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Getting some exorcise

November 21st 2010 01:34
: Vyoos news
exorcism

Some people just don't want to believe what's in front of their eyes. Why do so many have so little faith?

Take the news from Trinidad this week. Seventeen high school girls fell ill simultaneously, then started rolling on the ground and talking in strange tongues.


The Moruga Composite School students appeared to suffer nausea and headaches. Two tried to throw themselves over a railing and had to be restrained. Others fell into a semi-conscious state, eyes rolling and limbs out of control.

Alarmed school administrators called in Roman Catholic priests and pastors from nearby churches, who showered the students with holy water and said prayers. The exorcism seemed to work. Several of the girls were taken to hospital suffering grazes and bruises, but all were later released and full recoveries were made.

They were lucky. One teacher said the school was built on top of a cemetery. And a male student told the local newspaper that he had communicated with a "devil" who had possessed one of girls. "I asked the Devil what he wanted with the girls and the voice said he wanted a life," the boy said.

Despite all this evidence of evil visitation, however, some local residents are claiming the whole thing was a hoax. One said there is no cemetery under the school. Another said the whole thing had been arranged by clergy to drum up publicity for the church. Even local municipal administrators showed themselves on the side of the doubters, claiming there was "nothing in the environment to trigger the event".


It's shocking that people can doubt events just because they involve things we don't easily understand. And the fact that the whole episode was just like a scene in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible was, of course, pure coincidence.


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: Vyoos
robert edwards ivf
Robert Edwards, British scientist, IVF pioneer and Nobel Laureate

VYOOS EDITORIAL
Has everyone in the Vatican drowned on the tide of negative sentiment washing over the place? If there is anyone there trying to return some polish to the tarnished brand that is the Roman Catholic Church, they aren't rubbing hard enough.

That includes Bishop Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, who heads of the Pontifical Academy for Life. The splendidly-named body speaks for the Vatican on medical ethics.

de Paula today spoke for himself, he claims, when he painted 85-year-old Robert Geoffrey Edwards, the British physiologist and pioneer in reproductive medicine, as some sort of force for evil.

Edwards was yesterday awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work developing in-vitro fertilization, the process which has made parenthood possible for millions of infertile people.

This, said de Paula, was "completely out of order".

"Without Edwards, there would not be a market on which millions of ovocytes are sold ... and there would not be a large number of freezers filled with embryos in the world.

"In the best of cases they are transferred into a uterus, but most probably they will end up abandoned or dead, which is a problem for which the new Nobel Prize winner is responsible,'' the bishop told Italy's ANSA news agency.

de Paula later claimed he was speaking for himself and not the Vatican, an interesting claim from a man whose position makes him the official mouthpiece of the Holy See on medical ethics issues.

The Nobel committee hailed Edwards' work as a "milestone in the development of modern medicine''. And one of the first people to congratulate him was Louise Brown, the first ever "test tube baby". Clearly, she wouldn't be alive if Bishop de Paula had his way.

The truth of this debate lies beyond religious and ethical considerations. What Robert Edwards did was what any scientist must do - explore, with the aim of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.

He broke no laws of the land. He pushed the boundaries of understanding a very long way indeed. And his research brought happiness, not to mention life, to many families.

The Vatican is free to express its views. In a democracy, all minorities can be heard. But please, Bishop de Paula, understand that the freedom of scientific research has no less an imperative than the freedom of speech.

If you don't like the systems, processes and realities which have developed around IVF practices, then say so, and address those issues directly. Attacking the individual as you have done is as naive as it is radical. You, like the Roman Catholic Church, need more polish.
smh.com.au








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ground zero mosque

VYOOS EDITORIAL
They are going to build a mosque and Islamic community centre close to Ground Zero in New York. The final obstacle to the development has just been removed with a vote by New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission to reject landmark status for an existing building on the site. The rejection, which was unanimous, will allow for demolition of the existing building and construction of the mosque and community complex.

It is a massive project - the mosque will be 13 storeys tall - and it received considerable opposition. This is perhaps not surprising. To put it in the bluntest terms, Ground Zero exists because of an attack by Islamic fanatics on New York's World Trade centre which killed thousands. Now they want to build a mosque next door?

Opponents of the $100 million project, including 9/11 first-responders and family members of victims of the terror attacks, said the location would be "insensitive". Some went further, screaming "Shame on you!" at the nine commissioners who sit on the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission as they emerged from the meeting on Monday which cleared the final obstacle.

A different response came from the New York Civil Liberties Union, which praised the committee for ``standing up for the principles of religious freedom and tolerance''.

``We congratulate the Landmarks Preservation Commission for promoting our nation's core values and not letting bias get in the way of the rule of law,'' the organisation said.

Another group, called September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, which advocates peace and opposes the war in Afghanistan, also commended the decision.

"We understand the grief suffered by all those who also lost loved ones," they said. "However, we cannot allow grief to give way to intolerance and bigotry. Murderers killed our loved ones on 9/11, not Muslims."

Well said. This is obviously a voice of reason, and they do well to resist commenting on the short-sightedness of those who opposed this plan on emotional grounds. So Vyoos will do it for them.

We say “shame” on opponents of this plan. You are the voice of unreason. Your views ultimately come from the same blinkered, self-serving intolerance which leads to acts of fanaticism.







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saudi woman
Saudi Arabia’s religious police are not popular. Their job, fundamentally, is to ensure that Saudi women behave the way Saudi men think they should behave.

The thinking of Saudi men can be summed up by the fact that they have religious police in the first place


[ Click here to read more ]
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Questions about the afterlife

April 19th 2010 11:38
life after death

A remarkable story has unfolded today about the near-death experience of a three-year-old boy in Germany.

[ Click here to read more ]
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archbishop vincent nichols

Internet social networking sites which promote themselves as communities are in fact undermining community life. So are texting and emails.

[ Click here to read more ]
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Would Christ have wept?

March 22nd 2009 20:48
spectacled eider duck
The spectacled eider duck

Mary Colwell is a Catholic lay activist and environmentalist. About 15 years ago she went deep into the Arctic to film the spectacled eider duck, a rare species which lives all year round above the Arctic Circle. While other birds fly south for winter, it spends the dark months, as Colwell describes it, "sitting in the middle of the frozen Baring Sea".

[ Click here to read more ]
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