FACTOID THINKER: Things that make me go hmmmmm...Freedom to believe, not freedom to practice

Soooooo, anyone notice lately the FACT that there are increasing numbers of cases in the courts and media regarding freedom of speech? This is one such item of news that peeked my interest: Court Lets City Restrict Church Use of Schools.(Benjamin Weiser, NY Times, June 2, 2011). A legal battle that has been going on somewhat quietly since 1995 in New York, to challenge the freedom of speech of one church is spilling over towards a ban of all churches from using public schools as their venue for worship services.

Here's a brief excerpt...click on the above link to read the full article...it's an interesting must-read:

"Deciding 2 to 1, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said the city had “a strong basis to believe” that allowing the religious services to be conducted in schools could be seen as the kind of endorsement of religion that violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause.

“When worship services are performed in a place,” Judge Pierre N. Leval wrote for the majority, “the nature of the site changes. The site is no longer simply a room in a school being used temporarily for some activity.”

“The place has, at least for a time, become the church,” he wrote, adding that the city’s policy imposed “no restraint on the free expression of any point of view.” Rather, it applied only to “a certain type of activity — the conduct of worship services — and not to the free expression of religious views associated with it.”

Judge John M. Walker Jr. dissented, saying the ban on religious worship services violated the First Amendment’s free speech clause...Judge Leval wrote that “the fact that New York City’s school facilities are more available on Sundays than any other day of the week means that there is a de facto bias in favor of Christian groups who want to use the schools for worship services."...The Bronx church and others using the city’s schools, he wrote, “tend to dominate the schools on the day they use them.”

“They use the largest rooms and are typically the only outside group using a school on Sunday,” he wrote."

HMMMMMMMMMM.........."Then they took your freedom of speech, your freedom to preach, your freedom to think. What's next? Your freedom to blink?...Silent weapons, QUIET WARS, World War 3, earthquakes, riots, wars. you can't see THE HANDWRITING IS ON THE WALL. And what does it read? Babylon is gonna fall, is gonna fall!.." ( Corey Red )

Matthew 24:9-14
Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake. And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.

POETIC FACTS: The Persistence of Memory

The Persistence of Memory - Salvador Dali

Dreams ring to me like a clarion call

waking every sense of me

home bound

speaking to my soul

in warm, soft whispers of memory

of a childhood spent on blackened beaches

yellowing under the sun

like ripened fruit

growing in the sweetness of breezes

tainted with the scent of mangos and guava

swinging in trees

lifted high into the bluest sky

above The Old Mill at Canefield.

Days spent in Roseau come back to me

like the heat that stretches high under my Convent school skirt

snatching my attention from the palm tree breezes back to tarred streets.

A thirst-wrenching heat that I am forced to quench at a standpipe

that will soon be used for someone’s morning bath.

I want to run over past Cork Street into Four Corners

and beg an ice-cream from my uncle’s parlor to fend off the rising sun

but it is closed, as is Madech on Great George Street

where my Pahweh might have given me some from his stash above the store

The morning sun rises high and early

And I am drawn hypnotically to Bayfront again,

Cruise ships, sitting pretty on the water’s edge

as the horizon beckons in the dawn

I imagine waking to more mornings like this

Hoping tomorrow will never come

And I will never again leave my Dominica

But I open my eyes again, in another man’s land

Exile One playing on the stereo

as I lay reminiscing...

"Good Morning, Dominica!"

© 2011 Kalinago Woryi


ahhhhhhhhhh! The FACT is, I left home 24 years ago and still, the thought of the shores of my island home never cease to draw me back to her...