Paul Gill to finish 25-day blasphemy walk today

Today, Monday May 31st, Paul Gill of Atheist Ireland will finish his 25-day walk the length of Ireland to raise support for the promised blasphemy referendum. Please send him a text now to congratulate him at +35386 7325365.

Also, if you are in Ireland today, why not join Paul on the last leg of his epic walk? You can meet him at the Malin Hotel, Malin between 3:30-4:00pm on Monday 31st May. Malin to Malin Head is a 12km walk so should take about 2 & 1/2hrs to complete. If you can’t make it then he’ll see you at Sandino’s Bar, Derry at 8:30pm.

Throughout the length of Ireland from Cork to Donegal, Paul has failed to find a single person who supports the blasphemy law. On one occasion, he thought he had found one person who wanted blasphemy outlawed, but it turned out that person had got blasphemy mixed up with bigamy!

People all along the west coast have been incredibly supportive. Many people have refused to take payment for meals and staying at campsites. Comedian Tommy Tiernan met Paul to express his support. And you can give Paul a boost by joining him today, either on the final leg of the walk or later in Sandino’s bar, or else by texting him a message of congratulations to +35386 7325365.

Here’s Paul starting his walk in Cork on May 6th. The first few daily videos of his walk are also online on the Atheist Ireland YouTube channel. Tom Kennedy,who travelled with paul to video the walk, will gradually put the rest of the daily videos online over the coming weeks.

(If you can’t see this video, please go here to the original post.)

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Jesus the raging ruler of Revelation

Moderate Christians sometimes argue that Jesus changed the violent message of the Old Testament God. But this argument ignores the New Testament portrayal of Jesus as the raging ruler of Revelation.

A prophet called John believed that Jesus appeared to him on the Greek island of Patmos, to show him what the end of the world would be like. Jesus had white hair and eyes like flames, a sharp two-edged sword came out of his mouth, he wore a golden sash over a full-length garment, his feet were like brass, he carried seven stars in his hand to represent seven angels, and he stood between seven golden candlesticks that represented seven churches in Turkey. Jesus dictated letters to the angels of each of these churches. These included some strong rebukes. He told the angel of one church that a woman called Jezebel had seduced his servants to fornicate, so he was going to kill her children with death.

After dictating these letters, Jesus brought John to Heaven through a door in the sky. God was sitting on a throne being worshipped by twenty four elders with gold crowns, and four beasts with six wings each. God had a book sealed with seven seals, and nobody was worthy enough to open it except Jesus, who now appeared as a lamb. Jesus took the book from God, and opened the first six seals. Four horsemen brought disasters to the earth, but 144,000 Israelites were saved. Jesus then opened the seventh seal, and seven angels brought more disasters to earth, with various beasts killing some people and torturing others but not letting them die.

The angels in Heaven then cast the Devil down to earth in the form of a dragon with seven heads and ten horns. The dragon attacked a pregnant woman, but the earth protected her. Then a beast arose from the sea, and the dragon gave the beast his power and authority. The number of the beast was 666. Seven more angels then poured seven golden vials of God’s wrath onto the earth, bringing seven more plagues. The seas and rivers turned to blood, people were scorched with fire, and giant hailstones fell from the sky. A woman, the whore of Babylon, was sitting on the back of the beast, and an angel destroyed the city of Babylon.

Jesus himself then went to war with the beast. Jesus was on a white horse, and his robe was soaked in blood. Jesus cast the beast and his false prophet into a lake of fire burning with brimstone, and killed the beast’s army using the sword that came out of his mouth. An angel then jailed the Devil in a bottomless pit for a thousand years, after which the Devil returned and deceived various nations. God cast those nations, the Devil, Hell and Death itself into the lake of burning brimstone for eternity. God then sent a new Jerusalem, made out of gold, from Heaven to earth, and the righteous lived there in peace for eternity. Finally, Jesus assured John that the time for all of these prophecies to happen was soon coming.

Jesus as the raging ruler of Revelation is inconvenient to moderate Christians, because he is just as vengeful and violent as was the Jewish Jehovah of the Old Testament. Even before he brought John to Heaven, Jesus was threatening to kill the innocent children of the prophetess Jezebel because of the sins of their mother, which is straight out of Old Testament morality.

Of course, this Jesus may have been just a vision that appeared to John on the island of Patmos, but he was either as real, or else as imaginary, as the Jesus that appeared in a vision to Paul on the road to Damascus. There is no valid reason to give either of these hallucinations any more or less credibility than the other.

And this Jesus was adamant that his message was not to be revised: before he left, he told John that God would curse anyone who either added to or removed any of his words. So there’s not much room there for cherry-picking the bits that sound nice.

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Time for action on child sex abuse report

A year after the Ryan Report was published, we must not forget the decades of crimes it uncovered by Irish religious orders against children in their care. A new coalition of children’s groups is now calling for faster government action on the report. And two men are on hunger strike outside the palace of the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin seeking arrests and an international criminal investigation.

Between 1936 and 1970, about 170,000 children were sent to about fifty industrial schools, and were kept there for an average of seven years. The religious orders systematically abused the children in their care. They hit, beat, flogged and kicked children. They scalded and burned children and held them under water. They sexually molested and raped children. They told children they were worthless, and lied to them that their parents were dead. They left sick and injured children untreated. They neglected to provide children with basic standards of care, food and clothes. They shaved, beat and humiliated children who ran away and were caught.

The religious orders did all of this as a matter of policy, treating and beating children in similar ways in different schools. They wanted to create a climate of daily terror, with children not knowing where the next beating was coming from. They knew their behaviour was illegal: they reported abusive lay workers to the police, but protected priests, brothers and nuns. The Department of Education failed in its duty to inspect and monitor these schools. Despite knowing that violence was endemic, it saw its role as facilitating the religious orders.

The two men on hunger strike outside the Catholic Archbishop’s palace are John Ayres and Kevin Flanagan. John was physically abused and seriously beaten as a child, both by his parents and in institutions. Kevin’s brother Mickey was assaulted with a brush in Artane industrial school, suffering concussion and a broken arm, and was then locked in a shed for sixty hours and denied medical assistance.

The new coalition of eight groups who have come together to lobby the Government to carry out the Ryan Implementation plan are Barnardos, CARI, Children’s Rights Alliance, Irish Association of Young People in Care, ISPCC, One in Four, Rape Crisis Network of Ireland and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. Here’s what they want the Irish Government to do:

• Ensure that a referendum to strengthen children’s rights in the Constitution is held;
• Speed up the legislation to place Children First on a statutory basis and widen its remit to include all organisations and individuals, including faith organisations, sports bodies and volunteer groups;
• Ensure children’s voices are heard in all matters affecting them. Develop the necessary legislative and policy framework to make statutory provision for the right of children’s voices to be heard in judicial proceedings affecting them;
• Introduce and progress the National Vetting Bureau Bill, ensuring that the Bill provides adequately for the sharing of information between relevant agencies;
• Ensure all children in care have an allocated social worker and care plan;
• Evaluate the National Children’s Strategy 2000-2010 and begin the consultation process in preparation for the development of the next Strategy;
• Provide the necessary funding to those providing support services to survivors of institutional child abuse;
• Amend the Child Care Act 1991 via the Child Care (Amendment) Bill 2009 to place a statutory obligation on the State to provide aftercare for all children who need it and develop a comprehensive national aftercare policy;
• Ensure that separated children moving into care placements are provided with adequate supports to meet their specific needs. Ensure these children have access to aftercare services;
• Publish the promised national review of current practice in relation to Section 5 of the Child Care Act 1991 to establish current practices and gaps in the system for children experiencing homelessness;
• Commence the Health Act 2007 to allow independent inspection of foster carers and all children’s residential centres as a matter of urgency;
• Grant the Health Information and Quality Authority more independence and robust powers to enforce compliance with child care regulations, through a range of mechanisms, including penalties, sanctions and fines.

They have a website called Saving Childhood Ryan, which has a form that allows you to email your local TDs and Senators with a request for immediate action.

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Visionary has double vision of Virgin Mary

Joe Coleman claims to get messages from the mother of the son of the creator of the universe. People who believe him have damaged their eyes by staring into the sun. Last Friday Coleman was on RTE’s Late Late Show, promoting a book about his alleged visions. But his stories while being interviewed do not match up to what he has written in his book.

Let’s start with page one of chapter one. Coleman says he had his first apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the age of twelve, when he was looking at a picture of her in his grandmother’s house. Now, you would imagine that such a momentous event would be indelibly imprinted on his memory. But you would be mistaken.

In his book, Coleman describes the event as “a scene of utter silence” in which the image of Mary seemed to float towards him in a hazy cloud, then beamed at him with a beautiful smile, and “then it was over just as quickly as it had begun.”

But on the Late Late Show, Coleman says “She told me she was my blessed mother, and I was going to work for her in years to come, and I have to prepare myself”. When Ryan Tubridy volunteers the phrase “She said brace yourself”, Coleman replies “She said brace yourself, my child. It was the first time she called me my child. She said, you have come back to the earth, you have to work for me, but I didn’t understand that, because I didn’t even know who she was.”

So, based on his Late Late Show interview, Coleman believes the image of the Virgin Mary told him specific things when she first appeared to him, things that were central to his later role as a messenger of her visions. Yet he fails to mention any of these comments in his book. Instead, he specifically describes “a scene of utter silence” in which the apparition smiles at him and “then it was over just as quickly as it had begun.”

This leaves three broad possibilities: (a) while writing, revising and editing the first page of chapter one of a book about being visited by the mother of the son of the creator of the universe, Joe Coleman forgot that she had told him these very important things; or (b) he remembered that she had told him these things, but thought this too trivial to include in his book; or (c) he is making up or embellishing his stories as he goes along.

I know which option I am leaning towards.

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