Why do you think this has bearing on the argument? Surely it’s associated with the line of thinking that either ‘the true God will answer and the false God will not’ or ‘tradition made no difference so there is no God component involved’.
If someone prays, it involves God. By definition. Otherwise, it’s not prayer, it’s something else.
I think they noted prayer is a human activity and decided to explore the effect of this behaviour on humans. They weren’t making decisions about the deity, just the activity. The distinction they made is between prayer and positive thoughts. That is, a communication addressed to a Being outside of themselves or thoughts directed at themselves.
As such I believe the experiment, far from being hopelessly flawed is productive for the purposes it attends to. It has no purpose beyond that.
I think they noted prayer is a human activity and decided to explore the effect of this behaviour on humans.
This is where I differ from them. To my mind, you can’t isolate the human activity of prayer from the activity of God in response, even in relation to it’s effect on humans.
This has nothing to do with Christianity, but it makes for fascinating reading :) There’s been some drama over a supposed insider’s account of the Federal public service:
Midway through last year I was head-hunted by the federal Department of Health and Ageing to write speeches for their ministers - a surprise as I had no experience or qualifications. As far as the department was aware, my limited skills were derived from reviewing video games for The Canberra Times.
then this blog post on the age has some commentary & a very cranky response from the department…
It’s a cracker of a read from start to finish, exposing policy on the run, bureaucratic money-wasting verging on rorts and the frustration of being inside a system that seems to value announcements over action. [Note: department’s detailed and angry response has been added to the end of this blog]
Swiss vote no to lawyers for animals From : AFP March 07, 2010
ALREADY boasting laws to protect goldfish from being flushed down the toilet and to guarantee companions for lonely animals, Switzerland held a vote on whether abused animals deserve lawyers.
But the laws it already has were enough, with Swiss soundly rejecting the plan to appoint special lawyers for animals that are abused by humans.
Official results showed that 70.5 per cent of voters cast their ballot against the proposal to extend nationwide a system that has been in place in Zurich since 1992. Some 29.5 per cent of voters backed the proposal, with officials putting the turnout at just over 45 per cent.
“The Swiss people have clearly said our animal protection laws are so good we don’t need animal lawyers,” Jakob Buechler, a lawmaker for the centrist Christian People’s Party, told Swiss television SF1.
The vote was initiated by the Swiss Animal Protection (PSA) group and would oblige all cantons to name a lawyer for animals during judicial proceedings.
“It is not about Paris Hilton’s dog now needing a lawyer to represent its interests,” said Antoine Goetschel, Switzerland’s only lawyer mandated by his canton in Zurich to handle animal welfare cases.
It was about protecting animals who are harmed by the very people who were meant to take care of them, Mr Goetschel said ahead of the vote.
The problem was that the animal had “no rights”, unlike humans who could prosecute the person who had caused harm, Mr Goetschel said.
Switzerland already has one of the world’s most comprehensive laws on animal rights.
Under laws revised in 2008, people wanting to get rid of a fish cannot flush it down a toilet bowl alive. It must be knocked out, killed and then its body disposed of.
Sociable household pets such as budgies and hamsters cannot be left alone. Even sheep and goats must have at least a “visual contact with their fellows”.
On his daily radio and television shows last week, Fox News personality Glenn Beck set out to convince his audience that “social justice,” the term many Christian churches use to describe their efforts to address poverty and human rights, is a “code word” for communism and Nazism. Beck urged Christians to discuss the term with their priests and to leave their churches if leaders would not reconsider their emphasis on social justice.
[...]
Later, Beck held up cards, one with a hammer and sickle and other with a swastika. “Communists are on the left, and the Nazis are on the right. That’s what people say. But they both subscribe to one philosophy, and they flew one banner. . . . But on each banner, read the words, here in America: ‘social justice.’ They talked about economic justice, rights of the workers, redistribution of wealth, and surprisingly, democracy.”
Click the link for the picture of him holding up the cards. Beck’s industrial strength crazy is well known, but he really hit it out of the park with this one.
It’s easy to dismiss him as crazy, but he’s hugely influential, especially with the equally crazy segment of his audience. With one guy flying a plane into the IRS building and another showing up at the Pentagon and shooting guards, domestic terrorism from crazy, angry white males is going to be a big problem in the US over the next 7+ years, and lunatics like Beck will be doing their best to fan the flames.
Last rites for English at Denistone East Uniting Church
ENGLISH-SPEAKING parishioners have been forced out of a church whose service is now to be heard solely in Korean.
Denistone East Uniting Church in north Sydney will hold its final English service this Sunday.
The community that has replaced bygone eras in Denistone is “delightfully Asianised”, Reverend Les Pearson said, with at least 120 keen Korean Christians packing each sermon.
“At a time when church-going for Caucasian people seems to be diminishing, it is a healthy thing for our church to become more ethnic,” he said.
“This is society dictating to the church and the church responding to that. It would have been easy to say ‘This is an Aussie church’ but it would have been unreasonable and wrong.
“We live in a land enriched by migrants.”
Sixty years ago founder Rod Field painted a promise of things to come: “This is the site of the Denistone East Methodist Church.”
It was a simple sign on a cow paddock surrounded by orchards which were being carved up into suburban Sydney.
After 57 years of Sundays, this final English service would be sad, Mr Field said, but it was better that a Korean congregation use the church than none at all.
“I could not have put up a new sign saying it was to be closed. It would have been too emotional,” the 86-year-old said.
“Putting up a sign saying it was going Korean ... I could do that.”
Long-time parishioner Ron Hoffmann, 77, will miss his tiny church but he understands the change.
“It’s a very caring church, everyone knows everybody. I will always remember its heyday where the Sunday school had 300 children, our youth group had 70 teenagers and at Christmas you couldn’t fit everybody into this hall,” Mr Hoffmann said.
Korean Pastor Jim Ho Cho said there was huge demand for more Korean services and with English cancelled, he could run two morning services on Sunday as well as evening services during the week.
If you look at the picture in the link, the Korean church is Presbyterian. The Anglo Uniting Church seems to have had a remnant of Methodists from a bygone era.
Not sure what this means exactly. Politicking I suppose
Abbott softens on same-sex unions KATHARINE MURPHY
March 26, 2010
OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott has extended an olive branch to the gay and lesbian community, back-pedalling on recent remarks in which he described the lifestyle as ‘‘threatening’‘.
He also offered in-principle endorsement of recognition of same-sex relationships and stronger anti-discrimination laws.
Choosing a gay and lesbian community radio station in Melbourne to launch his mea culpa, Mr Abbott said his recent comments were ill considered and a ‘‘poor choice of words’‘.
’‘I think blokes of my generation and upbringing do sometimes find these things a bit confronting,’’ he said. ‘‘Anything that is different can be a bit challenging.’‘
Mr Abbott reiterated his opposition to gay marriage but said he favoured formal recognition of same-sex relationships. He was ‘‘very happy to look at’’ civil unions.
’‘I’m in favour of stable, enduring relationships. I’m in favour of people keeping their commitments to people. I would be very sympathetic to some institutional arrangement which encouraged that across the board, rather than in just what might be described as the more common or traditional contexts,’’ he said.
He also favoured stronger anti-discrimination laws if they stood up to what he termed ‘‘quality control’‘. ‘‘In principle, I would support it,’’ he said.
Mr Abbott’s remarks won a mixed response from the gay and lesbian community.
His positive response to anti-discrimination laws was welcomed by the Australian Coalition for Equality. ACE spokes-man Corey Irlam urged the Rudd government to strengthen the current laws.
’‘The absence of national discrimination protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex people is a shameful gap in Australia’s human rights framework,’’ Mr Irlam said.
But the lobby group Australian Marriage Equality said Mr Abbott needed to grapple with same-sex marriage, not simply relationship recognition.
’‘Why does Tony Abbott want to invent an entirely new federal scheme for recognising and fostering ‘stable, enduring relationships’ when we already have one, called marriage,’’ said AME spokesman Alex Greenwich.
The Wisdom of Symptoms: The Forgotten Foundation of Modern Physiology and Health Restoration by Don Tolman - 26 March 2010
“If 9,000,000 people who work for the pharmaceutical industry (as doctors, nurses, hospital staff administrators, FDA employees, or clinicians) are sincere, they can be sincerely wrong.” Don Tolman.
From the 20th Century until now, most of society bought into the propaganda of “pre-determined bought and paid for medical/pharmaceutical research” which has been founded upon the completely false idea that symptoms are “something wrong” with the body.
The reason for the perpetuation of this “false premise” that has been perpetrated by the drug industry, is because 99% of all medicines, surgeries and procedures can only treat “symptoms” not “causes” of disease. So without the myth of the “false premise” drugs could not be justified.
Here’s the True, Accurate Premise….Symptoms are not something “wrong” with the body. Symptoms are what’s RIGHT with the body!
Symptoms represent the efforts of the body’s intelligence in the self-healing autogenetic system to defend, cleanse and heal itself from a variety of infective agents, toxic sludge, and stresses. The body/mind intelligence creates fever, inflammation, pain, discharge, nausea or whatever is necessary in order to heal itself of the offense.
Medical science today is slowly but increasingly recognising symptoms as adaptive responses of the body to a cause. Standard texts of pathology define the process of inflammation as the manner in which the body seeks to wall off, heat up, and burn out infective agents or foreign matter. The cough has long been known as a protective mechanism for clearing breathing passages. Diarrhoea has been shown to be a defensive effort of the body to remove pathogens or irritants more quickly from the colon. Discharges are understood as the body’s way of ridding itself of dead bacteria, viruses, and damaged or spent cells. Even high blood pressure is an important defence and adaptation to the internal external stresses that a person experiences.
The derivation of the word “symptom” is helpful to help us move away from the “Disease process” mentality and better understand the “healing process.” The word “symptom” comes from a Greek root and refers to “something that falls together with or coincides with something else.” Symptoms are a “sign” or a “signal” of “something else” and treating symptoms doesn’t change that “something else”. In fact, drugs that suppress or inhibit a symptom tend to only provide a guise of success and usually lead to a longer and more serious illness. Using drugs to suppress symptoms is akin to pulling the plug on your car’s oil pressure warning light. Just because the light is turned off doesn’t mean that your car’s oil pressure is “cured”. In fact, ignoring that light may lead to your car’s breakdown.
It should be noted that people often incorrectly assume that conventional drugs have “side effects”. Actually, in purely pharmacological terms, drugs do NOT have side effects; drugs only have “effects” and physicians arbitrarily differentiate between those effects that they “like” as the “effects of the drug,” while they call those repercussions that they don’t like “side effects.” This is like saying that the effects of a bomb are that it destroys buildings, but its side effects are that it kills people. Needless to say, one cannot truly separate out one effect from the other. It’s a result of the bomb.
The reason that drugs create “side effects” that are most often worse than the original disease is that these drugs tend to suppress the symptoms (the avenues of healing and cure the sick person is experiencing naturally) and pushes the issue of offense deeper into the person’s body. This observation explains exactly why more and more people today are experiencing more and more serious chronic illnesses at earlier ages and why there is such an epidemic of mental illness (when physical disease is suppressed deeply enough that the disease is pushed into the brain and disrupts it’s function of manufacturing neuro-chemical supplies).
The law is indeed an ass - and all in the name of ‘free speech’ :
Father told to pay protesters’ court costs
YORK, Pa. (UPI)—An appeals court ruled a Pennsylvania man must pay court costs in his lawsuit against church protesters who picketed the funeral of his son who died in Iraq.
Attorneys for Al Snyder said the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered him to pay more than $16,000 in court costs for the Westboro Baptist Church, the Topeka, Kan., church that maintains combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are divine retribution for America’s tolerance of homosexuality, WGAL-TV, Lancaster, Pa., reported Tuesday.
The funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, 20, who died in March 2006 in Iraq, was one of many funerals picketed by the followers of church founder Fred Phelps. Church members have promoted an anti-homosexual agenda with provocative demonstrations outside funerals of service personnel killed in combat, chanting and carrying signs with messages such as “Thank God For Dead Soldiers.”
The elder Snyder sued the protesters and was awarded $5 million in damages for invasion of privacy and emotional distress, the York (Pa.) Daily Record said. But the appeals court last week overturned the decision on First Amendment free-speech arguments.
Earlier in March, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
World’s largest laser fires up for attempt to build new star on Earth
By Peter Farquhar From:news.com.au April 29, 2010 1:28PM
SCIENTISTS hope to provide limitless energy for humanity by using lasers to create a tiny star on Earth.
The laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is roughly the size of three American football fields, and those in charge of it aren’t joking when they say they’ll create a tiny sun in the next few months.
It’s called the National Ignition Facility and it’s all about finding the holy grail of energy production - nuclear fusion - a high-energy reaction that would theoretically provide limitless energy for humanity.
In a nutshell, the laboratory hopes to split its laser beam up into 192 beams, then fire them at a tiny target wrapped in gold that’s smaller than a fingernail.
Nerd alert - inside the target there’s a couple of reactive hydrogen isotopes, so you know what comes next.
The heat from the laser will fuse those isotopes together in reaction that at 100 million degrees Celsius, more than five times hotter than the centre of the sun.
There is a slight radioactive danger, but the lab has encased the facility in concrete walls that are two metres thick, just in case.
But the payoff is that if the isotopes fuse, the tiny star will emit enough energy to power the Earth.
That is, for the 200 trillionths of a second that it survives.
“It’s the most fundamental energy source in nature,” project manager Bruno Van Wonterghem told CNN.
The only fuel it requires is seawater, the source of the aforementioned isotopes.
If it’s successful, the laboratory hopes the project, which has so far been five years in development and cost more than $2 billion, will deliver useable outcomes within 20 years.
“This is something you’re going to tell your grandchildren about,” Mr Van Wonterghem told CNN.
“It’s like standing on the hill watching the Wright brothers’ plane go by.”
by Jonathan Leake From The Sunday Times April 25, 2010
THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.
The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.
Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.
Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.
“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”
The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals — the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history.
One scene in his documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of two-legged herbivores browsing on an alien cliff-face where they are picked off by flying, yellow lizard-like predators. Another shows glowing fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceans thought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter.
Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.
He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”
He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for Hawking, now 68, who is paralysed by motor neurone disease and has very limited powers of communication. The project took him and his producers three years, during which he insisted on rewriting large chunks of the script and checking the filming.
John Smithson, executive producer for Discovery, said: “He wanted to make a programme that was entertaining for a general audience as well as scientific and that’s a tough job, given the complexity of the ideas involved.”
Hawking has suggested the possibility of alien life before but his views have been clarified by a series of scientific breakthroughs, such as the discovery, since 1995, of more than 450 planets orbiting distant stars, showing that planets are a common phenomenon.
So far, all the new planets found have been far larger than Earth, but only because the telescopes used to detect them are not sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized bodies at such distances.
Another breakthrough is the discovery that life on Earth has proven able to colonise its most extreme environments. If life can survive and evolve there, scientists reason, then perhaps nowhere is out of bounds.
Hawking’s belief in aliens places him in good scientific company. In his recent Wonders of the Solar System BBC series, Professor Brian Cox backed the idea, too, suggesting Mars, Europa and Titan, a moon of Saturn, as likely places to look.
Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, warned in a lecture earlier this year that aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding.
“I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive,” he said. “Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”
Stephen Hawking’s Universe begins on the Discovery Channel (UK) on Sunday May 9 at 9pm
Stephen Hawking was probably influenced by Tim Allen in “Galaxy Quest” ;)
UK Telegraph: Christian preacher arrested for saying homosexuality is a sin
“A Christian street preacher was arrested and locked in a cell for telling a passer-by that homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God.”
Compare the laws of the UK & the US where the Westboro nutbars can say what they like, when they like, where they like…
That man was George Alan Rekers, of North Miami — the callboy’s client and, as it happens, one of America’s most prominent anti-gay activists. Rekers, a Baptist minister who is a leading scholar for the Christian right, left the terminal with his gay escort, looking a bit discomfited when a picture of the two was snapped with a hot-pink digital camera.
The story is tabloid-y as, and pretty crude, so consider yourself warned.
A gay rights dude asked Rekers about it on Facebook, and posted his response here. Rekers claims he was following Jesus’ example by ministering to prostitutes… one to one… on a ‘fun’ vacation… with someone he hired from a male escort web site… uh, right.
Too risky to phone ET? Too late — NASA’s tried
The SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., takes a passive approach, listening for any signals from aliens.
But for more than a quarter of a century, various groups have been purposely sending out signals to other worlds. The most famous was a three-minute broadcast from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in 1974, Shostak said.
The Canadians made a series of broadcasts using a Ukrainian antenna in the 1990s. The now-defunct Team Encounter of Houston and a prominent Russian astronomer make public and distinct “cosmic calls” out to the universe, including one just from teenagers.
NASA beamed “Across the Universe” to the star Polaris in 2008 to promote the space agency’s 50th anniversary, the 45th anniversary of the Deep Space Network and the 40th anniversary of the Beatles song. And the same year, as part of the publicity for the remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” the movie was broadcast to the stars, Shostak said.
Four NASA deep space probes — Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2 — carry plaques and recordings that say hello from Earth and give directions on how to get here. Those probes launched in the 1970s are at the edges of the solar system.
And that’s on top of the broadcasts Earth inadvertently sends into the cosmos as part of daily life: radio and TV signals, airport and other radar communications.
“That horse left the barn a long time ago,” Squyres said, speaking from an astrobiology conference in Houston. “Whether you do it intentionally or not, the signals are out there.”
MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager doesn’t think much of the broadcasts to space because so far they are pointed at random, not toward potential Earth-like planets.
”We wouldn’t even know where to send our message, it’s so vast out there,” Seager said. That will change in a few years when new telescopes will be able to find terrestrial planets that could support life.
But not everyone is so negative about alien contact.
I heard a snippet of a radio interview on this subject the other day (Who was being interviewed, I have no idea.) In this person’s opinion, the number one question to ask aliens should be -
From correspondents in Danvers, Massachusetts From:AP May 06, 2010 11:48AM
A MASSACHUSETTS church is scheduled to launch a new monthly worship service - for dogs.
Calvary Episcopal Church will offer later this month its first “Perfect Paws Pet Ministry” aimed at giving area pooches and their owners improved odds at getting canines into heaven.
The Danvers church plans to hold the service on the third Sunday of every month, complete with communion for the humans and special blessings for pets.
Dogs will get special treats. Church officials said well-mannered, leashed dogs are invited.
People can submit a paper prayer if their pets are sick, not good around other dogs or deceased.
Prayers can also be offered for other types of pets.
Reverend Thea Keith-Lucas told The Salem News dogs will have a say during service because barking won’t be banned.
Same Sex, Different Marriage
Many of those who want marriage equality do not want fidelity.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway | posted 5/10/2010 09:18AM
Same-sex marriage advocates frequently ask, “How would gay marriage affect your marriage?” The question is posed rhetorically, as if marriage is a private institution with no social consequences.
But The New York Times, of all papers, argues that gay unions could significantly alter marriage norms. A new study of gay couples in San Francisco shows that half are “open,” meaning that partners consent to each other having sex with other people. The Times says that the prevalence of such relationships could “rewrite the traditional rules of matrimony” by showing straight couples that monogamy need not be a “central feature” of marriage and that sexually open relationships might “point the way for the survival of the institution.”
In the gay community, open relationships are neither news nor controversial. Many of my partnered, gay male friends are in open relationships, some of which have lasted for decades. But the Times reporter, Scott James, who is himself gay, notes that nobody in an open relationship agreed to give their full name for the story, worrying that “discussing the subject could undermine the legal fight for same-sex marriage.”
Indeed, some gay activists were upset with the Times. Gay political commentator Andrew Sullivan derided the piece and pointed to several critiques of the study. However, Sullivan himself has made the same argument, saying that gay male unions could “help strengthen and inform” traditional marriages.
“Among gay male relationships, the openness of the contract makes it more likely to survive than many heterosexual bonds …. There is more likely to be a greater understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than between a man and a woman,” he wrote in his book Virtually Normal.
Other same-sex marriage advocates say a legal change would transform the institution. New York University professor Judith Stacey, testifying before Congress against the Defense of Marriage Act, said changing the law to allow same-sex partners to marry would help “supplant the destructive sanctity of the family” and help it assume “varied, creative, and adaptive contours,” including “small group marriages.”
Activist Michelangelo Signorile wrote that gays should “demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society’s moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution.”
To be sure, some advocates of same-sex marriage hope that heterosexual marital norms of monogamy and fidelity would be transferred to same-sex unions. But since these norms are based on the ideal that marriage is the union of a man and woman making a permanent and exclusive commitment for the purpose of bearing and rearing children, it would be irrational to expect same-sex partners—whose sexual relations bear no risk of procreation—to share the same norms.
Whether or not marriage law should change, the fact is that changing it to include same-sex partnerships would teach people that marriage is fundamentally about the emotional union of adults and not primarily about the bodily union of man and wife (let alone the children who result from such a union). The norms of permanence, monogamy, and fidelity would make less sense under such a change.
Consider changes in divorce laws. The spread of no-fault divorce in the 1970s didn’t just make it easier for men and women to get out of troubled marriages. It also changed people’s ideas about the permanence of the institution and the responsibility parents have to their children.
It had other unintended consequences as well. Studies showed that after divorce laws were changed, spouses tended to invest less in their marriages. Economists found that spouses in states that had passed no-fault divorce laws were 10 percent less likely to put the spouse through college or graduate school and 6 percent less likely to have a child together.
Marriage rates fell and cohabitation rates increased as men and women lost confidence in the institution. Some 20 percent of children are now born to cohabiting couples, the majority of whom will see their parents split up by the time they reach adolescence.
Legal changes have consequences. But no matter how marriage laws may change, we can, paradoxically, find more freedom in chastity—which calls for abstinence when unmarried and sexual fidelity when married—than in any form of open marriage.
As Catholic author Christopher West says, “Chastity is first and foremost a great yes to the true meaning of sex, to the goodness of being created as male and female in the image of God. Chastity isn’t repressive. It’s totally liberating. It frees us from the tendency to use others for selfish gratification and enables us to love others as Christ loves us.”
Orville Richardson’s body to be exhumed for head to be frozen
From:AP May 17, 2010 11:27AM
THE siblings of a man who died more than a year ago must exhume his body so his head can be cut off and cryogenically frozen, a US court has ruled.
The Iowa Court of Appeals has sided with Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which sought to dig up the remains of 81-year-old Orville Richardson. Mr Richardson had signed a contract with Alcor in 2004 and paid $US53,500 to have his head placed in cryonic suspension after his death.
When he died in February 2009, Mr Richardson’s brother and sister buried him instead, having told him earlier that they would have nothing to do with his plan, court records show.
Alcor learned of Mr Richardson’s death two months afterwards, when his brother, David Richardson, asked the company to refund the money paid.
The company filed a lawsuit seeking to exhume Orville Richardson’s body at its own expense, but a judge denied the request.
The appeals court has reversed that decision. It said the lower court should have granted Alcor’s request because Mr Richardson’s siblings ignored their brother’s request, “despite knowledge he had made different arrangements.”
I don’t really think that freezing a much decayed head has any real guarantee of being ‘resurrected’ even if such cryogenics ever evolved. What’s that old saying - “a fool and his money are soon parted” ? Also, referring to the appeal judges, “the law is an ass” ;)
Judge labels Anthony Hopkins ‘evil of worst kind’ after wife’s body found in freezer
From correspondents in Alabama From:AP May 22, 2010
A US evangelist who authorities say terrorised his family while preaching at revivals has been sentenced to life plus 51 years in prison after being convicted of killing his wife and storing her body in a home freezer.
Circuit Judge John Lockett imposed the sentence yesterday on Anthony Hopkins, 39, who showed no remorse during the proceeding.
He got the maximum sentence of life for murder and additional time for convictions including sodomy and sexual abuse. Assistant District Attorney Ashley Rich called Hopkins “evil of the worst kind”.
She said he taught the eight children in his home things about the Bible that were not true and that helped him get away with his crimes for years.
During Hopkins’ trial in April, prosecutors said he killed his 36-year-old wife, Arletha Hopkins, in 2004 after she caught him molesting a girl, then stuffed her body in a freezer at their home in north Mobile.
Investigators discovered the body in 2008 after a young woman abused by Hopkins told child advocates about it, authorities said. Police arrested Hopkins while he was preaching at a revival in the south Alabama town of Jackson.
Defence lawyer Jeff Deen said his client admits putting his wife’s body in the freezer, but he doesn’t know how she died. “There’s evidence in the trial that it could’ve been by natural causes, and it needs to be explored on appeal,” Mr Deen said.
The two oldest children in the Hopkins home are now adults. The six youngest are living with relatives in Georgia.
What exactly was his message at that revival ? Only in America ( we hope )......
Also, seems odd that his name is Anthony Hopkins… reminds me of the “Silence of the Lambs” mad killer.
A mammoth blow for global warming From : AAP May 24, 2010
SCIENTISTS believe gassy mammoths helped to fill the atmosphere with methane and keep the Earth warm more than 13 thousand years ago.
Experts estimate that, together with other large plant-eating mammals that are now extinct, they released about 9.6 million tonnes of the gas each year.
When the megafauna disappeared there was a dramatic fall in atmospheric methane which may have altered the climate, British scientists say.
Analysis of gases trapped in ice cores suggests that the loss of animal emissions accounted for a large amount of the decline.
So it’s not MAN made global warming, but rather MAMMOTH made global warming that’s the problem?
Well at least now we finally know why the dinosaurs died out - apparently they ran out of fresh air to breath ;)
Bethany Lott killed while being proposed to by a lightning strike in Knoxville
From correspondents in Knoxville, Tennessee From: AP June 08, 2010
RICHARD Butler wanted his girlfriend to think they were just taking a scenic hike in the North Carolina mountains, but he had a secret plan. When they got to the top, he planned to pull out a ring and ask her to be his bride.
Lightning struck three times as the Knoxville, Tennessee, couple were on Max Patch Bald, near Asheville. The third hit Mr Butler, 30, and his girlfriend, Bethany Lott, 25, killing her on Friday, he told the Asheville Citizen Times…..........
[null]Sex and the SecularistsNew York Times (blog)[{}]Only one in five Catholics said that church leaders were the proper arbiters in such matters as divorce, abortion, sexual conduct, homosexuality and abortion. Even fewer people, only 10 percent of Catholics, believe that the church should have the ...
[null]In Colorado, a Struggle Between Pragmatism and PassionNew York Times (blog)[{}]But in Colorado's Republican Party, the divide between traditional party pragmatists and the forces of passion – a local and potent brew of evangelical religion, antitax fervor and suspicion of anointed establishment front-runners – has become ...
[null]The Church That Politics Turned Into a MosqueNew York Times[{}]The town, whose income depends largely on surrounding olive groves, had also begun to trade on its eminent place in the history of Christianity to attract faith tourism from the West. It was here in ancient Nicaea, as the town was then called, ...
[null]Santorum Talks Faith With Texas PastorsNew York Times (blog)[{}]He used his own experience to attack abortion, describing a phone call he received from a young man confined to a wheelchair who said that a pregnant woman facing giving birth to a child with his condition might consider an abortion.and more»
Santorum Talks Faith With Texas Pastors New York Times (blog) He used his own experience to attack abortion, describing a phone call he received from a young man confined to a wheelchair who said that a pregnant woman facing giving birth to a child with his condition might consider an abortion.
[null]The Khmer Rouge's Perfect VillainNew York Times[{}]And he spoke of how, after eight years as a chief executioner in Pol Pot's police, in the late 1980s he quietly returned to teaching in northwestern Cambodia and a few years later swapped his faith in communism for Christianity.and more»
The Khmer Rouge's Perfect Villain New York Times And he spoke of how, after eight years as a chief executioner in Pol Pot's police, in the late 1980s he quietly returned to teaching in northwestern Cambodia and a few years later swapped his faith in communism for Christianity.
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