In Australia when a Labor government is on the nose, the off-stage powers-in-charge often replace the leader with a woman. It sometimes works wonders, getting things sorted out apart from protecting the "boys"-networks from more ridicule... The Liberal party does not have that luxury though, as many (not all) Liberal politicians believe women should be barefoot, pregnant and working their butt-off in the kitchen... Thus in the same vein as the more "woman"-oriented Labor party, it's time for a woman to start ruling the catholic church and squeeze the balls of sexually offending priests till it hurts or till they sing falsetto.

But for me, as an atheist, the whole religious lot — jews, muslims from whatever prophetic factions, catholics, protestants, orthodox, conundrumies — could vanish into hell. I believe this could make a difference in understanding the true position of humanity as an evolved ape beyond mere survival... But the very thing that could help get rid of religious idiotic lies — our amazing ability beyond the average ape to develop stylism in our own mind — is also the very entity that is conducive to various forms of sophisticated porkies that, at society's level, are big manufactured godly lies designed to comfort our cosmic angst and be submissive, all developed from seeing too much and understanding so little...

It would be much simpler to all be secularly good people — good to each others and to our environment in which many species that have done no harm to us are vanishing because our godly beliefs encourage a sneaky carelessness in our hearts, via the desire to conquer all that lives on earth. Tragic.

see toon at top...

From the Guardian

The head of Kyrgyzstan's new interim government yesterday revealed that her country was broke and said that the former president who was overthrown in a street-led revolution this week had left only $80m in the budget.

In an interview with the Guardian, Roza Otunbayeva appealed for urgent international aid so that the impoverished Central Asian nation could meet its immediate bills. "Tomorrow we should pay pensions. This is a really serious problem," she said.

Otunbayeva said that the ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiyev had plundered the economy, installing his sons in key government positions and flogging off strategic state industries for a fraction of their true value.

She said the country's leading telecoms firm had been sold to an offshore company in the Canary Islands, belonging to a friend of the president's son Maxim. "We had an absolutely scandalous situation where Kyrgyzstan had become a family-run regime," she said.

Otunbayeva, a former foreign minister, said popular anger against the president and his relatives exploded after he imposed new tariffs on 1 January on electricity and hot water. She said the revolt started in the freezing mountain town of Talas in early March, then spread across the country.

----------------

Gus: a country falls apart and a woman takes over... See comment above. See toon at top. May she have the best of luck and get the support she needs to turn things around...

From Maureen Dowd at the NYT

When I was in Saudi Arabia, I had tea and sweets with a group of educated and sophisticated young professional women.

I asked why they were not more upset about living in a country where women’s rights were strangled, an inbred and autocratic state more like an archaic men’s club than a modern nation. They told me, somewhat defensively, that the kingdom was moving at its own pace, glacial as that seemed to outsiders.

How could such spirited women, smart and successful on every other level, acquiesce in their own subordination?

I was puzzling over that one when it hit me: As a Catholic woman, I was doing the same thing.

I, too, belonged to an inbred and wealthy men’s club cloistered behind walls and disdaining modernity.

I, too, remained part of an autocratic society that repressed women and ignored their progress in the secular world.

...

The church that through the ages taught me and other children right from wrong did not know right from wrong when it came to children. Crimes were swept under the rectory rug, and molesters were protected to molest again for the “good of the universal church.” And that is bad, very bad — a mortal sin.

The church has had theological schisms. This is an emotional schism. The pope is morally compromised. Take it from a sister.

--------------------------

Gus: dear Maureen... not only some of our activities could be sins in a religious context, they are crimes in a social context... Humans are loopy when it comes to behaviour because we have the ability to manipulate the two main levers of life beyond the "natural" norms into uncertainty. These levers are aggressiveness and receptivity. Most animals operate within limits in their instinctive and learned behaviour using these two primal "levers" of behaviour — be it for sexual activity, for the chase of preys and for defence, as well as the processing of food. Many animals have social skills.

It's "natural".

We humans are the same, but we have the luxury of greater memory, thus greater choice in the usage of our aggressiveness and receptivity, thus beyond a certain point, we bathe in greater uncertainty. We even can "teach" dogs to exagerate these natural traits beyond their own "wolfness". We like an obedient dog, but some dogs will be trained to attack.

As mentioned in the pursuit of happiness, we need to manage our personal aggressiveness so that we do not harm others nor ourself, and manage our receptivity so we do not become submissive.

Much much more can be said here about the complexities of life, including why we choose to believe some religious dogma rather than others — from the reactivity ingrained in our habits to the way and framework in which we are "taught". But all is poised in the management of our aggressiveness and receptivity in regard to sex and other "purposes", in acceptance or beyond the codification within a social group in which we think we belong. And sometimes we cross the limits of the codification and call it perverse, sin or crime — because it creates pain. But the codification itself can be perverse or it enforces submissiveness of one group (women) by others.

Even the boundary of pleasure and pain can be blurred vicariously, in our memory as we become sadists and masochists... Some of us may prefer being submissive rather than having to be "adventurous" in an uncertain realm of freedom. More can be said..

I want to offer another perspective on the escalating scandal within the Catholic Church, and to alert readers to a good recent essay on these sordid topics.[1] In "The Pattern of Priestly Sex Abuse," Harriet Fraad offers some important data many of us didn't know.

Figures from the John Jay School of Criminal Justice, for example, estimate that since 1950, about 280,000 children have been sexually abused by Catholic clergy and deacons. With the shame and denial that accompany sexual abuse, the real number must be much higher.

Worse, this is not just a recent phenomenon. Father Thomas Doyle, a priest, and Richard Sipes and Patrick Wall, former monks, have written that the Catholic Church has recognized the problem of abuse by priests for 2,000 years. Their book, "Sex, Priests and Secret Codes: The Catholic Church's 2000 Year Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse" (Volt Press, 2006) was based on the church's own documents.

And far from being the case of a few bad apples, Brooks Egerton and Reese Dunklin have reported that even eight years ago, two-thirds of sitting US bishops have been accused of moving pedophile priests to new assignments.[2] It is not the apples that are bad; it's the barrel.

For Those With Ears to Hear

A married teacher is poised to become Italy's first woman priest when she is ordained later this month in an Anglican church close to the Vatican.

Maria Longhitano, a member of the breakaway Old Catholic Church, says she hopes her ordination will break down "prejudice" in the Roman Church.

The event may energise the debate among Roman Catholics about the role of women, a BBC correspondent says.

Pope Benedict is implacably opposed to women as priests.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8681779.stm

The US Episcopal Church has ordained an openly lesbian bishop in a move likely to increase the turmoil in the Anglican Communion.

Saturday's ordination came despite warnings from the Archbishop of Canterbury that it would deepen an already bitter dispute on sexuality.

Mary Glasspool, 56, became an assistant bishop at a ceremony attended by 3,000 people in Long Beach, California.

Gene Robinson became the first openly gay US bishop in November 2003.

BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott says that since then the Anglican Communion has been on course for a permanent split.