Did the Vatican steal Jesus' foreskin
so people would shut up about the savior's penis?

Even before its disappearance, the relic had a strange history.

It was discovered in Calcata in 1557, and a series of miracles soon followed (freak storms, perfumed mists engulfing the village).

The church gave the finding a seal of approval by offering a 10-year indulgence to those who came to venerate. Lines of pilgrims stretched from the church doors to beyond the walls of the fortress town. Nuns and monks from nearby villages and monasteries made candlelit processions. Calcata was a must-see destination on the pilgrimage map.

That is, until 1900. Facing increasing criticism after the "rediscovery" of a holy foreskin in France, the Vatican decreed that anyone who wrote about or spoke the name of the holy foreskin would face excommunication.

plus...

MERCHANDISE



A SHOP BY RUSSELL HIGGS



Christmas is all about shopping.



here is my first limited edition winter selection



A SHOP BY RUSSELL HIGGS

police: "I WANT THAT CAMERA"

Online Museum of Old Family Photographs

in honour of anonymous people from all over the world.
the things people throw away, forget or what seems to be irrelevant.

Flickr Patterns taken from public transport

via grow-a-brain

Weatherman, known colloquially as the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground Organization, was a U.S. Radical Left organization whose purpose was to carry out a series of militant actions that would achieve the revolutionary overthrow of the Government of the United States (and of capitalism as a whole).

pdf Full text of book Weatherman,
ed. by Harold Jacobs, a collection of documents by and about SDS/Weatherman. This book was published in 1970 and deals only with WUO's early period. Out of print

pdf Full text of book The Way The Wind Blew
A History Of The Weather Underground

The Weather Underground
Official site for the 2002 documentary directed and produced by Sam Green, Bill Siegel and Carrie Lozano

The scientist, author and campaigning atheist Richard Dawkins answers your questions

"I have a (you might say fanatical) desire for people to use their own minds and make their own choices, based upon publicly available evidence. Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'."

Do you consider parents forcing children to accept their religion a form of child abuse?

"Yes. What would you think of parents who forced their children to accept their politics, or their taste in architecture? Have you ever heard anyone speak of a "Leninist child" or a "Postmodernist child"? Of course not. Why, then, do we all go along with "Christian child" and "Muslim child"? Such labelling of children with their parents' religion is child abuse."

'Letting Go'

I am at that point of 'letting go'..... says doublevelvet over on flickr ........ I want to work out a way to give all my work away, to 'gift' it, to unblock the bottle neck that commodifying art creates. I want to take the power out of the hands of those who put a price on everything. To begin with I have 120 pieces in storage up for grabs. How can we set about this?I should say, to avoid confusion, that I am not looking to barter. I am of no fixed abode and do not intend ever owning walls, so I would have nowhere ever to store work swapped. I want to 'gift' them, that is give them away. I cannot afford their upkeep. The making of them was never a commercial venture. Those that find a loving home will survive, those that don't will be destroyed. The storage is in evidence further back in my photostream. This is a move forward. I do not want to be stymied protecting my past.

plus "A Reading list presented in an attempt to encourage the Reclamation of Hope"