This time round, it’s climate change sceptics: Continue reading
Tag Archives: Germany
Germany: What troop of blood-sucking parasites finds it hard to operate in cold weather?
If you guessed ‘global warming alarmists’, you’re right. But here’s another: Continue reading
US: These shoes aren’t made for posting…
So that’s not what we’ll do.
But one of these days these shoes are going
Postal over you.
I can’t extract the text so here’s a link to the image:
http://www.atheistberlin.com/skin/frontend/atheist/default/images/usps.png
Q: How do you know your shoes are atheists?
A: They’ve got no soles.
Germany: Carbon criminals all the way up
Jürgen Fitschen, co-chief executive, and Stefan Krause, a director, are involved in the investigation that on Wednesday saw hundreds of police and tax officials raid the bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt, as well as private addresses in Berlin, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt.
The investigation is centred on 25 of the bank’s staff, according to German prosecutors, and involves allegations of tax evasion, money laundering and obstruction of justice linked to carbon trading certificates.
As a commentator on WattsUpWithThat put it: “This is how to make money out of thin air”.
Germany: A Catholic hospital’s worst nightmare…
… a rape victim seeking help.
Irmgard Maiworm, an emergency centre doctor, first treated the 25-year-old woman when she walked into the centre in the early hours of December 15 saying that she believed that she had been sedated with a date-rape drug and sexually assaulted.
Dr Maiworm called the neighbouring St Vincent’s Hospital, run by the Catholic Foundation of the Cellites, to arrange a gynaecological examination – but she said doctors “fearful of their jobs” refused the request.
According to Dr Maiworm, the hospital’s ethics committee, following consultation with Archbishop of Cologne Cardinal Joachim Meisner, had decided not to conduct examinations of sexual assault victims to avoid having to be in the position to recommend options such as the morning-after pill, which run contrary to Catholic teachings.
Another hospital run by the same organisation also refused to help, Dr Maiworm claimed.
Germany: There once was a bishop of Limburg…
Say ‘Cheese’, Your Reverence!
…Beloved by the folk of that dim burg.
But the way he spent tithing
Got the diocese writhing,
And now Limburg to him is a grim burg.
On the upper deck of a jumbo jet, he and Vicar General Franz Kaspar had made themselves comfortable in the plane’s first-class section, which offers such amenities as champagne, caviar and a bed. “Traveling first class means you should always be able to expect the extraordinary,” Germany’s Lufthansa airline, which Kaspar flew with, promises.
SPIEGEL inquiries about this luxury trip to the slums triggered a flurry of contradictory reports. Questions directed to the diocese press office were answered by a law firm in nearby Frankfurt. The 10-page document contained a cease and desist declaration with a penalty clause forbidding the publication of the claim that the bishop had flown first-class to India — as well as a €1,890.91 ($2,400) bill for the legal warning. The bishop’s lawyer said that the claim “is untrue” and that his client had “flown business class.”
But after a follow-up written inquiry, the whole story changed a few days later. Suddenly, the truth was out. Now it was admitted that the bishop and his vicar general had, in fact, sat in first class on both the outbound and return flights.
UK: Informed consent is bad, says Giles Fraser…
…because it might lead to people not getting circumcised.
Yet the circumcision of babies cuts against one of the basic assumptions of the liberal mindset. Informed consent lies at the heart of choice and choice lies at the heart of the liberal society. Without informed consent, circumcision is regarded as a form of violence and a violation of the fundamental rights of the child. Which is why I regard the liberal mindset as a diminished form of the moral imagination. There is more to right and wrong than mere choice.
In other words: people should be free to do what I want, not what they want.
Germany: Cutting bits off baby boys’ dicks is not ‘child abuse’, because….
“Many secularist campaigners are cock-a-hoop about the ruling”, says O’Neill.
…Brendan O’Neill says so.
There are many bad things about the modern atheistic assault on religion. But perhaps the worst thing is its rebranding of certain religious practices as “child abuse”. Everything from sending your kid to a Catholic school to having your baby boy circumcised has been redefined by anti-religious campaigners as “abuse”. This use of emotionally loaded language to demonise the practices and beliefs of people of faith has reached its ugly and logical conclusion in Germany, where a court has decreed that circumcision for religious purposes causes “bodily harm”, against boys who are “unable to give their consent”, and therefore should be outlawed.
This is an alarming attack on freedom of religion and on parents’ rights to initiate their children into their faith.
No, it’s an attack on anyone’s right to viciously mutilate a person who is unable to resist their physical assault. The reasons for assault are immaterial — literally.
Comments on the article are both hidden and closed — suggesting that perhaps they didn’t get the enthusiastic endorsements they were looking for.
Germany: Cue outrage in 3..2..1…
A court in Germany has ruled that circumcising young boys for religious reasons amounts to bodily harm.
In a decision that has caused outrage among Jewish and Muslim groups, the court said that a child’s right to physical integrity trumps religious and parental rights.
The case involved a doctor who carried out a circumcision on a four year-old that led to medical complications.
Thousands of Muslim and Jewish boys are circumcised in Germany every year.
Although male circumcision – unlike female circumcision – is not illegal in Germany, the court’s judgement said the “fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents”.
Circumcision, it decided, contravenes “interests of the child to decide later in life on his religious beliefs”.
Listen carefully. This is what the voice of reason sounds like.
Germany: Catholic priest jailed over sex abuse
A German court has convicted a Catholic priest of 250 counts of sexual abuse involving three boys over the period of several years and sentenced him to six years in prison.
The state court in Braunschweig on Thursday found the priest guilty of abusing the boys, aged 9 to 15, between 2004 and 2011.
The 46-year-old man, whose name was not revealed, told the court he abused the children during youth camps.
Europe: Greenpeace joins Catholic church in attacking biology
Scientists in Britain face being barred from developing life-saving treatments after a court ruled it is ‘immoral’ to use embryos to produce stem cells.
The European Court of Justice has decreed that patenting any treatment using the cells is ‘commercial exploitation’ and ‘contrary to morality’.
Scientists warned the ‘devastating decision’ will stop pioneering treatments for degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s being developed in the UK, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the multi-million pound biotechnology industry…
Professor Brüstle filed a patent with the German government in 1997 to convert embryonic stem cells into nerve cells to help patients with Parkinson’s disease.
Greenpeace challenged it and the case went to the highest court in Germany and then Luxembourg.
First they came for the ‘deniers’. Then they came for the scientists…
Germany: Muslim gunman kills two US troops
SMH.
An attack on a bus carrying US air force personnel about to fly home from Germany left two airmen dead and two seriously injured.
…
Authorities in Germany said that the alleged gunman was a 21-year-old originally from Muslim-majority Kosovo in southeastern Europe who was living in Frankfurt. Police said it was so far unclear what his motives were.
Do I get three guesses?
Germany: Pope charged with crimes against humanity
TWO GERMAN lawyers have initiated charges against Pope Benedict XVI at the International Criminal Court, alleging crimes against humanity.
Christian Sailer and Gert-Joachim Hetzel, based at Marktheidenfeld in the Pope’s home state of Bavaria, last week submitted a 16,500-word document to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at the Hague, Dr Luis Moreno Ocampo.
Their charges concern “three worldwide crimes which until now have not been denounced . . . (as) the traditional reverence toward ‘ecclesiastical authority’ has clouded the sense of right and wrong”.
It sounds more like a grandstand play than a serious case, but it could encourage others…
Germany: Catholic Church systematically covers up child abuse
Germany’s Catholic Church systematically covered up cases of sexual abuse within its own ranks for several decades, according to an expert study commissioned by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising.
The lawyer heading up the investigation, Marion Westpfahl, said at a press conference on Friday that the available records pointed to huge gaps in the documentation between 1945 and 2009. She added this hinted strongly at a “systematic system of cover-up,” in which few abuse cases were criminally prosecuted….
Westpfahl also said that the period of 1977 to 1982, when Pope Benedikt XVI – then Archbishop Josef Ratzinger – headed up the archdiocese, was particularly poorly documented.
How long before Barmy Benny is thrown to the wolves, I wonder? Anything to keep them off the loot in the back of the sled.
Germany: Holocaust-denying bishop found guilty in court
The schismatic bishop who deeply angered Jews and embarrassed the Vatican by publicly denying the Holocaust was ordered to pay a $13,500 fine for violating a German law that makes it a crime to deny the Holocaust.
As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. — Proverbs 26:11.
Germany: child abuse in Catholic choir
SMH.
The famed Domspatzen (Cathedral Sparrows) choir in the southern city of Regensburg, founded in 975, acknowledged in a ”letter to parents” published on its website that a child had been abused in the 1950s. It also said a former choir member recently told a newspaper he had been sexually molested during his time with the choir in the 1960s.
Germany: ‘at least’ 94 Catholic priests implicated in child abuse
SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International.
A sickeningly detailed report on the systematic abuse of children and teens in their care by Catholic teachers and priests.
Germany: Jesuit admits systematic abuse of boys and young men under his care
“If I had known about this 30 years ago, I would have acted immediately.” said his superior. “So I took great pains not to find out.”
OK, I made that last bit up…
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