Today is Easter Sunday and it’s a beautiful day in Calgary. The sun is shining and the snow is melting giving us hope that spring is finally upon us. Today, I will resurrect the use of my deck and take in the sunshine while sipping a nice Chardonnay from Burgundy. Resurrection, of course, is today’s big theme, filling the pages of the Calgary Herald (Canada’s largest Christian daily). I confess to being somewhat astonished that people actually believe in the resurrection of Christ. The good news is that fewer and fewer people do. That’s probably why the faithful feel the need to pump up the marketing volume every Easter. Read the rest of this entry »
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Pastor Terry Jones finally got around to burning some copies of the Qur’an and sparked the outrage he was looking for. Responding to the desecration of the Qur’an, devout Muslims in Afghanistan killed 10 United Nations workers shooting eight and beheading two others. Isn’t religion wonderful?
We wrote about Pastor Jones before (See: ASkepticRTN: Qur’an Burning for Fun and Profit) noting that the pastor is effectively makes his point that Islam is a hate filled religion (evidenced by the response of some Muslims) while making the unintended point that so is Christianity (by burning the Qur’an in the first place).
This has prompted the typical response of the religious – questioning whether those who engage is such acts are ‘true’ Christians or Muslims or whatever. This was the tack taken back in September by Calgary Herald (Canada’s largest Christian daily) Editor Licia Corbella when Pastor Jones first proposed to burn the Qur’an. It is more or less the same direction taken by columnist Naomi Lakritz in her piece: Book-burning pastor gives religion a bad name, in the Tuesday April 05 edition of the Herald. Actually, religion doesn’t need Pastor Jones to give it a bad name, it’s doing pretty well on its own. What is not going so well is the laughable efforts of the religious to distance themselves from these obvious acts of religious bigotry and hate. Read the rest of this entry »
My favorite way of waking up in the morning is listening to The Calgary Eyeopener on CBC Radio. Usually. Unfortunately, on Thursday, April 07, host Jim Brown interviewed a California doctor pitching liberation therapy to Canadian MS sufferers. This was enough to put me off my breakfast. Evidently the doctor will be traveling across Canada and like the snake-oil salesman of yesteryear, will be selling unproven treatments and false hope to the desperate and vulnerable. The only thing that has changed? The price. According to the doctor, the cost of the procedure is $8,000. Read the rest of this entry »