From Hell's Heart of the New West, I Stab At Thee

I'll preface this up front by stating Halloween and Days of the Dead is/are my favorite social celebration/s of the year. It's a momentary departure from how one is told one *should* behave that not only permits but encourages all ages to celebrate colour, imagination, magic, What-if, the fantastic, the unknown, the untouchable, pageantry, debauchery, overdose of sugarbombs liquid and solid, heros, villains, ancestors, and anything else you can cram into it.

The fiestas are the breath between Harvest's closing and hopefully fat moments, and the shadows veiling the next Harvest, reminding us the only true certainty in the future is Death and if we don't laugh about it, we'll cry.

Having so much fun contemplating altered states and mortality apparently drives 'serious' religionists bats. And when they insist on being serious in Alberta, I get to hear about it as if it's news. Welcome to Jeesusween . Not as fun as you'd think.

Aside from the 'what marketing genius thought up the name so the rest of us can point and laugh', it's sadly apparent that the pastor doesn't seem to understand the Christian origin of Halloween. Note, I didn't say origin of Samhain, I said Halloween, or All Hallows Evening, the un-fun night before the amazingly un-fun All Saints/Hallows Day. No, not Harry Potter's Deathly Hallows. That would be *fun*. Yet another church day invented by the Catholics to usurp the pre-Christian Roman Empire rituals of the 'Celtic' calendar, in this case, their New Year.

You'd think Christians would at least know their own history but perhaps that far back is too papal. All I really know is, when the Christian Hellhouses started up in righteous moral opposition to the demonic influences of 'secular' Halloween, it was easy to see the teenagers allowed to take part were diving into the grislier parts of their horror show with nearly secular glee. They truly found their inner Grand Guignol in depicting the sins and punishments of Hell. Medieval as H..all get out.

Trust Alberta to come up with a version that will suck even that much life out of the experience for kids and everyone around them. This October 31st, I could find adults using kids as their stalking horses, planting them on doorsteps with some version of Christian bibles and 'sharing the Word'.

From "Benefits" at the darling website...

"The children coming out to give the bibles will do it with excitement. They will not feel deprived as they will be coming out like other kids to give the Word to people. They will definitely be received by families as it is just natural not to turn a child down. The children will understand from an early age that it is fun to give the Word."

And if that isn't enough, just think of the fun on the faces of the children receiving bibles and other heartwarming Christian paraphenalia in their treat bags when visiting a Jesusweenie household. I mean, really? Not even a chocolate Jesus?

Fun. I do not think this word means what you think it means. Also, too, Jesusweenies? Stating "The dictionary meaning of Ween is to expect, believe or think"...

a/doesn't make it so no matter how much you want to retroactively try to make it sound like you meant it that way and scavenging a dictionary for justification is just *low*. If you came clean and stopped doubling down, you wouldn't have to resort to JesusWin as the hep backup name.

b/isn't where Ween comes from in relation to Halloween, hence apparently requiring you to spout what Word Detective encounters all too often in etymology; 'common sense' interpretation of origin. How's that working out for you around evolution again? I mean, why not just say Jesus'een? or better yet and this is after three seconds contemplation on my atheist part, Nazar'een...wait...why am I helping you? You're accomplishing all I can ask of a Christian 'outreach'.

Happy Halloween, Pastor Paul.

In 1 ... 2 ... 3 .... Shrieeek!

This was completely predictable, of course.

A Senior Vatican figure, Spanish Cardinal Antonio Canizares, prefect for the Congregation of the Divine Worship, this week appeared to downplay the findings of the Ryan report when suggesting that the millions of lives lost through abortion represent a much more serious crime against humanity than clerical sex abuse.

How candid. Feminazis that we are here at DAMMIT JANET! we thought that the logic behind his statement deserved a closer look.

Oh, looky here.

Christine Buckley, barely a month old was found guilty of being the child of an unwed mother. For decades, such “sins” were sufficient to land children — and more than 30,000 others — in workhouse-style schools for girls and boys run by the
Roman Catholic Church.

At such schools, according to a long-awaited report Wednesday, children were beaten, sexually abused and emotionally terrorized for more than half a century.

A “culture of silence” protected victimizers rather than the children in their care — consigning generations of Ireland’s poorest children to misery, Ireland’s Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse has concluded. ...

These are some of the findings of the controversial 2,600-page report unveiled in Dublin on Wednesday after a nine-year investigation. Drawing on the testimony of nearly 2,000 witnesses, men and women who attended more than 200 Catholic-run schools from the 1930s to the 1990s, the commission painted a damning picture of a church engaged too often in covering up misdeeds instead of rooting out their perpetrators.

The panel found that sexual molestation was “endemic,” committed by offenders who were often transferred to other institutions rather than dismissed or turned over to authorities. ...The five-volume report is a major blow for a religious institution that continues to wield significant influence on Irish society, especially on moral issues such as divorce and abortion.

Nonetheless, it wasn’t tough enough for some of the victims who lobbied long and hard for an official investigation. Many are angry that the report includes no names of alleged offenders, an omission that one of the religious orders under investigation fought for — and won — in court. Only pseudonyms are used, making slim the chances of criminal prosecution based on the report’s findings.

“I do genuinely believe that it would have been a further step towards our healing if our abusers had been named and shamed,” said Buckley, now 62.

She spent the first 18 years of her life in a Dublin orphanage where she said children were forced to manufacture rosaries — and were humiliated, beaten and raped whether they achieved their quota or not.

Rosaries, hmmm. Who knew the Vatican Taliban was concerned with the loss of enslaved child-labour in Ireland? It's no wonder then that Blob Blogging Wingnut is so ecstatic about the growing encroachment of Catholicism in China. If "sinful" women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, then it would certainly be financially salutory for such children born "in sin" to labour in rosaries-manufacturing sweat-shops run by the Catholic Church - covertly of course.

Cruelty-free chocolate tastes better.

There are hard questions regarding chocolate that go beyond whether one first chomps on the ears or the tail of a chocolate Easter bunny.

Questions around provenance, for example. Nestle and Lindt, two major players in the global production of commercial chocolate purchase cocoa crops from densely planted, heavily fertilised and pesticide-sprayed plantations in Ivory Coast, Ghana, Malaysia and Brazil.

But far more serious is the issue of child slave labour.

... the big household names, such as Cadbury Schweppes, Mars and Nestle, refuse to speak individually on the thorny issue of child labour. They describe it as an "industry" issue. They say they are setting up a trust foundation and that surveys have been commissioned. They've also signed an international protocol.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) reports that

... 30% of children under age 15 in sub-Saharan Africa engage in child labor, mostly in agricultural activities including cocoa farming. Of the 200,000 children working in the Ivory Coast cocoa industry, the ILO claims - a maximum of 6% (12,000 children) may be victims of human trafficking or slavery.

Fair trade chocolate products can be found everywhere nowadays; there were even Green & Black tablets on sale at the local Blockbuster recently. An important aspect of fair trade is offering the farmers an opportunity to also participate in the transformation process, which creates more jobs in addition to those dedicated to agriculture employment. Fairly traded chocolate are available from Cocoa Camino (from La Siembra, Canada's largest fair trade chocolate company), Dagoba and others, here.

Another concern, but not as pressing from an ethical and human rights perspective is the ongoing debate among European Union governments and their chocolate producers regarding changes to chocolate purity standards.

How much vegetable fat -- other than cocoa butter -- can you put in chocolate and still call it chocolate? ... The EU's chocolate debate pits eight purist nations against seven that take a relaxed view of chocolate. Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, Germany, Greece and the Netherlands ban cocoa-butter substitutes in chocolate. The others [are] Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, Austria, Finland and Switzerland ...

With respect to fairly traded and organic chocolates, regulating whether products are adulterated with GMO soya, canola or corn oil, for example, is not as urgent a matter since farming and manufacturing practices are transparent and open to accountability.