Indian Man Charged With Blasphemy For Exposing "Miracle"

bhagwad writes "When a statue in Mumbai began to miraculously drip tears, huge crowds began to gather, pray, and collect the water in vials. Sanal Edamaruku has exposed such bogus miracles before, and when he was called in, his investigations showed that it was nothing more than a nearby drainage. The entire investigation was caught on tape. The priests were outraged and demanded an apology. When he refused, a case of 'blasphemy' was registered at the police station and they now want to have him arrested." In related news, today Kuwait's parliament "passed amendments to the Gulf state's penal code stipulating the death penalty for those who curse God, Islam's Prophet Mohammed or his wives." However, they made no change to the penalty for playing a joke national anthem at a sporting event.

Re:Tennessee Theocracy

[bobwrit]

This isn't the first time that Tennessee has taken an anti-science position either. The unfortunate thing is, it's not the only state moving in that direction. A few years ago, I remember Texas was thinking of doing the same. The larger issue with Texas doing that, however, is that Texas happens to be of of the main producers of school text books in the US. I, personally, use that piece to explain why the US is so lacking in science education- the people writing the text books are under heavy theocratic control :(

Re:Blashphemy???

[Frankie70]

If you RTFA, you will know that it happened in a Christian church in Mumbai.

Re:Blashphemy???

[Black Parrot]

I'll happily take some elephant worshipers over these psycho zombie worshiping cannibals.

Dude, zombies are cool these days. Don't you ever watch television?

Re:Cradle of Civilization My Ass

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't find this news on any indian news site (timesofindia, rediff, ibnlive). Where does this blog writer get his news from?

Only Fools and Horses did this

[Noughmad]

Drops of water on a holy statue? Sounds just like the Miracle of Peckham [wikipedia.org].

Re:Hopefully

[niftydude]

I have NEVER heard a Christian claim that dinos never existed. Nice straw man.

Actually, a Jehovah's witness who knocked on my door barely couple of weeks ago said exactly that. She completely refused to believe in any kind of evolution at all.

Normally I'd say you have to get out more if you want to meet these people with all sorts of weird and wonderful beliefs, but in this case the crazies came to me.

Re:Hopefully

[Dr_Barnowl]

Not a straw man [grumpydaddy.net], there are those Christians that claim that archaeologists who find dinosaur skeletons are the equivalent of modern day cryptozoologists who use hybrid taxidermy to support their claims. The more sophisticated dino-deniers believe that dinosaur fossils are a test of faith [claudemariottini.com], and presumably take the fact that they fit so perfectly into the fossil record without a trace of scientific incongruity as evidence that their deity is almighty and powerful enough to fake evidence really well.

There's also those who claim that dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans and are mentioned in the bible [clarifying...ianity.com], despite this argument being easily refuted by geological dating of the rocks the fossils are found in.

Re:Such a non-story

[orzetto]

You do realise the current white-clad wizard in the Vatican had quite a career in the Inquisition [wikipedia.org], and that during that period he actively pursued a policy of hiding from the public eye priests that raped children, moving them to other parished where they would keep raping children, so that the good name of the Vatican would not be blemished? That guy does not get anything of public relations.

Re:Hopefully

[grege1]

This must be Australia corner. Our Prime Minister is female, single, childless and an atheist. When such a person could be elected as the president of the USA I will believe in faeries at the bottom of the garden. The mad monk can keep the crap he is trying to import from American politics.

Re:What the fuck, article headline?

[sjames]

Yesterday (10th April,2012) Sanal received a phone call from a Police official of Juhu Police Station in Mumbai directing him to come to the said police station to face the charges and get arrested.

Seems fairly serious to me.

Re:Hopefully - HA!

[Grishnakh]

You're confusing your Christians. The young-earth Creationists are fundamentalists, not Catholic. The Catholics may be many things (cough*child molesters*cough), but they're not fundamentalists like that. Catholicism takes the Bible, and adds a bunch of extra stuff they call "revealed knowledge" and a lot of other odd practices and ideas, like transubstantiation (the idea that the crackers are the real body of Christ), confession, the idea that people can't talk directly to God but must instead use a Priest as an intermediary (this I think was dropped in more recent history), praying to Saints to ask them to talk to God on your behalf, etc.; the Protestants, when they broke off, largely rejected all this extra stuff; they have varied beliefs, but I don't believe any of them believe in transubstantiation. The fundamentalists take it even further and proclaim the Bible as the complete, inerrant word of God and that it must be read literally. Then of course there's the Mormons, who believe in the Bible the way the regular Protestants do for the most part, but then they add a whole new book about Jesus coming to visit a bunch of fictional civilizations in the Americas before Europeans got there, and then they added another book (Abraham) about how God lives on the planet Kolob, and how good Mormons will become gods when they die and get their own planets to rule over.

Anyway, as far as I know, the only Christians that believe the earth is 6000 years old and that dinosaurs either never existed, or co-existed with humans and were wiped out in Noah's flood, are all of the extreme fundamentalist variety. While these sects are rare in the rest of the Christian world, here in the USA they're a large and fast-growing number.

Re:Hook on Opiates

[Barsteward]

actually Catholic priests, the ones that think child abuse is on the same level as having women priests.

Re:Not really

[Reservoir Penguin]

The Catholic church now officially accepts the Scientific model of the world almost completely including the Big bang and origin of species through Evolution. To mainstream Christians American version of Christianity now seems like a different religion from another planet, only superficially sharing rituals with the rest of the Christian churches.

Re:Hopefully

[digitig]

The world is rapidly going the other way. Back in the 60s and 70s people thought that The Age of Reason had won and we could move into the future with hope. Now reason is under attack from the religions of the world.

Nope. Some people did, but others thought it was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and a revival of spirituality. Many of those folks rejected science as being a force for evil -- there was a massive anti-science swing in the 1960s. Turn off your nostalgia filter and you'll find that there was no golden age.

Re:Hopefully

[doublebackslash]

Atheism is being against religion while Agnosticism is having no religion.

I'm sorry, but that isn't correct. Atheism is simply asserting that there is no god. Agnosticism is a harder one to define but it is (in VERY brief) the idea that though there could be something beyond the mortal ken the details of it aren't anything more than pure speculation.

There are many shades of Agnosticism but there is only one of Atheism and that is "There is nothing supernatural." There is nothing in that statement that attacks anyone. People just feel attacked by it. I don't claim to understand why.

Re:Sounds like they'd be right at home in the GOP

[Moryath]

Mormons [wikipedia.org].

Mormonism to this day insists the following things:
- Women cannot ascend to the "highest level" unless dragged there attached to a man.
- Women cannot enter the priesthood
- The primary way for Mormon women to become "garmented" is through not just being married, but bearing children.

The phenomenon of women as workers in society under Brigham Young came about SOLELY because women began to outnumber the men in large number, due to the practices necessary to send young men away from the society in order to ensure enough young, unmarried women desperate enough to become married that they could be given to the old pervs of the Mormon hierarchy as second, third, fourth, or higher number wives as a form of enslavement. From a visit by Sir Richard Burton to the Mormons: "The motive for polygamy in Utah is economy. Servants are rare and costly; it is cheaper and more comfortable to marry them."

You sound like a fucking mor(m)on who doesn't understand the LDS "religion."

Re:Sounds like they'd be right at home in the GOP

[Moryath]

Oh, and:

Here, educate yourself [exmormon.org].