Mar
16
2013
The little girl was beaten for seven hours until she died. Her parents stopped only for short prayer breaks.
Pchyolki: Take Back Alaska From the Gays!
Mar
16
2013
Personally, I don’t think I’ll miss it.
A fundamentalist Russian Orthodox group has filed a lawsuit claiming President Barack Obama’s support of gay marriage invalidates the 1867 sale of Alaska. The Pchyolki are a group best known for advising its members to use violence if necessary to protect churches from “blasphemers” like the rock group Pussy Riot. …
In court papers, the Pchyolki said the U.S. purchase of Alaska was not legal because the contract specified payment in gold coins and the United States wrote a check for $7.2 million, which would be a far larger sum in today’s dollars. The Pchyolki or Bees, organized in 2008, have a stated goal of protecting orphans’ rights. They campaign against sex education in schools and advised, after the Pussy Riot arrests, that the faithful could protect churches by damaging equipment used by “blasphemers” with holy water, although they said “bloodshed” was only acceptable away from church property.
Drop Cloth Jesus
Mar
16
2013
When Jesus was done with toast and shower mold and bird poop as a medium, he moved on to something more conventionally artistic: Paint.
You could call it a divine sign: a Saugus man said he couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw Jesus Christ on a drop cloth at his home. “My heart went a million miles an hour. I was hyperventilating,” said Brian Krantz.
Facepalm-worthy stuff, but at least we get a new exclamation out of it; here at Moral Compass HQ, our future expression of frustration or astonishment will be “Sweet Jesus Christ on a drop cloth!” Thank you, Mr. Krantz.
For fun findings on the human brain’s face-detection proclivities, see here. Cliff Notes version: the more gullible people are, the more they’ll “recognize” random patterns as meaningful images.
God’s Will
Mar
16
2013
Different religion, same bull:
Abdullah Abdel Hamid, a professor at Al-Azhar University and Salafist preacher, described Egyptian government officials as “enemies of God,” following their statements about eradicating millions of locusts who infested several of Egypt’s governates in the last few weeks, Al-Watan newspaper reported on Friday
“Locusts embody a gift from God to humans living on Earth; how dare they say such things?” Abdel Hamid said at a Friday sermon in the Egyptian canal city of Suez. Abdel Hamid argued that no “police or military troops” could stop the locusts, as “God’s will” cannot be challenged.
[image via Ahram Online]
Breaking News: Sweeping Changes at Vatican
Mar
16
2013
A Different Kind of Monster Movie
Mar
16
2013
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God premiered last fall on HBO. It shouldn’t be too long now before the film, about the sexual abuse of young deaf boys at a Catholic institution, is available for streaming via Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, and/or Hulu. The reviews at Rotten Tomatoes and iMDB have been stellar, so here at Moral Compass HQ, we’ve added it to our watch list with a good deal of anticipation.
Here’s a little taste.
Friday Funnies
Mar
15
2013
And another one. Same artist (Dan Piraro); please check out his website.
[Comics by Dan Piraro. Via Godless Girl and Neatorama, respectively.]
Holiness Exemplified: 15 Friday Quickies
Mar
15
2013
All news items are from the past 48 hours.
• Rabbi Yehuda Rosilio stole $130,000 worth of Torah scrolls from his own synagogue, and replaced them with cardboard-and-paper replicas.
• The former pastor of an Arkansas church, 42-year-old Hank D. Guilliams, is in jail, accused of multiple counts of sexual assault. Some of the crimes allegedly occurred in the church.
• A pastor in Jamaica invited the police into his church in an effort to quell rumors that his wife had been sleeping around. The service then erupted in “pandemonium,” according to the Jamaica Star.
• Pakistani-born Lord Ahmed, Britain’s first Muslim peer, caused an accident while he was thought to have been driving-and-texting. Although his sentence was postponed so that he could keep “building interfaith bridges,” that didn’t prevent him from going on a radio show and complaining the verdict was the result of a Jewish conspiracy.
• According to Human Rights Watch, there are at least 15 people on death row for blasphemy in Pakistan, and more than 50 people have been killed while facing trial for the charge.
• Indiana pastor Jack Schaap (55, photo) had sex with a 17-year-old girl who had been sent to him for counseling. He told her that Jesus approved of his advances: “Christ wants to marry us + become eternal lovers,” he wrote her in a text message.
• Muslim Mali, a new video game for would-be jihadists, features a button in the corner of the screen that reads: “There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his messenger.” Click on it and it sends a pulverizing black laser beam of death at the French enemy, courtesy of Allah.
• A Toronto pastor, Artelino Vallada, 36, has been charged with sexually assaulting four of his parishioners, including a 14-year-old girl.
• The FBI has apprehended a former Missouri pastor wanted on suspicion of child sexual abuse in New Orleans. George Spencer, 48, was arrested Friday on several charges of forcible sodomy of a child and child molestation.
• Jason Lee Ray, treasurer and youth pastor at a church in Tennessee, admitted to stealing money from the church from more than a year. He is thought to have taken more than $60,000.
• A retired Roman Catholic priest was given an 11-year sentence in a Newfoundland (Canada) court on Thursday for sexually abusing children. George Ansel Smith, 75, was sentenced for offenses involving 13 children he assaulted between 1969 and 1989.
• The deadliest mass killing in Orange County, Calif. history (Seal Beach, 2011, 10 dead) might have been God’s way of protesting the community’s treatment of homeless people, believes pastor Shirley Broussard. City Councilman Michael Levitt offered, however, that God wouldn’t kill a group of people just “because we didn’t pay for housing.”
• More details emerged in the Fairfield, Calif. sex-abuse case involving the Rev. Robert Ruark. Known by parishioners as “Father Silas,” Ruark was charged with more than 30 counts of committing lewd acts on children as young as 13 and, in some instances, photographing them while naked. The victims told detectives that most of the molestations took place either at the church or at his home.
• To prove that he wasn’t hungry for companionship or sex, a 59-year-old priest in Britain who is accused of sexually assaulting a teenage girl announced he had in fact been secretly married for more than a decade. William Finnegan claims he couldn’t have attacked the 17-year-old because, despite his vows of celibacy, he was enjoying a healthy sex life with his wife.
• Robert Lyzenga, a former pastor at Sunrise Christian Reformed Church in Lafayette, Ind., has been charged with five counts of child exploitation and five counts of voyeurism. He had installed small video cameras inside air fresheners in the women’s bathrooms at the church.
[image via the Chicago Tribune]
Rabbi Warns of Lying Children, Murderous Blacks
Mar
15
2013
Always good to know who the real enemy is: killer “schvartze” (blacks), but most of all, mendacious, sex-starved kids. I’m not entirely certain that that’s in the Torah, but New York Rabbi Hershel Schachter is making it an article of faith anyway.
A top rabbinic dean of Yeshiva University has warned rabbis about the dangers of reporting child sex abuse allegations to the police because it could result in a Jew being jailed with a black inmate, or as he put it, “a schvartze,” who might want to kill him.
Rabbi Hershel Schachter, one of the most respected faculty members of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, also said that children can lie and ruin an innocent man’s life.
Schachter’s warnings appear to be a response to reports about sex abuse at Yeshiva University — some of it involving another rabbi, George Finkelstein, who loved to wrestle. With his penis, apparently.
Yeshiva University has been embroiled in a mounting scandal following a series of reports in the Forward [a Jewish newspaper] since December about abuse allegations against two former staff members at Yeshiva University’s high school for boys in Manhattan.
Several former students have told the Forward that they were sodomized by Rabbi Macy Gordon, a Talmud teacher employed at the school until the mid 1980s. More than a dozen students have complained of inappropriate behavior by Finkelstein who rose to school principal before he resigned in 1995. Finkelstein was notorious for forcing students to wrestle with him in a school office and at his home. Several students told the Forward they could feel his erect penis grinding up against them during the wrestling sessions.
[image via bestclipartblog]
Ebayer Uses God to Justify Her Thievery
Mar
14
2013
Nice images, aren’t they?
The first picture was made by Stephen W. Oachs. The one in the middle is by Ksenia Raykova. The one on the right is by Carol Cavalaris.
Other than the fact that these are images by artists with some serious (and most likely hard-earned) chops, what do they all have in common?
They are among scores of digital works that are being illegally peddled on eBay by a seller named bellasmomgodsway (for the sake of brevity, we’ll just call her GodsWay). She has them listed in an eBay section called ‘Direct From the Artist.’ Yeah. Not really the kind of ‘artist’ that the good folks at eBay had in mind.
Here’s one of GodsWay’s listings:
Pro photographer Stephen Oachs, who got that shot, wasn’t asked. He didn’t license the image to GodsWay, and doesn’t get a penny from the eBay sale. The same is true for all the other high-end image makers whose work GodsWay rips off.
You see, GodsWay scours the Internet for quality images, copies them with a click or two, and makes them “hers” by putting her watermark smack dab in the middle. Then she lists the stolen works on eBay, and delivers them (sans watermark) to the buyer, digitally. She’s done it hundreds of times, netting as little as a dollar for each sale.
The watermark she applies (it reads ‘bellasmomgodsway’) is an especially chutzpah-filled touch, because like all watermarks, it says “this is mine, respect my copyright.” Wow.
It goes without saying that this thievery is both immoral and illegal, but we’re supposed to think it’s OK, maybe because she has a seller name with the word God in it. And the word Mom. Oh, and the name of a little girl, her future adopted daughter. Is that enough apple-pie schtick for you?
How do we know about the adopted daughter? Because GodsWay tell us in the auction description. In all of her auction descriptions, actually.
I’m not a grinch, and I’m well aware of the monetary difficulties that adoption can inflict on a family of modest means. In the past decade, my wife and I adopted two absolutely awesome girls. They mean everything to us. With a good deal of financial pain (which we knowingly brought upon ourselves when we decided to adopt), we paid all our adoption-related expenses — get this — without resorting to petty crime.
Maybe an all-powerful Creator could get GodsWay to reflect on the fact that some of those expenses were paid thanks to my work as a professional photographer. I work hard to create my images; then I sell them, and I provide for my family with those sales. As a result, I find it ever-so-slightly galling when people invoke the Almighty to screw actual creators out of enough of our livelihoods that it may well affect our own chances of adopting another child — or of buying our existing kids meals, books, toys, an education, and so on.
A friend sent GodsWay a message via eBay, asking if she’ll teach her future child that the Bible says it’s cool to steal other people’s stuff.
No reply yet.
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Postscript: The image guidelines that we apply on this blog are here.
Update: GodsWay’s eBay listings all got pulled Thursday evening EST — whether as a result of multiple complaints about her thieving behavior, we cannot say.
[Big thanks to Michelle Grove for the editorial tip]