A Northern Irish priest has sparked a local uproar after accidentally displaying a series of pornographic gay images to a group of parents during at a primary school meeting.

As the BBC is reporting, Father Martin McVeigh projected 16 "indecent images of men" onto a screen as part of a Powerpoint presentation during a March 26 meeting for parents in preparation for First Holy Communion for their children at St. Mary's School in Pomeroy. One eight-year-old child is also reported to have been present during the meeting, according to The Ulster Herald.

"He was visibly shaken and flustered," one parent who was present during the meeting told the BBC. "He gave no explanation or apology to the group and bolted out of the room. The co-ordinator and the teachers then continued with the presentation." The parent also noted that those who saw the pictures "were horrified and distracted."

After numerous failed doomsday predictions, Family Radio founder Harold Camping announced this month that he has no plans to predict ever again the day of God's Judgment. He also issued an apology to listeners, admitting that he was wrong.

"Even the most sincere and zealous of us can be mistaken," Camping and Family Radio staff stated in their March letter. "We realize that many people are hoping they will know the date of Christ's return. In fact for a time Family Radio fell into that kind of thinking.

AN Indonesian civil servant who declared himself an atheist on Facebook was arrested and is now facing jail for blasphemy after being attacked by an angry mob, police said today.
Alexander An, 30, who wrote "God doesn't exist" on his Facebook page, was beaten by a mob of dozens on Wednesday in his hometown in Pulau Punjung, West Sumatra province.
"He is suspected of having blasphemed against Islam," local police chief Chairul Aziz told AFP.
"The man told police investigators that if God really exists and has absolute power, why didn't he prevent bad things from happening in this world."
An said on his Facebook page that he was brought up as a Muslim, like the vast majority in Indonesia, where blasphemy is a punishable crime carrying a maximum five-year prison term.


Read more: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/atheist-faces-jail-after-facebook-remark/story-e6frfku0-1226249817335#ixzz1k2GExQSj

Hoping to catch lightning in a bottle twice, British comedian Ricky Gervais – who brought The Office to the USA – is working on a new sitcom called Afterlife.

The show will follow an atheist who goes to heaven and is being developed in partnership with Dexter producer Clyde Phillips.

A Jewish rabbinical court condemned to death by stoning a stray dog it feared was the reincarnation of a lawyer who insulted its judges, reports say.

The dog entered the Jerusalem financial court several weeks ago and would not leave, reports Israeli website Ynet.

It reminded a judge of a curse passed on a now deceased secular lawyer about 20 years ago, when judges bid his spirit to enter the body of a dog.

The animal is said to have escaped before the sentence was carried out.

One of the judges at the court in the city's ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighbourhood had reportedly asked local children to carry out the sentence...

A Jewish rabbinical court condemned to death by stoning a stray dog it feared was the reincarnation of a lawyer who insulted its judges, reports say.

The dog entered the Jerusalem financial court several weeks ago and would not leave, reports Israeli website Ynet.

It reminded a judge of a curse passed on a now deceased secular lawyer about 20 years ago, when judges bid his spirit to enter the body of a dog.

The animal is said to have escaped before the sentence was carried out.

One of the judges at the court in the city's ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighbourhood had reportedly asked local children to carry out the sentence...

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

"In a large number of modern secular democracies, there's been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%," Dr Wiener said.

"I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!!" he tweeted late Sunday afternoon. "YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO..."

Thousands of tickets for open-air Masses during Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Britain this week are yet to be sold just days before he is due to arrive.

The Pope starts his visit in Scotland on Thursday. The largest organised event is an open-air Mass at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow on the opening day of his four-day trip to the UK.

The capacity has been reduced to 80,000 after a slow take-up of tickets.

Dioceses in England and Wales have also reported thousands of unfilled places for a London vigil in Hyde Park on Saturday and the service to beatify Cardinal Newman in Birmingham on Sunday.

Officials have blamed the early start, with pilgrims having to leave home at 2am in order to board official coaches heading to the venue, rather than the cost of tickets.

The Roman Catholic Church of England and Wales remains confident that the first-ever state papal visit to Britain will prove a success.

LONDON - God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the Universe due to a series of developments in physics, British scientist Stephen Hawking said in extracts published Thursday from a new book.

In a hardening of the more accommodating position on religion that he took in his 1988 international best-seller "A Brief History of Time", Hawking said the Big Bang was merely the consequence of the law of gravity.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist," he writes in "The Grand Design", which is being serialised by The Times newspaper.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going," added the wheelchair-bound expert.

Hawking has achieved worldwide fame for his research, writing and television documentaries despite suffering since the age of 21 motor neurone disease that has left him disabled and dependent on a voice synthesiser.

In "A Brief History of Time", Hawking had suggested that the idea of God or a divine being was not necessarily incompatible with a scientific understanding of the Universe.

But in his latest work, Hawking cites the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star outside our own Solar System as a turning point against Isaac Newton's belief that the Universe could not have arisen out of chaos.

"That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions — the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass — far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he wrote.

Hawking argued earlier this year that mankind's only chance of long-term survival lies in colonizing space, as humans drain Earth of resources and face a terrifying array of new threats.

He also warned in a recent television series that mankind should avoid contact with aliens at all costs, as the consequences could be devastating.


Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/create+Universe+Hawking/3473347/story.html#ixzz0yOXX6KgZ

LONDON - God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the Universe due to a series of developments in physics, British scientist Stephen Hawking said in extracts published Thursday from a new book.

In a hardening of the more accommodating position on religion that he took in his 1988 international best-seller "A Brief History of Time", Hawking said the Big Bang was merely the consequence of the law of gravity.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist," he writes in "The Grand Design", which is being serialised by The Times newspaper.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going," added the wheelchair-bound expert.

Hawking has achieved worldwide fame for his research, writing and television documentaries despite suffering since the age of 21 motor neurone disease that has left him disabled and dependent on a voice synthesiser.

In "A Brief History of Time", Hawking had suggested that the idea of God or a divine being was not necessarily incompatible with a scientific understanding of the Universe.

But in his latest work, Hawking cites the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star outside our own Solar System as a turning point against Isaac Newton's belief that the Universe could not have arisen out of chaos.

"That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions — the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass — far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he wrote.

Hawking argued earlier this year that mankind's only chance of long-term survival lies in colonizing space, as humans drain Earth of resources and face a terrifying array of new threats.

He also warned in a recent television series that mankind should avoid contact with aliens at all costs, as the consequences could be devastating.


Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/create+Universe+Hawking/3473347/story.html#ixzz0yOXX6KgZ

“There’s no longer evidence for a need of God, even less of Christ. The so-called traditional churches look like they are dying.”

It matters who said this. If it came from Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens – the Four Horsemen of the New Apocalypse – few would accept it as an objective assessment. But the author of this quote was Pope Benedict XVI.[1]

The Pope’s candor fits well with other research sponsored by churches. When you count the people in the pews on Sunday rather than having a pollster ask whether or not they attend church, fewer than 18% attend church regularly.[2] From 1980 to 2005 in the Southern Baptist Church, baptisms of people between eighteen and thirty four – in other words, their next generation of leaders – fell 40 percent, from 100,000 in 1980 to 60,000 in 2005.[3]

But the U.S. population grew by 27% during those 25 years, so the Baptists would have had to baptize 127,000 in 2005 just to stay even; they really fell by 52%.[4] In 2006, the Southern Baptists – who claim almost six times more members than any other white evangelical church – made a concerted effort to baptize one million people. Not only did they fall over two-thirds short, they actually baptized even fewer than they had the year before.[5]

You might think that some faith group must have grown during the last thirty years, and you’d be right: atheists and nonbelievers more than doubled in the eleven years between 1990 and 2001, from 14 million to 29 million: from 8% of the country to 14%. There are more than twice as many atheists and nonbelievers as there are evangelical Christians.[6] And since it’s hard to believe that all atheists/nonbelievers would be willing to confess that to pollsters, the number is probably much higher. From 2000 to 2005, church attendance fell in all fifty states.[7]

Nor is this trend a new phenomenon: American churches have not kept up with population growth in over a century.[8]

Then, to add insult to injury, when a sampling of non-Christians were asked to rate eleven groups in terms of respect, they rated evangelicals tenth. Only prostitutes ranked lower.[9]

Are believers more moral? No. When pollster George Barna – himself an evangelical – looked at seventy moral behaviors, he didn’t find any difference between the actions of those who were born-again Christians and those who weren’t. His studies and other indicators show that divorce among born-agains is as common as, or more common than, among other groups. One study showed that wives in traditional, male-dominated marriages were three times more likely to be beaten than wives in egalitarian marriages.[10]

Evangelicals constitute not 25 percent of the U.S. population – as they have claimed – but at most 7 percent, and their numbers are falling, not rising. All these numbers come from the churches themselves. (Wicker, p. 67) While evangelical women make up at least 3.5% of the population (half of 7%), they make up about 20% of the women who get abortions.[11]

“The Spirit,” as the Gospel of John says, “blows where it will.” Where is it blowing now? Adding together the data from pollsters, evangelical researchers and Pope Benedict XVI, it’s not a stretch to say the Spirit – the spirit of life and the truth that can make you more free – has settled in the land of atheists, nonbelievers, and church alumni.

Radio masts operated by the Vatican's radio station are causing cancer
in children, a medical expert has told a Rome court – resulting in six officials of the station being investigated for manslaughter.

The claims of Professor Andrea Micheli, from Milan's National Tumor Institute, focus on 19 child deaths from leukaemia or lymphoma between 1980 and 2003 in the Cesano area, north of Rome; Vatican Radio operates masts nearby in Santa Maria di Galeria.

Micheli, a professor of cancer epidemiology, says in his 300-page report: "The study suggests there was an important, coherent and significant link between residential exposure to the Vatican Radio structures and an excess risk of death from leukaemia and lymphoma in the children."

He said the raised cancer risk
occurred in children under 14 who lived less than 7.5 miles from the masts. He also found evidence of a link between the radiation and adult cancers – but only among those who lived much closer to the antennae.

His investigation was ordered by the court five years ago after concerns were raised about an increased incidence of cancer in the area. As a result of Prof Micheli's evidence, six officials of Vatican Radio have been placed under investigation for manslaughter, by investigating magistrate Stefano Pesci.

The Vatican was quick to point out yesterday that the Italian Navy also operated radio masts in the area.

La Repubblica reported, however, that the leaked court report singled out the Vatican Radio masts as the likely cause, quoting it as saying: "It is due to exposure to the antennae of Vatican Radio and not that of the navy."

Father Federico Lombardi, the director general of Vatican Radio, said it had followed all regulations in setting up the masts.

He also expressed concern that the report was leaked ahead of its official publication,

Vatican Radio, which was set up in 1931, broadcasts to 61 countries in 47 languages.

The turning point was one Christmas, when Nate decided to teach his children about God. In the end, his son Tyler began crying in the backseat of the car, saying that he didn't want to go to hell.

"He wanted to believe because he didn't want to go to hell," Nate said. "I was just stunned because I didn't know what I had said or how I had left him with that fear. I thought I was doing a good job of presenting it without the fear.

"Thinking about it after the fact, I realized you can't do that. With a young mind it doesn't matter. You can try as much as you want to talk about how good God is, but the bottom line is there’s this intolerably frightening punishment if you don't accept it. And how does a young mind deal with that?"

The Divine Mercy Care Pharmacy in Chantilly proudly and purposefully limited what it would stock on its shelves. But it turns out that no birth control pills, no condoms, no porn, no tobacco and even no makeup added up to one thing:

No customers.

The self-described "pro-life" pharmacy went out of business last month, less than two years after it opened to great fanfare, with a Catholic priest sprinkling holy water on the strip-mall store tucked between an Asian supermarket and a scuba shop.

No word on whether he returned for last rites.

March 12 (Bloomberg) -- Pope Benedict XVI, during his tenure as archbishop of Munich, played a role in a decision to move a priest accused of sexual molestation to his diocese to undergo therapy, the church said today.

The priest was later reassigned by another church official and committed more abuse, the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising said in a statement on its Web site. Benedict, at the time Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, “was involved” in a 1980 decision to move the priest, identified only as “H.,” from a church in Essen, Germany, to a rectory in the Munich region for treatment, the diocese said.

A former vicar-general in the church administration, Gerhard Gruber, subsequently allowed the accused priest to continue pastoral duties, during which he committed abuse and was convicted by a court in 1986. Gruber said in the statement that the decision to re-post “H.” was his alone.

“The repeated employment of ‘H.’ in pastoral duties was a serious mistake,” Gruber said. “I take full responsibility for this and I deeply regret that this decision led to offenses against youths -- I apologize to all those who were harmed by this.”