29.4.05
24.4.05
Plastic replica of an 11-12 week old fetus, 3" long, holding a firearm in its precious little hand, with an assortment of other military paraphernalia, encased in a translucent plastic ornament, with a patriotic yellow ribbon on top. Includes a metal ornament hanger. If only a womb were this safe, attractive and reasonably priced!
17.4.05
Harald Stäuble of the Archaeological Institute of Saxony, based in Dresden, discovered the 8cm lower half of a man, which has been named Adonis von Zschernitz.
"A unique find," reported Spiegel magazine. "This is the oldest male clay figurine ever discovered in the world."
But the most amazing find came at the dig in Leipzig one month later, when Dr Stäuble found what could be the matching female figurine.
Dr Stäuble, who is due to publish a paper on his findings this year, said: "After finding Adonis, we got the team to sieve every speck of soil for a whole month. We were well rewarded because we then found fragments of a female figurine of the same size."
He added: "Adonis is bent forward and the female figure is bent forward even more."
"There are two ways of looking at this. The first is that they were doing a ritual dance, but the other possibility is that the man and woman were copulating and that he was standing behind her. The copulation option is far more likely, and would make this the oldest representation ever of a pornographic scene."
5.4.05
excerpt from an article by Micheal Dickenson
Let's start with an innocent wank...
The Catholic Church condemns masturbation. Catholic teaching is that sexual activity is intended for conception, thus masturbation is an immoral sexual practice because it does not permit conception. In addition, the Catholic Church teaches that masturbation breeds lust and selfishness, which takes one further from God.
Pope Paul wrote: " - masturbation is an intrinsically and seriously disordered act...the deliberate use of the sexual faculty outside normal conjugal relations essentially contradicts the finality of the faculty. For it lacks the sexual relationship called for by the moral order, namely the relationship which realizes 'the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love.' All deliberate exercise of sexuality must be reserved to this regular relationship."
How about a fuck?
In 1996 Pope John Paul said that artificial birth control was ruining people's moral sense by giving a false idea of sexual freedom. He attacked 'unbridled hedonism' which was slowly creating 'an eclipse of values'. The Roman Catholic Church considers artificial birth control and abortion an objectively grave or "mortal" sin (that is to say it causes the "death" of the soul by depriving it of the life of grace, when it is committed with full knowledge and full consent).
To the Vatican Institute of Bioethics he said: "Worrisome consequences have been produced in the sexual sphere of life by a false sense of freedom provided by contraception, which is both an incentive and a tool. He criticized public health campaigns that promote contraception. "Unbridled hedonism and a distain for life is at the heart of the modern world's moral quandary. The 'Gospel of Life' must be maintained by educating children to recognize their vocation as carriers of life, in responsible collaboration with the creator."
"This teaching must be considered to be definitive and irreformable. Contraception is gravely opposed to marital chastity, it is contrary to the good of the transmission of life (procreation aspect of marriage), and it is contrary to the mutual giving of the spouses (union aspect of marriage). It hurts true love and denies God's sovereign role in the transmission of human life"
"Even for people infected with AIDS or for those who want to use condoms to prevent AIDS," said John Paul 11 at the International Congress of Moral Theologians in Rome in 1988, "the Church's moral doctrine allows no exceptions."
Carlo Caffarra, the pope's spokesman for marriage and family issues, added that if an AIDS - infected husband couldn't manage to maintain "total abstinence" for the rest of his life, then it was better to infect his wife than to use a condom, "because the preservation of spiritual goods, such as the sacrament of marriage, is to be preferred to the good of life."
I'm feeling a little queer...
From Pope John Paul's 1986 "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons"-
"Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder. Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed to those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not."
Catholic Catechism: #2357 (in part) Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of great depravity, tradition has always declared that "Homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered". They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complimentary. Under no circumstances can they be approved....#2359: Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection."
So there you have it.
Pope John Paul believed that it was contrary to God's law for anyone - Catholic or otherwise - to engage in birth control, abortion, homosexuality, in-vitro fertilization, masturbation, artificial insemination or sterilization. Intercourse between married partners, with no barrier to pregnancy and childbirth, was the only permissible sexual act in his eyes.
And you go to hell if you believe otherwise
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'
4.4.05
"A shadowy British artist who calls himself Banksy walked into the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Natural History sometime around March 13 and surreptitiously mounted his own artwork on the walls.
The four framed pieces - including two oil paintings appropriated and embellished by Banksy and an insect "specimen" - were not discovered in some cases for several days. The bogus acquisitions have now been removed, but the museums are not talking about whether further action will be taken. A spokeswoman for the Museum of Modern Art, where Banksy left a painting of a discount can of tomato soup (à la Andy Warhol), would only confirm that the work was found tucked away in an elevator lobby on March 17."