, said Principal Dale Carlson.
One student set up an Internet conversation site to discuss the incident, and according to postings on that site, the T-shirts read: “So long as a man thinks, he is free,” “Bring (the student’s name) back” and “Those who mind do not matter, and those who matter do not mind.”
Carlson said the plea to bring the student back was the objectionable part of the T-shirts’ message.
Officials believed it was likely that the shirts’ reference to the Bible incident would have caused a disruption “with other students that were involved in this incident,” Carlson said.
Good news for once. A student who ripped pages out of a bible was not sent to Guantanamo Bay and tortured! Incredible. The kid sounds like something of an asshole, but the people who bitched and moaned about his actions are bigger assholes, so it pretty much balances out.
Some Janesville parents said that they’re concerned that in this incident, in which a student allegedly tore pages from a Bible, the balance between the two was tipped toward the First Amendment, WISC-TV reported.
As many Parker High School students get ready for Christmas break, junior Elle Jacobson is at home and will not be returning like her friends.
“I have never felt threatened like that in a classroom before,” said Jacobson.
The 17-year-old is talking about an incident in her English class two weeks ago during a class presentation.
“This boy got up and his visual aid was a Bible and a book. And he got up and started his speech by saying ‘Now, this piece of crap’ and pointed to the Bible.”
Jacobson said that she quickly felt threatened.
“He took the Bible and he said, ‘I’m going to do this because I can. I’m going to do something that your stupid, little minds aren’t going to be able to comprehend and he took the Bible and started ripping out pages.”
School officials said that they know about the incident.
“We take this extremely seriously,” said Dr. Karen Schulte, Janesville School District safety and security coordinator.
Officials said that they will not confirm whether the boy was suspended.
“We do an assessment of this situation and students involved to ensure the safety of every student and staff at that school,” said Schulte.
Officials said that ripping up a Bible is constitutionally protected, adding the punishment has nothing to do with the student’s Freedom of Speech demonstration.
“Any actions that were taken in this case were because of behavior separate from the Bible,” said Parker High Principal Dale Carlson.
Some parents said that they disagree with the school’s reaction.
“The school worries about his right to privacy and to free speech that to teachers’ rights or the students’ right to safety,” said Paul Jacobson, Elle’s father.
He said that he’s pulling his two high school daughters out of Parker High.
“It’s not about free speech. It’s not about necessarily about the Bible although that was disgusting, too. This is about the vicious, vile manner in the way this kid went about this and tried to make some kind of point,” he said.
Elle Jacobson’s parents are looking for another school for their daughters.
Parker High School officials aren’t saying whether the student who sparked the controversy is back at school.
In a separate incident, following the punishment, three Parker High Students wore T-shirts asking for the student in question to be brought back after a punishment was levied against him. School officials made those students change clothes.
Teachers banned a nine-year-old boy from his class Christmas party because his parents had barred him from RE lessons.
Douglas Stewart was forced to stay at home while his friends received presents from Santa and tucked into ice cream and jelly.
His parents were told he was not welcome at the celebration because they had pulled him out of religious eduction classes earlier in the year.
Headmaster Ian Davidson said that because the youngster had no interest in religion he could not celebrate the birth of Christ.
Furious mother Dawn Riddell, 38, said yesterday: “I’ve helped out at the Christmas party before and it’s got absolutely nothing to do with Jesus. Douglas was heartbroken he couldn’t go. It was cruel.”
“The Golden Compass” and two other books in the “His Dark Materials” trilogy have been banned indefinitely by the Halton Catholic District School Board despite a committee’s recommendation that the titles remain on library shelves.
Board chair Alice Anne LeMay told CTV.ca that the committee found the books suitable for students in Grades 7 and up, but the majority of board members voted against the committee’s report Tuesday night.
The book, written by popular British author and avowed atheist Philip Pullman, has won numerous awards, including the Maine Student Book Award and the American Library Association’s Best Books for Young Adults award.
“Philip Pullman’s trilogy of atheistic ideology, carefully couched within the realm of fantasy for young readers, is in direct opposition to the mission statement and governing values of our board,” the board’s decision reads.
The trio of books was removed from library shelves last November after receiving a request for review from a member of the community. All three titles were available to students upon request.
The board set up a committee, made up of teacher, principals, trustees and consultants, to review the book and recommend whether it should be available to students.
LeMay said this is the first time a book has been banned from school libraries within the board. The three titles will not be made available to students upon request and will be “stored at the central board office for the time being.”
