Norway: And while you’re at it, fix those nail holes in the church door…

ONTD_Political

All parties stand united when the Norwegian constitution is changed, so that the state will no longer be a part of the Norwegian church. The amendment is to be presented Tuesday.

The amendment which will be passed later in May, historically changes the state’s relationship with the church. Parliament will no longer appoint deans and bishops, and Norway will no longer have one offical state religion.

This is historic both for the Norwegian Church and for the politicians in Parliament, says Svein Harberg who has been the spokesman and mayor of the Church, Education and Research Committee.

Some good news for a change.

Norway: Christian mass murderer also a misogynist

The Daily Beast

A terror of feminization haunts his bizarre document. “The female manipulation of males has been institutionalised during the last decades and is a partial cause of the feminisation of men in Europe,” he writes. He blames empowered women for his own isolation, saying that he recoils from the “destructive and suicidal Sex and the City lifestyle (modern feminism, sexual revolution) … In that setting, men are not men anymore, but metro sexual and emotional beings that are there to serve the purpose as a never-criticising soul mate to the new age feminist woman goddess.”

Why waste time picking out individual objects of hatred when religion can sell you a preselected package?

US: Rumbled! Norway killings really due to atheism, says angry moron

Truthdig.

The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik. This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway.

Sam Harris has a pleasantly rational response here:

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/response-to-chris-hedges/

US: Mass murderer ‘may have had a point’ says Christian commentator

ThinkProgress.

Today, in a World Net Daily op-ed, failed presidential candidate and conservative pundit Pat Buchanan offers an example of the ethnic bigotry and racial insensitivity that has come to define him.

Offering his take on the horrendous terrorist attacks in Norway, Buchanan joined the Wall Street Journal and the Jerusalem Post in arguing that the far-right extremist perpetrator Anders Breivik may have had a valid point. Arguing that Breivik was bringing attention to his cause, “a Crusader’s war between the real Europe and the ‘cultural Marxists’ and Muslims,” Buchanan declares that, on the “climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world…Breivik may be right“:

Because who needs left-wing Norwegian teenagers anyway?

Norway: Christian conservative linked with mass killings

Huffpost World

On a Facebook account that Norwegian media outlets have attributed to Breivik, he describes himself as having Christian, conservative views.

The Facebook account has been taken down, so this is second-hand news so far.

Update 2011-07-25: Breivik’s Christian beliefs confirmed.

Norway: Head Scientologist arrested for abusing protestors and police

Dagbladet.no

 When the police arrived Hasle squares he came out again and was furious that the cars honked. He claimed that it interfered with his work in peace. He pushed the people and the police asked him to calm down. The police gave him the choice to leave voluntarily or be taken to the police station. Then he pushed the police.

Maybe Xenu was giving him a hard time…

Iranian refugees, tell the truth! No, not THAT truth, the other truth!

Iran Human Rights.

According to reports that reliable sources have given to Iran Human Rights (IHR), an Iranian Kurdish asylum seeker who was extradited from Norway to Iran on February 9th 2011, is in danger of torture, ill-treatment or even death at Tehran’s Evin prison.

…

On extradition of Iranian asylum seekers to Iran, Amiry-Moghaddam said:” Iranian authorities have recently signalized that Iranians who have sought asylum abroad should be charged for “dissemination of false propaganda against the Islamic Republic of Iran” and punished for that. This means that seeking asylum by itself could be a reason for the Iranian authorities to subject the asylum seekers who are extradited to Iran, to persecution, imprisonment and ill-treatment.

So anyone can apply to leave Iran, provided they acknowledge that it’s so wonderful there that only a mad person would ever want to leave. How’s the Persian translation of Catch-22 been selling lately?

Norway: Catholic Church takes no action on pedophile priest

The Associated Press

Church officials disclosed on Wednesday that the reason Eidsvig’s predecessor, 58-year-old Georg Mueller, resigned in June was that he had admitted to abusing a boy about 20 years earlier, when he was a priest.

Also

In Spain on Wednesday, a Catholic clergyman was convicted of sexual abuse for molesting a 10 year-old girl and an 11-year-old girl at a school there. Identified only as F.V.T., the clergyman was given a two-year suspended prison sentence and fined.