http://lc.org/index.cfm?PID=17981
Are they serious?
http://lc.org/index.cfm?pid=17981.
are they serious?.
a new jail could be built in cornwall - 85 years after the the last one closed.. those behind the proposal say a prison is needed in the county because sending locals to jails outside of cornwall can strain inmates' family relationships.. a christian organisation is looking at the feasibility of building a faith-based private jail, run on christian ethics, to help rehabilitate inmates.. however, the prison service said it had "no current plans" to build faith-specific prisons in england and wales.. e sf the leaders of carpenters house project are now raising funds to provide a prison feasibility study and will then lodge their proposal with the government.. 'early days'.
if the proposal receives government backing, the next step would be to identify a suitable site in cornwall and then build the 50m jail.. cornwall's last prison, in bodmin, shut in 1927 and later became a tourist attraction.. the project, which it is hoped will also help to cut to re-offending, would see a voluntary in-house training course run in the jail for inmates which would be based on the bible and 10 commandments.. it would be spearheaded by the kainos community, a faith-based charity which has operated its challenge to change programme in jails for more than a decade.. during that time they claim to have cut re-offending rates among inmates they have worked with by 87% within two years of their release - the national average is 40%.. .
Plans for a faith-based prison have won the backing of the Bishop of Truro, the Quakers, as well as Baptist, Methodist and pentecostal churches in the county.
However, prisoners of all denominations could be sent to the prison.
Mike Critchley, chairman of the Carpenters House project, said: "...research has been ongoing for the last two years regarding the establishment of a prison in Cornwall run by the Christian community in the county.
"It is very early days but we continue to research the proposal which we trust will eventually see a facility built here."
A spokesman for the Prison Service said: "The National Offender Management Service (NOMS), which runs prisons in England and Wales for the Ministry of Justice, is aware of the initiative suggested by this group."
source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cornwall/8349863.stm
a new jail could be built in cornwall - 85 years after the the last one closed.. those behind the proposal say a prison is needed in the county because sending locals to jails outside of cornwall can strain inmates' family relationships.. a christian organisation is looking at the feasibility of building a faith-based private jail, run on christian ethics, to help rehabilitate inmates.. however, the prison service said it had "no current plans" to build faith-specific prisons in england and wales.. e sf the leaders of carpenters house project are now raising funds to provide a prison feasibility study and will then lodge their proposal with the government.. 'early days'.
if the proposal receives government backing, the next step would be to identify a suitable site in cornwall and then build the 50m jail.. cornwall's last prison, in bodmin, shut in 1927 and later became a tourist attraction.. the project, which it is hoped will also help to cut to re-offending, would see a voluntary in-house training course run in the jail for inmates which would be based on the bible and 10 commandments.. it would be spearheaded by the kainos community, a faith-based charity which has operated its challenge to change programme in jails for more than a decade.. during that time they claim to have cut re-offending rates among inmates they have worked with by 87% within two years of their release - the national average is 40%.. .
A new jail could be built in Cornwall - 85 years after the the last one closed.
Those behind the proposal say a prison is needed in the county because sending locals to jails outside of Cornwall can strain inmates' family relationships.
A Christian organisation is looking at the feasibility of building a faith-based private jail, run on Christian ethics, to help rehabilitate inmates.
However, the Prison Service said it had "no current plans" to build faith-specific prisons in England and Wales.
The leaders of Carpenters House project are now raising funds to provide a prison feasibility study and will then lodge their proposal with the government.
'Early days'
If the proposal receives government backing, the next step would be to identify a suitable site in Cornwall and then build the £50m jail.
Cornwall's last prison, in Bodmin, shut in 1927 and later became a tourist attraction.
The project, which it is hoped will also help to cut to re-offending, would see a voluntary in-house training course run in the jail for inmates which would be based on the Bible and 10 Commandments.
It would be spearheaded by the Kainos Community, a faith-based charity which has operated its Challenge to Change programme in jails for more than a decade.
During that time they claim to have cut re-offending rates among inmates they have worked with by 87% within two years of their release - the national average is 40%.
you know the standard jw doctrine, babylon the great, fall of jerusalem, kingship of david, jonah's life you name it, it has to have a "bigger completion" later.
some of these are actually mentioned in the bible - jesus being the bigger jonah, revelations mentioning the fall of babylon the great many years after the actuall babylon fell, jerusalem falling to babylon was just a precursor to jerusalem falling to the romans, which was just a precursor to... (what now?
meh... is old age creeping upon me?
The multiple fulfillment thing is not something the JWs came up with. It has involved the interpretation of "holy" writings since long ago (a fter all, their basic ambiguity makes it an easy exercise).
Typological exegesis was already a fundamental feature of the pesher literature from Qumran; indeed, the word pesher, “prophetic meaning”, suggests the belief that a text from the biblical period (previous "fulfillments" notwithstanding) anticipates events that would transpire much later (mostly in the Qumran community own time, of course).
For pesher, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesher
The early Christians did something similar when they "saw" ancient prophecies (or events) as referring to their Messiah and "saw" the OT as the preparation of the NT (i.e. apostle Paul - in Ephesians 5:31,32 - claiming that the union between man and woman in Genesis was a mysterious reference to the union between Christ and his Church).
BHUBANESWAR: Hundreds of villagers in Orissa's Kendrapada district have been worshipping a rare turtle since Thursday as it has eyes similar to that of a Hindu deity, a forest official said on Saturday.
The turtle was brought Thursday to Khadipala village, about 150 km from here, by Ramesh Patra from a nearby river. It has been kept in a village temple in a water container.
The residents lined up Friday and Saturday to have a glimpse of the turtle in the belief that it will bring good fortune.
"The villagers are worshipping the turtle because it has marks on its carapace which look similar to the eyes of lord Jagannath - the state's presiding deity," Patra said.
It is an Indian soft shell turtle - one of the most critically endangered species of fresh water turtles in the country - said a state forest department official.
In Hindu mythology, sea turtles are described as an incarnation of god.
"The turtle would be shifted to the Nandankanan zoo soon and would be conserved," the forest official said. The coastal district of Kendrapada is home to one of the world's largest rookeries of sea turtles.
http://www.marshfieldmail.com/articles/2009/11/07/news/doc4af0615bb4875749282473.txt.
http://www.fijitimes.com/story.aspx?id=133229.
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/paula_kirby/2009/10/morality_no_gods_required.html.
morality: no gods required begin blogger thumbs end blogger thumbs q: is there good without god?
can people be good without god?
Q: Is there good without God? Can people be good without God? How can people be good, in the moral and ethical sense, without being grounded in some sort of belief in a being which is greater than they are? Where do concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, come from if not from religion? From where do you get your sense of good and evil, right and wrong?
Can people be good if they don't think Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist in the English language? Or if they prefer cats to dogs? Or if they fail to resemble me in any other small detail? Ludicrously smug questions, of course, yet the religious never seem to blush when asking non-believers whether we can be good despite not sharing their peculiar beliefs.
And yet it is an important question for secularists to answer, because it is the myth that religious belief is somehow necessary for morality that is providing the life support for religion in many Western societies, long after we should have been reaching for the embalming fluid.
My sense of right and wrong comes from exactly the same source as yours: parental upbringing, society's norms, an evolved empathy with others.
There has been considerable research into this aspect of human existence, and what is emerging is a pretty clear rule-of-thumb: namely, in any community - of whatever race, social class or religious belief (or none) - 4 out of 5 people will generally obey society's rules and behave in ways considered to be 'moral', and 1 out of 5 won't.
There is an evolutionary explanation for this: we are dependent for our survival and well-being on the people around us. Most of us survive best when we are living harmoniously with others (i.e. not stealing, not killing, not harming them avoidably). Doing otherwise can have negative consequences: loss of life in some societies, loss of freedom in most, loss of respect and good standing in all. And most of us survive best when the people around us respect and like us, for the obvious reason that they are then more likely to help us if we need them to.
However, if someone is sufficiently devious, he may survive best by breaking, rather than obeying, the rules, because he may be less likely to get caught and less likely to have to face the negative consequences of his actions. This is the 1 in 5.
This has been tested in a host of different situations, environments and cultures, and has been found to be universally consistent. It is the same whether people are religious or not: there is no correlation between better behavior and belief in a deity.
Interestingly, the 4 in 5 people who are generally happy to obey society's rules cease being happy to do so if they see the 1 in 5 getting away with it. At that point, they become resentful and, significantly, less inclined to follow the rules themselves. Again, this has been shown to apply to the religious and non-religious alike. This is why most prison sentences carry an element of retribution and are not just intended to protect society from an offender's potentially harmful actions; it is why justice not only has to be done, but seen to be done.
From here it is not difficult to see where ideas about post-death retribution sprang from. 4 out of 5 of us feel the need to see wrong-doers punished for their actions. According to the Jewish biblical scholar Geza Vermes, in the earliest days of Judaism there was no belief in life after death, heaven or hell: they believed the claim in Deuteronomy that the righteous would be rewarded and the wicked punished during their lifetimes. It was only later, when it became patently obvious that this wasn't the case, that some Jews started to think that the promised reward or retribution must come after death. And so the Abrahamic tradition of heaven and hell was born - and was tremendously convenient to those trying to govern the masses, of course, because it declared: 'Don't even think of breaking the law, because even if we don't get you, God will.'
Convenient but superfluous, because all the research shows that atheists as well as believers all conform to the basic 4:1 ratio of moral vs amoral. Belief in divinely imposed rules and post-mortem punishment is not just silly in itself, but quite unnecessary in terms of upholding society's values. (Anyone interested in learning more about the 4:1 ratio will enjoy
&feature=PlayList&p=34FBAB97197AB401&index=19.)But there's more. Normal, healthy human beings feel empathy towards others: it has evolved with us and has been shown to be present in a range of other animals too. We have an overwhelming dislike of suffering ourselves, and our imaginations - which developed for other, survival-related purposes - allow us to feel other people's suffering and vicariously suffer with them. So 4 out of 5 of us simply don't want to cause others to suffer. Nothing to do with being made in the image of God, and everything to do with evolution and survival.
Humans have been around in their current form for the best part of 150,000 years. Judaism emerged about 4000 years ago. How could humans ever have managed to survive so long prior to the invention of the Abrahamic god if they needed belief in God to give them a sense of how to live together in their communities? If there wasn't a strong sense of acceptable and unacceptable behavior? The simple fact is that humans are social animals and our chances of survival are greatly enhanced when we abide by certain basic social norms. That is more than enough reason for a basic understanding and acceptance of those norms to be hardwired into us.
We do not need God in order to be moral. In fact, our innate moral instincts tell us that many of the acts and commands attributed to God are themselves morally repugnant. And most immoral of all is the Christian teaching that even a newborn baby is steeped in Original Sin and deserves to burn in hell for all eternity. Any philosophy that teaches us to view our fellow humans as inherently evil, especially if they do not subscribe to our own belief system, is actively dangerous and works against our ability to live together in harmony - and it is our need to do this which underlies all genuinely moral precepts and behaviour.
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/paula_kirby/2009/10/morality_no_gods_required.htmlmorality: no gods required begin blogger thumbs end blogger thumbs q: is there good without god?
can people be good without god?
how can people be good, in the moral and ethical sense, without being grounded in some sort of belief in a being which is greater than they are?