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| Bishop James C. Timlin, Suffer little children. |
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| Pastor Terri Copeland Pearsons |
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| Octopus bimaculoides Credit: Tom Kleindinst/Marine Biological Laboratory |
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| Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison, Wisconsin. "It was the gays!" Credit: CNS/Jason Studnicka |
It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord...
My new book, A History of Ireland: How Religion Poisoned Everything, is a bit of a departure for me, delving into other areas of interest - history and Ireland - and combining them into a coherent critique of religion and the harm it does.
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| Sam Young - Excommunicated for defending children. |
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| Jose Vicente Morales. Pastor of the Iglesia Cristiana Impacto de Fe, Poenix, Arizona |
Pando, the Word’s Heaviest Organism, is an Ever-Growing Witness of an Ancient Earth – Naturalis Historia
Pope Francis Favorability Down Sharply in U.S. | Gallop.
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| Artist's impression of dinosaur Lingwulong shenqi Credit: Zhang Zongda |
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| Bishop Michael J. Bransfield, under investigation |
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| Don Perosi with his scuola di canto (singschool) c. 1905. Source: Wikipedia |
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| New Jersey Atorney General, Gurbir S. Grewal "We're not going to protect those individuals who perpetrated these crimes any more." |
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| Leo Behe |
Dutch Catholic church accused of widespread sexual abuse cover-up | World news | The Guardian. Over the course of 65 years, 20 of 39 Dutch cardinals, bishops and their auxiliaries “covered up sexual abuse, allowing the perpetrators to cause many more victims. Four [of them] abused children and 16 others allowed the transfer of paedophile priests who could have caused new victims in other parishes".
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| Cardinal Reinhard Marx Working with PR advisers on best way to present the report. |
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| Ooceraea biroi clonal raider ants with larvae. Photo: Romain Libbrecht |
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| "[The great accuser] seeks to reveal sins, which people can see, in order to scandalize the people." |
In these times, Pope Francis said, it seems like the devil, "the great accuser, has been let loose and he's got it in for the bishops. True, there are, we are all sinners, we bishops."
The great accuser "seeks to reveal sins, which people can see, in order to scandalize the people" of God, he said in his homily during morning Mass at Domus Sanctae Marthae.
[My emphasis]
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| New Cardinal Sergio Obeso Rivera, retired archbishop of Xalapa, Mexico, greets cardinals during a consistory at which Pope Francis created 14 new cardinals in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican June 28. Credit: CNS photo/Paul Haring. |
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| The Anglican Church has been abandonned by the British |
The most recent British Social Attitudes survey reveals that the number of Brits who identify as Church of England has more than halved since 2002, falling from 31% to 14%.The sharpest decline happened among 45 to 54 year olds (35% in 2002 vs 11% in 2017). The proportion of people who describe themselves as Roman Catholic (8%), belonging to ‘other Christian affiliations’ (10%) and ‘of non-Christian faiths’ (8%) have remained fairly stable. 52% of people now say they have no religion, compared with 41% in 2002. Men are more inclined to say they follow no religion than women (57% compared with 48%).
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| Source |
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Khazar Khaganate, 650–850 |
...recent DNA analysis of Ashkenazic Jews – a Jewish ethnic group – revealed that their maternal line is European1. It has also been found that their DNA only has 3% ancient ancestry2 which links them with the Eastern Mediterranean (also known as the Middle East) – namely Israel, Lebanon, parts of Syria, and western Jordan. This is the part of the world Jewish people are said to have originally come from – according to the Old Testament. But 3% is a minuscule amount, and similar to what modern Europeans as a whole share with Neanderthals. So given that the genetic ancestry link is so low, Ashkenazic Jews most recent ancestors must be from elsewhere.
To understand why this is the case, we need to go back in time, to look at where these other ancestors came from. It starts in Persia (modern-day Iran) during the sixth century. This is where most of the world’s Jews were living at this time3.
The tolerance of the Persians encouraged the Jews to adopt Persian names, words, traditions, and religious practices, and climb up the social ladder gaining a monopoly on trade4. They also converted other people5 who were living along the Black Sea, to their Jewish faith. This helped to expand their global network6.
Among these converts were the Alans (Iranian nomadic pastoral people), Greeks, and Slavs who resided along the southern shores of the Black Sea. Upon conversion, they translated the Old Testament into Greek, built synagogues, and continued expanding the Jewish trade network.
These Jews adopted the name Ashkenaz, and the DNA of Ashkenazic Jews can be traced to “Ancient Ashkenaz”4 – an intersection of trade routes in eastern Turkey.
DNA of Yiddish speakers could have originated from four ancient villages in northwest Turkey.
We now know that at the time these Jews adopted the name Ashkenaz, they also acquired unique Asian mutations7 on their Y chromosome. This is where another important group of people in our story come into play – and they are called the Gok-Turks.
During the sixth century8, these nomadic people were ruled by a Siberian Turkic tribe called the Ashina. They were forced by the Chinese Tang Empire – who were in power in China at the time – to migrate westwards toward the Black Sea.
Thanks to their organisational and military skills, the Ashina united many tribes in this area – and a new empire called the “Khazar Khaganate” was born. Offering freedom of worship and taxing trade, these people quickly rose to power.
The Asian group of these DNA mutations9, found in Ashkenazic Jews, likely originated from the Ashina elite and other Khazar clans, who converted from Shamanism to Judaism. This means that the Ashina and core Khazar clans were absorbed by the Ashkenazic Jews.
It was also around this time that the Jewish elite adopted many Slavic customs. And based on my previous research, I would suggest that Yiddish was developed as a secret language to assist in trade4.
What happened next was that the Jewish empire began to collapse. By the tenth century, the Jews on the Black Sea migrated to Ukraine and Italy. Yiddish became the lingua franca of these Ashkenazic Jews and absorbed German words while maintaining the Slavic grammar10. And as global trade moved to the hands of the Italians, Dutch and English, the Jews were pushed aside.
What this all shows is that by using modern genetic technology – that enables scientists to track the past of modern-day people – a new appreciation for Jewish ancestry can be discovered.
It has meant a greater understanding of the journeys these people took to arrive in Europe. It has also allowed for increased knowledge as to the significant role the Ashina and the Khazar clans – from which some of the real Jewish patriarchs actually came from – played.
Eran Elhaik;
Ashkenazic Jews’ mysterious origins unravelled by scientists thanks to ancient DNA
The Conversation September 5, 2018
Published Open Access
Reprinted under the terms of a Creative Commons licence.
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| St Patrick's Church, Sydney. Lots of money; empty pews. |
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| Cardinal Wuerl. About to flee the USA rather than face arrest as a leader of a crime syndicate. |
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| Researchers have designed a synthetic small protein that wraps around a metal core composed of iron and sulfur. This protein can be repeatedly charged and discharged, allowing it to shuttle electrons within a cell. Such peptides may have existed at the dawn of life, moving electrons in early metabolic cycles. Image: Vikas Nanda Source: Rutgers Today |
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| Credit: Eva Hoffman / The University of Texas at Austin. |
Abstract
Transformations in morphology, physiology and behaviour along the mammalian stem lineage were accompanied by profound modifications to reproduction and growth, including the emergence of a reproductive strategy characterized by high maternal investment in a small number of offspring1,2 and heterochronic changes in early cranial development associated with the enlargement of the brain3. Because direct fossil evidence of these transitions is lacking, the timing and sequence of these modifications are unknown. Here we present what is, to our knowledge, the first fossil record of pre- or near-hatching young of any non-mammalian synapsid. A large clutch of well-preserved perinates of the tritylodontid Kayentatherium wellesi (Cynodontia, Mammaliamorpha) was found with a presumed maternal skeleton in Early Jurassic sediments of the Kayenta Formation. The single clutch comprises at least 38 individuals, well outside the range of litter sizes documented in extant mammals. This discovery confirms that production of high numbers of offspring represents the ancestral condition for amniotes, and also constrains the timing of a reduction in clutch size along the mammalian stem. Although tiny, the perinates have an overall skull shape that is similar to that of adults, with no allometric lengthening of the face during ontogeny. The only positive allometries are associated with the bones that support the masticatory musculature. Kayentatherium diverged just before a hypothesized pulse of brain expansion that reorganized cranial architecture at the base of Mammaliaformes4,5,6. The association of a high number of offspring and largely isometric cranial growth in Kayentatherium is consistent with a scenario in which encephalization—and attendant shifts in metabolism and development7,8—drove later changes to mammalian reproduction.
Hoffman, E. A. & Rowe, T. B.
Jurassic stem-mammal perinates and the origin of mammalian reproduction and growth.
Nature (2018). doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0441-3
Copyright © 2018 Springer Nature
Reprinted with kind permission under licence #4418800310084
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| Illustration of a female Xenomorphia resurrecta ovipositing into a puparium. |
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| Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. Photo: Edward Pentin |
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| Taoiseach Leo Varadakar welcomes Pope Francis ahead of his speech in St Patrick's Hall at Dublin Castle, Dublin Photo: Yui Mok/PA Wire |
Holy Father, on behalf of the Irish people, I want to greet you using one of the oldest blessings we use to welcome a special guest to Ireland - cead mile failte - one hundred thousand welcomes.
After Pride parade, priest cleanses route with holy water | News | LifeSite
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| Data source: Archer, M, et al. |
It shows that in the 32 years since Ham left Australia, belief in Young Earth Creationism (YECism) amongst Australian first-year university biology student has fallen from 10.0% to 3.6% (peaking at a high of 17.3% in 1988). Over the same time, belief in non-theistic evolution has risen from 25.1% to 62.2% and in theistic evolution has halved from 50.0% to 25.2%. In other words there has been a massive move away from the belief that somehow a god was involved in 'creating' humans towards acceptance of the scientific, evolutionary explanation.
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| 230 million year-old Eorhynchochelys sinensis from Guizhou, China. Photo Credit: Xiao-Chun Wu |
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| The fragment of bone from Denisova Cave seen from different angles. Source: Brown, S. et al/CC BY 4.0 |
Creationism and conspiracism share a common teleological bias: Current Biology
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| Rice University bioscientists found that love vines attach themselves to galls, extracting energy from the nurseries at the expense of the young wasps inside. Biologists found dead, mummified wasps in almost half of the attacked galls they opened. Photo: Mattheau Comerford/Rice University |
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| A target matching a typical moth pinned to a lichen covered tree in woodland in the predation experiments. |
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| Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League. Not paedophiles, just gay! |
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| Jimmy L. Naylor bringing the love of Jesus to Ugandan hotel staff |
Epigenetics is a relatively new branch of biology which is presenting biologists with some new challenges, not the least of which is its complexity. It is also presenting creationism with some exciting new gaps in which to try to insert a creator and attack science on the basis that if science doesn’t know something it has failed and proven itself unreliable. No matter that in a few years, maybe a little longer, science, using the scientific method will one day close those gaps and, like all the other gaps, will fail to find a god in them. By then, creationist apologists will have moved on to some more gaps, still confident that this time science will be forced to admit that ‘God did it!’
Whole books are being written about epigenetics and the challenges it presents to biology, one such being Nessa Carey’s The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance1.
Briefly, epigenetics is the study of how various genes are turned off in different cells as they become specialised during embryonic development. The actual mechanism, the epigenetic processes itself, are beyond the scope of this book but what interests us here is what this means for our understanding of evolution and, more importantly, why the processes are needed.
