I thought that the late lamented Sir Peter Medawar had demolished Freud years ago ……
Second –
“Deracinated Western States are supposed to be worse than “Ethnic” nationstates? Or at least, that’s how I’m reading it.
Is this actually a plea for recism?
Or is the writer merely 5 years out-of-date.
Come on, the whole of humanity has 27 mothers, as shown by mitochondrial DNA research, so why we should want ethnically-based (read “Racist” here) nation-states?
Or has the original writer forgotten to switch his brain to “ON” ??
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other specific laws and how to follow them:
When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord – Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness – Lev.15:19- 24. The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?
I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination – Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this?
Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?
I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? – Lev.24:10-16. Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.
Who was it that said that Freud elevated quackery to a whole new level? Phrenology, spiritism, etc have been consigned to the dustbin of history, but you’ll still find smart people praising Freud’s contributions to science, psychology, philosophy or whatever field of human knowledge seems to apply. Yet to adapt General Bosquet’s remark about the Charge of the Light Brigade: Freudian theory may be magnificent, but it ain’t science.
>Who was it that said that Freud elevated quackery to a whole new level?<
I don’t know. But Vladimir Nabokov delighted in referring to him as the Viennese quack.
Deracination the ideal? The state providing for us irrespective of colour, race or creed? If this is philosophy I’m a Dutchman. For one thing the state that ‘provides’ does so using taxpayers’ money. The state’s existence is, or should be, entirely a matter of public dispensation. Nor, as Max Weber realized, is the state a benign entity. Unchecked it is monolithic and tyrannous. Worse than these stupid, ill-informed opinions, however, is the blithe assumption – resting no doubt on a further uncontested premiss about human equality – that the creation of a ‘rainbow people’ consitutes the loftiest of human social aspirations. When we have finished being lectured on the ‘rights’ of ethnic and racial minorities to maintain their existence (at our expense) perhaps someone could tell me why the same principle doesn’t apply to Whites? White academics write tosh like like this all the time. They never question the desirability of western society losing its identity in the face of relentless mass immigration.
Baber is dishonest or astonishingly ignorant. He ignores that fact that current racial mixing in western societies is wholly enforced, imposed against the direct wishes of European peoples. Why should they accept as legitimate what they had no say in creating? What is more Whites had better, if they wish to survive, acknowledge the fact of differential race characteristics. In the eighteenth century the preachers of Enlightenment fought long and hard to put man firmly under the governance of natural law. This was the same law that affected all life on this planet. So just as breeds (or ‘species’) of dog or cattle display varying physical or temperamental characteristics so too do the breeds of man. In animals we have even learnt to promote the more prized features through selective breeding. We can do this because we know how genetic differences operate, that differences just as often mean temperamental and even intellectual differences, not just physical ones.
Nor has it anything to do with background either. How do you think Texas Longhorns learn to behave like Texas Longhorns – by watching Westerns? The races of man are different. Human beings are different. Here is true diversity. If Baber puts his brain to work he will see deracination not as heralding a bright new tomorrow but as sounding the death knell for human creativity.
Where to begin where every “empirical” claim conflicts with my studied observations of the world?
Man is a tribal creature, and even if we can avoid nationalism or (somehow) ethnicity, we cannot avoid tribes based on shared vocations, avocations, and ideologies. Even the tribe of the deracinated, multicultural “liberal” has its familiar shibboleths. As David Mamet suggests in “The Wicked Son,” the tribe offers real satisfaction and there is nothing romantic or naive about it – the film crew at work is an example he gives. To that, I can attest. And it is a very efficient tribe as well.
Sorry to do this in spurts, but this essay just gets me too angry to sit still and offer a cohesive and comprehensive response, but from one craw to another….
On the supposed trend toward and desirability of membership in the “north Atlantic elite,” for which Ms. Baber’s paradoxical evidence is her own escape from Northern New Jersey, I would point out that the tribes seem to be winning in the Darwinian sense. And the deracinated have resorted to importing tribesman to replace their dwindling numbers.
Perhaps the tribes simply want what the deracinated already have without the disconnection that deracination demands.
>It’s the suggestion that the ethnic-based nation-state will remain the aspiration for most human beings “other than deracinated north Atlantic elites” that sticks in my craw. Clearly this is currently the case. But one hopes that eventually it will not be so. At least the line I’m running is that deracination is the ideal for which we should strive so that, ideally, everyone will approximate the idea of this north Atlantic elite.<
In terms of realistic propositions, I’d put that on a par with an aspiration for a communist society in which there are no fundamental conflicts between different individuals’ goals and aspirations.
What one should strive for is a moderation of the tribalist propensities of human beings, not an utterly unrealistic goal of the elimination of them. If the world of “deracinated north Atlantic elites” is Baber’s eventual goal, she is doomed to disappointment (should she look down on the earth in some future existence where immortal souls reside), along with the other aspirers to blueprints for human societies. Give me Popper’s trial-and-error mode of societal improvement any day.
“In my eyes, both Adolf Hitler and my grandfather were false prophets of the 20th century.”
Sophie Freud
Sophie Freud: Psychoanalysis Not Useful
There was a time when psychoanalysis was very popular, but today it seems to have more detractors than supporters, especially in the scientific community. As it turns out, even Sigmund Freud’s granddaughter Sophie doesn’t think very highly of it anymore – according to her, his ideas are simply “outdated.”
Judy Gerstel reports for The Toronto Star:
[Sophie Freud] dismisses most of her grandfather’s theories as “outdated” and says that another psychiatrist, Irving Goffman, “had a much better grasp on human motivation than Freud.” She also faults her grandfather for “being very angry about any critique and viewing people who criticized him, or thought otherwise, as villains.” Freud and Hitler didn’t just share a neighbourhood in Vienna, she says in the film. “They also shared the ambition to convince other men of the one and only truth that they had come upon.” “Never could he be wrong,” she says. “That lasted for 50 years after his death, until a few people started to dare to say, “Yes, but …” “The bad thing was that psychoanalysis kept itself apart from the scientific advances of time, stuck in a 19th-century way of thinking.” Freud’s status started to take a tumble in the 1960s when authority and established ideas were overturned, in particular those that he represented: institutionalized medicine, psychiatric treatment, patriarchy. “It started with his view of women,” Sophie Freud says, explaining her disillusionment with her grandfather’s thinking. “If you didn’t have a vaginal orgasm, you were not a mature woman, and the clitoris didn’t count. Stuff like that, penis envy, it was amazing. Women believed the great man more than their own bodily experiences.” Not everything about psychoanalysis awful – it did, for example, emphasize the idea of sitting down and listening to what patients had to say. By and large, however, our understanding of the physical processes in the brain have led to a large number of medical treatments which far outstrip psychoanalysis in terms of effectiveness. Just about al of Freud’s theories about the unconscious and mental illness were, quite simply, wrong.
I hesitate to respond to Ovidiu Stoica, as I have no intention of engaging in a bout of responses to an illogical argument – but Ovidiu’s argument implied in his last question is just that.
Paul Gross makes two claims about ID which are false (straw man arguments): one is that ID is anti-evolution, and two is that it is theistic science. ID is about intelligent causes, pure and simple, and we admit in secular science that intelligence may have natural origins – the human mind, case in point.
The review says that ID is not proven, and that most of the claims are bad science. That leaves some of the claims as being good science, and a weak to strong possibility of ID. Many scientific claims which have not been proven are still taken very seriously, and are often called hypotheses. There will be ways to test for intelligence in sub-cellular life, and there is evidence of intelligence when we observe sub-cellular life. This is the direction ID must take to be serious science: not anti-evolution, and not theistic – simply looking into natural intelligence on levels other than the neural brain. Getting Past the Culture Wars: Regarding Intelligent Design
If, as Glenn Shrom says, the claim that “ID is anti-evolution” is false, then it would not exist for that is the very purpose for which it was designed.
He also writes : “The review says that ID is not proven, and that most of the claims are bad science. That leaves some of the claims as being good science”. This confuses alternative with opposite. The altenatives to bad science include philosophy, literature, indeed even the subject matters of the sciences themselves, among many other things.
Thank you very much for highlighting a very serious issue which has been gnawing away at me for a very long time indeed.
As a result I will now be able to look at one of my demons in the eyes and I will be able to repeat, yes! yes!
I have at long last gotten hold of you and I am going to give you such a good shaking that you will not be able to attempt to frighten/anger me any longer. I will gain control and the truth will set me free.
An all-too-common telling of the tale of the supposedly ‘religious’ lording it over and torturing their charges. The names of all the scum who participated in these child molestations should be writ large so that everyone will know. We have endured a similar story in Canada with the Residential Schools and other so-called ‘holy’ places. The monsters should have all been pilloried, at the very least.
“The Sisters of Mercy were now bound to the laborious duties of instructing ‘the ignorant’, visiting the sick and imprisoned, managing hospitals, orphanages, industrial schools, and homes for distressed women; in fact to every work of ‘mercy’. They were to make perpetual vows, observe choir, and spend some six or seven hours daily in spiritual exercises and about three weeks altogether in strict retreat; the midsummer retreat proper covering eight full days, a triduum occupying the last three days of each year, and the first Sunday of every month except two being devoted in silence to a preparation for death. On the Octave of the Ascension
Regarding “retreats” – it does not say that children who were sent to them through the court system should also had to have gone on ‘silent weekend retreats’which was the case.
In desperately trying to give me encouragement, my solicitor once said; ‘didn’t it get you off the hook from having to make rosary beads!’
The Retreats may have gotten children off the hook from manufacturing Rosary Beads, but wait for it………
We inevitably, though got caught on another hook…………as we were obliged, countless times, to say fifteen decades of the rosary as we marched two by two up and down – the otherwise private paddock entrance of the industrial school.
I found this practice okay, as it got me off the hook from having to remain silent….. which was so difficult
There was also the added freedom of the open space which was so refreshing from the otherwise hemmed – in prison-type yard, and that too of the stuffy secret rosary bead factory.
Chidren were given blue threaded plastic rosary beads to pray on.
There were no such luxuries as pearl beads for us to pray on as we solemnly lifted up our prayers to Our Blessed Mother in Heaven asking her for an easy death.
I wonder why Marie-Therese and other girls who were imprisoned at Goldenbridge do not sue the Sisters of Mercy for upaid wages, as well as for damages. This would not only bring this to the attention of holy blindness and deafness, and would make it less likely to happen again. It would also bring the tawdry record of religion and education to the forefront at a time when religions are making absurd claims to have some kind of proprietary right to be engaged in the education of children.
I am arreligious, but I grew up in a religious household. I have lived for 15+ years with tolerant, relatively liberal, very compassionate individuals who would both consider themselves religious–my parents. That said, I have also attended institutions in which the degree of religious intolerance, hypocrisy, and astoundingly ignorant politics led me to reject that breed of religion, as well as leading me to question everything I had previously thought about religion in general.
Having said all that, my point is this: I believe that the world is heading to a completely secular age; at least, I think world society should go in that direction. Nevertheless, there will always be those spiritually inclined and too often genuine persons who feel that “spiritual truths” as revealed in ancient doctrines provide the best path of enlightenment for humanity. Therefore, I belive that it would be in organized religion’s best interests to isolate and secularize their moral teachings and develop them in light of modern society.
(I know that is an extremely idealistic and nearly impossible goal to shoot for. I realize that many religious ideas about, for instance, homosexuals could well be discarded in light of some demagogues who recommend denying such individuals their full rights–or even suggesting execution by firing squad.)
In short: there is such a thing as a positive outlet for human spiritual leanings, regardless of specific and ignorant quarrels that fundamentalists may have. I do not know much about the case that you described as an example, but I theorize that the religious leaders in question did not say “Religion has nothing to do with it”, they said “This is not all that our religion stands for.”
I may not have faith in God, but I do have faith in humanity.
I cannnot fathom what you are trying to say. Say it again but be clear. For example, what does the phrase “not easily absorb fragilities” refer to? That, and the point of the whole comment, totally eludes me. This is in contrast to your original article which expressed in crysal-clear fashion the savagery you and other children were forced to endure.
As another reader suggested-can you sue these individuals, the church, the religious order for the damage they caused you and other children enslaved by them?
>I cannnot fathom what you are trying to say. Say it again but be clear. For example, what does the phrase “not easily absorb fragilities” refer to?<
Follows on from the preceding line.
So can we not be afforded a little bit of respect, or whatever one would like to call it.
>I e-mailed the editor {Geraldine Kennedy} of the Irish Times and also the Irish Independent asking if they would possibily highlight issue.<
I have written innumerable times to the Irish media about various issues pertaining to Goldenbridge Industrial School,and it will not entertain me. It does not want to know. It will not take on board new “inside” stories. All it does is rehash old ones already out there.
In plain english I am being silenced. I know others who have found themselves in the same situation.
The media will only accept mostly, stories coming from those acting as spokespersons for the institutionally abused.
Correction in last posting should have read – preceeding!
>”does not easily absorb fragilities”<
People who live in bigger countries have more freedom to express themselves without feeling fear.
In Ireland, one is ostracised if one steps out of line.
The media/Government are drinking out of the one bowl. The media even has offices within Dail Eireann.
Both are also weary of victims/survivors of institutional abuse
The Government wants those of us who were incarcerated in the past to just go away and be satisfied with the paltry pittance it puts before us.
We are a thorn in their flesh.
The comment that you did not understand was basically a general one related to Sr Helena O’Donoghue.
Perhaps I should have posted it in the comments section of B&W.
>As another reader suggested-can you sue these individuals, the church, the religious order for the damage they caused you and other children enslaved by them?<
A dirty Indemnity deal, was some years ago struck between the Government and eighteen religious orders.
See: RateYourSolicitor.com RYS FORUM, Solicitors comments, my name should appear, log onto {1} there you will find background knowledge on the Indemnity Deal.
Also try Paddy Doyle’s “God Squad” website for interesting articles regarding Irish Institutional Abuse issues.
Two things:
First –
Sigmund Fraud, please!
I thought that the late lamented Sir Peter Medawar had demolished Freud years ago ……
Second –
“Deracinated Western States are supposed to be worse than “Ethnic” nationstates? Or at least, that’s how I’m reading it.
Is this actually a plea for recism?
Or is the writer merely 5 years out-of-date.
Come on, the whole of humanity has 27 mothers, as shown by mitochondrial DNA research, so why we should want ethnically-based (read “Racist” here) nation-states?
Or has the original writer forgotten to switch his brain to “ON” ??
an open letter to Dr. Laura Schlessinger
Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other specific laws and how to follow them:
When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord – Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness – Lev.15:19- 24. The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?
I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination – Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this?
Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?
I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? – Lev.24:10-16. Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.
Your devoted fan,
Jim
Re: Freud the quack.
Who was it that said that Freud elevated quackery to a whole new level? Phrenology, spiritism, etc have been consigned to the dustbin of history, but you’ll still find smart people praising Freud’s contributions to science, psychology, philosophy or whatever field of human knowledge seems to apply. Yet to adapt General Bosquet’s remark about the Charge of the Light Brigade: Freudian theory may be magnificent, but it ain’t science.
Bruno
>Who was it that said that Freud elevated quackery to a whole new level?< I don’t know. But Vladimir Nabokov delighted in referring to him as the Viennese quack.
Deracination the ideal? The state providing for us irrespective of colour, race or creed? If this is philosophy I’m a Dutchman. For one thing the state that ‘provides’ does so using taxpayers’ money. The state’s existence is, or should be, entirely a matter of public dispensation. Nor, as Max Weber realized, is the state a benign entity. Unchecked it is monolithic and tyrannous. Worse than these stupid, ill-informed opinions, however, is the blithe assumption – resting no doubt on a further uncontested premiss about human equality – that the creation of a ‘rainbow people’ consitutes the loftiest of human social aspirations. When we have finished being lectured on the ‘rights’ of ethnic and racial minorities to maintain their existence (at our expense) perhaps someone could tell me why the same principle doesn’t apply to Whites? White academics write tosh like like this all the time. They never question the desirability of western society losing its identity in the face of relentless mass immigration.
Baber is dishonest or astonishingly ignorant. He ignores that fact that current racial mixing in western societies is wholly enforced, imposed against the direct wishes of European peoples. Why should they accept as legitimate what they had no say in creating? What is more Whites had better, if they wish to survive, acknowledge the fact of differential race characteristics. In the eighteenth century the preachers of Enlightenment fought long and hard to put man firmly under the governance of natural law. This was the same law that affected all life on this planet. So just as breeds (or ‘species’) of dog or cattle display varying physical or temperamental characteristics so too do the breeds of man. In animals we have even learnt to promote the more prized features through selective breeding. We can do this because we know how genetic differences operate, that differences just as often mean temperamental and even intellectual differences, not just physical ones.
Nor has it anything to do with background either. How do you think Texas Longhorns learn to behave like Texas Longhorns – by watching Westerns? The races of man are different. Human beings are different. Here is true diversity. If Baber puts his brain to work he will see deracination not as heralding a bright new tomorrow but as sounding the death knell for human creativity.
Where to begin where every “empirical” claim conflicts with my studied observations of the world?
Man is a tribal creature, and even if we can avoid nationalism or (somehow) ethnicity, we cannot avoid tribes based on shared vocations, avocations, and ideologies. Even the tribe of the deracinated, multicultural “liberal” has its familiar shibboleths. As David Mamet suggests in “The Wicked Son,” the tribe offers real satisfaction and there is nothing romantic or naive about it – the film crew at work is an example he gives. To that, I can attest. And it is a very efficient tribe as well.
Sorry to do this in spurts, but this essay just gets me too angry to sit still and offer a cohesive and comprehensive response, but from one craw to another….
On the supposed trend toward and desirability of membership in the “north Atlantic elite,” for which Ms. Baber’s paradoxical evidence is her own escape from Northern New Jersey, I would point out that the tribes seem to be winning in the Darwinian sense. And the deracinated have resorted to importing tribesman to replace their dwindling numbers.
Perhaps the tribes simply want what the deracinated already have without the disconnection that deracination demands.
H. E. Baber writes:
>It’s the suggestion that the ethnic-based nation-state will remain the aspiration for most human beings “other than deracinated north Atlantic elites” that sticks in my craw. Clearly this is currently the case. But one hopes that eventually it will not be so. At least the line I’m running is that deracination is the ideal for which we should strive so that, ideally, everyone will approximate the idea of this north Atlantic elite.< In terms of realistic propositions, I’d put that on a par with an aspiration for a communist society in which there are no fundamental conflicts between different individuals’ goals and aspirations. What one should strive for is a moderation of the tribalist propensities of human beings, not an utterly unrealistic goal of the elimination of them. If the world of “deracinated north Atlantic elites” is Baber’s eventual goal, she is doomed to disappointment (should she look down on the earth in some future existence where immortal souls reside), along with the other aspirers to blueprints for human societies. Give me Popper’s trial-and-error mode of societal improvement any day.
Auf Wiedersehen Freud
“In my eyes, both Adolf Hitler and my grandfather were false prophets of the 20th century.”
Sophie Freud
Sophie Freud: Psychoanalysis Not Useful
There was a time when psychoanalysis was very popular, but today it seems to have more detractors than supporters, especially in the scientific community. As it turns out, even Sigmund Freud’s granddaughter Sophie doesn’t think very highly of it anymore – according to her, his ideas are simply “outdated.”
Judy Gerstel reports for The Toronto Star:
[Sophie Freud] dismisses most of her grandfather’s theories as “outdated” and says that another psychiatrist, Irving Goffman, “had a much better grasp on human motivation than Freud.” She also faults her grandfather for “being very angry about any critique and viewing people who criticized him, or thought otherwise, as villains.” Freud and Hitler didn’t just share a neighbourhood in Vienna, she says in the film. “They also shared the ambition to convince other men of the one and only truth that they had come upon.” “Never could he be wrong,” she says. “That lasted for 50 years after his death, until a few people started to dare to say, “Yes, but …” “The bad thing was that psychoanalysis kept itself apart from the scientific advances of time, stuck in a 19th-century way of thinking.” Freud’s status started to take a tumble in the 1960s when authority and established ideas were overturned, in particular those that he represented: institutionalized medicine, psychiatric treatment, patriarchy. “It started with his view of women,” Sophie Freud says, explaining her disillusionment with her grandfather’s thinking. “If you didn’t have a vaginal orgasm, you were not a mature woman, and the clitoris didn’t count. Stuff like that, penis envy, it was amazing. Women believed the great man more than their own bodily experiences.” Not everything about psychoanalysis awful – it did, for example, emphasize the idea of sitting down and listening to what patients had to say. By and large, however, our understanding of the physical processes in the brain have led to a large number of medical treatments which far outstrip psychoanalysis in terms of effectiveness. Just about al of Freud’s theories about the unconscious and mental illness were, quite simply, wrong.
Hitler didn’t want to convince most men that his ideas were true. He wanted to kill them.
Who was Carrie Eicher?
I hesitate to respond to Ovidiu Stoica, as I have no intention of engaging in a bout of responses to an illogical argument – but Ovidiu’s argument implied in his last question is just that.
Paul Gross makes two claims about ID which are false (straw man arguments): one is that ID is anti-evolution, and two is that it is theistic science. ID is about intelligent causes, pure and simple, and we admit in secular science that intelligence may have natural origins – the human mind, case in point.
The review says that ID is not proven, and that most of the claims are bad science. That leaves some of the claims as being good science, and a weak to strong possibility of ID. Many scientific claims which have not been proven are still taken very seriously, and are often called hypotheses. There will be ways to test for intelligence in sub-cellular life, and there is evidence of intelligence when we observe sub-cellular life. This is the direction ID must take to be serious science: not anti-evolution, and not theistic – simply looking into natural intelligence on levels other than the neural brain. Getting Past the Culture Wars: Regarding Intelligent Design
If, as Glenn Shrom says, the claim that “ID is anti-evolution” is false, then it would not exist for that is the very purpose for which it was designed.
He also writes : “The review says that ID is not proven, and that most of the claims are bad science. That leaves some of the claims as being good science”. This confuses alternative with opposite. The altenatives to bad science include philosophy, literature, indeed even the subject matters of the sciences themselves, among many other things.
Ravi Shankar, seems to be a member of Congress Party led by Sonia Gandhi. What he want to prove or say?
I totally disagree with him. The article clearly depicts that the auther is biased againsed RSS, or any other true Hindu…
Editor,{OB]
Thank you very much for highlighting a very serious issue which has been gnawing away at me for a very long time indeed.
As a result I will now be able to look at one of my demons in the eyes and I will be able to repeat, yes! yes!
I have at long last gotten hold of you and I am going to give you such a good shaking that you will not be able to attempt to frighten/anger me any longer. I will gain control and the truth will set me free.
Nollaig shona duit
Marie-Therese O’ Loughlin.
An all-too-common telling of the tale of the supposedly ‘religious’ lording it over and torturing their charges. The names of all the scum who participated in these child molestations should be writ large so that everyone will know. We have endured a similar story in Canada with the Residential Schools and other so-called ‘holy’ places. The monsters should have all been pilloried, at the very least.
Re: Goldenbridge
The people who ran and supervised this living hell should be convicted and sentenced to making rosary beads forever
“The Sisters of Mercy were now bound to the laborious duties of instructing ‘the ignorant’, visiting the sick and imprisoned, managing hospitals, orphanages, industrial schools, and homes for distressed women; in fact to every work of ‘mercy’. They were to make perpetual vows, observe choir, and spend some six or seven hours daily in spiritual exercises and about three weeks altogether in strict retreat; the midsummer retreat proper covering eight full days, a triduum occupying the last three days of each year, and the first Sunday of every month except two being devoted in silence to a preparation for death. On the Octave of the Ascension
Regarding “retreats” – it does not say that children who were sent to them through the court system should also had to have gone on ‘silent weekend retreats’which was the case.
In desperately trying to give me encouragement, my solicitor once said; ‘didn’t it get you off the hook from having to make rosary beads!’
She was so right.
Slan go foill.
Marie-Therese O’ Loughlin.
Re: Retreats vs Rosary Beads.
The Retreats may have gotten children off the hook from manufacturing Rosary Beads, but wait for it………
We inevitably, though got caught on another hook…………as we were obliged, countless times, to say fifteen decades of the rosary as we marched two by two up and down – the otherwise private paddock entrance of the industrial school.
I found this practice okay, as it got me off the hook from having to remain silent….. which was so difficult
There was also the added freedom of the open space which was so refreshing from the otherwise hemmed – in prison-type yard, and that too of the stuffy secret rosary bead factory.
Chidren were given blue threaded plastic rosary beads to pray on.
There were no such luxuries as pearl beads for us to pray on as we solemnly lifted up our prayers to Our Blessed Mother in Heaven asking her for an easy death.
Slan go foill,
Marie-Therese O’ Loughlin.
I wonder why Marie-Therese and other girls who were imprisoned at Goldenbridge do not sue the Sisters of Mercy for upaid wages, as well as for damages. This would not only bring this to the attention of holy blindness and deafness, and would make it less likely to happen again. It would also bring the tawdry record of religion and education to the forefront at a time when religions are making absurd claims to have some kind of proprietary right to be engaged in the education of children.
Goldenbridge Industrial School and the Ryan Commission 15,16th March 2006.
In 1996 – the documentary “Dear Daughter” was broadcast.
It was claimed that children from Goldenbridge Industrial School were subject to terror and cruelty that destroyed their lives.
The Sister of Mercy who managed the home at the time, Sr Xaveria Lally, was accused of acts of unspeakable cruelty.
Among the allegations:-
Children dressed in rags.
Babies strapped to potties for so long, their rectums prolapsed.
Forced to drink water from outdoor toilets
Forced to work in a “Rosary Beads” factory for hours, until their fingers bled.
A girl thrown into a furnace for three days.
Identified by serial numbers – to deprive them of their identities.
Many more allegations were made each one more horrific than the last.
While we can’t speak for all of them we can certainly rely on the Ryan Commission to deal with some of the more major ones.
Goldenbridge – Ryan Commission to inquire into Child Abuse. Tuesday 15th, Wednesday 16th March 2006.
I was very blessed with having two prison numbers = first one was; 155.
I was given this number at almost five years of age.
At nine years of age I was given a new number = it was; 39
Re: Goldenbridge.
Senior Counsel, at the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, put it to Sr Helena O’ Donoghue, Provincial Leader of the sisters of Mercy
Q
“I take it, that Sr. Bernardine was characterised as a paronoid
schizophrenic, by Sr Fabian who she considered was grossly insulting to adults and children and who, in effect established a regime of terror”.
A
When people “define situations as real, they are real in their consequences conversation,
I believe that she did mention Sr. Bernardine as being very strict and perhaps some of those terms that you have mentioned. Yes!
Sister Helena O’ Donoghue’s “smiling mugshot” is plastered all over the Irish Mercy Order website.
I think it is despicable considering the fact that she is to the forefront with regards her religious congregation
in all this child abuse debacle.
I would also consider it inappropriate if Judge Sean Ryan was to be seen by public in the same manner.
The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse has not finished its dreary task.
So can we not be afforded a little bit of respect, or whatever one would like to call it.
I e-mailed the editor {Geraldine Kennedy} of the Irish Times and also the Irish Independent asking if they would possibily highlight issue.
Ireland is a small country, and unlike the United Kingdom or the United States of America it does not easily absorb fragilities.
Industrial Schools abuse is a very sensitive matter and it behoves those with high standing to act with decorum and dignity.
I do not want to be a kill joy, I just want to be realistic all round.
Re: On Multiculturalism and Religion
I am arreligious, but I grew up in a religious household. I have lived for 15+ years with tolerant, relatively liberal, very compassionate individuals who would both consider themselves religious–my parents. That said, I have also attended institutions in which the degree of religious intolerance, hypocrisy, and astoundingly ignorant politics led me to reject that breed of religion, as well as leading me to question everything I had previously thought about religion in general.
Having said all that, my point is this: I believe that the world is heading to a completely secular age; at least, I think world society should go in that direction. Nevertheless, there will always be those spiritually inclined and too often genuine persons who feel that “spiritual truths” as revealed in ancient doctrines provide the best path of enlightenment for humanity. Therefore, I belive that it would be in organized religion’s best interests to isolate and secularize their moral teachings and develop them in light of modern society.
(I know that is an extremely idealistic and nearly impossible goal to shoot for. I realize that many religious ideas about, for instance, homosexuals could well be discarded in light of some demagogues who recommend denying such individuals their full rights–or even suggesting execution by firing squad.)
In short: there is such a thing as a positive outlet for human spiritual leanings, regardless of specific and ignorant quarrels that fundamentalists may have. I do not know much about the case that you described as an example, but I theorize that the religious leaders in question did not say “Religion has nothing to do with it”, they said “This is not all that our religion stands for.”
I may not have faith in God, but I do have faith in humanity.
Re: Author’s comment 30/12/06
Ms. O’Loughlin-
I cannnot fathom what you are trying to say. Say it again but be clear. For example, what does the phrase “not easily absorb fragilities” refer to? That, and the point of the whole comment, totally eludes me. This is in contrast to your original article which expressed in crysal-clear fashion the savagery you and other children were forced to endure.
As another reader suggested-can you sue these individuals, the church, the religious order for the damage they caused you and other children enslaved by them?
>I cannnot fathom what you are trying to say. Say it again but be clear. For example, what does the phrase “not easily absorb fragilities” refer to?< Follows on from the preceding line. So can we not be afforded a little bit of respect, or whatever one would like to call it.
>I e-mailed the editor {Geraldine Kennedy} of the Irish Times and also the Irish Independent asking if they would possibily highlight issue.< I have written innumerable times to the Irish media about various issues pertaining to Goldenbridge Industrial School,and it will not entertain me. It does not want to know. It will not take on board new “inside” stories. All it does is rehash old ones already out there.
In plain english I am being silenced. I know others who have found themselves in the same situation.
The media will only accept mostly, stories coming from those acting as spokespersons for the institutionally abused.
I find this despicable.
Correction in last posting should have read – preceeding!
>”does not easily absorb fragilities”< People who live in bigger countries have more freedom to express themselves without feeling fear. In Ireland, one is ostracised if one steps out of line.
The media/Government are drinking out of the one bowl. The media even has offices within Dail Eireann.
Both are also weary of victims/survivors of institutional abuse
The Government wants those of us who were incarcerated in the past to just go away and be satisfied with the paltry pittance it puts before us.
We are a thorn in their flesh.
The comment that you did not understand was basically a general one related to Sr Helena O’Donoghue.
Perhaps I should have posted it in the comments section of B&W.
>As another reader suggested-can you sue these individuals, the church, the religious order for the damage they caused you and other children enslaved by them?< A dirty Indemnity deal, was some years ago struck between the Government and eighteen religious orders.
See: RateYourSolicitor.com RYS FORUM, Solicitors comments, my name should appear, log onto {1} there you will find background knowledge on the Indemnity Deal.
Also try Paddy Doyle’s “God Squad” website for interesting articles regarding Irish Institutional Abuse issues.
Thank you for your interest.