OPEN LETTER FROM SINEAD O'CONNOR TO THE POPE!

As my readers know, I've posted a lot of material on the abuses, incredible hubris and disturbances in the Catholic Church. This time, I will leave it up to Sinead O'Connor.

Here she is:

Sir,

Your remarks made last week concerning church authorities' handling of child rape complaints give the impression that neither John-Paul II nor yourself knew of how these complaints were being managed.

Can you please make clear exactly who has been running the church since 1979?

You have said church authorities did not act quickly nor decisively in dealing with allegations. This is entirely dishonest.

In fact church authorities acted extremely quickly and decisively, but in protection of rapist priests and the church, not of children.

In your letter to Irish mass-goers you stated that the Irish hierarchy, in covering up rape and transfering known rapists to other parishes, where many more children were raped, had done so out of "a well-intentioned desire to protect the reputation of the church."

If there is any such well-intentioned desire on your part then why have you not in outrage fired every employee of the church who contributed even in the remotest of ways, consciously or uncsonciously, to the attack on Christ himself as made manifest in those children who were raped?

It looks extremely bad that you have not done so. And that you continue to set up lies and smoke-screens and treat us as if we are stupid.

Spokespeople on your behalf keep saying, falsely, that hierarchies acted independently of The Vatican, when countless pleading letters from bishops to The Vatican show that is not the case, as do the specific instructions issued by The Vatican in 1962 to all bishops in the world for dealing with allegations of rape and abuse.

As you are aware, those instructions required the cleric taking complaints, as well as the victim making the complaint, to sign an oath of silence under threat of excommunication.

Your letter of 2001 to all bishops in the world confirms the 1962 instructions were in operation until 2001.

Why do you allow your representatives to lie?

All reports carried out in the four corners of the earth have found, independently of each other, that the church's main concern in dealing with abuse was the preservation of its assets and reputation and that the welfare of children was not a consideration.

As an example I refer you to the fact that in 1987 the church in Ireland took out a series of insurance claims in every diocese in order to protect the church from claims they foresaw would be made.

The church then sat back and did nothing until 1995 when complaints became public knowledge.

The reports show that without exception each diocese in the world behaved in exactly the same manner when dealing with allegations.

If hierarchies had been acting independently of The Vatican there would have been differences in their behaviour.

We deserve better than lies and insults to our intelligence.
The Holy Spirit deserves better.

As long as the house of The Holy Spirit remains a haven for criminals the reputation of the church will remain in ruins.

Finally, your statement that you hope the church's "humiliation will help the victims" is deplorable on two levels.

One: not one member of The Vatican has publicly displayed an iota of humility over this issue. Instead each person who has spoken has done so most arrogantly and dismissively.

Two: how dare you use the word humiliation to describe what you and the church are going through? Hope and pray, and thank God that you will never know the abject humiliation of children who were raped by monsters in the employ of your church. That is true humiliation.

"LJB" on PL's Post: "CHILDLESS AND LOVING IT!"/PL RESPONDS!

Here's LJB:

Hey, PL!
Thanks for this post! As a young, unmarried woman in my late twenties, it feels like everywhere I turn another friend or relative is getting married or giving birth. While I'm not ruling it out in this lifetime, right now I'm happy carving a different path and making fantastic discoveries about myself, discoveries which I don't think I'd be making as a wife or mother. In short, it's nice to hear I'm not alone! Because, at the end of the day, I would rather be my complete self for my partner and children, and I don't think I could if I tried to accomplish it on the "social clock."

From the green mountain state,
LJB


Here's PL:

Good to hear from you, LJB!

Some folks might want to protest what is being said in the article, and here by you, but the facts support you. As a general rule, I have rarely had parents who are actively raising children coming for therapy in my 30+ years in practice. Why? Because all too often (though less often than it used to be), having kids is chosen instead of working on one's self-actualization. Sadly, parents can and do use their offspring as a distraction from their own issues for 2 or more decades. By the time said parents arrive to the empty nest years, and finally do come for therapy, it is often with a "What the fuck happened to my life?" look on their 45 year old faces. They feel trapped in a job they never wanted, their marriage is dead, and their kids are disgruntled at best, narcissistically disturbed at worst.

Good for you, LJB. The world needs a lot more self-actualized people than it does more children with the baggage of their parents unlived lives!

Enjoy the turning of the leaves up there!

TODAY'S DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSION HEADLINE!

VATICAN CITY: Vatican Bank Facing Money Laundering Probe!

Italian authorities seized euro23 million ($30 million) from a Vatican bank account Tuesday and said they have begun investigating top officials of the Vatican bank in connection with a money-laundering probe.

The Vatican said it was "perplexed and surprised" by the investigation.

Italian financial police seized the money as a precaution and prosecutors placed the Vatican bank's chairman and director general under investigation for alleged mistakes linked to violations of Italy's anti-laundering laws, news reports said.

The investigation is not the first trouble for the bank – formally known as the Institute for Works of Religion. In the 1980s, it was involved in a major scandal that resulted in a banker, dubbed "God's Banker" because of his close ties to the Vatican, being found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London.

The Vatican expressed full trust in the chairman of the bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi.

AAAAAAYYY!!!

TODAY'S DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSION HEADLINE!

CHILDLESS AND LOVING IT!

"Since the dawn of birth control, more women have opted against having kids. Nearly one-in-five American women now ends her childbearing years without giving birth, up from one-in-10 in the 1970s, according to a recent Pew study. The percentage has risen for all racial and ethnic groups. The top reason women give for not wanting kids is simply loving their life as it is," says Laura Scott, author of Two Is Enough: A Couple's Guide to Living Childless by Choice.

DON'T JUMP OUT THE WINDOW YET, BUT...

According to one Dr. Erik Verlinde, a respected professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, gravity is an illusion.

You can read the entire article in the New York Times about it HERE, but let me try and give my own understanding of it, and please note, I'm not at all speaking for Dr. Verlinde.

What any quantum physicist, and any genuine spiritual teacher, will tell you is that we create reality from our consciousness. The scientist will explain it in terms of particle physics and the "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle," etc., the spiritual master in much more poetic, though not necessarily more understandable terms, but nonetheless, science and metaphysics seem to be coming together more and more these days, in conjunction with what I have referred to as The Wave sweeping though our planet.

So, if we create reality from our consciousness, why can't we just jump out the window and fly?

Well, the short answer is, technically, we can. Yogi's have been known to levitate during focused meditative states, and throughout history there have been reports of spiritual masters who could teleport from one place to the next or even be in more than one place at a time. (Okay, how many readers did I just lose here?)

But don't jump just yet, because here's the thing - three-dimensional physical life on planet Earth in a linear time continuum is the game we all agreed to play here, and while gravity is not a universal law, it is one of the rules we agreed to abide by. Again, like said yogis, any one individual could supersede the rules, but it would require a level of mental clarity in which gravity is fully understood to be an illusion as Dr. Verlinde proposes.

That being said, the useful information here is that even within the rules of the game, even if most of us can't fly or walk through walls or over hot coal without being burned, we can still get clear enough to change many aspects of our lives. In the areas of our health, relationships, finances, etc., we are all operating from erroneous beliefs that shape our reality in ways that do not fulfill us. With a genuinely-intentioned amount of self-work, one can change repetitive, negative thought patterns that attract unpleasant outcomes and inspire self-defeating behaviors.

Think about it.

I don't know about you, but if I can become healthy, wealthy and wise, and have a great love, Eros and sex-life, I'll be flying!

MORE ON: "TEACHERS, LEAVE THOSE KIDS ALONE!!"

Just ran into a review of a book out there - The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing by Alfie Kohn.

It's that time of year again, folks, and while many of my readers may not be parents, this is nonetheless an issue for all of us. What passes for education so often, just like what passes for parenting, amounts to a great extent to crushing a child's spirit. Forcing a child to control the flow of energy through their body by sitting still and standing in lines all day, and forcing a child's mind to think by using rote methods instead of by using their minds imaginatively is truly cruel and unusual punishment. Whether you have children or not, please do a meditation this Labor Day weekend that we may wake up and stand on the side of the souls of our kids.

Here's an excerpt from the review:

Education watchdog and author Kohn (No Contest: The Case Against Competition) questions why teachers and parents continue to insist on overloading kids with homework when there are no definitive studies proving its overall learning benefits. Indeed, argues Kohn persuasively, homework can be detrimental to children 's development by robbing families of quality evening time together and not allowing a kid time simply to be a kid. Americans in general advocate a tough-going approach to education and push teachers to give more drudgery nightly as a way of "building character." Yet Kohn shows that doing forced busywork only turns kids off to school and kills intellectual and creative curiosity. The American insistence on producing good worker bees "by sheer force or cleverness," notes Kohn, "reflects a stunning ignorance about how human beings function in the real world." Kohn pursues six reasons why homework is still so widely accepted despite the evidence against it, including the emphasis on competitiveness and "tougher standards" and a basic distrust of children and how they would fill their time otherwise if not doing busywork.

LIFE BEGINS IN... MISSOURI?!

Politicians in Missouri have declared that life begins at conception, and now it is encoded in state law - Missouri Senate Bill #793 to be exact.

"The life of each human being begins at conception," according to Bill 793, which adds new regulations to the state's 24-hour informed consent law for abortions. "Abortion will terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being."

South Dakota already has a similar law, by the way.

Yep. Who better than midwestern politicians to know when life begins, huh?

Well, let me throw this out there, folks, and I know its radical, but these days, I'm just swingin' the axe of truth, you know? According to my "sources," which I won't divulge here, when the soul decides to enter into physicality varies greatly from circumstance to circumstance. In fact, a soul may not enter the body at all until right at birth, and in some cases occasionally not even fully at birth. In other situations, the soul may indeed enter at conception, or at any time during the entire gestation process. And the soul could decide to leave during gestation in a variety of ways - what we think of as miscarriages, etc., and by choosing a pregnant woman who intends to have an abortion.

You see, there are no "miscarriages of justice" when it comes to the soul. Life is understood by our Higher Self to be eternal, and the ways to experience physical life can vary widely, from a brief toe-dipping into 3D, or the full nine yards of a whole lifetime.

Our Higher Self is always choosing the experiences it wants to have, and the circumstances for those experiences... except, of course, in Missouri!

TODAY'S FREUDIAN QUOTE!

"Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent."
Sigmund Freud

TODAY'S DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSION HEADLINE!

HEADLINE: "A 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation into the purchase of child pornography online turned up more than 250 civilian and military employees of the Defense Department - including some with the highest available security clearance - who used credit cards or PayPal to purchase images of children in sexual situations. But the Pentagon investigated only a handful of the cases, Defense Department records show."

Hmm... what is it about those macho men and little kids?
 

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