C’était hier que s’ouvrait le congrès conjoint de l’Alliance athée internationale (AAI) en collaboration avec Humaniste Canada (HC).

Premier congrès explicitement athée à Montréal et premier congrès nord-américain de l’AAI à l’extérieur des États-Unis, l’événement, qui se déroule à l’hôtel Delta centre-ville jusqu’à demain, devrait accueillir une centaine de personnes tout au long de la fin de semaine.

Parmi les conférenciers, les Québécois Daniel Baril, Rodrigue Tremblay et Louise Mailloux, militants bien connus du milieu laïque, de même que le Français Philippe Besson, les Américains, P.Z. Myers, biologiste évolutionniste célèbre, le philosophe américain Daniel Dennett, auteur de Breaking the Spell, et les Belges Serge Deruette et Nadia Geerts (auteure de Fichu voile!). Parmi les activités du congrès, une soirée célébrant la Journée internationale contre les lois antiblasphèmes, marquant l’importance de la liberté d’expression, aura lieu, ainsi qu’un spectacle d’humour.

Le Devoir
Consultez le communiqué de la conférence ici.

If you want to know about God, you might want to talk to an atheist.

Heresy? Perhaps. But a survey that measured Americans’ knowledge of religion found that atheists and agnostics knew more, on average, than followers of most major faiths. In fact, the gaps in knowledge among some of the faithful may give new meaning to the term « blind faith. »

A majority of Protestants, for instance, couldn’t identify Martin Luther as the driving force behind the Protestant Reformation, according to the survey, released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Four in 10 Catholics misunderstood the meaning of their church’s central ritual, incorrectly saying that the bread and wine used in Holy Communion are intended to merely symbolize the body and blood of Christ, not actually become them.

Atheists and agnostics – those who believe there is no God or who aren’t sure – were more likely to answer the survey’s questions correctly. Jews and Mormons ranked just below them in the survey’s measurement of religious knowledge – so close as to be statistically tied.

So why would an atheist know more about religion than a Christian?

Read the full story by Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times.

MAJ : REGARDER L’ÉPISODE

À venir jeudi le 30 septembre 20h à l’émission Enquête de Radio-Canada

Il y a quelques mois, d’anciens élèves du Collège Notre-Dame sont sortis de l’ombre pour accuser plusieurs frères de la congrégation de Sainte-Croix d’agressions sexuelles. Selon eux, non seulement les responsables de la congrégation étaient au courant des crimes commis par leurs membres, mais ils n’ont dénoncé aucun des agresseurs et ils les ont même protégés.

Enquête a rencontré plusieurs victimes, recueilli les confessions extrêmement troublantes d’un ancien frère et obtenu un document confidentiel qui confirme ce que les victimes avancent : les responsables de Sainte-Croix savaient, mais ils ont choisi de se taire.

Merci FX Tremblay

September 23, 2010 on CNN

 

Deaf victim of sex abuse is suing pope, and going public with his story for the first time

By Scott Bronstein
CNN Special Investigations Unit

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin – Terry Kohut has kept a dark secret for nearly 50 years. Now he is breaking his silence, becoming a key figure in the sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church and the growing controversy over what Pope Benedict XVI did about it.

When Kohut was barely a teen, and for years afterward, he says, he was sexually molested and assaulted by the headmaster and priest of the school where he lived, St. John’s School for the Deaf, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. What occurred there is one of the most notorious cases of sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

Read the full story.

 

Bonus :
Sex Abuse Victim Reads Letter That Kept His Abusive Priest in Church

September 24, 2010 on CNN.
View the Screenshot of the Letter.

ROME : The Vatican bank’s top two officials are under investigation for suspected money laundering and police have frozen 23 million euros ($30.21 million) of its funds, Italian judicial sources said on Tuesday.

They said President Ettore Gotti Tedeschi and director-general Paolo Cipriani were being investigated by Rome magistrates Nello Rossi and Stefano Fava in a case involving alleged violations of European Union money-laundering rules.

The Vatican confirmed the Rome magistrates’ action in a statement that expressed « perplexity and amazement » at the move and “utmost faith” in the two men who head the bank, officially known as Institute for Religious Works (IOR) …

Gotti Tedeschi, 65, has been at the helm of the bank for a year and is a close adviser to Italian Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti.

The sources said Italy’s financial police had preventively frozen 23 million euros of the IOR’s funds in an account in an Italian bank in Rome.

Two recent transfers from an IOR account in the Italian bank were deemed suspicious by financial police and blocked.

One was a transfer of 20 million euros to a German branch of a U.S. bank and another of 3 million euros to an Italian bank.

A statement from the Vatican’s Secretariat of State said the bank had committed no wrongdoing because it was transferring its own money between its own accounts.

Gotti Tedeschi, a devout Catholic who has taught financial ethics at the Catholic University of Milan, also heads an Italian unit of the Spanish Banco Santander (SAN.MC), according to its website.

He also serves on the board of several major Italian banks.

Read the full story at Reuters.