Tulsa-Smith:- emotional...: Do religious bodies still have the moral right to pontificate?

Monday, May 11, 2009

Do religious bodies still have the moral right to pontificate?

I mean, it is a great pity that there is no perfect human being and, pious people, in trying to become more perfect, fall into the age-old dilemma of mankind and temptation and, thereby, become hypocrites whenever they think that their unholy ways have gone unobserved.

The Catholic Church is struggling with gay - not necessarily happy - priests and the related scandals and compensatory settlements worldwide to families of aggrieved choristers.

As if that were not enough, the nuns themselves may need to look in the mirror sometimes to see the mothers of all those fatherless children in their motherless baby homes.

The Pope's recent visit kicked off in Israel on a controversial note by stepping on the toes of his hosts and hostesses - and they were not even dancing: he demanded for an independent Palestinian nation as soon as he landed in Israel!

As for the Moslems, how can a peace loving and pious Imam encourage his followers to destroy themselves and their perceived enemies by detonating home made bombs, no matter how aggrieved?

What happened to the principles of verbal dialogue and loving your neighbor as yourself? When exactly did the religious communication gap or breakdown happen or occur?

I was watching the CNN presentation last weekend on India - Reporters in India - and heard the statement that, in a particular state, the lowest-caste Hindu was much better off in terms of living standards than any Muslim!

How can all these aberrations point towards the fact that the truth is always constant? Definitely, there is a lie lurking somewhere out there in the land of human piety...

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Greenville, Rhode Island bakery owned by the Cavanagh family, which uses the plant to produce church communion bread from just water and bread. That business is known to produce about 850 million sacramental wafers annually and to supply 80% of the Holy Communion bread used in American, Australian, Canadian, and British churches. The only middlemen in the supply chain are nuns living in convents! Now they want to expand to West Africa with their Christian sacramental ware for Pentecostal, Catholic, 'New Wave', and Orthodox church offerings. I make reference to the so-called New Wave churches - my term for those churches that broke away from the orthodoxy of the Protestant fold, just as the latter roke off from the Catholic church by virtue of the exploits of Martin Luther centuries ago. Many new-wave and other church goers in the generally undeveloped West African subregion of Africa pay more to religious organizations in monthly tithes and offerings than they do to their government in personal income and value added taxes. Now, that last fact is quite interesting because it is an admission that a bakery in Rhode Island has seen a huge market in the center of Black Africa for small white perfectly laminated and non-crumbly holy wheat bread, reportedly costing "less than a penny" apiece, for the use of both the bible-reading and the bible-believing religious organizations. However, the picture from the Cavanagh's factory floor speaks volumes, in my own opinion, about the need for the company to watch its business ethics and to treat all customers equally irrespective of location, creed, or other discriminatory demographic information or criteria. So, I just hope and pray that the wafers falling off the conveyor belt and by the way side are not destined for West Africa and that the actual wafers delivered will be wheat bread and water, and not just glutamate-free bread and 'pure' water, if you get my point, even if so requested by some shady, greedy, and unethical businessmen over in West Africa. Posted by Okonkwo O. Awa on Sunday, December 28, 2008.

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