Down with this sort of thing
</Father Ted>
Parents in Northern Ireland were shocked when a priest's PowerPoint presentation in preparation for their children's First Holy Communion displayed gay pornography. Father Martin McVeigh, the local Catholic priest, was giving the presentation to parents (and one child) at St Mary's School in Pomeroy when he inserted a USB …
"Luckily for Ms. Amero, some members of the computer-security industry decided to take up her case, and found that the school-issued PC was a Windows 98 SE machine with IE 5 and an expired antivirus subscription, and she had picked up porn-producing malware from visiting a website discussing hairstyles.
The judge ordered a retrial and Ms. Amero escaped with a $100 fine. She still lost her teaching license, however."
So basically that teacher was using a /company/ ('school') computer which was obviously suffering from a serious lack of maintenance, thus causing the infection with a virus leading up to pr0n showing on the computer during the presentation. And yet /she/ is losing her license over all this? What kind of nonsense is that?
I have to agree that visiting hairstyle websites using a company computer probably isn't the best of ideas (the ever going discussion of work vs private use) but even then; you can hardly blame her for damages done by the virus, especially since it turned out that the virus scanner had never been updated by the (hopefully present?) IT staff.
"Risk of injury to a minor" because they saw a bunch of naked men and women? And that's worth 40 years of jail time?
As soon as you start working 'for the man' (viz Uncle Sam, either federally or locally) you are subjected to a full frontal lobotomy and have every ounce of common sense forcibly remobed from your brain.
IF the system says 40yrs Max then that is what the prosecutor is duty bound to ask for.
Don't get caught taking a leak (if you are a man) in at least 10 states. You could get sent down for life as a sex offender. Women are excempt from this law. Now how crazy is that?
Where is the common sense here?
Don't ever try to argue with an official. They are always right and you will never win no matter how obscure and silly it might seem.
Anon obviously... otherwise the black helicopter would be hovering above my abode and I'll be renditioned to gitmo in a trice.
Losing your license at that point is a moot point --- incident in 2004, convicted in 2008, so she's 4years not teaching anyway. The tragedy to me seems the four years of this creeping nightmare thing (neighbours and acquaintances don't tend to like people accused of this sort of thing), on top of all the costs and unemployability, with no sympathy from most people you'd ask for assistance.
From where I'm sitting, I'd never [falsely!] admit fault & pay the $100, even if that's a cheap and quick stop to haemorrhaging thousands. But after a year or two of this torture, I bet most people's self-respect and lives would be already destroyed so far that they'd sign anything.
A bit like the incredible confessions at witch trials.
She lost her license because she didn't bother to unplug the computer and let it just run. Weak, but the state had lost their case and this was probably the only line of reason that would allow someone to save face for the orignal 'rush to justice' before verifying what occurred.
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The sin of Onan was refusing to raise up children for his brother with his brother's wife. Any children that were born would be classed as his brother's, not his, and in the custom of the time that wasn't exactly desirable. What Onan WAS prepared to do was enjoy humping his brother's wife, he just tried to ensure that his fun didn't result in the kid that he was obliged to produce.
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More blanket statements. Certainly catholic priests and probably catholics in general have come across as self righteous and hypocritical. It's not my experience, though.
For protestants it's too much emphasis on guilt and self deprecation. That's my experience anyway. Growing up in a protestant environment you certainly don't become self-righteous, nor do you feel you can tell others what they should do or think.
I'm critical of religion and christianity myself, but the anti-religious froth on these forums rings hollow to me, and makes me question the critics' understanding of religion and their critical faculties. A lot of it actually reminds me of the worst I've seen among religious fanatics.
Are you seriously suggesting that protestants never feel that they're entitled to tell others what to do? Have you been paying any attention to what is happening in the US lately. Rick Santorum may be Catholic but I can assure you that his brand of self-righteous arrogance comes straight out of the fundamentalist protestant playbook.
Now I don't want to get into a Catholic versus protestant debate (the differences are far smaller than the similarities to my mind) but it strikes me that your comment is a good example of something I've frequently observed. When someone, religious or not (and these days, it seems, more often they are not), criticises atheists for lacking understanding of religion what they are really saying is "your criticisms don't apply to my experience of religion" as if the fact that there are some nice CoE vicars somehow cancels out the existence of the Taliban.
The thing is, critics of religion generally have taken the time to acquire at least a passing knowledge of the full range of religious practices. They're arguing from facts not personal experience. Questioning their "understanding of religion and their critical faculties" on the basis of unexamined anecdotal evidence is the rhetorical equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and chanting "I can't hear you".
As for the tired "critics of religion are like religious fanatics" canard - XKCD
"As an atheist, why would you care what the church thinks at all?"
Because they're counting me amongst their numbers, and those numbers give them influence on world events which is almost always negative. I don't want to be counted as a Catholic, because I don't want Africans dying in my name, or altar boys being buggered for it. I left Catholicism long before I left Christianity, because I simply couldn't continue associating myself with the horror and corruption of the Vatican.
Similarly I find myself conflicted as to what was more disgusting, the begging by a member of one of the richest organizations in the world or the ritualistic cannibalism that brought him there. The gay porn doesn't even make the list because that has the potential to be tastefully done.