15 posts tagged “religion”
From Cornwall in somewhere Canada comes news of a secret place where you have to tell everything. Not quite clear what you do once you get there or how you get out of there and live your life. But the faith that this is the place to go is certainly intriguing.
Religion is created as a way of answering holy mysteries. But could it be that nothing created by humanity can be free of secrets? Oxford Brookes University professor Robert Beckford claims Jesus had a family pretty much written out of Christianity and his documentary scheduled for Easter Sunday (on British TV) promises to deliver secrets of the disciples who put his religion to paper.
Here's how rumors get started and become secrets and then get revealed. Unlike the more traditional telling of the day's origins -- with secret marriages of Roman soldiers, one history of Valentine's Day tells the tale of two religious in a way that their coincidental death on Feb. 14 suggests something else besides the exchange of cards was going on.
And here's how secrets get revealed, but people don't hear or don't listen: there's a rogue VD virus. Don't open e-cards from "secret admirers"!
** You can keep almost every secret from Big Jo today as long as you tell her where her candy is. **
It's a stew of secrets for Syrian intellectual, author, troublemaker Nabil Fayyad. There was a fatwa issued over the internet calling for his death as punishment for what he wrote about one of the Prophet Muhammad's wives, Aisha. But the fatwa has been lifted, which he believes might signify secret plans being carried to take it out; and then there was the book that was mysteriously published in Egypt that got him in trouble; and the ban on his work forcing into secret in many other places. All in all, it's time he secreted away to where he hopes he will be safer: ""I was reassured [by Syrian officials] that the matter is under control and that nothing will happen to me if I stay, but I didn't take that seriously."
It's probably too late to worry if the Vatican will accept PayPal for the $8,377 cost of the Knights Templar secrets they're selling. Only 799 copies are available -- the 800th goes to the Pope -- and the copies are likely pre-sold to very wealthy Dan Brown fans. The books may be gone but there will still be an Oct. 25 press conference to discuss the long-forgotten records of the papal hearings convened after Pope Clement V and French king Philip IV (Philip the Fair) conspired to arrest and torture Templar leaders in 1307 on charges of heresy and immorality.
An unknown German bishop is ordaining women as Catholic priests. According to Rev. Juanita Cordero, an ordained Catholic priest in Los Gatos, Calif., "if a bishop or priest had been validly ordained by another bishop, even if that new bishop or priest did something wrong he was still validly ordained. My succession line comes from those male bishops so we are validly ordained, even if the Vatican considers us 'illicit.' "
Cordero and her fellow (?) female priests are keeping their German benefactor's name a secret so that his power can't be taken from him.
Searching for secrets often turns up surprising, if unrelated, info. For example, "Soul Sanitizers," an article about all the online sites where people spill secrets offers the info that the Vatican was forced (?) to issue a 2002 pronouncement that confessing your secrets in pixels is not equivalent -- religiously speaking -- to sitting in a coffin sitting on end and spilling your guts out to a priest.
Chief prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Warren Jeffs, has a vision that virtuous men should have three wives. So, his secretive sect kicks out boys for wanting to keep boy-type secrets. And that improves the sect's mares to studs ratio. Although, since Jeffs is on trial for using his status to pressure a 14-year-old to marry and have sex with a cousin when she didn't want to, it appears that outing secret holders to maintain your own secrets might not be a panacea for what ails Jeffs and his followers.
"The smile," wrote Mother Theresa, is "a mask ...a cloak that covers everything." And everything included her doubts about her faith, Worries that according to the Malta Star report dissipated as her fame grew.
