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Post by Deleted on Mar 11, 2013 19:08:25 GMT 10
From the Los Angeles Times....Roman Catholic Church feels Europe slipping from its handsThe issue of gay rights is just one in which the church is losing its influence, and its privileged status is increasingly called into question.By HENRY CHU | 7:31PM - Sunday, March 10, 2013People gather at St. Peter's Square at the Vatican ahead of the cardinals' conclave this week. — Photo: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images/March 10th, 2013.VATICAN CITY — The timing said it all.
A smiling Pope Benedict XVI had just wrapped up an official visit to Portugal in May 2010, during which he praised Catholic organizations striving to protect families based on "the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman."
But barely 72 hours after the pontiff flew home, the president of Portugal declared that he would sign a bill allowing gay and lesbian couples to wed. With Spain having granted such rights five years earlier, the move turned the entire Iberian Peninsula, historically a Catholic stronghold, into an unlikely hitching post for homosexuals.
"That shows the importance of the pope's views, of the Catholic Church's views, on same-sex marriage in terms of domestic politics," Paulo Corte-Real, a gay rights activist and economics professor, recalled wryly.
More than just an embarrassment, the turn of events was emblematic of the fact that the Roman Catholic Church, once a mighty force on its home continent, is weaker in modern Europe than ever before, its influence ebbing, its privileged status increasingly called into question.
The now-retired Benedict spent much of his eight-year papacy trying to revive Catholicism here on its home turf. But the cardinals now assembled at the Vatican to pick his successor face a grim reality: The campaign has failed to reverse, or even just to halt, Europe's slide toward what church leaders regard as godless humanism.
Empty spaces in the pews abound. The clerical sex-abuse scandal has stripped the church of much of its credibility and moral authority in parts of Europe (and the United States as well). When it comes to high-profile social issues such as gay rights and abortion, the church has lost battle after battle.
For many Europeans, the relevance of the church, both for their personal and their public lives, is a thing of the past.
"The modern world and the Catholic Church are out of step," said Clifford Longley, a Catholic columnist and analyst in Britain. "The Catholic Church can try to re-evangelize by getting the modern world back into step with it, but I don't think that's going to work."
The church's declining fortunes in Europe pose tough choices to the cardinals gathering in their secretive conclave. Should they maintain the emphasis on shoring up the faith in the Vatican's backyard, or concentrate and increase their resources in places where the church is actually growing, such as Africa and Asia? Should they take an even more dramatic step (and a deep breath) and elect a new pope from one of those regions?
No clear favorite has emerged, at least in public discourse. But the composition of the College of Cardinals suggests that the new pontiff is more than likely to wind up being a white man in his 60s or 70s with the same conservative, orthodox views on religious doctrine and social issues as Benedict and the late John Paul II.
Europe, by contrast, is steadily becoming more ethnically and religiously heterogeneous and more socially liberal.
That divergence helps explain why, by most every quantitative measure, the Catholic Church has hit hard times in the region.
Weekly Mass attendance is at an all-time low in Western Europe. Only 1 in 5 Catholics in Spain report going to a service once a week. In Germany, it's 1 in 6, and fewer than 1 in 10 in France, according to research by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
"I'm Catholic. I was [educated] in a religious school," said molecular biologist Antonio Garcia, a 33-year-old Spaniard. "But my family never goes to church — only my grandmother."
In Europe's biggest countries, the number of baptized Catholics as a share of the overall population has dropped. Indeed, Europe was the only region of the world to witness a decline in the number of Catholics between 1990 and 2010, a period during which the global tally climbed nearly 30% to 1.2 billion adherents, according to Vatican statistics. The proportion of Catholics in Europe was just 23.8% in 2010, the lowest in memory.
The shrinking number of the spiritually devout in Europe has corresponded with a serious loss of temporal clout for the church, an institution that once exercised significant power in alliance with the state or even, in some cases, over and above it.
Catholics and non-Catholics alike have been disillusioned by factors that, critics warn, could fatally undermine the church's influence if it does not take steps to correct course.
The sex abuse scandal, with its reports of Vatican coverups and insensitive treatment of victims, has robbed the church of its moral standing in the eyes of many. In recent days, the only cardinals in Rome to speak out on the need for the global church to address the issue have been Americans, reinforcing the impression that the church hierarchy in Europe still refuses to acknowledge the severity of the problem.
At the same time, the Vatican's traditional teachings on family, gender and sexuality no longer seem to connect with the daily experience of many Europeans, who find official Catholic strictures on such matters as birth control and the role of women in the church retrograde and unfair.
To stick to the same dogma risks losing more adherents, said columnist Longley, but change is not on the horizon with the current crop of conservative-leaning cardinals.
"To some extent, they're prisoners of their own ideology," Longley said. "The Catholic Church seems so far away from where people are that discussion doesn't even start."
Nowhere is the retreat of Catholic influence seen more clearly than in the realm of gay rights.
Catholic leaders have routinely denounced same-sex marriage as a threat to society, organizing demonstrations against it and demanding that lawmakers shun measures to legalize it.
Yet Benedict's papacy was bookended with major defeats on the issue in countries with large Catholic populations. In 2005, shortly after he was named pope, Spain approved marriage equality, joining nations such as Denmark and Belgium. This year, as Benedict prepared his resignation announcement, both France and Britain introduced bills authorizing same-sex marriage. They are almost certain to become law.
Garcia, the Spanish molecular biologist, is marrying his British boyfriend in September. They're planning a big bash.
"I have a very conservative family, and I have quite a lot of religious friends. They accept [it] completely," Garcia said. "Spain is a very Catholic country, but at the same time it's very progressive."
No longer the unassailable institution of yore, the church in Spain is even finding its tax-exempt status questioned. Dozens of cash-strapped municipalities have decided to target church-owned properties being used for commercial purposes, not religious ones, and are demanding their share of the revenue.
"The case of a convent where the nuns sell sweets — that's very typical in Spain. We think that's an economic activity, for which tax must be paid," said Anselmo Avendaño, a practicing Catholic and a councilman in Alcala, a town outside Madrid that is $400 million in debt.
In Germany, Benedict's homeland, local bishops caused a stir last year when, backed by the Vatican, they warned of serious consequences for Catholics who opted out of paying a government-collected tax that goes to the church. Any parishioner who did so would no longer be allowed to take Communion, make confession or serve as a godparent.
Such moves have alienated many of the flock even as Benedict trotted from country to country trying to rejuvenate the faith in Europe.
His visits were met with enthusiasm by many devotees, but the effects often seemed ephemeral. To make Europe a successful mission field, his successor will have to fire up local parishes to take the initiative, said Santiago de la Cierva, a communications professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.
"I don't think the pope alone will make the change," De la Cierva said. Papal visits are "really important for many Catholic institutions to recover the pride in being Catholic and the enthusiasm for being Catholic. But that alone doesn't work."• Special correspondent Lauren Frayer in Alcala, Spain, contributed to this report.www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-catholic-church-europe-20130311,0,3117008,full.story
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Post by jody on Mar 11, 2013 19:11:03 GMT 10
There is more to religion than the catholic church.
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Post by garfield on Mar 11, 2013 19:15:37 GMT 10
Dumbfuck spamming wanker, religion is actually enjoying a renascence in Europe, the muslim religion that is, and the muslim religion is the only religion that the atheist left can relate to being the fascist arseholes that they are and as such they will do everything they can to assist with its implementation.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 11, 2013 19:17:08 GMT 10
I bet if you look at the figures, you'll find that protestant churches are also in decline in Europe.
They certainly are in New Zealand (and I believe in Australia).
Ironically, the RC church has actually increased the number of parisioners in NZ over the past several years (mostly Asian immigrants who are staunch catholics) and it is widely believed by statisticians that last week's census held in NZ will show that Roman Catholics have overtaken Anglicans as the most sizeable religion in NZ (RCs have traditionally been way behind Anglicans and other mainstream protestant churches in numbers). Meanwhile, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists and the other christian religions are all in freefall as far as numbers go. The only other religions that appear to be holding their own are some of those fundy mega-church cultists such as Destiny, Equippers and their ilk, who suck in the gullible (simpletons like Matty-boy).
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Post by Deleted on Mar 11, 2013 19:20:10 GMT 10
Dumbf*** spamming wanker, religion is actually enjoying a renascence in Europe, the muslim religion that is, and the muslim religion is the only religion that the atheist left can relate to being the fascist arseholes that they are and as such they will do everything they can to assist with its implementation. Piss off, stupid idiot. Muslims are but a tiny percentage of the population of Europe. Ditto in New Zealand where they rate in even smaller numbers than insignificant cultist wankers such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, Exclusive Brethren and Mormons.
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Post by caskur on Mar 11, 2013 19:23:33 GMT 10
People may or may not believe in God.... but one thing they've cottoned onto is that churches are corrupted like anything man organizes. Even tho numbers are down... People would still believe in a supernatural.
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Post by jody on Mar 11, 2013 19:37:46 GMT 10
Faith in God will never die off. Churches have nothing to with it.
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Post by caskur on Mar 11, 2013 19:42:05 GMT 10
Faith in God will never die off. Churches have nothing to with it. I agree....
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Post by caskur on Mar 11, 2013 20:54:29 GMT 10
you won't be here in a couple of centuries!
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Post by jody on Mar 11, 2013 21:00:55 GMT 10
You couldn't be more wrong Buzz. Faith in God will never die off.
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Post by Occam's Spork on Mar 12, 2013 10:03:02 GMT 10
Christianity has been on the increase in the East. (We'll give you guys the west, and while you are distracted, we'll take China..)
Then there will be so many of us, we'll be unstoppable. Mwahahahaha! ;D
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Post by pim on Mar 12, 2013 11:02:57 GMT 10
KTJ, look I don't care if you proclaim your back-of-the-envelope "atheism" based on the latest radical chic left-liberal tract that comes from the west coast of the United States. You're entitled to your views even if they're loopy, shallow and crackpot. After all, this is NTB where the expression of opinions that are loopy, shallow and crackpot is a speciality. So you're in good company - as indeed are we all. But you're clueless about the Roman Catholic Church. This is a religion that for two millennia used to conduct its services in a language that its congregations didn't understand - Latin - and in which the celebrant performed his office with his back turned to the congregation.
And this was to packed churches.
Then, in the latter 1960s, they switched from Latin to the vernacular and the celebrant at the religious service faced the congregation and involved them in the liturgy - and numbers have declined ever since. I understand that these days what you call "Catholicism" is a generic term covering all sorts of worships, from the "cool" happy clapper charismatic "praise the lord" stuff that I personally find creepy and off-putting, to the anodyne, bland and somewhat boring "standard" liturgy in English to the old-fashioned esoteric but very prayerful Latin liturgy which I have to admit I rather like.
Last time I attended a Mass in Adelaide the cathedral was full of Indians & Chinese ... well, maybe I exaggerate a tad. Not "full" perhaps but there were a lot of them.
I attended a Mass in Nouméa a few years ago. The Cathedral was full of Pacific Islanders - and I mean full! The singing was beautiful beyond belief. If I lived in Noumea I'd be there every Sunday just for the music. Here's another straw in the wind: it used to be the case that vocations for the Catholic priesthood were at rock bottom and the seminaries were practically empty with almost no priests-in-training. These days however they're doing a roaring trade. Apparently there are 350 candidates for the Catholic priesthood nationwide. That's actually quite a lot. The Catholic Church is far from moribund.
As for Europe, Christianity is at its core. Not this confection invented by the American bowdlerisers called "Judeo" Christianity. Just Christianity. Secular Europe, the outcome of the revolutionary upheavals of the 19th century such as the French Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento, with its separation of church & state and the relegation of Christianity to the private sphere, is looking somewhat tatty these days. Forget about people like Garfield, Stellar and Colonel Flagg sounding their alarms about "Eurabia" just because Geert Wildebeest has done a clever piece of political niche marketing in the Netherlands, that ain't gonna happen. And nor is European Christianity going to wither on the vine and disappear.
The bible says:
Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my church.
You can believe it, or you can disbelieve it. I really don't care. I didn't put up that quote to "debate" it. To be honest I don't care what you think of it. But here's what Catholics think of it - they believe it means that Christ kick started Christianity he did it on pretty solid foundations.
There's more:
The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
That means it's gonna last ... and last ... and last, and it'll outlast anything its detractors might throw against it. That's what Catholics think.
I don't know if that's true or not. But what I do know is that so far, over the past 2000 years, it has proved to be true. And you have to admit that over the past 2000 years Christianity has been through tough times that make today's problems seem pretty minor.
"History's dustbin"? I wouldn't be so sure about that!
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Post by pim on Mar 12, 2013 12:41:49 GMT 10
- quibbles over the translation. This is from imperfect memory. Did I get a subjunctive mood wrong? An ablative absolute out of place? One could argue that "congregation" (a Latin derivative as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon "church", and in any case "church" is used here in a generic organisational sense rather than referring to a particular or specific building - as any Catholic would understand) is synonymous with "church" in this context. This is just diversionary spam from a troll who comes here with a very negative agenda, and who will respond to this post with another dummy spit containing words like "narcissist" and ... well ... you know what I mean! We've heard it all before, gentle reader ... [
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Post by caskur on Mar 12, 2013 15:30:21 GMT 10
- quibbles over the translation. This is from imperfect memory. Did I get a subjunctive mood wrong? An ablative absolute out of place? One could argue that "congregation" (a Latin derivative as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon "church", and in any case "church" is used here in a generic organisational sense rather than referring to a particular or specific building - as any Catholic would understand) is synonymous with "church" in this context. This is just diversionary spam from a troll who comes here with a very negative agenda, and who will respond to this post with another dummy spit containing words like "narcissist" and ... well ... you know what I mean! We've heard it all before, gentle reader ... [ Church and congregation mean the same thing. Buzz is not a scholar, nor has he read the Bible in it's entirety, nor is he in anyway an expert on translations. He once said he wanted a Greek Bible and an English translation in exact word for word rendering. I gave him one which he left in my car... then later, I offered it to him again, he took it, but left it behind without even opening it. I didn't offer it a third time. It was a Bible with the Greek, the English word for word, and the English arranged to make proper sense. Now he seems to have adopted the Bahá'í Faith... .. He does not know the history of man from his civilization. He gets stuck in a groove like a broken record and off he goes. Most people would start from the beginning and go to the next stage and look for the facts and myths. Doing that would take at minimally 2-3 years... minimally... I personally would say 10 yrs... Anyway, that is neither here nor there really. Don't you think it's funny watching him go off half baked and nutso because no one takes him seriously? He denies everything when confronted. The image he wants to project of himself doesn't match the reality.
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Post by caskur on Mar 12, 2013 18:32:46 GMT 10
devaluation and invalidation and character assassination from caskur - typical of a Narcissist - a very nasty person and completely cowardly There word congregation is different to church - big differenceAs usual pim its a waste of time communicating you Only to you who has no real understanding... when you're corrected, you fail to recognize it and own it .
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Post by garfield on Mar 12, 2013 19:40:43 GMT 10
Did you two used to be married or something?
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Post by Occam's Spork on Mar 16, 2013 14:13:08 GMT 10
Faith in God will never die off. Churches have nothing to with it. A church is neither a building, or an institution. It's people.
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Post by caskur on Mar 17, 2013 19:25:26 GMT 10
Faith in God will never die off. Churches have nothing to with it. A church is neither a building, or an institution. It's people. that is what we tried to teach buzzy boy!
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Post by KTJ on May 7, 2018 14:45:13 GMT 10
And in America, Trump is facilitating the eventual consignment of religion to the dustbin of history in Jesusland. from The Washington Post....No wonder there's an exodus from religionJesuitgate and Trumpian hypocrisy show how politics is driving people from church.By E.J. DIONNE Jr. | 7:07PM EDT — Sunday, May 06, 2018President Donald J. Trump at a National Day of Prayer event in the Rose Garden of the White House on Thursday. — Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency/Agencia-EFE/Shutterstock.DO YOU wonder why the proportion of Americans declaring themselves unaffiliated with organized religion has skyrocketed in recent decades?
This trend is especially pronounced among adults under 30, roughly 40 percent of whom claim no connection to a religious congregation or tradition and have joined the ranks of those the pollsters call the “nones”.
To understand how so many now prefer nothing to something when it comes to religion, ponder the news over the past few days.
The same newspapers and broadcasts that were reporting on how President Trump finally admitted that he had indirectly paid a porn star to keep quiet about an alleged affair also offered accounts of what we'll call Jesuitgate, the controversy over who should be the chaplain of the House of Representatives.
On Thursday, Speaker Paul D. Ryan backed down from his effective dismissal of the Reverend Patrick Conroy, a Jesuit priest, as chaplain. Ryan had said he asked the cleric to quit because he had provided inadequate “pastoral services,” but denied that Conroy was ousted because of a mild prayer for justice he delivered during the debate over the GOP tax cut.
That phrase “pastoral services” must inspire a chuckle from your typical millennial agnostic. It makes the work of holy men and women sound like the this-worldly tasks of the accountant, the mechanic or the dentist. (As the grateful son of a dentist, I speak with respect for these extremely useful professions.)
Conroy had initially agreed to Ryan's request to step aside but withdrew his resignation in a quietly stinging letter. The priest noted that he had never been informed of the shortcomings of his “pastoral services.” If he had, he would “have attempted to correct such ‘faults’.”
Conroy also quoted Ryan's chief of staff, Jonathan Burks, as telling him “something like ‘maybe it's time we had a chaplain that wasn't a Catholic’.” Ryan's office vehemently denied this (the Catholic vote is substantial), but the speaker announced he didn't want to have a “protracted fight” and that Conroy could stay.
Many of us could have told the speaker that it's a mistake to mess with a Jesuit. But think about it: The House Republican leadership was more inclined to push out a chaplain than to impose accountability on a president who is a proven liar and trashes the rule of law for his own selfish purposes day after day.
This degree of partisan irresponsibility only aggravates the already powerful skepticism among the young about what it means to be religious. In their landmark 2010 book, “American Grace”, the scholars Robert Putnam and David Campbell found that the rise of the nones was driven by the increasing association of organized religion with conservative politics and a lean toward the right in the culture wars.
Revealingly, Putnam and Campbell found that millennials with tolerant and open views on homosexuality were more than twice as likely to be religious nones as their statistically similar peers with conservative or traditionalist views on homosexuality. Many young people came to regard religion, in Putnam and Campbell’s words, as “judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical and too political.”
If you want a particularly exquisite hypocritical moment, consider that on Thursday, the very day when Trump had to admit his lies on the Stormy Daniels payoff, the president held a White House commemoration of the National Day of Prayer. “Prayer is the key that opens [to] us the treasures of God's mercies and blessings,” he proclaimed, quoting Billy Graham. He tweeted this out as part of a pious 42-second video set to a sentimental soundtrack of peaceful strings. I guess Trump can use some peace and a lot of mercy right now.
What's maddening about all of this is that religion has a strong case to make for itself — to the young and to everyone else — given its historical role as a prod to personal and social change and the ways in which movements for justice have been inspired through the centuries by the words of Exodus, Micah, Isaiah, Amos and Jesus.
Conroy was getting at this in the most uncontroversial way possible when he spoke in his now-contested prayer of how “our great nation” has created “opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle.” If a chaplain could be rebuked for voicing that simple and undeniable truth, what's the point of the “religious liberty” that Trump and his GOP allies celebrate?
And when will those who advertise themselves as religion's friends realize they can do far more damage to faith than all the atheists and agnostics put together?__________________________________________________________________________ • E.J. Dionne writes about politics in a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post and on the PostPartisan blog. He is also a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University and a frequent commentator on politics for National Public Radio, ABC's “ This Week” and MSNBC. Before joining The Post in 1990 as a political reporter, Dionne spent 14 years at The New York Times, where he covered politics and reported from Albany, Washington, Paris, Rome and Beirut. He is the author of six books: “Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism-From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond” (2016), “Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent” (2012), “Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics After the Religious Right” (2008), “Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge” (2004), “They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate The Next Political Era” (1996), and “Why Americans Hate Politics” (1991), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a National Book Award nominee. Dionne grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts, attended Harvard College and was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife and three children. __________________________________________________________________________ Related to this topic: • Dana Milbank: This week proved God exists, and he has a wicked sense of humor • Kathleen Parker: Paul Ryan's failed exorcism • Letters to the Editor: The real chaplain scandals • Rachel K. Laser: Why do we need a chaplain in Congress, anyway? • Jennifer Rubin: The religious right isn't doing much for religionwww.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-wonder-theres-an-exodus-from-religion/2018/05/06/4ad8c33a-4feb-11e8-84a0-458a1aa9ac0a_story.html
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Post by Occam's Spork on May 8, 2018 13:47:26 GMT 10
You have difficulty with the concept of Jesus rising from the dead... Yet your faith holds firm when it comes necroposts such as these.
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Post by pim on May 18, 2018 10:14:46 GMT 10
Meanwhile in Australia and most likely in other settler countries of the New World with high migration levels from Asia ...
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Post by KTJ on May 18, 2018 10:35:23 GMT 10
The same has happened in New Zealand where asian catholics have pushed the papist church into being the most popular religion group in the country (previously it was the anglicans for most of NZ's history).
However, it still doesn't change the fact that, in New Zealand at least, the percentage of the population who indulge in religious clap-trap has been steadily declining and is most definitely in the minority of NZ's total population. And not even close to half of the population either....I cannot recall the exact figures, but I think it is less than 25% of NZ's population who need dark-ages religion as a prop due to being unable to stand on their own two feet. The majority of Kiwis are smart enough to ignore the god delusion inside their mind, or else they have managed to erased it altogether, which has to be a good thing for the collective sanity levels of the country. However, sadly, the speaker of NZ's parliament still prays to thin air at the beginning of each day in the debating chamber. The politicians appear to be too scared to tell the religious minority to “go and fuck themselves” and cease dark-ages clap-trap inside parliament.
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Post by Occam's Spork on Jun 4, 2018 5:47:45 GMT 10
It's important to point out, this trend doesn't necessarily reflect an increase in Atheism.
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Post by pim on Jun 4, 2018 11:59:40 GMT 10
Trickle Down Phil has nothing to contribute so he spams the thread with a Normie Rowe song from the 1960s. Watch this space Occam. Normie Rowe isn't a well-known name in Canada. Outside the baby boomer generation he isn't that well known here either. Name recognition factor among Australian millennials: zero. I'll give you a brief on him.
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Post by pim on Jun 4, 2018 12:16:27 GMT 10
Normie Rowe, a potted history en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normie_RoweHe's not really the atheist that Trickle Down Phil tries to make out. True his "It Ain't Necessarily So" was a 1960's success but that was more Normie channelling Porgy & Bess than any original creative declaration of atheism. Fast forward to the 1980s and I did see him in live in Sydney in the lead role of "Les Miserables". He'd matured as a singer and sang well, as I recall. I remember when Normie was drafted into the army and did a tour of military service in Vietnam. He was no rebel, did the job he was duty bound to do and even got a medal. These days he's active as an advocate for veterans. He's OK. I doubt that he's an atheist. And even if he is, it would be private and personal. Not something he'd advocate publicly. And he wouldn't indulge in paleo-atheist trolling of discussion boards that have a faith-based theme.
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