Posted on 11/13/2009 5:37:11 AM PST by marshmallow
The Greek Orthodox Church is urging Christians across Europe to unite in an appeal against a ban on crucifixes in classrooms in Italy.
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled last week that the presence of crucifixes violated a child's right to freedom of religion.
Greece's Orthodox Church fears the Italian case will set a precedent.
It has called an emergency Holy Synod meeting for next week to devise an action plan.
Although the Greek Orthodox Church has been at odds with Roman Catholicism for 1,000 years, the judicial threat to Christian symbols has acted as a unifying force.
The European Court of Human Rights found that the compulsory display of crucifixes violated parents' rights to educate their children as they saw fit and restricted the right of children to believe or not to believe.
'Worthy symbols'
The head of the Greek Church, Archbishop Ieronymos, shares Catholic complaints that the court is ignoring the role of Christianity in forming Europe's identity.
It is not only minorities that have rights but majorities as well, said the archbishop.
One of his subordinates, Bishop Nicholas from central Greece, lamented that at this rate youngsters will not have any worthy symbols at all to inspire and protect them.
Football and pop idols are very poor substitutes, he said.
The Greek Church has ostensibly intervened in this case in response to an appeal by a Greek mother whose son is studying in Italy.
But without doubt it is concerned that its omnipotence in Greece is under threa
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
No, probably because no one really tried seriously to overthrow the government or incite rebellion lately.
apologies for double post
“They are free to leave the EU. They should have thought of these things when they decided to join the EU. Thye know what the EU constitution says.”
Well, the EU Constitution may or may not require that, say, Poland, dispense with crucifixes or Greece with icons. But otherwise, Alex, Kosta is right.
Condolences on that position. Good luck; the powers that be are attempting to lower the standard of living for everyone. My sister is a contract programming manager and manages to telecommute most of the time. A lot cheaper, too. The best of luck.
Two things that you said are correct, but do not address the issue. Schools are unlike parks but they are, like a park, public places. In fact, they are the public places where the presence of religion is more important than parks, because we get our education primarily in schools and not in parks. Nor are parks in the formerly free West any less despotically regulated by Atheists than schools. Second, we are called to private prayer as well as public ministry. I speak of the latter without addressing the former. Yes, most fervently we must privately pray for the protection of the religious freedom, restoration of the right to publicly practice religion, and return to sanity in education and immigration.
The rest is wrong, at least in the implication. I do call for ghettoization, but this is the process that is happening naturally whenever the individuals have the freedom and ability to move around. That is precisely because with geographical separation comes an ability to do what all religions rightly demand: public practice. I do not call for restriction of minority rights, individual or communal. I do not call for sedition at all, or for a departure from the original American system where people moved around and formed religiously homogenous communities all the time, and religion was a public affair. I do indeed call for rupturing all ties some mislead Euriopean countries have, to the EU as an evil insititution. If you mean “sedition” in the sense “from the EU” then it is an unusual terminology, but the issue is hardly novel: the whole EU empire hardly emerged and already is dictating people what to hang on school walls. The sooner Europe wakes up and blows that monster to smithereens the better.
The recession (if that's the right word) changed that landscape. It might work in niches or for established relationships when the principal and the hired telecommunter know and trust each other. In fact, I worked as an independent contractor for a long time in the 90s and rarely had to leave my house.
Today, contract work that is advertized, is all on site. The difference between conract and direct hire is that with direct hire the company looks for personality as well as for skill sets as they contemplate eventual promotions to leadership. Contract work is more narrowly focused on the skills. The wages are pretty much equalized, contract or W2.
The numbers that I have heard explain why the programmer has little leverage. A job posting generates hundreds of resumes that pass the initial automated screening for busswords. A job posting in a well-known company like Microsoft generates thousands. It is worse in California, where a lot of them are. Here, the hiring managers advertise everything and a kitchen sink as required skills, apparently in order to get precisely the profile they want.
Here's an example:
Skills:Basically, they want someone their direct competitor just laid off. They may get that, too as the big name companies shed employees by the thousand, often without regard for professional ability.
· Strong background in C coding, especially product coding, stack codes. Along with Block level data movement and Block to filesystem translation
· Strong demonstrated knowledge of multi-threading, socket programming, RPC, TCP/IP and interprocess communication is a must.
· Strong analytical and debugging skills for trouble shooting and root causing bugs and customer issues.
· Experience implementing for large scale Enterprise wide distributed systems
· In-depth demonstrated operating system knowledge of UNIX (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and Linux) and WINDOWS
· Experience with Filers and NAS devices technologies is a plus.
· Experience with Database technologies is a plus.
· Understanding of CIFS, NFS, SAN, DAS, NAS and Clustering, Storage devices, Disk.
· Knowledge of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAP, XML)
buzzwords.
In my previous, I forgot to mention that if a programming job can be done remotely, it can be done remotely from China or India, at a fraction of the cost.
This basically devastated the telecommuting developer market. The projects that remain staffed by Americans are all tied to something that cannot be moved: hardware development, defense department work, client-facing design work on fluid specs. Surely, once things get going one can carve out homework projects for a day or two and telecommute, but frequent lab presence is typically necessary.
Recruiters that I talk to daily often sound like they work from home. That, indeed, is quite possible. So does your sister have a contract work for me? C/C++ Unix or Windows, lots of experience in diverse environments, good references, solid right wing credentials, Catholic work ethic...
But we digress.
Negative. They are not public places and in fact are treated as such.
In fact, they are the public places where the presence of religion is more important than parks, because we get our education primarily in schools and not in parks.
Negative. If your children are only getting religion in school, then nothing short of God Himself can rescue them.
I do not call for sedition at all, or for a departure from the original American system where people moved around and formed religiously homogenous communities all the time, and religion was a public affair.
Religion was never a public affair in the US. Public prayer was, sure. But not the elevation of religion
I do indeed call for rupturing all ties some mislead Euriopean countries have, to the EU as an evil insititution. If you mean “sedition” in the sense “from the EU” then it is an unusual terminology, but the issue is hardly novel: the whole EU empire hardly emerged and already is dictating people what to hang on school walls.
The various European countries have been hundreds of years trying to make this happen. Again, this ruling is only the enforcement of Italian laws. Why not put it back onto the Italians to fix their Constitution? If their Constitution was not the shambles that most things Italian are, we would not be discussing this.
I agree that children should get religion from a religious source (church, that is, but we speak broadly of all religions). I also agree that it would be best if Italy were left alone to sort out her legal system, even though if they make it compatible to the atheistic EU, then their system becomes illegitimate as well.
But these are technicalities.
On the rest, I disagree. I don’t understand this public-but-not-quite-public distinction between parks and schools. This is special pleading for the schools, I think.
Well, how about this: you may take a walk unhindered in the park any day (to the point of curfew in some places). Try that in a public school. You'll be arrested before you get past the front door. A public institution is not necessarily a public place. Try to enter CIA hq in Langley or Foggy Bottom (State Department) at your own whim. Try to waltz through the checkpoint at Fort Bragg without being on official business.
Or, the courtroom. Try to tell me that the courtroom in the US is a public place.
Right, most public places have regulated access, and parks are less restrictive than the CIA. But I did not propose that some outsider, such as the EU usurpers, enter schools and place crucifixes there. I instead proposed that the principal acting in accord with the parent’s conference does so in the locales where crucifixes are common.
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