Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Apparently so… It seems that an “oppressed” group whose “rights” have been consistently and unfairly violated by societies across time and cultures is just not going to take it any more. They are registering a new political party in the Netherlands to change things. The goals?

Dutch pedophiles are launching a political party to push for a cut in the legal age for sexual relations to 12 from 16 and the legalization of child pornography and sex with animals, sparking widespread outrage.

The Charity, Freedom and Diversity (NVD) party said on its Web site it would be officially registered Wednesday, proclaiming: “We are going to shake The Hague awake!”

The party said it wanted to cut the legal age for sexual relations to 12 and eventually scrap the limit altogether.

“A ban just makes children curious,” Ad van den Berg, one of the party’s founders, told the Algemeen Dagblad (AD) newspaper.

“We want to make pedophilia the subject of discussion,” he said, adding the subject had been a taboo since the 1996 Marc Dutroux child abuse scandal in neighboring Belgium.

“We want to get into parliament so we have a voice. Other politicians only talk about us in a negative sense, as if we were criminals,” Van den Berg told Reuters.

The party wants private possession of child pornography to be allowed although it supports the ban on the trade of such materials. It also supports allowing pornography to be broadcast on daytime television, with only violent pornography limited to the late evening.

Toddlers should be given sex education and youths aged 16 and up should be allowed to appear in pornographic films and prostitute themselves. Sex with animals should be allowed although abuse of animals should remain illegal, the NVD said.

The party also said everybody should be allowed to go naked in public and promotes legalizing all soft and hard drugs and free train travel for all.

And what is the response from the public?

An opinion poll published Tuesday showed that 82 percent wanted the government to do something to stop the new party, while 67 percent said promoting pedophilia should be illegal.

“They make out as if they want more rights for children. But their position that children should be allowed sexual contact from age 12 is of course just in their own interest,” anti-pedophile campaigner Ireen van Engelen told the AD daily.

Right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders said he had asked the government to investigate whether a party with such “sick ideas” could really be established, ANP news agency reported.

Kees van deer Staaij, a member of the Christian SGP party, also demanded action: “Pedophilia and child pornography should be taboo in every constitutional state. Breaking that will just create more victims and more serious ones.”

Source:

In news from the twilight zone, the asinine logic of a self-victimized mind mixed with a sexually confused society is a recipe for the preposterous.

BOSTON - A man serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife is asking a federal judge to order the state to pay for a sex-change operation for him, saying that denying him the surgery amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

Since then, Kosilek has received psychotherapy, female hormone treatments and laser hair removal. Kosilek, who wears his hair long and tucked behind his ears, has developed larger breasts since beginning hormone treatments.

“I believe that she would kill herself,” Brown said, when asked by Kosilek‘s attorney what would happen if Kosilek does not have a sex-change operation.

The attorney’s line of logic is to be expected, but the fact that this guy is being turned into a living sex toy in a male prison is a criminal act in it’s self. I wonder who’s paying for this?

The final installment in this series will look at the correspondence between human experience and the Sacraments. I should first mention that when I say experience, I do not mean by it the modern sense that it is a completely private and unique event that is not universalizable.

There is certainly an aspect of experience that is personal because it is conditioned by one’s sex, one’s cultural background, the events of one’s life, one’s perceptive skills, etc. However, there is an objective aspect that is common to all human beings because it is given by an objective reality that is publicly available to everyone and because all human beings operate on this reality via a rational intellect and a common set of apparatus for sense perception. In the case of sacramental experience, there are further objective features. Each Sacrament is administered in a common rite that is objectively defined by the reality that takes place; namely, the pouring forth of sanctifying grace. However, this experience does have a subjective aspect to it, including the above sources and from fact that it is conditioned by one’s preparation for and cooperation with sacramental grace.

Sacraments make perfect sense from a metaphysical perspective as we have seen. We have a need for restoration, for re-creation from our fallen states. This is remedied by access to sanctifying grace obtained through the Sacraments. However, from an experiential aspect, we can also see that matter mediating this grace is important in terms of human experience.

Sacraments are visible signs of the supernatural grace that is being bestowed. Let’s look at this in terms of an analogous experience. If we draw an analogy to experiences that have both material and non-material aspects to them, such as obtaining knowledge, we can see the importance of the material aspect of Sacraments.

For this example, imagine that you are going to go to an historical site filled with much meaning for you. Perhaps a pilgrimage to the Holy Land might be the most appropriate here. Now, in order to better appreciate this trip, you decide to study everything you can obtain about the locations you are going to visit. You study the history of each site, it’s geography and topography, it’s climate, etc. You even view pictures and movies about the locations. Now, cognitively you have a great amount of information about what you are going to see.  In fact, when you get there it is likely that you may add only a little in the way of additional substantive information.

However, when you finally arrive, you find that your experience complements the previously obtained knowledge in an almost ineffable manner. Certainly, there are things that you can point to that add to your knowledge in a substantive way such as perhaps scale and positional relationships, but the vividness of your existing knowledge is enhanced and made much more real. Your previous knowledge was obtained in an almost completely non-material manner. Now, you are appropriating the information through physical contact. You see things directly; you touch, smell, hear and even taste what previously you had only read about. This knowledge is now much more real for you because it is integrated with your entire person.

We are composite beings, both soul and body, matter and form. When we experience things directly through our senses, we understand them in a way that was not possible before we came into physical contact with the locations and artifacts of which we previously had only a remote, cognitive knowledge.

In a similar way with the Sacraments, the grace that is being poured out upon us is received in a way that is much more real to us when we experience the sacramental rite with the physical mediation of the grace than if the grace were to be given without it. The matter makes the experience much more real for us for the very reason that we are both body and soul. The experience of what is happening in our souls is more integrated into ourselves when it simultaneously happens in our entire persons, body and soul.

This is why it is appropriate that we experience grace in both aspects of our human nature. God created us and gave us the Sacraments because He knows what we need. Sacraments are not magic; nor are they are simply psychological experiences. They are what you would expect to be given to human beings as an integral part of the divine condescension by which God has chosen to save us.

As reported by LifeSite, it was discovered in that the U.K. abortions are being performed as late as 7 months in cases where babies were discovered to have club feet, extra digits, and cleft palate. These children were once deemed as desireable until it was discovered they had conditions that could be corrected by surgery or physiotherapy.

The abortion drug Mifeprex has doubled in the past 12 months. 10,000 women (in the U.K.) used the dangerous medication to end the life of their child last year.The drug is taken within the first nine weeks of pregnancy to cause a chemical abortion. The procedure is highly controversial, with the deaths of at least 12 women in Europe and North America linked to its use. Severe haemorrhaging, incomplete abortions and massive septic infections are among the many dangerous side effects to the medication.

Russia decriminalized homosexual activities in 1993.

MOSCOW, Russia, May 29, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Violence broke out between demonstrators and opponents at an unauthorized Gay Pride parade in Moscow on Saturday. Police said over 120 arrests were made in the city center, reported Interfax.

Despite a ban by the city government, upheld by a Moscow district court on Friday, homosexual activists flouted the law and went ahead with a “gay pride” parade.  The ban on the parade was supported by all major religious groups in the city.

Planned Parenthood International failed miserably in it’s effort to convince Ecuador to adopt a contraceptive mentality, as evidenty by the unanimous vote to abolish the abortion pill. PPI currently provides about 150 annual ’sex education’ workshops for adolescents.

“The efforts of the pro-life movement to ban the drugs in the largely Catholic country received strong support from Church leaders and physicians. The physicians association of Ecuador and the Ecuadorian Catholic Bishops’ Conference joined efforts to have the pill banned completely because of its abortifacient effect. Luis Sanchez, President of the Medical Federation of Ecuador said in 2004, “The morning after pill cannot be classified as a contraceptive method because by its very nature it acts against something that has already been conceived.”

“In March of 1997, Kurylowicz announced to his Sparta church that he was ‘gay’. Three months later he left to study at the University of Michigan.”

Diocese officials deny the recent actions taken by the Bishop have anything to do with Kurylowicz’s same-sex attraction. The action of removing the diocesan faculties means that Fr. Kurylowicz cannot publicly participate in the sacrafice of the Mass as a priest.

In a memo, Bishop Walter Hurley wrote “I have removed the diocesan faculties of Father Martin Kurylowicz to publicly exercise priestly ministry. It is with great reluctance that I have taken such action.”

A former Catholic high school teacher has been charged with second-degree sexual assault under a law that makes having sex with students a crime, even if the student has reached the age of consent. He was caught having sex with a 16 year old girl in a state where the age of consent has been reached. He’s arguing that his right to sexual privacy was violated.

According to court records, (He) made repeated overtures to the female student in early 2005 and, by the middle of April, she began spending the night at his apartment. The student told police she had sex with (him) at least eight times until she decided to report their relationship to authorities on May 3, 2005, records say. (He) claims the statute infringes on his constitutional right to privacy, which, he argues, includes engaging in a sexual relationship with another consenting adult. Glasser was 29 when the relationship is alleged to have taken place; the girl was 16.

“We believe that the statute infringes on a fundamental right to sexual privacy and therefore does not hold up under constitutional scrutiny,” Jeremy Donnelly, one of (his) lawyers, said Friday.

In their legal brief seeking a dismissal of the charges, (His) lawyers contend that privacy rights cannot be infringed upon unless there’s a “compelling state interest” in doing so. The state has fallen short of defining that interest, they argue.

Here is a website that is pushing to “reform” statutory rape laws they feel undermine the rights of both minors and adults.

An Australian daycare center has adopted a program where they will start teaching children 6 months - 6 years about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and inter-sex issues. They hope to challenge little children’s perception of what is normal gender and sexuality. I remember my perception of sexuality and gender were pretty much in place at about 9 1/2 months old, as best as I can remember.

“At Marrickville we believe in offering children and families an inclusive program based on social justice,” he told The Saturday Daily Telegraph. “These are reflected through an open environment where alternative perspectives, values, beliefs, lifestyles and people’s identities are respected and accepted.”

Here are some of the books that are used in the programming.

A male student who describes himself as “gay” was turned away at the front door of his prom . Unfortunately for the lad, the school dress code forbids males from wearing dresses. Notifying the ACLU of Indiana is being considered. His mother was outraged by the ignorance of the school administrators.

At this point, if you have been following this series, it should be apparent that there is more than simply an accidental connection between the fact that the human person is a unity of a spiritual soul and a material body and the truth that Sacraments mediate a spiritual substance (grace) through a material substance (if you are not conversant with hylomorphism you might want to reread this post). Any moderately observant person, even one without a background in sacramental theology, can see the natural correspondence between human nature and the Sacraments.

Aristotle, without access to divine revelation, came to the understanding that man is both body and soul. In a completely separate time and culture, God revealed this same truth to His Old Testament, and later New Testament, Church. This is the way we are made. Man exists at the point of union between the spiritual and material realms and joins them both together. But this ought not be understood as the joining of two parts like the gluing of wood to stone but as a seamless unity of two distinct (but not separate) aspects of existence. We live and experience life in this realm. In it we suffered the fall from grace and the restoration of the breach. St. Thomas Aquinas said that informed matter was the mediator of our fall (the fruit from the tree of knowledge) and so informed matter is fittingly the mediator of our salvation (the Sacraments).

This is the point that those who learn sacramental theology without a proper philosophical foundation would experience their eyes glazing over, but now that we have the proper background it ought to be painless. We have all heard what will follow, many times I suppose. We know that for a Sacrament to be valid, it must have proper form and matter. Of course the form is the words proper to the Sacrament, spoken during its administration according to the rite. The Sacrament’s matter also varies for each, but it is the material substance appropriate to the Sacrament. In Baptism, the proper matter is water. In Confirmation it is the chrism (oil) and the laying on of hands of the bishop (or authorized priest). In the Eucharist, the matter is bread made from wheat and wine made from grapes.

Therefore, I have to emphasize, that a Sacrament is more than simply the material element (matter) mediating grace. It is a greater reality. A Sacrament is the unity of the form (e.g. ‘I baptize you in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit’ during the triple immersion or pouring of water over the person being baptized ) with the matter (water). In the same way that the form gives the matter its existence for hylomorphic entities, the words spoken in a properly structured sacramental rite together with the matter bring a new entity into existence. The Sacrament’s substantial form gives new shape and existence to the matter such that it now is a mediator of God’s grace. And God’s grace is God Himself! In a very real way, this sacramental entity mediates the Person of Christ.

For six of the Sacraments, the hylomorphic entity of the sacramental matter remains, and is taken up whole into the new entity we call the Sacrament. However, in the Sacrament of Sacraments, the Holy Eucharist, the substantial form of the sacramental matter is replaced. That is why it is called Transubstantiation. The substantial forms of the bread and wine are replaced by the substantial Form of Jesus (i.e. His human soul). Because His soul now informs the matter (which still maintain the accidents/properties of the previous forms of bread and wine) the matter now belongs to Christ and so He is present Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Just as His created body is to be worshiped as God, these created but transubstantiated elements must be worshiped as well.

In the other Sacraments, the sacramental entity only exists as the grace is mediated. After the baptismal rite, while the water is still blessed, it is no longer a mediator of grace. In other words, the water cannot just be poured over another person and have them baptized. A new sacramental entity, a new encounter with the Person of Christ, must be brought about. After the rite, the water itself is just holy water having the substantial form of water. However, this is not the case for the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, because the bread and wine have a new form, until they no longer have their symbolic value as bread and wine, the hylomorphic entities remain Jesus Christ Himself.

What all of this means is that in the Sacraments, and in Eucharist par excellence, we experience a personal encounter with Christ. The Sacraments mediate to us God Himself. As St. Peter says, we become partakers in the divine nature (2 Pt 1:4). We experience this encounter in a fully human manner. Our persons encounter the person of Jesus and His grace, as body-soul unities coming into physical contact with Jesus in sacramental form and matter. This is, by the way, why physical proximity is required for the Sacraments. In other words, we cannot go to confession over the phone or attend Mass by television. Neither form nor matter can be transmitted via electro-mechanical means.

In the final segment of this series, we will talk about the sacramental experience and the experience of daily life.

The “rhythm method” may kill off more embryos than other contraceptive methods, such as coils, morning after pills, and oral contraceptives, suggests an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

After the results showing a record high in abortions was made public today, Mario Conti, Archbishop of Glascow said , “Today’s figures reveal yet again that the approach of ever greater availability of contraception, ever more explicit sex education, and ever easier access to abortion, is a recipe for disaster.” The sharpest increase was for girls under 16.

John Sweeney, of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, said: “The current programme of providing contraceptive services with its value-free safe-sex message encourages young people to be sexually active. The consequence is more abortions.”

Valuable lesson here. Insert foot ….

“I don’t think it’s a secret and I have nothing against lesbians, but it must be clarified that Rosy Bindi is a lesbian,”

Elton John blames the Church for 60 0f his friends contracting HIV and dying of AIDS. I wonder how many of his friends were “Catholic” enough to submit to It’s authority on condom use (which is not an issue of contraception with homosexual sex - the Church doesn’t have issues with synthetic rubber things), but not submit to It’s teaching on sexual intercourse outside the marriage between a man and woman?

Using this logic, Elton has to assume responsibility for sending some of his friends to their grave. John, if you push ‘em on others, maybe you should do your homework and know that condoms have approximately a 10% failure rate.

The controversial case of abortionist George Tiller who performed an abortion on a mentally disabled woman who later died, continues with a grand jury probe. He was originally found not guilty, but pressure to re-examine the case has shown hope towards a conviction.

“The young woman died in January 2005, weeks after an abortion was performed by Tiller. The Kansas Board of Healing Arts found Tiller and his clinic did nothing wrong — but anti-abortion activists were able to take advantage of a 1970 state law that allows the public to petition for a grand jury.”

“We have strong reason to believe that the KSBHA investigation was tainted by political influence and cronyism. People who were financially and politically tied to Tiller are the ones who ‘cleared’ him. Those people cannot be trusted because they owe their jobs and political positions to Tiller’s large financial campaign contributions.”

One of many websites on  Tiller who specializes in partial birth abortions.

This confused brother has “declared” that creationism discredits religious faith and demeans science.   In his confusion, he believes that creationism is the primitive beliefs in “nature gods” who were held responsible for natural events.  

“Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which [turns] God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not necessarily be a good thing to do.

I think this guy has a distorted sense of God and creation, or is projecting his ignorance of what he thinks others believe.

A new Gallop poll finds 58% oppose the legal recognition, while 39% support it. Other poll results  here.

The director of pro-life activities for the Nebraska Catholic Conference credits pro-life education in changing abortion attitudes of teens and young adults.

Young adults “are much more inclined to see abortion as violence and as a failure,” he said. “They are more inclined to abstinence and spirituality.” According to the state’s report, the average age of a woman having an abortion was 25.6 but women between 20-24 had the highest abortion rates of any age category.

Planned Parenthood of Nebraska and Council Bluffs, claimed sex education has led to the decline.

Source

“Adherents to many religions display their devotion with tattoos”. The Catholic perspective is here, with principles by which Catholics can discern whether it is sinful to be tattooed or have one’s body pierced in particular situations.