Posts Tagged ‘religion’
School girl exorcists. Modelling on Buffy the Vampire-slayer?
Reads like a story from The Twilight Zone … Oh boy. ‘We’re not like normal teenagers’: Meet the exorcist schoolgirls who spend their time casting out DEMONS around the world By JEFF MAYSH Mail Online 11th August 2011 Brynne Larson, 16, is one of many newly-qualified teenage demon slayers Reverend Bob Larson of Spiritual Freedom [...]
Browser choice and IQ
What a hoot reading the different ways a ‘study’ ‘finding’ that browser choice has been correlated to IQ has been (cough) ‘reported’… People with higher IQ are shunning Internet Explorer: study IE Users Have Lower IQ Than Users of Other Web Browsers [STUDY] Internet Explorer Users are More Stupid Than Others: Study Internet Explorer Users [...]
More inconvenient juxtaposition
While I am committed to the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ I must admit to a groan of dismay and recognition when I read this NZ Herald headline: Missing uni cash: priest quits job A priest working as a senior executive at the Auckland University of Technology has resigned after “accounting discrepancies” involving hundreds [...]
Richard Nixon’s dirty dirty tricks alive and well in 2011
I’m still reading Nixonland by Rick Perlstein, initially prompted by the mention of Fox News’s Roger Ailes‘s early work as a Nixon operative. Ailes is credited with teaching Nixon how to succeed in the world of television — by bending reality, faking news events and running highly staged ‘impromptu’ candidate meetings with ‘off the cuff’ [...]
Uncovering the Scientology cult and its practices
Writing in The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright gives a comprehensive and illuminating account of the cult known as the Church of Scientology. His article is a follow-up the controversy surrounding writer/film director Paul Haggis’s public defection after 35 years as a Scientologist. I quoted Haggis’s resignation letter with its core message: ‘Silence is consent … [...]
Bishop Eddie Long — the unravelling of bling theology
Last week as I referred to in Shame, not shock, we learned that the cult-leader Bishop Eddie Long, the ‘spiritual father’ of Destiny Church’s Bishop Brian Tamaki was being accused of sexual abuse of young men in his ‘flock’. Here’s an insightful article — harsh, in parts, but fair, it seems to me — about Bishop [...]
Don Draper is the devil?
Here’s a fantastic review of Mad Men, by Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times, suggesting Don Draper is … the devil. While everyone has been sidetracked by tortured-soul vampires and loveable werewolves, Don has been quietly taking over the world, one manipulative half-truth at a time. She makes a good case. (Very good writing [...]
Shame, not shock
I wish I could express the same shock and astonishment at the allegations of sexual coercion by the leader of a religious sect that Destiny Church’s Bishop Brian Tamaki does (“Sex claim against mate stuns Bishop Tamaki”). Like many others I’m sure, the news that a persuasive ‘spiritual’ figure is being accused of multiple cases [...]
The worst stuff isn’t even in there?
Wow, I thought the ‘It came from Wasilia’ profile on Sarah Palin by Todd Purdue was eye-opening. She also came off pretty badly in that book I hoovered up over a wet weekend Race of a Lifetime … but read this piece from the current Vanity Fair – ‘Sarah Palin: the Sound and the Fury’. [...]
