Get Cynical

From the Times Online:

Barefoot and wearing a sari, with a bindi on her forehead and a naked baby on her shoulder, the woman in the picture is unmistakably Indian. So is the man behind her, clad in a loincloth and turban.

They could be any poor family in an Indian village, or at one of the country’s teeming railway stations. This, however, is no ordinary family.

The image is one of the Virgin Mary with Joseph and the baby Jesus in the first “Indianised” version of the Bible, published by the Roman Catholic Church last month.

The New Community Bible is part of an attempt by the Vatican to attract more converts in the world’s second-most populous country as congregations decline in Europe and North America.

“I am sure this Bible, made in India and for Indians, will bring the word of God closer to millions of our people, not only Christians,” Oswald Gracias, the Archbishop of Bombay, said at a ceremony on the Bible’s release.

Update:

Comment of the week from Inti:

Jesus took a papadum, and said, Take, eat, this papadum is my body.
And he took the glass of mango lassi, and he said, drink, this mango lassi is my blood.

From the Mormon Times:

Already in several states, there are textbooks for children in the earliest grades that show “gay marriages” as normal. How long do you think it will be before such textbooks become mandatory — and parents have no way to opt out of having their children taught from them?

And if you choose to home-school your children so they are not propagandized with the “normality” of “gay marriage,” you will find more states trying to do as California is doing — making it illegal to take your children out of the propaganda mill that our schools are rapidly becoming.

How dangerous is this, politically? Please remember that for the mildest of comments critical of the political agenda of homosexual activists, I have been called a “homophobe” for years.

This is a term that was invented to describe people with a pathological fear of homosexuals — the kind of people who engage in acts of violence against gays. But the term was immediately extended to apply to anyone who opposed the homosexual activist agenda in any way.

A term that has mental-health implications (homophobe) is now routinely applied to anyone who deviates from the politically correct line. How long before opposing gay marriage, or refusing to recognize it, gets you officially classified as “mentally ill”?

Remember how rapidly gay marriage has become a requirement. When gay rights were being enforced by the courts back in the ’70s and ’80s, we were repeatedly told by all the proponents of gay rights that they would never attempt to legalize gay marriage.

No matter how sexually attracted a man might be toward other men, or a woman toward other women, and no matter how close the bonds of affection and friendship might be within same-sex couples, there is no act of court or Congress that can make these relationships the same as the coupling between a man and a woman.

This is a permanent fact of nature.

If you’re against gay marriage, marry someone of the opposite sex. Why try to prevent two people who love each other from marrying just because you feel icky about it?

From Slate:

A hot dog from Yankee Stadium. Potato latkes from the Four Seasons in Manhattan. Sirloin steak at Applebee’s. The jumbo cheeseburger at the University of Iowa Hospital. While it would seem these menu items have nothing in common, they’re all from Sysco, a Houston-based food wholesaler. This top food supplier serves nearly 400,000 American eating establishments, from fast-food joints like Wendy’s, to five-star eating establishments like Robert Redford’s Tree Room Restaurant, to mom-and-pop diners like the Chatterbox Drive-In, to ethnic restaurants like Meskerem Ethiopian restaurant. Even Gitmo dishes out food from Sysco. Should you worry that one source dominates so much of what you eat?

(via Gerry Canavan)

I was wondering why they were building a stage across from Peet’s. I’m not sure it will beat Wednesday’s entertainment in that park when a homeless guy kept flinging cigarette butts at pedestrians but it might be worth it if you’re in the area.

(This is still my favorite)

(via Miss Cellania)

Thanks to Flaming Atheist and the Cat Adoption Team in Oregon for today’s guest cat blogging. If you’re interested in adopting a cat and live in or close enough to Oregon, take a look at what the Cat Adoption Team has to offer.

I present to you Marquez! He’s an oriental/tabby mix and besides being a little cross eyed he also has alopecia and gets little bald spots but is otherwise healthy and playful. He (and over 200 other kitties) is available for adoption from the Cat Adoption Team, the Northwest’s largest feline shelter. www.catadoptionteam.org

Safe for work.
(via Clusterflock)

From Slate:

Attention abuse is certainly one way to describe the on-screen tumult that is by now a summer multiplex ritual and that increasingly suggests even more aggressive terms than Murch’s. (Try pureed instead of tossed.) In last year’s The Bourne Ultimatum, directed by shaky-cam virtuoso Paul Greengrass, the action often approximates epilepsy (and, according to some, induced motion sickness). This year, the murky, jerky aesthetic dominates the whiz-bang scenes in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Despite general enthusiasm for the movie’s pop-Nietzschean gloom, some critics have grumbled about the blink-and-miss-it action, especially the sequences of hand-to-hand combat. “Nolan appears to have no clue how to stage or shoot action,” David Edelstein wrote in New York magazine, complaining that it was impossible to make “spatial sense” of some of the fight scenes. Even in her New York Times rave, Manohla Dargis noted that the finale was “at times visually incoherent.”