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GERMANY: MOVE TO TIGHTEN BLASPHEMY LAW Germany's Catholic hard-liners are fed up. Every time they want a blasphemer to be punished, they have to go out in the street, demonstrate, make scenes and disturb the public peace in order to mobilize the public prosecutor to file a case. This is not only exhausting and dangerous, sometimes all their efforts are not even successful! For example, in the case of the play "Corpus Christy", by theUSplaywright Terence McNally, which was performed in the city of Heilbronn this year. It infuriated fundamentalist Christians by presenting Jesus and his apostles as boozing homosexuals. They took to the streets and tried their best to disturb the public peace. To their utter disappointment, however, the public prosecutor refused to file charges against anybody involved in the production of the play since the play did not fulfill the requirements of the blasphemy law. Since then they feel the blasphemy law is good for nothing and has to be changed. The Christian Democratic Union(CDU)and its Bavarian sister Christian Social Union(CSU)are sounding the charge against blasphemers these days. They lament against an increase of blasphemous attacks against Christians inTV, radio, cinema and advertisement, and complain that religious freedom for Christians in Germany is in danger. They have prepared a draft legislation to be discussed in the Upper House of the parliament, the Bundestag, in order to tighten paragraph 166 of the German penal code. In its current form, the blasphemy paragraph 166 foresees punishments of fines or prison up to three years for those who "insult publicly or by distribution of writings the contents of creed or ideology (Weltanschauung) of othersin a way that is suitable to disturb the public peace." The new hard-liner initiative wants to change this. They want to cut all references to public peace and to get the state to become active by itself. A change of legislation, according to the proposed draft, would mean a major shift. If the value protected by the state is no longer "public peace" but "religious belief", Germany would join the ranks of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. Interestingly, the German blasphemy law goes back to the year 538C.E(Justinian's Novelle 77), in which Christian religion was made state religion. In its present form it was established in 1933 in the Concordat between Hitler and Pope Pius XII.
BRITAIN: PSYCHIC TEST FAILS TO PROVE ESP Telepathy is once again exposed as bunkum. There have already been telepathy studies carried out in the past, using pairs of volunteers. But this was the first psychic mass experiment employing large numbers of "senders". It failed in its purpose of demonstrating the existence of extra-sensory perception. In the first mass experiment, hundreds of members of the public focussed during the trials at the Museum of the Unknown in London at a giant projected image and attempted to transmit it physically to one person. For each of the 10 experiments, images were projected on walls for around 30 seconds to observe and attempt to transmit them with their extra sensory perception. The "receivers" were out of sight, had eyes and ears covered to achieve sensory isolation and were connected to the crowd via an audio link. When the "receivers" in the 10 experiments were asked to pick the correct image from four photographs, they got even fewer right than could be attributed to pure chance. "We tried an idea and it did not work", said Dr. Richard Wiseman, experiment head and expert in paranormal experiments. Dr. Wiseman heads the Perrot-Warrick Research Unit at the University of Herfordshire, UK. This unit carries out skeptical research into evidence relating to paranormal and promotes the public understanding of science. In November 1999, Dr. Wiseman was awarded Britain's first Readership in the Public Understanding of Psychology.
BRITAIN: WILL SANTA CLAUS WEAR A BISHOP'S ROBES? Santa Claus, the central character of the Christmas celebrations, who developed into a secular myth, may soon get a bishop's robes in Anglican strongholds. As it is almost hopeless to reinstall Jesus Christ as the central figure of the Winter Solstice celebrations, Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey and other senior members of the Church of England are backing a move by Christian zealots to end the "cult of Father Christmas." A major strategy identified by the newly established St. Nicholas Society, based in the Diocese of London, would be to present the friendly mythological Father Christmas as a fourth century bishop renowned for his generosity. "It is time for Father Christmas to get out of his elf's costume and back into his religious robes", said Jim Rosenthal, the director of communication for the Worldwide Anglican Communion and the founder of the St. Nicholas Society. The society's efforts would be to promote more recognition to the Feast of St. Nicholas that falls on 6 December and to see that Britain falls in line with nations such as Belgium, The Netherlands and Russia which give the religious figure St. Nicholas priority over Santa Claus, the secular Christmas Father. Santa Claus owes his current robes and its design from the soft drink giant Coca-Cola, which redesigned him in the 1940's for a promotion campaign.
IRAN: DISSIDENT CLERIC STARTS CYBER WAR Hossein Ali Montazeri, 79, dissident Iranian cleric, who had been once chosen to succeed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, last week dropped a bombshell by publishing a 600-page memoir on an internet site, provoking a cyber war with the fundamentalist leadership of Tehran. Montazeri has been living under house arrest in Qom, south of Tehran, ever since he was forced to resign weeks before Khomeini's death in 1989. Montazeri, a fierce opponent of Iran's current supreme spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been successful in making his opinions heard from time to time despite the arrest and curtails on Freedom of Speech in the fundamentalist state. The memoir provides important testimony to some of the most dramatic moments of the Islamic revolution and the war with Iraq. Montazeri writes in his memoir, among other things of interest, how he tried in 1988 to prevent the execution of thousands of opponents to the Khomeini regime. The memoir of Hossein Ali Montazeri is written in Persian language and is available at www.montazeri.com
RUSSIA: CONTROVERSY OVER RE-REGISTRATION OF RELIGIONS An effort to regularize mainstream religions and to keep off small churches from recognition has triggered off a bitter controversy in Russia. Only 56 per cent of about 17,500 mutually fighting and competing religious organizations, registered under a 1991 law on religion had been re-registered by July, under a stricter 1997 law, recognizing only four traditional religions, including Orthodoxy, Judaism, Buddhism and Islam. Though more recent figures are not available, perhaps thousands of religious groups are facing disbandment, as they can't meet a December 31 deadline. Small churches of religious organizations new to Russia are likely to be degraded as groups. Now, often they are described as 'sects'. They would lose their right to hold services in public, distribute literature, own property or invite foreign guests under the new religious law. Who is recognized, and who not, is decided by the small religious group's proximity to the leadership of the powerful Russian Orthodox Church, accused leaders of some religious groups, who are not in the good books of the mainstream religion. Many religious leaders have accused the regional authorities to deliberately delaying the re-registration, in collusion with the predominant Russian Orthodox Church.
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