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...but in case any of you are bored out of your minds, you might want to have a go. If not – gasp, horror – he will note on his website that the ‘ex-muslims declined’. Please, please don’t let it get to that point. Here’s his email:
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| Orthodox Epiphany baptism of ice. |
Thirty sex religious leaders joined together against redefining marriage in America, warning that such a move would have “far-reaching consequences” for religious freedom.
In their statement, they said that marriage is a universal and foundational institution that “precedes and transcends” any government, society or religious group. This, they explained, is because it is rooted in the nature of the human person as male and female and the children that are born from their union.
The religious leaders argued that changing the civil definition of marriage changes hundreds or even thousands of laws that are dependent upon marital status, including taxation, housing, property, employment discrimination and benefits, adoption, education and health care.
“In 2006, St. Michael’s Media of Ferndale, Michigan, through its chief executive, Michael Voris, and his associates, requested approval of its media enterprise and programming from the Archdiocese of Detroit. The Detroit archdiocese responded to their initial submission and gave them direction as to the additional information and steps that would be need to be taken. At issue was and is compliance with our basic archdiocesan media protocols and those of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). While there have been some discussions, the matter with St. Michael’s Media remains unresolved; it is not an approved apostolate.
“In 2008, a Web-based video provider named RealCatholicTV.com was launched, with Michael Voris as the primary host and senior executive producer utilizing new and archive program material produced and provided, primarily, by St. Michael’s Media. RealCatholicTV.com has yet to present itself or receive approval
of its media enterprise from the Detroit archdiocese.
“Therefore, the catechetical presentations and the interpretations of Catholic teachings or positions presented by St. Michael’s Media and/or RealCatholicTV— be they audio, video, or exclusively Web-based— cannot be approved or endorsed by the archdiocese at this time.”
"We judge people not just for what they do, but what they're thinking at the time of their action, what they're intending," Young says. But, she says, a brief magnetic pulse was able to change that.
The fact that scientists can adjust morality with a magnet may be disconcerting to people who view morality as a lofty and immutable human trait, says Joshua Greene, psychologist at Harvard University. But that view isn't accurate, he says.
"Moral judgment is just a brain process," he says. "That's precisely why it's possible for these researchers to influence it using electromagnetic pulses on the surface of the brain."
The new study is really part of a much larger effort by scientists to explain how the brain creates moral judgments, Greene says. The scientists are trying to take concepts such as morality, which philosophers once attributed to the human soul, and "break it down in mechanical terms."
If something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation, Green says, it will be hard to argue that people have, or need, a soul.Indeed.
In a forlorn attempt to improve my education, a friend regularly pops round with a pile of back copies of a magazine called New Scientist. They invariably have clever and colourful covers asking things like "Is Time Travel Possible?", "Can we Build a Brontosaurus?" or "Will Man Live Forever?"
Sadly, the answer to all these questions is always an emphatic NO. Sadder still, to reach this conclusion you have to wade through pages of gobbledegook understandable only by the sort of chap who wears sandals and socks and still lives with his mother.
However, it's good to know that people who have difficulty forming relationships have somewhere cosy to discuss quarks, neutrinos and the Higgs Boson Particle. After all, you never see them down the pub.
But this indulgence is rapidly turning to horror as you notice how fascination with the arcane is seeping out from publications like New Scientist into the media as a whole. Coverage of such things as the arts and history – even light entertainment – has been replaced with matters scientific.
Comedy panel shows all must now have a technological bent and every time someone notices something odd happening with a sandwich in the canteen of the Cern large hadron collider it dominates headlines. The schedules are packed and it will be only a matter of time before peak viewing is dominated by Kirstie Allsopp splitting the atom in a folksy, accessible way.
All through, the message comes across clear as "Hey! isn't science interesting? Isn't it fun?" to which the answer again is an definite "No!"
Riding the crest of this assumed wave of interest is a simpering weed called Prof. Brian Cox who obviously took his chair as a result of research into zit cream and having a whining northern accent. He is science's answer to gardening's Alan Titchmarsh and once he has appeared in front of the cameras he is presumably sucked back into the same oily tube from which he was squeezed. On his very debut he joined the Ron Bendell "Don't you want to hit him in the face with a shovel?" hall of fame.
As BBC budgets are trimmed – entailing vast cuts to local radio, regional TV and the rest – Cox is always there, delivering a piece to camera outside an observatory in Chile spouting on about his interest in black holes and the wonders of delving into dark matter.
His preoccupation – and that of the legion of cohorts dragged out from the bowels of laboratories across the world to back him up – always seems to be the origins of us all, the Big Bang and how little gizmos flying around the cosmos affect you, me and the fundamentals of creation.
Once, of course, these things were all left to theologians although that's terribly non-PC these days. Now, exponents of the new beliefs are free to ponder the imponderable and come up with the explanation of life, the universe and everything.
But what, I wonder throughout, has any of this got to do with the price of fish? Yes, bearded men looking at screens may have tracked down the tiny neutrons that enabled the formation of the Crab Nebula but how should that alter my life? Does that knowledge help any of us, at any time, drag ourselves through the day?
All of it, as archbishops, popes and ayatollahs before have found, is irrelevant tosh and does nothing to make the world a better place.
Good science must surely lead to practical good rather that highfalutin conjecture. Do new thoughts about the origins of the Solar System help us provide sewage systems that could save thousands in the slums of India? Do theories about the first few seconds after the creation save millions from malaria?
We already have all the understanding of the basics we need to make a happier, comfier world but instead billions are spent on meaningless research while millions starve – and folk shiver in front of gas fires they can't afford to switch on while their licence fees are spent sending Prof Cox to sit in front of yet another radio telescope. But clearly the nerds have taken over. Our tiny bit of spare cash goes to the new elite and our tiny bit of leisure time is filled by the same people telling us how fascinating it all is. New Scientist should be placed on the top shelf along with other publications of interest to people who need to get a life.
