756 words

8 May 2007

Irish Independent

English

(c) 2007 Independent Newspapers Ireland Ltd

There are times when religion, in all its glorious madness, can truly make the world a better, or at least brighter, place.

Whether it’s Pope Benny railing against rock music, that hideous little troll the Dalai Lama condemning oral sex or those Muslim chaps cutting each others’ heads off, it seems that religious types are always angry about something. Which, when you consider that they are all convinced that they, and they alone, are on the fast track to Paradise, seems rather peevish.

But it seems that even when they get together with other denominations to have a bit of fun things can still spiral out of control, if the recent attempts to stage a football match between priests and imams is anything to go by.

Last week saw an interfaith conference take place in Sweden and there were plans to finish the conference with a game.

Sadly, however, the imams objected to the presence of filthy women on their team and refused to play.

Then, just to further confuse matters, the Christian team agreed to drop its two women players and field an all-male team instead.

Which forced the Christian team’s captain to promptly storm off in disgust at the way the female members had been treated.

“Because we thought it would be a nice conclusion of the conference we didn’t want to call it off, so we decided to stage an all- men’s team game instead,” a spokesman said.

“We realise now that it was wrong to have a priest team without women.”

They can’t organise a match without falling out but they expect the rest of us to hand over our souls to them? You gotta love religious types.

Someone needs to get a hobbyWe are well used to politicians saying and doing stupid things. It’s one of the few reasons we keep them around, frankly.

Sadly, this current election campaign has been notable more for the weasel Ahern’s growing discomfort (when you have people cheering on Vincent Browne, of all people, over you, then you know the game is up) than any real gaffes, so we have to turn towards the frozen wastes of Canada for the most recent example of mad politician behaviour.

Local MP Mike Lake has decided that it’s time Canada gets serious about the real issues, which is why he wants to place Big Foot – or Sasquatch, if you’re a stickler for names – on the endangered species list.

The politician has collected 500 signatures in his home town of Alberta and wants to force the Canadian parliament to do more to protect the non- existent creature.

Bigfoot researcher Todd Standing, who was behind the petition, claims to have proof of the Sasquatch’s existence and says he fears for its safety.

Next week, Scottish MPs on why we need to protect the Loch Ness monster.

Junkie see, junkie doHaving already suggested that they might be interested in adopting their own little black baby, Kate Moss and Pete Doherty have now decided that they would actually like to have a baby the old fashioned way.

And while the thoughts of that scabby junkie engaging in any sort of intimate activity is rather repulsive, it seems that Moss refuses to listen to reason.

Doherty was once more arrested on Saturday night when he was busted with crack and hash in his car.

Despite the fact that Doherty is a serial offender, the judge refused to jail him on the rather remarkable grounds that he has been attending therapy sessions in the Priory.

Pity he didn’t get the judge who gave Paris Hilton a custodial sentence.

This is what you call a big whooopsSpare a thought for John Brandrick. He faces bankruptcy and will have to sell his house after he stopped paying his mortgage, donated all his clothes to charity and blew his remaining life savings on fancy meals and nights out.

And what was the cause of such profligate spending? Well, Brandrick was told he had less than a year to live because of cancer, and he decided to go out with a bang.

Now it has emerged that the test was incorrectly conducted and he is in fine physical, if not financial help.

Not surprisingly, he is planning to sue the hospital.

Still, it must be a record – is Brandrick the first man to become enraged by the news that hedidn’t have cancer?

This article is hilarious. It brings in a few religions together not through the story but an organised interfaith meeting, it simply discusses the novelty happening during it. It really is quite funny when you read through it. Also i liked it because it was from a different country, a more international story..

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Herald Sun

By Philip Pullella in Vatican City

May 04, 2007 09:53pm

FORMER Iranian president Mohammad Khatami met Pope Benedict today and said the wounds between Christians and Muslims were still “very deep”, including those caused by a controversial papal speech last September.

Mr Khatami became one of the most prominent Muslim clerics to visit the Vatican since the Pope’s controversial Regensburg speech which angered Muslims by appearing to link Islam and violence.

“These wounds are very deep. There are many wounds and they cannot heal that easily,” Mr Khatami said just before the papal meeting, when asked if the wounds that followed the Pontiff’s speech in his native Germany had been healed.

“For sure, a meeting with the Holy Father cannot be enough to heal all these wounds but at least we are making a joint effort in order to start healing these wounds,” Mr Khatami said.

In his September speech, the Pope quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor as saying Islam had only brought evil to the world and that it was spread by the sword, a method that was unreasonable and contrary to God’s nature.

He used the quote to launch into a much longer discussion of the key influence of ancient Greek philosophical reasoning on the early Christian faith and invited Muslim scholars to enter into a dialogue about faith and reason with Christians.

The Pope later said he regretted any misunderstanding it caused among Muslims, after protests including attacks on churches in the Middle East and the killing of a nun in Somalia.

The Vatican said Mr Khatami and the Pope met for about 30 minutes and spoke through interpreters about the “dialogue among cultures” to overcome current tensions and promote peace.

In talks that a spokesman called cordial, they also discussed the problems of minority Christians in Iran and the Middle East and encouraged peace efforts such as the conference on Iraq’s future taking place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

Mr Khatami, speaking through a translator, said that Christianity and Islam needed to rediscover their common roots as monotheistic religions in order to improve relations.

“If Christian and Islamic societies could only rely on love and justice and get back to these founding principles and if together we fought against violence and extremism … then we can lay the foundations to heal any wound,” he said.

The conference on religious dialogue Mr Khatami attended was to have been held in October but was postponed following the fallout in the Muslim world over Benedict’s Regensburg speech.

At the conference before meeting the Pope, Mr Khatami said no one could use God’s name to “instigate war or hate or speak ignorantly of crusades”.

He said both religions must enter a “sincere and practical dialogue and commitment to achieve peace and eliminate terrorism and war”.

This was a good piece, it linked two very different faiths together by discussing the wounds between them, it is a fairly rational piece where neither leader says anything horrible to the other. It isnt often you find two religious denominations getting along in the same story.

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FEATURE STORY

The Canberra Times

1 May 2007

We are told that we live in godless times, yet more and more people all over the world are going on pilgrimages: as if being on the road to somewhere holy suits us better than being inside the building at the end of it. The new pilgrims are Christians and Muslims but also Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, Jains. There are also swelling numbers of don’t knows: people with little commitment to any established religion whose marriage has collapsed, or whose wife has died, who have lost their job or retired, and decide to take time off on the road to somewhere ancient, beautiful and reputedly holy, to sort their lives out. The clear and the woolly, the devout and the troubled, those who know exactly where they are going and why and those who haven’t a clue, increasingly walk shoulder to shoulder along these ancient tracks. The rise in popularity of pilgrimages all over the world in the past 80 years has been dramatic.

In 1925, 90,662 Muslim pilgrims performed the Hajj, but by 1995 the figure had gone up more than tenfold; by December last year it had doubled again to over two million. For centuries, interest in walking ”the Way of St James”, the 1000 mile pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago di Compostela in north- western Spain, legendary resting place of St James, was on the wane: by the late ’80s only a handful of pilgrims arrived at the city’s cathedral every day. But then came the revival: by 1998 the numbers had jumped from 3500 per year to nearly 10 times that number; by 2006 they had topped 100,000. The Kumbh Mela, the moving Hindu festival on the Ganges, has always drawn crowds but today they are stupendous, the biggest assemblies of humanity ever seen in history, numbering tens of millions and readily visible from space. Also in north India, the site of Buddha’s enlightenment, the bodi tree in Bodhgaya and the Mahabodi temple that stands next to it, have attracted monks and lay Buddhists from around the world for decades but in modest numbers. But despite Bihar’s reputation as one of the poorest and most dangerous corners of India, the crowds of pilgrims have continued to multiply: now more than 350,000 come every year and the small town is crammed with monasteries, temples and meditation centres. Last month the Indian Government inaugurated a special train connecting Bodhgaya with the other main Buddhist pilgrimage sites. But it is in Europe that the pilgrimage, while enjoying a surge of popularity, has also undergone a subtle change of meaning. In the Middle Ages, a pilgrimage to Lourdes or Medjugorje was like the Hajj for Muslims or a dip in the Ganges for Hindus, performed to obtain specific benefits from heaven. But the huge rise in numbers of Western pilgrims today derives from a desire to reduce one’s life to its simplest elements and see what is left. This August the Reverend Edward Condry, an Anglican priest and canon treasurer of Britain’s Canterbury Cathedral, is leading a group of 30 pilgrims from Canterbury to Rome by bicycle along the restored Via Francigena, an ancient network of modern roads and restored trails that in 1994 was

declared a Cultural Route by the Council of Europe. ”Thanks to Thomas a Becket,” says Condry, ”in the Middle Ages Canterbury was one of the four great pilgrimage destinations, along with Santiago, Jerusalem and Rome. But the Reformation killed it off. Calvin’s view was typical: a pilgrimage, he said, never gained anyone salvation. ”Even today we Protestants feel strange at sites like Lourdes. But for me the pilgrimage is the dominant metaphor for what faith is like: walking embodies the spirit of faith.” Condry is also walking to Santiago, doing the 1000 mile pilgrimage a week at a time, one week per year. ”People go on pilgrimages for hundreds of different reasons,” he says, ”as a physical challenge, as tourists, to sort their lives out, or a combination of those. But whatever the reason, they always find some spiritual meaning in it.”

Perhaps the most truly modern pilgrimages are like those conducted by the Dalai Lama when he travelled to Lourdes and the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, or by the Christians who travelled with him to Bodhgaya, or the joint pilgrimages of Jews, Muslims and Christians who tramp between places of intense meaning to all three religions in the Holy Land. Because, as Condry explains, the pilgrimage’s goal is no longer necessarily the point. ”Walking is such a minimalist activity,” he says, ”the less you have in your rucksack the better, and with this stripping away of possessions you are left startlingly exposed. And that’s the significance of the pilgrimage. Reaching Santiago is important but do I really want to reach Santiago?” The Independent

I think this is a great story. Its a feature story, and I haven’t found many religion based feature story, it also manages to link quite a few different religions together which is interesting. I thought it was well rounded.

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