Hillary Clinton - THE END - Doctors Speculate Hillary has Parkinson's afte...

Are Theresa May and Angela Merkel in the ILLUMINATI?

Conspiracy theorists are convinced the leaders are in secretive sect because of similar hand gestures

By Patrick Lion For Mailonline

12:12 EST 23 Jul 2016, updated 16:37 EST 23 Jul 2016

Theresa May dragged into conspiracy theory about a 'secret EU society'
The 'secret sign' is a hand signal used by German leader Angela Merkel
Jean-Claude Juncker also used the sign meeting Belgian royalty this week

Prime Minister Theresa May has found herself in the middle of a bizarre internet conspiracy theory involving claims of a secret EU Illuminati society.

Mrs May used the hand signal - already frequently used by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker - on July 11 when speaking at Westminster before her elevation to 10 Downing Street.

The hand signal is listed on the illuminati hand signs conspiracy theory website illuminatiRex and described as a 'Merkel-Raute'.

Prime Minister Theresa May used the hang signal after Andrea Leadsom pulled out of the Tory leadership contest outside the Houses of Parliament on July 11

The 'Merkel-Raute' is a reverse variation of the first illuminati 'Roc Sign' - roughly in the shape of a diamond or pyramid - used by celebrities such as actors, Denzel Washington, Ben Stiller and Tom Cruise

Users of the 'Merkel-Raute', as it has become known due to the German's frequent use, have also included other European historical figures including Pope John Paul II and Adolf Hitler.

'The pyramid is an important Illuminati symbol showing their few ruling the many on the bottom type power structure,' the illuminatiRex website states.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel used the signal in Hamburg on February 12 when meeting with David Cameron when he was prime minister

'The symbol becomes more powerful when the sign is done over an eye, representing the All-Seeing eye in a capstone floating over an unfinished pyramid.'

'The pyramid sign is seen by many researchers to be THE sign of the Illuminati.'

Mr Juncker was captured using the 'Merkel-Raute' signal this week when he met Belgium royalty on Friday.

But he had also used it on July 7 in Strasbourg, France.

German politician Memet Kilic had noticed the similarities between Mrs May and Mrs Merkel, describing the new PM as a 'competitor' in hand gestures against the German.


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Scalia at ranch with elite society; Bohemian Grove connection

Feb25

by Jon Rappoport


Scalia at ranch with elite society; Bohemian Grove connection

—name of traveling companion revealed—

—FBI admits it has done no investigation into Scalia’s death—

by Jon Rappoport

February 25, 2016

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)

The Washington Post has the story, 2/24, “Justice Scalia spent his last hours with members of this secretive society of elite hunters”:

“When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died 12 days ago at a West Texas ranch, he was among high-ranking members of an exclusive fraternity for hunters called the International Order of St. Hubertus, an Austrian society that dates back to the 1600s.”

“Cibolo Creek Ranch owner John Poindexter and C. Allen Foster, a prominent Washington lawyer who traveled to the ranch with Scalia by private plane, hold leadership positions within the Order. It is unclear what, if any, official association Scalia had with the group.”

“The society’s U.S. chapter launched in 1966 at the famous Bohemian Club in San Francisco, which is associated with the all-male Bohemian Grove — one of the most well-known secret societies in the country.”

The Bohemian Club isn’t just “associated” with the Grove. The Club has two locations: in the city of San Francisco and outside the city at the 2700-acre Grove.

Interesting, to say the least, that the St. Hubertus hunting society launched itself in the US at the Club, and that members of St. Hubertus were at the Cibolo Ranch, where Scalia died.

The Post:

“Members of the worldwide, male-only [St. Hubertus] society wear dark green robes emblazoned with a large cross and the motto “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes,” which means “Honoring God by honoring His creatures,” according to the group’s website. Some hold titles, such as Grand Master, Prior and Knight Grand Officer. The Order’s name is in honor of Hubert, the patron saint of hunters and fishermen.”

Even more interesting is this quote from the Post:

“Law enforcement officials told The Post that they had no knowledge of the International Order of St. Hubertus or its connection to Poindexter and ranch guests. The officials said the FBI had declined to investigate Scalia’s death when they were told by the marshals that he died from natural causes.”

In addition to all the strange circumstances surrounding Scalia’s death I’ve detailed so far, now we have two degrees of separation from the Bohemian Grove, where the rich and powerful gather every summer, hold bizarre rituals, and chat about carving up ownership of the world…

And the FBI just ignores all this and accepts “death by natural causes.” No investigation.



For further information on the Bohemian Grove, there are many sources; for example: “Occult Activities at the Elite Bohemian Grove,” by Alex Jones, at Prison Planet; Mike Hanson’s book, “Bohemian Grove: Cult of Conspiracy.” Jones and Hanson infiltrated the Grove together and filmed the secret sacrificial ceremony, “The Cremation of Care.”

Note: Looking up Scalia’s traveling companion, C Allen Foster, on the last weekend of Scalia’s life, I notice Foster has argued at least one case before the US Supreme Court, while Scalia served as a Justice:

“Johnson v DeGrandy” (512 U.S. 997 (1994)) — Represented Hispanic republicans in Florida redistricting Voting Rights Act case in U.S. Supreme Court.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

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Yellowstone about to blow?

Scientists warning over SUPER-VOLCANO that could kill MILLIONS

SCIENTISTS have warned the world is in "volcano season" and there is up to a 10% chance of an eruption soon killing millions of people and devastating the planet.

By JON AUSTIN

PUBLISHED: 04:05, Thu, Jan 7, 2016 | UPDATED: 14:25, Thu, Jan 7, 2016

GETTY

Volcanoes are the biggest threat to human survival, claim scientists

Instances of volcanic eruptions are their highest for 300 years and scientists fear a major one that could kill millions and devastate the planet is a real possibility.

Experts at the European Science Foundation said volcanoes – especially super-volcanoes like the one at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, which has a caldera measuring 34 by 45 miles (55 by 72 km) - pose more threat to Earth and the survival of humans than asteroids, earthquakes, nuclear war and global warming.

There are few real contingency plans in place to deal with the ticking time bomb, which they conclude is likely to go off within the next 80 years.

The world's most dangerous active volcanoes include Yellowstone, Mount Vesuvius in Campagnia, Italy, and Popocatépetl i near Mexico City.

If any of them or other massive volcanic peaks suffered a major eruption the team said millions of people would die and earth’s atmosphere would be poisoned with ash and other toxins "beyond the imagination of anything man’s activity and global warming could do over 1,000 years.

The chance of such as eruption happening at one of the major volcanoes within 80 years is put at five to ten per cent by the experts.

GETTY

Yellowstone does not appear like many volcanoes but is believed to have the most magma underneath

There are already fears that Yellowstone could blow any time within the next 70 years on a scale that would wiped out the western USA and affect the course of global history.

The report - “Extreme Geo-hazards: Reducing the Disaster Risk and Increasing Resilience,” warns global government's preparations for such happenings are virtually non-existent.

It said: "Although in the last few decades earthquakes have been the main cause of fatalities and damage, the main global risk is large volcanic eruptions that are less frequent but far more impactfull than the largest earthquakes.

“Due to their far-reaching effects on climate, food security, transportation, and supply chains, these events have the potential to trigger global disaster and catastrophe.

"The cost of response and the ability to respond to these events is beyond the financial and political capabilities of any individual country.”



The Yellowstone volcanoThu, January 7, 2016

The volcano at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and Montana sits atop a huge reserve of magma and last erupted 640,000 years ago

AFP/GETTY IMAGES

GETTY

We are currently in a global volcano season, say scientists



Hence extreme volcanic eruptions pose a higher associated risk than all other natural hazards with similar recurrence periods, including asteroid impacts.

Extreme Geo-hazards: Reducing the Disaster Risk and Increasing Resilience report

The report looked at other major geo-hazards facing the globe, including earthquakes, drought, asteroids floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, avalanches and wildfires.

Large earthquakes and tsunamis have happened more in the last 2,000 years, meaning there was better preparedness.

The report concluded: “Volcanic eruptions can have more severe impacts through atmospheric and climate effects and can lead to drastic problems in food and water security, as emphasized by the widespread famine and diseases that were rampant after the Laki 1783 and Tambora 1815 eruptions.

“Hence extreme volcanic eruptions pose a higher associated risk than all other natural hazards with similar recurrence periods, including asteroid impacts.”

The eruption of Tambora on Sumbawa, Indonesia killed about 100,000 people, but ash clouds meant there was no summer the following year and it was “one of the most important climatic and socially repercussive events of the last millennium,” the report said.

The earlier Icelandic event killed close to 10,000 instantly, but the long-term, effects wiped out 25% of the population and were felt across the planet.

A famine in Egypt reduced the population by one sixth, 25,000 died in the UK from breathing problems and there was worldwide extreme weather.

Similar scale events today would be much more catastrophic, the team warned, due to

much bigger populations, global travel and food chains and reliance on technology.

Worryingly, scientists say research over the last 300 years of volcanic activity shows we are currently in a "volcano season" meaning increased activity.

Volcanoes are also more likely from November to April in the northern hemisphere when ice, rain and snowfall can compress the bedrock.

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End Day - BBC Apocalypse Documentary

End Day ( 2005 BBC film / documentary )

Gary Edmunds

Published on May 3, 2015

Cern, Meteors, Volcanoes, Tsunami's, and more......

Note: This video, when it was aired in the USA. was edited to remove the 'supervolcano' section.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_Day

This film is available on many social networks, so is already in the public domain, including Youtube.

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How Long Will Pope Francis Be Pope? According To The Man Himself, Not Long At All

CHRIS TOGNOTTI@CTOGNOTTI
18 HOURS AGO NEWS

Franco Origlia/Getty Images News/Getty Images


If one thing jumps out about the papacy of Pope Francis, it’s this: it feels like its been so much longer than two years. Francis ascended to the papacy in March 2013, and following the far more conservative Benedict XVI, people all over the world wondered who the new representative of the Catholic faith would turn out to be. And now, the man himself thinks that the Church could be asking all those same questions again pretty soon — Pope Francis expects a short tenure of “four or five years,” he said in an interview with Mexican outlet Televisa.

If that sounds like altogether too short a run, it’s probably worth keeping in mind that Pope isn’t a job getting landed by many people in their mid-30s. Historically speaking there may have been a few extremely young ones, but in the modern era it’s an old man’s game, and that trend continued with Francis. He was already 76 years old when he was elected, so if he were indeed Pope for just four or five years, he’d be 80 or 81 — about four years short of the age that Benedict XVI stepped down.

Old enough, certainly, for anyone to start thinking about their own mortality, and their desire to spend all their days representing a billions-strong faith. Francis seems aware of this feeling — as noted by ABC News, he described his feeling that “the Lord has placed me here for a short time” as being like “a gambler who convinces himself he will lose so he won’t be disappointed.”

In other words, who knows, right? It’s clear that the concept of papal retirement is something Francis is in full support of, however. He also praised Benedict XVI’s decision to step down on his own terms at age 85, calling it courageous to Televisa.
I am in favor of what Benedict did I think what Benedict so courageously did was to open the door to the popes emeritus. Benedict should not be considered an exception, but an institution.

Of course, this raises an obvious question. If Francis were to opt to ride off into the sunset, who would take his place? One thing’s for sure, it’s unlikely you’d get a second Pope in a row with as many reformist tendencies as Francis, nor one who’d somehow land on the cover of LGBT magazine The Advocate as their Person Of The Year. 

But beyond that, the simple answer is that it’s impossible to say without being wildly speculative. The process by which the Papal conclave decides on these things is notoriously opaque, with Cardinals sealing themselves out of public view for as long as the decision takes. It’s enough of a high-profile guessing game, in fact, that you can even place bets on who the next Pope will be, a fact I somehow suspect doesn’t thrill the Vatican. (Also, Pope Francis’ election was a big upset by the betting odds.)

Whatever ends up happening, it’s altogether possible we’ll end up missing Pope Francis once he’s gone. Even if you still have objections to his views and statements (and there’s plenty to object to), it’s hard to deny that his comparative humility and occasionally compassionate rhetoric go far beyond what anyone could’ve anticipated at the end of the Benedict XVI era, and you could easily imagine things backtracking after he’s gone.

Images: Getty Images (2)

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A Device of the Enemy

We are to pray for divine enlightenment, but at the same time we should be careful how we receive everything termed new light. We must beware lest, under cover of searching for new truth, Satan shall divert our minds from Christ and the special truths for this time. I have been shown that it is the device of the enemy to lead minds to dwell upon some obscure or unimportant point, something that is not fully revealed or is not essential to our salvation. This is made the absorbing theme, the "present truth," when all their investigations and suppositions only serve to make matters more obscure than before, and to confuse the minds of some who ought to be seeking for oneness through sanctification of the truth.--Letter 7, 1891.

Let no one present beautiful, scientific sophistries to lull the people of God to sleep. Clothe not the solemn,sacred truth for this time in any fantastic dress of man's wisdom. Let those who have been doing this stop and cry unto God to save their souls from deceiving fables.

It is the living energy of the Holy Spirit that will move hearts, not pleasing, deceptive theories. Fanciful representations are not the bread of life; they cannot save the soul from sin.

Christ was sent from heaven to redeem humanity. He taught the doctrines that God gave Him to teach. The truths that He proclaimed, as found in the Old Testament and the New, we today are to proclaim as the word of the living God.

Let those who want the bread of life go to the Scriptures, not to the teaching of finite, erring man. Give the people the bread of life that Christ came from heaven to bring to us. Do not mix with your teaching human suppositions and conjectures. Would that all knew how much they need to eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of God--to make His words a part of their very lives.-- Manuscript 44, 1904.

Selected Messages Book 1, pp.159,160.

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The Wilderness Act Is Facing a Midlife Crisis

Rethinking the Wild



By CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON

JULY 5, 2014

Credit

Jon McNaught


YOU won’t hear it on your summer hike above the bird song and the soft applause of aspen leaves, but there’s a heresy echoing through America’s woods and wild places. It’s a debate about how we should think about, and treat, our wilderness in the 21st century, one with real implications for the nearly 110 million acres of wild lands that we’ve set aside across the United States.

Fifty years ago this September, Congress passed the Wilderness Act, which created a national system of wilderness areas. Wilderness has been called the “hard green line” for the act’s uncompromising language: Man will leave these places alone. As the law’s drafter and spiritual father, Howard Zahniser, put it, “we should be guardians, not gardeners.”

At 50, however, the Wilderness Act faces a midlife crisis.

We now know that, thanks to climate change, we’ve left no place unmolested and inadvertently put our fingerprints on even the most unpeopled corners of the planet. This reality has pushed respected scientists to advocate what many wilderness partisans past and present would consider blasphemy: We need to rethink the Wilderness Act. We need to toss out the “hands-off” philosophy that has guided our stewardship for 50 years. We must replace it with a more nuanced, flexible approach — including a willingness to put our hands on America’s wildest places more, not less, if we’re going to help them to adapt and thrive in the diminished future we’ve thrust upon them.

Credit

Jon McNaught

A great example is Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California, most of which lies within the 595,000-acre Joshua Tree Wilderness. Up to 90 percent of the park’s namesake trees could disappear by century’s end, according to models that factor in expected warming. Should we let that happen as nature’s atonement for our mistake? Or should park managers instead intervene in some way — relocating trees to higher elevations to promote their survival, for instance, or finding or creating a hybrid species that can withstand the hotter temperatures and combating exotic grasses that increase the threat of fires?

Such questions didn’t exist in 1964 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act. Then, the nemesis of wilderness was America’s unchecked appetite — for land, roads, mines, timber — that gnawed away even at the boundaries of government-sanctioned “primitive areas.” Wilderness advocates craved permanence, in the form of legislation that took decision making away from capricious bureaucrats and political appointees.

What was at stake was nothing less than the wellspring of the American experiment itself. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner had pinned American democracy to wilderness; hacking a life from the wild made settlers ruggedly individual, self-assured and unwilling to suffer the yoke of any monarch. Wilderness, wrote the naturalist Aldo Leopold, is “the very stuff America is made of.”

The law’s definition of wilderness (maybe you’ve read it on a trailhead sign as you shouldered an overheavy backpack) reflects the idea of these places as a bulwark against humankind and its thirst for domination: “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” These places of “primeval character” should be maintained, the law says, to preserve their “natural conditions.” For the last half-century that let-it-be philosophy has carried the day, with few exceptions.

In recent decades, however, several pillars upon which the act was built have eroded. One is the idea of “naturalness,” that nature exists in some unadulterated state apart from humans. Work in paleoecology and other fields has shown that humans have shaped many of the ecosystems on the planet for thousands of years (and not always to their detriment). Research has also dismantled ideas about a stable, primeval world. Nature is always in flux.

Now comes our jarring latest contribution: climate change, with all its rippling effects, as the planet continues to heat up.

Faced with such change, “there’s increased recognition that the paradigm has to change,” said Cat Hawkins Hoffman, the national climate change adaptation coordinator for the National Park Service, which manages 40 percent of American’s wilderness acreage.

“The real conundrum is, how much manipulation in wilderness is acceptable in order to protect the values for which the wilderness was established,” she added.

In short, we need to accept our role as reluctant gardeners.

THE 1964 law does provide some exceptions to its prohibitions against human interference, including in instances in which an area’s managers consider intervention necessary to protect the wild lands or its creatures.

In that context, intervention could take many forms. One strategy is simply to resist or forestall effects of climate change.

Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park is one of the most arresting places in the West, and it’s important as the largest subalpine meadow in the Sierra Nevada.

But as the climate changes, the meadows, some of which lie in the Yosemite Wilderness, are being invaded by lodgepole pine. Keeping the meadows intact will require regular tree-cutting and possibly irrigation for species intolerant of drier conditions, according to David Cole, an emeritus scientist with the Forest Service’s Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute and co-editor of “Beyond Naturalness,” a 2010 book of scholarly essays about wilderness and climate change.

Another example: watering groves of California’s giant sequoias to keep them alive if a future climate grows too dry for their survival.

While hardly long-term solutions, “those can help buy us some time, and by buying time they can help us have that broader societal discussion” and form policies so that what land managers do reflects what society wants, said Nate Stephenson, a research ecologist for the United States Geological Survey who works on the future of forests.

A second approach is to intervene in a way that will make the landscape more resilient.

At Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, the past century of livestock grazing and fire suppression had turned much of the savanna-like landscape into one crowded with dense juniper and pinyon trees, with bare earth below. “The rates of soil erosion had accelerated to damaging levels,” as rains chewed away at the almost 3,000 archaeological sites that the monument was established to protect, said Craig Allen, a research ecologist with the survey’s Jemez Mountains Field Station.

After 15 years of study, in 2007 the park started taking chain saws to about 5,000 acres of land — mostly in the monument’s 23,000-acre Bandelier Wilderness — cutting small trees and mulching the ground with their branches. The scale of the action “was and remains unprecedented” in wilderness, where engines aren’t usually permitted, he said.

It’s worked. Rates of erosion have fallen by at least an order of magnitude, while native grasses and shrubs have increased threefold.

“I think we improved the resilience of the system going forward,” Brian Jacobs, a Bandelier botanist, said. “The healthier a system is going into these changes, the more likely it is to be able to respond favorably.”

Thinning select wilderness forests could help in many places around the American Southwest where forest density has increased to more than 1,000 trees per acre from roughly 100 trees, Dr. Allen said. The remaining trees would be more likely to survive the hotter, thirstier future, while thinning could also reduce the likelihood of extremely destructive fires from which these landscapes struggle to recover, he said.

Yet another approach is to help nature adapt by giving it a hand in this strange new world — accommodating the changes we want more than fighting those we don’t.

Gnarled by wind and weather, the whitebark pine grips the high slopes of the Pacific Northwest and the northern Rockies in such locations as the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana. Its fatty pine nuts are a staple of the threatened grizzly bear. Whitebark pine is rapidly declining in many places, however, because of invasive blister rust; the lack of fire in this ecosystem to promote the growth of new trees; and infestations by mountain pine beetles, probably aided by mellower winters. To help both beast and tree, some have proposed planting high slopes in places like “the Bob” with seeds from trees that show a resistance to the rust.

Still more controversial is assisted migration. Some species like the American pika, a small rodent-like mammal that lives among the rocks on high, cold mountains, can’t do much to escape a warming world. It’s been suggested that pikas — or marmots, or certain butterflies whose narrow habitats are shrinking — could be relocated to a more hospitable setting where they can, with luck, thrive.

Critics of intervention argue that the best thing we can do for wilderness is leave it alone. Opening up the Wilderness Act, they fear, will invite an attack on wild lands by the usual suspects: mining companies, give-back-the-land groups, Western red-state pols who pander to both. Then there are concerns like those of one Bureau of Land Management wilderness expert, who quoted to me the ecologist Frank Egler: “Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think, they are more complex than we can think.” Or to paraphrase the ecologist Peter Landres: Isn’t it a fool’s errand to try to manage what we don’t fully understand, at a time when the context is changing and the precise future is uncertain?

I share those concerns. And I cling to the romantic idea that, when I step into wilderness, I’m heading somewhere better than us — that there are some places where we can still walk a few miles into red rock desert and when we get there, we’ll find not a fracking pad or a Burger King but instead (Insert Your Deity Here). And it’s true that if science has taught us one thing it’s how little we know about nature. Yet as Dr. Stephenson counters, “Ecosystems may be more complex than we can understand, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have any understanding.”

Why not intervene — carefully, selectively, with humility — in the places that need help the most, with an eye toward giving nature, and us, options? Perhaps we have different levels of wilderness, with different levels of human involvement, something even the founders of the Wilderness Society discussed, Dr. Cole told me, adding, “What we need is a system with more diverse goals.” Fears that we’ll turn wilderness into a 110-million-acre garden miss the mark. If nothing else, lack of time, money and manpower will always constrain our efforts.

When it comes to our most precious wild places, we need to flip the conversation from cause, to effect — focusing on whether the change to the ecological system is “acceptable or desirable” and not whether humans helped nudge it there, according to Richard Hobbs, former editor of the journal Restoration Ecology.

The environmental titans of the 20th century — John Muir, Marshall, Leopold, Zahniser — handed us an awesome responsibility in America’s wilderness legacy. Ironically, it may take us committing a necessary apostasy to show how much we truly revere these wild places.


Christopher Solomon is a journalist who writes about the outdoors and the environment.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 6, 2014, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rethinking the Wild.

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Electing the Jesuit superior general

Sounding Board



By Fr. Joaquin G. Bernas S. J. |Philippine Daily Inquirer
1:00 am | Monday, June 16th, 2014



Word has been officially circulated that the current superior general of the Jesuits is set to resign in 2016. What is so special about that?

The Jesuit superior general is sometimes referred to as the Black Pope because he is seen as a powerful religious leader who, unlike the pope who is usually seen in white, is more often dressed in a black soutane—that is, when he is not running around in mufti.

But like the pope, the Jesuit superior general is elected to serve office for life. This is a feature in the Jesuit Order introduced by Ignatius himself purportedly for the purpose, among others, of preventing Jesuits from ambitioning for the position. I have never been subjected to that temptation myself. But if ever the general wants to quit, it is not a simple nor an inexpensive matter.

The general is elected by a General Congregation, that is, an assembly of elected Jesuit delegates summoned from around the world who travel to Rome for the purpose. (Although the next one might be somewhere outside Rome.) The first step in the process is a consultation of provincial superiors around the world, asking them if in their judgment it is time to consider looking for a new general. If their judgment is positive, then the general summons a General Congregation and the general submits his resignation to the assembled General Congregation. Once the resignation is accepted, the General Congregation proceeds to the election of a new general.

How is the election done? I was one of the Philippine delegates to the General Congregation that elected Fr. Hans von Kolvenbach as general to succeed Fr. Pedro Arrupe who, for reasons of health, submitted his resignation. First, we had to vote to accept the resignation of Fr. Pedro Arrupe. After Father Arrupe’s resignation was accepted, we proceeded to the election of a new general. How is it done?

It is nothing like the election processes we are familiar with. There are no nominated candidates. There is no campaigning. The most we have is what is called “murmuratio” when a delegate is allowed to talk to others who might know something about one who is a possible general. After the days of “murmuratio,” the delegates—and the delegates alone—are locked up in the session hall where they go through the process of voting.

There are no nominees. The delegates could vote for any qualified Jesuit in the entire world.

Each is given a slip of paper on which to write his vote. The votes are collected, counted to ensure that there is no duplication, read and tallied. If no one gets the majority of the votes, then another round of voting is done until someone finally comes out as the choice of the majority. Next, palakpakan.

This is also how it will be when we finally go through the process of electing who will succeed Fr. Adolfo Nicolas.

Father Nicolas is well known to many of us in the Philippines where he spent several years of his Jesuit life. Many times we had dinner together in the Jesuit Residence where I live. He was then director of the East Asian Pastoral Institute in the Ateneo de Manila campus when he was pulled out to become general. But why is he now resigning?

In his letter to the whole Jesuit society, he said: “Several years have passed since my election as Superior General of the Society and I have recently reached the age of 78. Reflecting on the coming years, I have reached the personal conviction that I should take the needed steps towards submitting my resignation to a General Congregation. After obtaining the initial approval of the Assistants ad providentiam and having informed his Holiness Pope Francis, I formally consulted the Assistants ad providentiam and the Provincials, as our law requires (NC 362). The result of the consultation is favorable towards the convening of a General Congregation.”

What follows now? Before the next General Congregation to elect a general, there will be Provincial Congregations whose task it will be, among others, to elect delegates to the General Congregation. As I a recall, from the Philippines those going there are the current provincial superior and whoever are the two delegates elected by our Provincial Congregation.

Who will be the next general? If I am not mistaken, past generals, like all past popes before the current one, have all been European. We now have a Latin American pope. Will the next general be again European? Or will the General Congregation decide that it is now time for a Latin American or an Asian or an American general? The only thing I am sure of is that it will not be this Asian.


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Did Bowe Bergdahl go AWOL in Afghanistan?

After five years as a POW, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is headed home. But the circumstances of his capture by the Taliban in Afghanistan remain unclear, indicating he may have walked away from his base.

By Brad Knickerbocker, Staff writer / June 1, 2014





Jani and Bob Bergdahl speak during a news conference at the White House Saturday about the release of their son, U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, held prisoner by the Taliban since 2009. He was handed over to U.S. special forces by the Taliban in exchange for the release of five Afghan detainees held by the United States.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

For now, the story for US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is one of physical and mental recovery and reunion with his family.

Related stories

In Pictures Far from home: US soldiers serving in Afghanistan

Obama's Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap: Was it illegal?

Bowe Bergdahl's first hours of freedom: Now the questions begin (+video)

Five years a POW, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl released by Afghan Taliban (+video)

The Christian Science Monitor
Weekly Digital Edition

But very soon it will involve debriefings about the nearly five years of his captivity by Taliban fighters, who apparently held him in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, where his infantry unit had been engaged in combat.

Military and intelligence experts will want to know how he was treated, anything he can tell them about his captors, and what he learned about insurgent capabilities.

But for the young soldier – 23 when he became a prisoner of war, now 28 – those debriefings also will include difficult questions about how and why he happened to be in a position where he fell into the hands of Taliban fighters.

RECOMMENDED: Far from home: US soldiers serving in Afghanistan

There have been no reports that he was captured during direct combat, that the “fog of war” had put him involuntarily in a vulnerable location.

At this point in the developing narrative, Sgt. Bergdahl seems to have grown disillusioned with the mission, bitter about the Army and especially higher ranking enlisted men and officers, and simply walked off – gone “outside the wire” or protective base limits – and disappeared.

That could indicate that he had gone AWOL (Absence Without Leave), also referred to as “Unauthorized Absence” (UA), which could bring charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

This scenario – it’s important to note that it has not been confirmed – is based on detailed reporting in 2012 by Rolling Stone magazine, which included interviews with Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers as well as apparently lengthy conversations with his parents in Idaho, who shared e-mails they had exchanged with him up until his disappearance.

“The US army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at,” he wrote from Afghanistan. “It is the army of liars, backstabbers, fools, and bullies. The few good SGTs are getting out as soon as they can, and they are telling us privates to do the same."

"I am sorry for everything here," Bergdahl wrote at another point "These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live."

In his final message, Bergdahl refers to having mailed home boxes with his uniforms and books.

“Feel free to open them, and use them,” he wrote.

Later that night, Bowe Bergdahl’s father Bob Bergdahl, a UPS truck driver, sent his son an email from their home in Hailey, Idaho, with the subject line: OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!

"Dear Bowe," he wrote. "In matters of life and death, and especially at war, it is never safe to ignore ones' conscience. Ethics demands obedience to our conscience. It is best to also have a systematic oral defense of what our conscience demands. Stand with like minded men when possible. dad."

“Ordinary soldiers, especially raw recruits facing combat for the first time, respond to the horror of war in all sorts of ways,” Rolling Stone observed. Bowe Bergdahl “decided to walk away.”

“In the early-morning hours of June 30th, according to soldiers in the unit, Bowe approached his team leader not long after he got off guard duty and asked his superior a simple question: If I were to leave the base, would it cause problems if I took my sensitive equipment?

“Yes, his team leader responded – if you took your rifle and night-vision goggles, that would cause problems.

“Bowe returned to his barracks, a roughly built bunker of plywood and sandbags. He gathered up water, a knife, his digital camera and his diary. Then he slipped off the outpost.”

When his absence was discovered, Bergdahl was listed as “DUSTWUN” – Duty Status: Whereabouts Unknown.

Search parties were sent out. The search included drone aircraft as well as F-18 and F-15 fighter jets.

Reports from Afghan intelligence sources indicated that Bergdahl had been captured by the Taliban, later confirmed by intercepted radio conversations and the first videos of him being held.

Speaking at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan Sunday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said the US had to move quickly to rescue Bergdahl as part of a prisoner transfer involving five mid- to high- level Taliban being sent to Qatar from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Bergdahl's "safety and health were both in jeopardy, and in particular his health was deteriorating,” Secretary Hagel said.

"Our first priority is assuring his well-being and his health and getting him reunited with his family," Hagel said. "Other circumstances that may develop and questions — those will be dealt with later."

Those “other circumstances” and “questions” involve how the young and apparently disillusioned soldier came to be taken a prisoner of war.

Not surprisingly, the issue has stirred considerable discussion and debate.

“Though Americans may be celebrating the release of the only American soldier held prisoner in Afghanistan by the Taliban, the reaction of the military community has been mixed at best,” Army Times reports.

“Within an hour of the announcement that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was handed over to U.S. special forces by the Taliban Saturday evening, Army Times’ Facebook page lit up with hundreds of comments reacting to the news,” the publication reported. “Most centered on the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl's capture, which remain something of a mystery. There has been some speculation that he willingly walked away from his unit, raising the question of whether he could be charged with being absent without leave (AWOL) or desertion.”

“I'm happy for the Bergdahl family and friends to have their loved one home, but I am angered deeply at Bowe…. It disgusts me greatly that a man that turned his back on his brothers, unit, and country is going to be hailed as a hero/saint,” wrote one Army Times Facebook visitor.

But another post summed up the situation this way:

“This guy may have made a tremendously bad decision, but I'm willing to bet that what he's endured since then has been far worse than anything the US or military judicial system would have imposed. Have some heart.”


RECOMMENDED: Far from home: US soldiers serving in Afghanistan

Related stories
In Pictures Far from home: US soldiers serving in Afghanistan
Obama's Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap: Was it illegal?
Bowe Bergdahl's first hours of freedom: Now the questions begin (+video)
Five years a POW, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl released by Afghan Taliban (+video)


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The Danger of Speculative Ideas

There is a time of trouble coming to the people of God, but we are not to keep that constantly before the people, and rein them up to have a time of trouble beforehand. There is to be a shaking among God’s people; but this is not the present truth to carry to the churches. It will be the result of refusing the truth presented.

The ministers should not feel that they have some wonderful advanced ideas, and unless all receive these, they will be shaken out, and a people will arise to go forward and upward to the victory. Satan’s object is accomplished just as surely when men run ahead of Christ and do the work He has never entrusted to their hands, as when they remain in the Laodicean state, lukewarm, feeling rich and increased with goods, and in need of nothing. The two classes are equally stumbling blocks.

Some zealous ones who are aiming and straining every energy for originality have made a grave mistake in trying to get something startling, wonderful, entrancing, before the people, something that they think others do not comprehend; but often they do not themselves know what they are talking about. They speculate upon God’s Word, advancing ideas that are not a whit of help to themselves or
to the churches. For the time being, they may excite the imagination; but there is a reaction, and these very ideas become a hindrance. Faith is confounded with fancy, and their views may bias the mind in the wrong direction. Let the plain, simple statements of the Word of God be food for the mind; this speculating upon ideas that are not clearly presented there, is dangerous business.—Undated Manuscript 111.

The danger that threatens our churches is that new and strange things will be brought in, things that confuse the minds of the people, and give them no strength, at the very time when they most need strength in spiritual things. Clear discernment is needed that things new and strange shall not be laid alongside of truth as a part of the burden of the message to be given at this time. The very messages we have been giving to the world are to be made prominent.—An Appeal for Canvassers, pp. 1, 2.

Selected Messages Book 2, pp.13,14.
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Soros betting against stocks? Not likely

 By Patrick M. Sheridan @CNNMoneyInvest
February 19, 2014: 2:20 PM ET





George Soros increased his position in an investment that would profit if stocks fall. But it may simply be a smart hedge.


NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
Hedge fund heavyweight George Soros appears to be making a billion dollar bet against the stock market. But looks can be deceiving.

Tongues have been wagging on Wall Street since Soros Fund Management revealed in a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday that his fund owned 7 million "puts" on the S&P 500 (SPY) exchange traded fund in the fourth quarter. Puts are essentially a bet that the price of an asset will go down. The total value of the "puts" as of the filing date was $1.3 billion.

Soros first bought the position last year as the S&P 500 was on its way to setting a series of new record highs. So if Soros is boosting the size of an investment that many short sellers and other market bears use, then that should be big news to make investors worried about where are stocks going, right? Not necessarily.

According to one investment expert, the move may be nothing more than a standard hedging practice for Soros, whose total portfolio is worth about $11.7 billion. Insider Monkey research director Ian Dogan noted that even though the size of the S&P 500 put position increased by a whopping 150%, this may be normal given that Soros also increased his overall long position on the market by $2 billion.

Related: Soros and other hedge fund bailed on gold in 2013

To that end, Friday's filing also revealed that Soros added to stakes in several well-known stocks, such as Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500), General Motors (GM, Fortune 500), JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) and Dish Network (DISH, Fortune 500), in the fourth quarter.

Another thing to remember is that the latest filing is a snapshot of what the fund held as of the end of December. We won't know what Soros has bought or sold in the first quarter until sometime in May when his firm is required to file its latest quarterly update.

A Soros representative declined to comment on the filing. But with his history of big bets, it's understandable why some investors are curious.

A little more than 20 years ago Soros made his most famous investment. He shorted the British pound and pocketed a billion dollars in the process.

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Pope Francis' Statements Reported By Media Cause Doctrinal Confusion

Religion News Service | By David Gibson Posted: 01/08/2014 7:15 am EST





(RNS) No doubt about it, Pope Francis is generating the kind of Internet buzz and sky-high Q Scores that brand managers can only dream of. But is the pontiff becoming a victim of his own good press?

The Vatican once again had to dispel media reports that went well beyond what Francis actually said, as his spokesman formally denied that the pope had signaled an openness to same-sex unions in a recently published conversation with leaders of religious orders.

During the November discussion with leaders of the Jesuits, Franciscans and others, Francis said they needed to engage “complex” situations of modern life, such as the prevalence of broken homes and the growth in gay couples rearing children.

He noted in particular the case “of a very sad little girl” he knew of who confessed that her mother’s girlfriend “doesn’t like me.” After citing the example of that lesbian couple he seemed to warn against being quick to condemn: “How can we proclaim Christ to a generation that is changing? We must be careful not to administer a vaccine against faith to them.”

And that was quickly interpreted as a papal blessing of sorts of gay families.

The Vatican’s chief spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, on Monday issued a statement saying that while Francis certainly wants to “affectionately accompany” people no matter their circumstances, the pontiff had “absolutely not expressed” his opinion on gay unions and that some reports had “forced” such an interpretation.

On Tuesday (Jan. 7), another Jesuit and papal confidante, the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, wrote to a leading Italian daily to protest that Francis has no intention of “legitimizing any behavior that’s inconsistent with the doctrine of the church.” Spadaro said any other reading was an effort at “manipulation.”

Still, it’s not the first time this has happened, and it probably won’t be the last. Consider:

* On New Year’s Eve, Lombardi put out a statement to counter a column by a prominent Italian journalist and atheist, Eugenio Scalfari, claiming that Francis “has abolished sin.” Lombardi had to reiterate that those “who really follow the pope daily know how many times he has spoken about sin.”
* After fevered speculation that the pope might break with tradition and name women as cardinals, Francis himself denied the rumors. “I don’t know where this idea sprang from,” he told an Italian journalist in an interview in December. “Whoever thinks of women as cardinals suffers a bit from clericalism.”
* In early December, the Vatican categorically denied a media report that Pope Francis has been slipping out at night to visit the homeless in Rome. The stories, while appealing and in keeping with Francis’ intense concern for the poor, are “simply not true,” Vatican officials said.
* In September, the Vatican “firmly denied” that Francis had called a gay man in France to assure him that “your homosexuality doesn’t matter.” No way, no how, said Lombardi.
* And last May, the Vatican called the claim that Francis had performed an exorcism on a handicapped man in St. Peter’s Square “absolutely false.” Francis often embraces the sick and disfigured when he mingles with the crowds, and those images often go viral. But that wasn’t enough for some.

Indeed, the exaggerations have become so commonplace that a parody blog post last month claimed Francis had convened a Third Vatican Council (there have been only two) to declare that “all religions are true,” there is no hell and there’s nothing wrong with supporting abortion rights. What’s more, the piece went so viral so fast that Catholic blogs and even the myth-busting website Snopes.com rushed out disclaimers.

So why all these overbaked reports? There are several reasons:

One: The media and the public, especially in Italy, are always hungry for something new and surprising, especially when it comes to a tradition-bound institution such as the Vatican. Just think of the 2010 hubbub over Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks that seemed to indicate condoms could be OK if used to prevent the spread of AIDS.

Two: Francis is actually doing a lot of new and newsworthy things, like driving his own car — a used one at that — and cold-calling strangers and upending all manner of sacred papal customs. He also keeps insisting that the church needs a “new balance” in its approach that emphasizes the poor and suffering rather than just fights over abortion and gay rights.

Three: Because of those novelties, many liberals are ecstatic and expecting more, while many conservatives are picking up on any stray signal and hyping it to show that Francis is in fact a danger to their traditional agenda and must be opposed. As Spadaro wrote in his article, the exaggerated claims about Francis come “from his ‘detractors’ on the right, as well as those who exalt him in order to take advantage of him on the left.”

Four: From the start of his pontificate in March, Francis has said he wants a church that “runs the risk of an accident,” as he put it. In July in Brazil he encouraged millions of young people to go out and “make a mess.” So he’s not one to lose sleep over what people say about him. He’ll just keep talking.

Five: Francis is a Jesuit and a pastor, accustomed to engaging people and dealing with the ambiguities of life, and he likes to talk about that. Most churchmen tend to be theologians and canon lawyers who deploy the kind of clear-cut, “abstract” concepts that Francis disdains. But such concepts don’t lend themselves to misinterpretation so easily.

Finally: Francis has focused so relentlessly on the mercy of God rather than the judgment of the church that the shift in tone and emphasis has led many — like Scalfari — to think that perhaps anything goes under this pope.

But in a follow-up column this week to his earlier piece, Scalfari himself repented of his claim that Francis had abolished sin and instead focused on the pope’s message of mercy despite sin. So maybe, after nearly a year of both genuine changes and overblown expectations, perceptions of Pope Francis are actually catching up to reality.


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Has the Fed been fueling bubbles? You be the judge

Some say the Fed-engineered rates have produced an economic sugar high that risks triggering a crash akin to the tech-stock swoon in 2000 and the housing bust in 2006.


By JOSH BOAK, AP Economics Writer 12/19/13 10:28 am :: Last updated: 12/19/13 10:28 am


The Federal Reserve’s super-low interest-rate policies have inflated a slew of dangerous asset bubbles. Or so critics say.

They say stocks are at unsustainable prices. California homes are fetching frothy sums. Same with farmland, Bitcoins and rare Scotch.




Under Chairman Ben Bernanke, the Fed has aggressively bought bonds to try to cut borrowing rates and accelerate spending, investing and hiring. Its supporters say low rates have helped nourish the still-modest economic rebound.

Yet some say the Fed-engineered rates have produced an economic sugar high that risks triggering a crash akin to the tech-stock swoon in 2000 and the housing bust in 2006.

STOCKS

The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index has jumped about 26 percent since the Fed announced a year ago that it would buy $85 billion in bonds each month. And since the Fed’s first round of bond buying at the end of 2008, stocks have soared 124 percent. Stocks outside the United States have also surged as other central banks have followed the Fed with their own low-rate policies. Germany’s DAX is up 20 percent, Japan’s Nikkei index 46 percent.

Why it’s a bubble:

By artificially depressing bond yields, the Fed has led more investors to shift money into stocks. Such a flood of cash can swell share prices without regard to corporate earnings. Once the Fed unwinds its support, many investors could abandon stocks and send shares tumbling. “I am most worried about the boom in the U.S. stock market” because of its disconnect from a “weak and vulnerable” economy, Robert Shiller, the Nobel Prize-winning Yale economist, told the German magazine Der Spiegel a few weeks ago. Shiller knows a bubble when he sees one. He accurately warned of both the tech and housing bubbles before they burst.

Why it isn’t:

One key measure assesses stock prices relative to corporate profits. A healthy price-earnings ratio is around 15 — or $15 a share for each dollar of profit. The current P/E ratio is about 18.4, slightly above average but probably no cause to panic. Janet Yellen, nominated to succeed Bernanke, said last month: “If you look at traditional valuation measures … you would not see stock prices in territory that suggests bubble-like conditions.”

HOUSING

The last housing bubble ignited the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. Home prices became inflated in part from an influx of cash and low rates driven by the Fed and other central banks. And in recent months, prices have again soared in some hot U.S. markets.

Why it’s a bubble:

It depends on location, location, location. All-cash sales, low rates and tight supplies have lifted prices in areas like New York City and Washington, D.C. Fitch Ratings estimated in November that a worrisome 17 percent of the U.S. home market is overvalued, a risk because much of the buying is tied to investments and house-flipping. Coastal California is “approaching bubble-year peaks,” with Bay Area prices nearing the “environment in 2003,” Fitch said. Some leading forecasters have also warned of bubbles in London and areas of Canada and Norway. New York University economist Nouriel Roubini worries about bubbles in Switzerland, France, India, Indonesia, Turkey, Israel and Brazil. These countries have accelerating prices, rising price-to-income ratios and huge proportions of mortgage debt as a share of total household debt.

Why it isn’t:

At least in the United States, some safety valves are in place that didn’t exist during the previous housing bubble, Roubini wrote this month. Lending standards are tighter. Banks are cushioned from possible losses from greater capital in reserve. And homeowners have more home equity this time.

FARMLAND

Over the past five years, the cost of Iowa farmland has rocketed 118 percent to $8,400 an acre, according to the Agriculture Department. Prices have more than doubled, too, in Kansas, Nebraska and North Dakota. The prices recall a 1970s-era boom. That ended with a bust that put many family farms into foreclosure, leading musicians such as Willie Nelson to start the Farm Aid benefit concerts.

Why it’s a bubble:

The Fed’s low-rate policies have encouraged farmers to expand their holdings over the past five years. Ethanol subsidies led them to plant more corn as prices for that crop rose during the past three years. “The bubble has been climbing,” said Dan Muhlbauer, a grain farmer who’s also a Democratic representative in the Iowa House. One ominous sign: The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed cutting ethanol blending requirements.

Why it isn’t:

Unlike during the 1970s bubble, farmers haven’t become “over-leveraged” with debt, Esther George, president of the Kansas City Fed, noted last summer. The percentage of farmers’ assets financed with borrowed money has dropped from 22 percent in 1985 to less than 11 percent. This decline in debt should protect many farmers if the value of cropland plunges.

BITCOIN

Critics fear that the Fed’s low rates are undermining the dollar’s value. For some, the hot new choice is an Internet-based currency called Bitcoin. Because there’s a finite supply of 21 million Bitcoins, devotees say the currency will continue to appreciate. The value of a Bitcoin relative to the U.S. dollar has surged at an average pace of 292 percent a year, according to a Bank of America analysis.

Why it’s a bubble:

Prices are insanely volatile. They jumped 50 percent on Nov. 18 after regulators signaled that digital currencies could be acceptable. They plunged 30 percent on Dec. 5 after China’s central bank banned Bitcoins as currency, according to the online exchange Mt.Gox. And the volatility suggests that Bitcoins are highly speculative. Bank of America said this month that Bitcoin is “at risk” of bubble status.

Why it isn’t:

Bitcoin may become a useful commodity in the future economy. Its digital nature could make it easier for immigrants to send money back home. It could charge lower transaction fees than credit cards, saving retailers money. Eli Dourado, an economics research fellow at George Mason University, says bubbles occur when assets are priced above their fundamental value, “but we don’t know the fundamental value of a Bitcoin yet.”


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A Vatican scientist

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Catholic News Service


Published on Jun 24, 2012

An interview with Jesuit Brother Guy J. Consolmagno, a research astronomer at the Vatican Observatory. Brother Consolmagno speaks on the relationship between science and faith.

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Related:

(Sunday -November 11, 2013)

 

Guy Consolmagno on Theology and Astronomy (PRI: To the Best of Our Knowledge)

Transcript for Guy Consolmagno on Theology and Astronomy

Interview details for Guy Consolmagno on Theology and Astronomy

VIEW OTHER INTERVIEWS FROM: Alone in the Universe?


Jim Fleming: When Guy Consolmagno was a freshman in college, he thought about becoming a Jesuit priest. Science lured him away. He went to MIT, got a doctorate in planetary science, and then realized something was missing. Today, Guy Consolmagno is “Brother Guy” a Jesuit priest and an astronomer at the Vatican. He believes science and religion can work alongside each other.

Guy Consolmagno: Anybody who’s looked at the stars and not been moved, just emotionally, has no soul. That’s something that is wonderful about astronomy that anyone at any level of education could go out and just go, “Wow!”If you look through a telescope and you see the rings on Saturn, that’s even more, “Wow!”And if you’re able to handle the mathematics to understand all of the things that you can get to when you get to graduate school, then it’s just all the more amazing and wonderful. You know, it’s one thing to be amazed at the universe is rational; it makes sense. That was completely unexpected. But that it should also be beautiful is the deepest and most wonderful mystery.

Fleming: Do you see astronomy as a spiritual pursuit?

Consolmagno: I’ll say how my religion and science interact is, it’s not the case that I’m going to use my science to prove or disprove some religious point. That doesn’t work. But they both interact on a mettle level. Religion is what motivates me to do science. Religion is what gives me the courage to say, “There are going to be answers. The universe is rational.

Fleming: So one of the big things going on right now, that I suspect is talked about a lot in all of the fields in which you work, is the search for life, that there may be life, that there is the expectation of life elsewhere in the universe, biological life, maybe intelligent life, maybe life that we can communicate with. Do you imagine that is a possibility? Is it a possibility you would welcome?

Consolmagno: Yes and yes. Absolutely. Part of that is the science fiction fan in me. I’ll confess one of the reasons I went to MIT was to read science fiction. They have a big science fiction library there. Part of it is scientific. My Master’s thesis at MIT, among other things, predicted oceans under the ice crust of Europa and even talks about the possibility of life there. That was 1975. So I would feel vindicated if we actually found life in those places. Part of it is simply, well, to quote Carl Sagan, the famous agnostic, “If there isn’t life out there, it sure is a big waste of space.”

Fleming: So tell me, does the Vatican have a position on how to respond to the possibility of life outside of Earth?

Consolmagno: The Vatican doesn’t have positions like that on anything but there’s certainly no reason to argue theologically one way or the other.

Fleming: Well, I can imagine that there might be some who would say, again, perhaps I’m just, perhaps I’m misquoting, I don’t know. God gave His only son. God created man in His own image. Those kinds of things, if those are true, how is it possible for there to be life elsewhere?

Consolmagno: Well, you know, I’ll give you three points. First, the whole idea of, “What is God’s image and likeness?” that was discussed in the Middle Ages and what they were talking about in terms of the Middle Ages was soul, what Thomas Aquinas refers to as “intellect and free-will”. In other words, an entity that is aware of itself, aware of other entities and able to make choices maybe to love or not love, to interact or not interact. That’s the essence of what the image and likeness of God is about. It has nothing to do with how many tentacles you have. The other question of God sending His son, our theology also says that this person of the Trinity was there at the beginning, long before the Earth was created. And, thus, not tied merely to planet Earth. We also have in our religious tradition, the tradition of, if nothing else, we’ve got angels who are, presumably, intelligent beings free to choose or not choose creations of the Creator and, obviously, not human beings. We’re not afraid of there being other entities out there.

Fleming: Does this suggest that there could be a seven-tentacled Jesus landing on the third moon of Saturn?

Consolmagno: For all I know. When you find him, ask me again. We don’t know how it’s going to work. One of our fellows at the observatory said, “The incarnation of Jesus is, in a sense, the word.”That’s how it’s described in John’s gospel. Who’s to say that word couldn’t exist in more than one language? On the other hand, the fact that it happened once with us human beings here on Earth is sufficient to say that it’s possible that it did happen. Like a mathematical proof, it’s the one instance that says, “OK. It could happen,”and once is sufficient. But are there a zillion? We don’t know.

Fleming: Of course for centuries, the Catholic Church’s response to the discovery of new lands, of new people, was to send out missionaries to convert everyone. Do you suppose that could happen again? It’s been the subject of that science fiction that you so love.

Consolmagno: Right. Well, the very fact that they sent out the missionaries showed that they accepted these other people as fully equal human beings.

Fleming: And if the discovery of life turns out to be lettuce plants in the galaxy next door, it’s going to be a little difficult.

Consolmagno: Well, the fact of the matter is that the possibility of finding intelligent life in our own solar system is probably limited.

Fleming: And yet it is something . . .

Consolmagno: Having said that, having said that, yeah, I agree. It’s something that is fantastic to think about precisely in the sense of science fiction and saying, “All right. Let’s posit this way. Then what happens?”Because when you ask, you know, “What is the image and likeness of God mean? What is it like to talk to a non-human entity?” You’re immediately asking, “Well, then, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean for us to have a soul? What does it mean for us to have a Savior? Is it likely that other intelligent beings who are going to be subject to, presumably, the same laws of physics and chemistry, you know, they’re going to have to eat food and if they fall off a cliff, they are going to kill themselves, are they also going to have the same laws of right and wrong? Are they going to say that lying is a sin? That taking a life, an intelligent life is a sin and that the possibility of sin exists?”These are great questions. These are science fiction questions and these are philosophy questions for which there is never going to be a final, definitive answer but always, the more you think about them, the more you talk about them, the more you play with the ideas, the more you can come back and reflect on what it really means to yourself.

Fleming: One of the other things not science fiction that is currently talked about a great deal in the world of cosmology is the theory of the multiverse, the potentially infinite number of universes and we’re living in just one. What do you think of that?

Consolmagno: Well, we’ve got people working at the Vatican observatory who are actually looking into the mathematics of this, the physics of this. One of our cosmologists did his doctorate under Martin Rees, who is one of the people who’s come up with the idea. I think it’s a great idea both to make you think and to make you appreciate the infinite possibilities of creation. Back when Genesis was being written, and whoever wrote it took the best science of that day, which was Babylonian science, and said, “Bigger than the flat world that we all know we live on and the dome and the water above and below the dome, bigger that any of that was God,”and that was as big as they could imagine. If we say, “Bigger than the solar system, bigger than this galaxy, bigger than our universe, bigger than all of the infinite multiverses together, is God.”Then we’re really talking some big.

Fleming: It does seem to present a challenge but you’re saying it’s a challenge, really, not to religion but to the imagination.

Consolmagno: It is. A religion that doesn’t challenge you is not much of a religion and, frankly, a science that doesn’t challenge you is not much of a science.

Fleming: Stephen Hawking, in his recent book said, “We no longer need philosophy.”The implication was pretty clear that he felt that we no longer need religion because science can explain everything. Do you feel you’ve answered that?

Consolmagno: Well, when Hawking says we don’t need God to start the universe, he’s right. Anyone who’s trying to use God to explain the things that science can’t explain in the 21st century, is a fool because who knows what science is going to explain in the 23rd century? That’s called the God of the gaps. In fact, it’s the fastest route to atheism because if your belief in God is the God who can explain why something happens, and then science comes along with an explanation, “Oops. Suddenly, I don’t believe in that God anymore.”Hawking is right that you don’t need God to explain the gaps in our knowledge but, of course, he doesn’t really mean we don’t need philosophy. The very statement, “We don’t need philosophy,”is a philosophical statement. And there’s an awful lot of value, a lot of value that I got as a Jesuit, in studying philosophy, in studying history, in studying the humanities. Sadly, an awful lot of British scientists of the older generation never got around to taking philosophy 101.

Fleming: Brother Guy Consolmagno is an American research astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican observatory.


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Texas Gov. Rick Perry to declare political plans

Catalina Camia, USA TODAY6:47 a.m. EDT July 8, 2013



(Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta, AP)

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Republican to announce political plans in San Antonio
Perry, already the longest-serving governor in Texas history, is up for re-election in 2014
He has said running for president again is 'an option'

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is scheduled to announce Monday plans for his political future, leaving open the question of whether he'll seek an unprecedented fourth term next year or try again to seek the White House.

Perry, 63, is already the longest-serving governor in Texas history and has been the Lone Star state's chief executive since December 2000 when George W. Bush left to become president. Perry's departure would set up the biggest political shuffle in Texas since he took office.

The Republican was coy during an appearance onFox News Sunday about his future, saying only that another presidential bid was "an option out there." He also said his attention is more focused now on a special session of the Texas Legislature, as lawmakers consider a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy that would also close most of the state's abortion clinics.

Perry will announce his plans at a Caterpillar dealership of a top supporter in San Antonio.

For much of the nation, Perry is known for his ill-fated White House bid last year. Once considered a top conservative alternative to eventual GOP nominee Mitt Romney, Perry briefly was leading in early public opinion polls but faltered quickly.

His "oops" moment during a televised debate, in which he forgot the name of the third federal agency he wanted to eliminate, solidified for many that Perry wasn't ready for the White House. The Texan dropped out of the 2012 race ahead of the South Carolina primary.

Perry poked fun at his own debate gaffe on late-night TV and mocked his own candidacy during a speech last year. "The weakest Republican field in history — and they kicked my butt," Perry joked at the Gridiron Club dinner.

Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said Perry "loves to keep people guessing" but noted the signs are there that the governor will not run again for his current job in 2014. Making another presidential run, Jillson told USA TODAY, is an entirely different enterprise.

"If he plans to run for president again, he needs to be free of the governor's office so he can give his full attention to putting together a top-flight campaign team and prepare himself substantively, especially on foreign policy and national security issues," Jillson said.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, viewed as an up-and-coming Republican, has been making moves as though he is running for governor. He recently released a video, narrated by former senator-TV actor Fred Thompson, introducing himself to voters – even though Abbott has won statewide elections five times. Abbott also has amassed $18 million in campaign funds.

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Awaiting the Supreme Court's gay marriage decisions

Live coverage from SCOTUSblog

By SCOTUSblog | Yahoo! News – 6 hrs ago



Reuters/REUTERS - Reporters wait to hear which rulings are handed down at the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, June 13, 2013. The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued a mixed ruling in a case concerning …more


The Supreme Court is expected to hand down several rulings Tuesday, two of which have the potential to drastically expand the rights of gays and lesbians in the country.

As the term draws to a close at the end of this week, the nine justices still have not released decisions in two highly anticipatedgay marriage cases—Perry v. Hollingsworth and Windsor v. United States—as well as one key case involving race, Shelby County v. Holder.

At 9:00 a.m., the experts at SCOTUSblog—SCOTUS stands for Supreme Court of the United States—will begin analyzing what the Court might do in the liveblog below, and when a decision is handed down, this liveblog will likely be the first place to break the news.

In the Perry case, the court is expected decide whether California voters discriminated against gay people when they voted to ban same-sex marriage. In Windsor, the court is weighing whether the federal Defense of Marriage Act—which limits all federal marriage benefits to opposite sex couples--violates the constitutional rights of same-sex couples.

In Shelby, the justices could significantly scale back the federal government's right to supervise states with a history of voting discrimination against minorities.

The Court will begin issuing opinions at 10 a.m. ET.

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Christians' views vary on gay marriage

High court expected to decide this week on same-sex issues

June 23, 2013 12:05 am



Sam Rohrer says he may disagree with same-sex marriage, but he would welcome them as neighbors.


By Ann Rodgers / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Sam Rohrer leads a statewide network of 2,000 conservative Protestant pastors opposed to same-sex civil marriages. But if the U.S. Supreme Court broadens access to such marriage this week, the Pennsylvania Pastors Network won't advise anyone to shun gay or lesbian couples who move in next door.

"They should respond in love and treat them as they would any other person. That would be Christ's example," said the former state representative from Berks County, adding that it doesn't mean "endorsing the condition."

Most opposition to same-sex civil marriage comes from theologically conservative Christians, while more liberal denominations support it. Many theological conservatives support a status other than marriage to provide benefits to same-sex couples, though leaders on both sides say the opportunity for such compromise has passed.

The leaders and pastors interviewed for this story hold a wide range of views, but all said they would welcome a same-sex couple as neighbors.

Archbishop Robert Duncan of the Anglican Church in North America and the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh led a split with the Episcopal Church, triggered partly by acceptance of a partnered gay bishop. He argues that same-sex marriage isn't a matter of equal rights but of preserving heterosexual marriage as the foundation of human society. He could reluctantly accept civil unions.

"While we would say that this won't have a good result for the nation ... this is not a theocracy. The nation has a freedom to define what equal rights look like. It doesn't have the right to redefine an institution," he said.

Evan Wolfson, a Squirrel Hill native who founded Freedom to Marry, believes same-sex marriage will strengthen society.

"It does not change the meaning of marriage. It simply allows same-sex couples to marry the person they love, to establish and protect a family, and to make a lifetime commitment in the same way that other couples are able to," he said.

Civil unions and domestic partnerships "are no substitute for the full measure of respect, clarity, security and responsibilities of marriage," he said. They "do not fully protect families in real situations, especially in emergency situations.."

This week the Supreme Court is expected to rule on a ban on same-sex marriage in California and the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which, passed in 1996, says marriage is only between "one man and one woman," denying federal benefits to same-sex couples. The court decision may affect only California and federal programs but theoretically could require or ban gay marriage nationwide.

Prior to 2003, when the Massachusetts high court was the first to rule same-sex civil marriage a matter of equal rights, there was little consensus among gay activists over its importance.

"There was a whole mentality 20 years ago where gay people would say, 'Oh, we don't want to be married. It's an institution that's falling apart. We're fine with civil unions,' " said the Rev. Renee Waun, pastor of East Suburban Unitarian Universalist Church in Murrysville. She became an advocate for gay rights a few years after her 1981 ordination as a United Methodist minister, when she was often called to visit dying AIDS patients in Shadyside Hospital.

The AIDS crisis led to the marriage movement, said the Rev. Janet Edwards, a Presbyterian Church (USA) minister from Squirrel Hill. Gay people realized the danger of not having health insurance or federal survivor benefits and were inspired by men who faithfully cared for their stricken partners.

"They embraced many within the community who were involved in long-term, deeply committed, loving, supportive relationships, which they began to recognize was marriage," said Rev. Edwards, who endured a church trial in 2008 for conducting a marriage of two women. She was acquitted on the grounds that she couldn't have done so since marriage is only between a man and a woman.

Rev. Edwards said that in an era when Christians lament the failure of heterosexuals to marry, same-sex couples are their allies.

"It's a gift from the LGBT community to the whole, which is to get all of us thinking about the value of marriage," she said.


Different interpretations

Most opposition to same-sex civil marriage is rooted in religious conviction. A recent Pew poll found that 73 percent of those who believe that gay sex is sinful oppose it, while 84 percent of those who say it's not a sin support it.

Leviticus 20:13 says, "If a man has sexual relations with a man ... both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death."

That Bible verse isn't what led Wesley Hill, assistant professor of biblical studies at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, to conclude that his gay sexual orientation requires him to be celibate. The first two chapters of Genesis, which "presents male and female as the partners of one another" and Jesus' affirmation of that in Matthew 19, are far more important to him.

Mr. Hill, 32, grew up in a Baptist family where homosexuality was unacceptable, but he knew that other traditions found it compatible with Christianity. He studied all sides, he said.

"I found myself convinced of the more traditional reading of scripture, that marriage between one man and one woman was the only context for sexual expression in a Christian setting, and that if I intended to remain a traditional orthodox Christian, I needed to be celibate."

He believes people are born with same-sex orientation as a result of the fall -- humanity's original rebellion against God -- which brought imperfections to the world. He hasn't settled his view of same-sex civil marriage.

"There is wide agreement in traditional Christian churches on what scripture says but a wide range of views on how you translate that into a secular society where there are people who are not Christians and there are gay people who want to get married," he said.

Some theologians say the biblical condemnations concern pagan rituals, not committed relationships. More liberal theologians argue that there was no biblical standard for marriage, citing patriarchs with multiple wives. Theological conservatives say those are a record of sin, not an endorsement of polygamy or adultery.

The Rev. Dave Thompson of Tacoma, Wash., is an evangelical gay man who consults with conservative congregations torn over how to respond to gays and lesbians. He believes that God created humans heterosexual, but after the fall, some people inherited same-sex attraction. He says this is as morally neutral as blindness, and that a faithful same-sex relationship is the closest that gays and lesbians can come to the biblical standard of marriage.

Despite Jesus' condemnation of remarriage after divorce, most "evangelical churches welcome and embrace those individuals whose circumstances are unchangeable," he said. "We don't recommend celibacy because we know it won't work. We need to embrace gay individuals in the same circumstances and say as God did in Genesis that 'It is not good that man should be alone.' "

Archbishop Duncan isn't convinced that same-sex attraction is inborn. If it is, he said, it's a temptation that Christians are called to resist.

"People have inclinations for all kinds of things, but we don't celebrate addiction. We don't celebrate things that result from our fallenness," he said.

"In the cases where he meets people with moral problems and blesses and heals them, Jesus says 'Go and sin no more.' I've got to try to love the way he loves."


New majority

John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron, has been surveying gay marriage since 2003, when 32 percent of Americans favored legalization.

For the first time, his poll for the Pew Research Center this month found a majority -- 51 percent -- saying it should be legal. The shift has been smaller among theologically conservative Protestants, with 22 percent of white evangelicals and 32 percent of black Protestants supporting same-sex civil marriage. Despite opposition from their bishops, Catholics are among Americans most supportive of legal same-sex marriage, with 61 percent in favor.

Mr. Green attributes that figure to less active Catholics who outnumber frequent Mass-goers. Hispanics, who account for nearly a third of Catholics and tend to favor legalizing gay marriage, also made an impact.

He speculates that Hispanic support comes from roots in nations where civil marriage and church marriage are separate, and couples marry at city hall before any church ceremony. They may see no conflict between civil and church marriage, he said.

Some evangelical leaders now acknowledge that people with an exclusively same-sex orientation can't change it, said Rev. Thompson, a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Now 38, he spent 15 years trying to change his orientation. Exodus International, which sponsored his support group, renounced such therapy last year and closed its doors last week.

Evangelical support for legal agreements, such as civil unions, that grant rights and responsibilities similar to marriage, was at 49 percent in the Pew survey. Overall, 67 percent of the public approved of such unions.

In 1997, the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, led by an archbishop who later served doctrinal guardian for Pope Benedict XVI, reached an accord with the city over same-sex health benefits. Employees could designate beneficiaries in their household, such as adult siblings or friends, whether or not the relationship was sexual.

But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops now opposes federal efforts to "incrementally erode marriage, including attempts to expand spousal benefits ... to persons of the same sex or other unmarried persons."

Mr. Rohrer, the former state legislator, is as opposed to alternative legal arrangements as to same-sex marriage.

"Government's interest is to not recognize any other substitute and thereby weaken the family, which weakens society, which weakens the nation."

Rev. Waun said, "People are treating this as a religious issue when it's a constitutional issue. We're talking about equality before the law. The church can decide what it wants to do. It doesn't have to perform gay weddings."

Clergy often refuse to officiate. Many rabbis won't marry a Jew to a non-Jew, for instance.

"The First Amendment ensures that no house of worship or clergy will ever be forced to marry anyone they do not want to, including same-sex couples," Mr. Wolfson said.


Other impacts on marriage

James Skillen is the retired president of The Center for Public Justice, the evangelical social justice lobby.

He believes that if the Supreme Court rules that same-sex marriage is a civil right, anti-discrimination statutes are likely to be amended. He cited Catholic social service agencies that ended adoptions because their state required them to consider same-sex adoptive parents.

"I'm against the whole idea of assuming that America should be a Christian culture," he said. "But the reality is that what people of faith will be allowed to do publicly will become narrower and narrower."

Mr. Skillen has long been on record in cautious support of a domestic partnership that would allow the designation of benefits to household members whether or not the relationship was sexual. But he is deeply concerned about same-sex marriage.

"Government doesn't create marriage and government doesn't define marriage," he said. It provided benefits only to strengthen society and protect children, he said.

He believes that developments since 1970, including test-tube babies and surrogate mothers, have weakened those protections and turned children into commodities. He expects same-sex civil marriage to further that trend. He said the battle against gay marriage was lost long ago when society failed to ask how the pregnancy industry redefined marriage and family.

"I think we will have a society in which marriage will mean less and less socially and morally," he said. "Government will become increasingly responsible for the unwanted children and for those turned back because the people changed their mind. They will pay a fine, but they won't have the police on their doorstep to make sure children are taken care of."

If same-sex marriage is ruled a civil right, "Then why shouldn't any combination of persons, whether same sex or opposite sex, be able to claim a right to call their relationship marriage? To insist on legalizing marriage only for twosomes would be ... arbitrary," he said.

No matter what the court rules, same-sex couples live openly now. When they move in next door, said Bishop David Zubik of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, they should be welcomed. Those who fear it sets a bad example for children, he said, "Any time that I act uncharitable toward someone, I'm setting a bad example. ... Sometimes people have a difference of opinion. But I think that can lead to a very fruitful discussion. It doesn't mean that people have to surrender their beliefs."


Ann Rodgers: arodgers@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1416.
First Published June 23, 2013 12:00 am


Source: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/region/christians-views-vary-on-gay-marriage-692745/#ixzz2X31vfUeX

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