Thursday 28th of March 2024

outrageous...

exemptionexemption

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Australian government granted exemptions for 75 foreign nationals with critical skills in religion or theology to enter the country in the first half of this year.

The Department of Home Affairs confirmed it issued the travel exemptions under the critical skills category, using the codes for minister of religion or religious assistant.

Travel exemptions are required for anyone who is not a citizen or permanent resident to enter Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic. About 20,000 were issued between January and June this year overall, mostly in the critical skills category.

The category of expertise in “religious or theology fields” was added to the list of critical skills in August last year.

 

One of the exemptions was for Bishop Mykola Bychok, the new “eparch” or head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania.

He was appointed by Pope Francis in January 2020 and ordained as bishop in a ceremony in Europe in June 2020 but it took another year to organise the visa, travel exemption and flight to Australia.

After quarantine in Sydney, Bishop Bychok was finally installed as eparch in a ceremony in Melbourne earlier this month.

Representatives from other Christian denominations and other religions mostly say they have not used the exemptions for visiting clergy and religious assistants.

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/dozens-of-religious-clergy-and-assistants-granted-travel-exemptions-to-enter-australia-20210724-p58ciw.html

 

 

musings with stan...

 

George Harrison, the most philosophical Beatle and a devotee of Eastern mysticism, famously wrote: "All things must pass." 

How might we cling to that sense of hope, as COVID lockdown drags on again? To whom do we turn to help us try to navigate these times?

Maybe Harrison's optimism does it for you. Or perhaps your mood, like mine, more often runs to Harrison's great friend Bob Dylan: "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."

There is certainly nothing new under the sun; we have been here before. Tough times pose big questions of existence: the meaning of life, how we approach death, our responsibility to others, the nature of freedom.

 

As Ancient Rome was devastated by a plague that killed at least five million people, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius penned his famous Meditations, a stoic philosophy of accepting what you cannot change.

Stoicism also cautions us that we can become paralysed with fear — that fear itself can be greater than reality.

The Emperor, surrounded by death, told us that it is not death we should fear, rather we "should fear never beginning to live". 

Marcus Aurelius has much to teach us in our own time of "plague". With millions of people locked down, liberty and freedom sacrificed to beating the pandemic, how do we accept what is beyond our control?

How do we not fall prey to fear when all we hear is a drumbeat of doom and a daily roll call of new COVID cases?

 What price will we pay for lockdowns?

Science has extended our life expectancy to the point where we can almost think ourselves immortal, yet paradoxically we also seem to fear and hide from the only thing that is inevitable: death itself.

Baruch Spinoza said: "The free person thinks least of all of death." A free person, he said, "is not lead by fear ... wisdom is a meditation on life".

Today so many of us are shut away from each other; alive, yes, if not fully living.

Hannah Arendt, in her book Men in Dark Times warned us against such isolation. She reminds us that to the Ancient Romans to live was "to be among people", to die was "to cease to be among people".

She said we can become "expelled" or "withdrawn" from the world, we "hole up in the refuge of one's psyche", lose our "humanness" and forsake "reality".

How many people now are locked away, refuge in our own psyche, distracted, frustrated, angry, lonely, bored? As Arendt put it, "in the soundless dialogue of the I with itself"?

Where is our humanness? And what is the price we will pay?

These are not questions for daily news but they will resonate long beyond the headlines.

Arendt wrote about the rise of the Nazis and how too many people turned their eyes from the unfolding horror. They stopped asking questions. Especially in dark times, Arendt says, we should ask questions, think and put our thoughts into action.

How would Arendt have seen COVID and lockdown? She may well have supported the necessity of lockdown but not isolation. She certainly would have warned against creeping authoritarianism, encouraged us to ask questions, challenge what we are told and to think with compassion.

To think and to question is to pursue truth — the great defence against tyranny — yet Arendt cautioned that even when it comes to science, "truths are never final", they are always being revised.

'Fear is the name we give to uncertainty'

Truth is often no match for fear. The resistance or hesitancy to the AstraZeneca vaccine is a case in point.

The tiny risk of death from the vaccine shot has scared otherwise rational people away from the overwhelming benefits of getting the jab.

Zygmunt Bauman calls this "liquid fear" — diffuse, scattered, unclear: we are "haunted" by this fear. "Fear", he writes, "is the name we give to our uncertainty; to our ignorance".

Philosophers Dan Dagerman, Matthew Flinders and Matthew Thomas Johnson, in their study In Defence of Fear: COVID-19, Crises and Democracy, write that we live in an age of fear: ...

 

Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-25/philosophers-might-help-through-covid-dark-days-lockdown/100317978

 

Gus: We've been living in the age of deceit, ignorance and fear for a long time... For many years it was the "fear of god" (deceit and ignorance being fostered on the populaces)... Then when this was loosing traction, "god became the god of love", other fears had to be created: The Ruskies, the Chinese, the plague, death, life itself, mice, wolves, our own selves, the falling skies, the weather, climate change, fear itself, a bus on the loose...

 

Piss god off and do something about whatever, until we can do nothing about it.

 

Gus is a rabid atheist... Read from top.

 

See also: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/fbi-using-the-same-fear-tactic-from

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

god is an atheist...

 

Although many religious leaders have reportedly welcomed Facebook’s attention at a time when worshippers are forced to stay at home, some users voiced concerns over the privacy of prayer posts, the potential exploitation of their spirituality, or how “icky” the whole thing felt.

“Anytime Facebook rolls out something new, you know it’s because they are hoping to make money off it... to eventually sell you something, somehow,” Simcha Fisher, a member of a Catholic women’s Facebook Group, told Reuters.

The majority of social media users echoed that sentiment, with some people claiming that they did not think the platform could “get any creepier” while another person claimed Facebook was being “subtle and crafty” for “easing into the one world religion through desensitization and deception.”

 

Others said the episode reminded them why they had left the platform, with one person who recently quit Facebook noting that this would have been the last straw if they were still undecided about leaving.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/529971-prayer-tool-personalized-ads/

 

Read from top.

Preachers please note: GOD DOESN'T EXIST. 

 

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