No Title
27 December 2007 by Bob
Priests Brawl at Jesus’ Birthplace
BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AP) — Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests attacked each other with brooms and stones inside the Church of the Nativity as long-standing rivalries erupted in violence during holiday cleaning on Thursday. The basilica, built over the grotto in Bethlehem where Christians believe Jesus was born, is administered jointly by Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic authorities. Any perceived encroachment on one group’s turf can touch off vicious feuds. On Thursday, dozens of priests and cleaners were scrubbing the church ahead of the Armenian and Orthodox Christmas, celebrated in early January. Thousands of tourists visited the church this week for Christmas celebrations. But the clean-up turned ugly after some of the Orthodox faithful stepped inside the Armenian church’s section, touching off a scuffle between about 50 Greek Orthodox and 30 Armenians. Palestinian police, armed with batons and shields, quickly formed a human cordon to separate the two sides so the cleaning could continue, then ordered an Associated Press photographer out of the church. Four people, some with blood running from their faces, were slightly wounded.
Ever have one of those stories that just doesn’t need a title?
27 December 2007, on 11:00 pm
How completely and utterly inspiring! Too bad the cops broke it up before someone got crucified.
28 December 2007, on 12:18 am
Goddamned filthy Armenians! I thought I’d wiped them all out last century. Mutter, mutter…
28 December 2007, on 12:41 am
Despite this, atheists are the “militant” ones. Shame on us.
28 December 2007, on 10:47 am
This doesn’t surprise me too much. I’ve visited the Church of the Nativity myself and you can cut the tension between all these factions with a knife. Isn’t it interesting that the supposedly all powerfull sky daddy can’t do anything about the folks who have been slaughtering each other in the HOLY LAND for centuries? FYI – After we’d been admitted to the church by one “clergyman”, my wife (who was dressed pretty modestly) was asked to leave by another because her knees were showing. So I guess assault and murder are okay as long we don’t have to look at that dirty female body.
28 December 2007, on 11:31 am
Hey, c’mon Brooklyn, you’re being unreasonable. These clergymen are only human. It’s only natural that they would be swayed to sin by your wife’s…knees. Her knees wouldn’t want to be responsible for that, would they?
28 December 2007, on 3:32 pm
Hmm.
Ah!
TERRITORY
“Unknown man
Speaks to the world
Sucking your trust
A trap in every world
War for territory
War for territory
Choice control
Behind propaganda
Poor information
To manage your anger
War for territory
War for territory
Dictators’ speech
Blasting off your life
Rule to kill the urge
Dumb assholes’ speech
Years of fighting
Teaching my son
To believe in that man
Racist human being
Racist ground will live
Shame and regret
Of the pride
You’ve once possessed
War for territory
War for territory”
SEPULTURA
\m/
28 December 2007, on 6:13 pm
Meanwhile, in Lousiana, the Devil loses his phone service…
28 December 2007, on 6:50 pm
Well, that’s basically the history of Christianity in a microcosm, the different sects squabbling with each other over trivial bullshit.
28 December 2007, on 9:33 pm
Just a bunch of wild and crazy guys.
28 December 2007, on 10:05 pm
RDZ;
If I lived in Allen parish, I would request that, in exchange for changing my prefix to 749, they assign me the last four digits 6666.
As Tommy pointed out, this incident outlined in this post is just a drop in the ridiculous religion bucket. If it weren’t real people being hurt and killed, I would be endlessly amused by folks arguing over the will of a god whose very existence they have no empirical evidence to support. The will of an ALL LOVING god, mind you. An all loving god that, evidently, isn’t overly concerned with making his will very clear to his followers.
But, alas, real people, sometimes innocent bystanders, are hurt/maimed/killed, and besides, irony is overdone and falling out of favor these days…
28 December 2007, on 10:14 pm
It becomes really difficult to muster up any sort of sympathy for the tribulations of those involved in nonsensical disputes over magical earth and apocalyptic cartography. I’ve come to view the whole Middle Eastern situation through the eyes of an exasperated parent. “If you two can’t share your toy, then neither of you will have it!”
Just haul off the most archaeologically significant rocks and whatnot to the museums and bulldoze the whole place into the Mediterranean.
Well, then again…
29 December 2007, on 12:02 am
It’s like a friggin gang war. I guess that’s why they get called godfathers huh?
29 December 2007, on 12:20 am
And the unseen though most lasting image, unrecorded after the brouhaha and the cameras have faded from the place, is the myriad motes of dust and bits of fluff floating, now undisturbed. Each mote, each speck, is in its own way grateful for a bit of peace. A respite from turbulence. Each, in its own fashion, settles softly to the ground, recording prior events more accurately than today’s eyes and lenses. Tomorrow, they will be disturbed anew. All this from a clash of brooms.
And so it goes, Billy Pilgrim.
And so trudging, into the New Year! (insert poorly concealed amusement here).
E Pluribus Unum
29 December 2007, on 7:11 am
Totally OT, but rather more important than silly dueling priests. I can hear the music for that one now.
Anyway, Discovery on its Science Channel is rebroadcasting Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” series starting tomorrow. A must see or re-see. Apparently it has been visually improved.
http://science.discovery.com/tv-schedules/series.html?paid=48.15336.114617.29708.1
29 December 2007, on 2:06 pm
I read this post (and others covering the same event) and I can’t help having that old hymn, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” running through my head.
I do find it interesting that what set off the brawl was a ladder being placed slightly in the Armenian section. Will this create a whole new series of warning labels on ladders?
WARNING: Placing This Ladder In Someone Else’s Religious Space May Cause Brawls
29 December 2007, on 3:17 pm
Brooklyn Boy -
Did everyone else remember to thank him for making sure she didn’t provoke their uncontrollable lust?
29 December 2007, on 3:18 pm
Hmm… Don’t know if I got that link right:
http://www.cafepress.com/jmoshop
29 December 2007, on 3:44 pm
RDZ…RE that video link…as is my usual wont, I often check the follow-up comments.
Yikes! Talk about stupid dorks! Or maybe…”TYPICAL!!!”
Thanks for that Cosmos alert, Bernarda.
I watch the Science Channel quite often; many times, just to escape the constant repeating [beating to death?] of the CNN/MSNBC (all too often religious-leaning…kiss-ass?) News coverage.
I’d like to record the whole series on my DVR
I was going to ask how many Episodes there were in the series; but I googled and found the DVD set; which listed the following info:
Episodes:
I. The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean
II. One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue
III. The Harmony of the Worlds
IV. Heaven and Hell
V. Blues for a Red Planet VI. Traveller’s Tales
VII. The Backbone of Night
VIII. Travels in Space and Time
IX. The Lives of the Stars
X. The Edge of Forever
XI. The Persistence of Memory
XII. Encyclopedia Galactica
XIII. Who Speaks for Earth?
I think the Science Channel will be ’spreading it out’ (whilst spreading their legs?) over several months…?
Like many of you, I watched the original airing, WAAAY back when. It’s an amazing series…updated a bit, and well worth purchasing the DVD set.
For an ‘Overview’ of the whole series…here’s Wiki’s summary page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage
OK…and now for something…erm…(maybe not TOO) completely different?…
A rather humorous atheist clip that I stumbled on whilst chasing after Sagan’s Cosmos Series on YouTube…
I think you guys might enjoy it…?
“We’ve Heard it Already Yet Again”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUUHwUDZCuI
29 December 2007, on 3:57 pm
And…from the same ‘guy’ (It’s on the same YouTube page)…
“We’ve Heard It Already Again”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3msHZdLqZsw&feature=related
29 December 2007, on 4:21 pm
Sorry…
One more of his (’condensed, rapidly verbose’?) vids…
Yeah, I totally fucked up on the order of these.
Oh well…2007 is winding down…or something like that?
“We’ve Heard It Already”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUWZLBDz5eY&feature=related
OK…I’ll shut up now.
29 December 2007, on 6:14 pm
Chuck A, those were funny. Couldn’t have said it better myself and the guy came up with some metaphors I hadn’t heard.
29 December 2007, on 7:36 pm
As a sort of P. S. here, I came up with the ideal solution to Middle East violence. Unfortunately it has yet to be tried:
IF … IF, mind you … everyone in the Middle East will sit down and make nice, every man, woman and child will receive a pound of colored beads, and a replacement batch will be issued automatically every year. Make bad, however, and the bead supply will be cut off.
Cheap. Simple. Easy to implement.
29 December 2007, on 8:07 pm
If I were in the Church of the Nativity, I might try to see if I could start a fight between them.
Whisper to the Armenian monk, “Hey, that Greek monk over there just said your mother was a whore!”
29 December 2007, on 9:44 pm
In #7 Raindogzilla says:
It’s Route_666 all over again – FUCK!
This is exactly the kind of retarded shit for which all religious people deserve to be beaten to within an inch of their worthless miserable fucking lives.
The crazy fundies deserve to be beaten because they need to learn that they don’t have the right to inconvenience normal people who don’t give a shit about their retarded superstitions.
But, the moderate enablers deserve to be beaten even more for failing or refusing to assert control over and take responsibility for the actions of their crazy fundies.
If not for the majority of moderate religious enablers (those who enable the crazy fundies), the crazy fundies would be a negligible minority which would be relatively easy to marginalize, criminalize, medicate and eradicate.
If the moderate religious majority want to have their religion they must take full responsibility for all of it – including the crazy fundies. They can’t only have the general feel-goodery of believing in some meaningless nonsense without also being responsible for the dangerously insane components and the dangerously delusional contingents of their bullshit faiths.
It’s a simple fucking concept – ALL OR NONE! You either support a cause or you don’t. If you don’t support something, then you are against it. If you are against it, then act like it. That is the ULTIMATUM that should be drilled into the heads of all religious people. They must be made to understand that they can have their religion only if they take active measures to keep their own house clean (just making sure I’m not off topic here).
———————————————-
Here’s a simple analogy in which:
“You” = normal people
“The Child” = moderate religious majority or the enablers
“The Puppy” = religion itself including crazy fundies
Lets say you have a child. The child wants a puppy. You give your child a puppy on the condition that the child is fully responsible for everything that the puppy needs and does. One day the child does not play with the puppy so the puppy acts out and chews up the couch. You come home and find the puppy ripping up the remains of a cushion. Do you punish the puppy? Yes, but per the agreement you have with the child, the harshest punishment should go to the child because the child failed to take care of the puppies needs and is therefore responsible for the puppies actions. The child broke the agreement, not the puppy.
This is the reality in which we live and reality is firmly on our side. So why then do we cower before the great beast of mental midgetry instead of beating the “children” senseless until they learn to control their “puppies”.
FUCK!
2 January 2008, on 7:52 pm
Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests attacked each other with brooms and stones
No no no, not brooms; brooms are of teh Debbil! Haven’t you heard of witches (and a certain adolescent bespectacled wizard) riding them?
The babble is very clear in all its versions: stones only are to be used. That’s stones for the win. Got it? Good; now put down those satanic broomsticks and let the stoning continue!
Ah, that ol’ time religion…