Headlines:

Jacobs, Benefiel To Spend 40 Days Laying Spiritual “Seige” To Washington DC
Last week we posted a video John Benefiel, head of the Heartland Apostolic Reformation Network, explaining how he had gone to Washington, DC in order to exercise his “spiritual authority” to “divorce Baal” and rename the city “the District of Christ.” Read full story from rightwingwatch.com

Why Pagans Need Community Centers
In response to the Sacred Paths Center’s financial situation, opinions have been circulating that Pagans don’t need community centers.  I realized that we assume the reasons for community center projects are obvious.

In some of the conversations online, the feeling that we get is that some folks are looking at just what they need instead of the needs of other people and the whole of the Pagan community.  If your first response is that you don’t need X (be it a building or whatever) to practice your religion, so that X isn’t a valid reason for Pagans to have a center, ask yourself this…  Are there are a lot of other folks who would benefit from that function of the community center?  What would having X mean for the Pagan community.  Just think of all of the Pagans in just the DC region.  What about the regions with large numbers of Pagans? Think of all of the Pagan groups and all of the Pagan event organizers.  Just because you don’t feel that you’re in need of a community center doesn’t mean that the Pagan community wouldn’t greatly benefit from a community center. Read full story from openhearthfoundation.blogspot.com

Arts & Entertainment:

10 Creepy, Sexy Fairy Tales That Should Be Films
Kelly Faircloth — If there’s one thing we learned this past week at Comic-Con, it’s that Hollywood is obsessed with fairy tales. They’re magical, they’ve got instant recognition… and they’re public domain. But Hollywood keeps hitting on the same five stories.

With all due respect to both Emma Watson and Guillermo del Toro, the absolute last thing we need is yet another take on Beauty and the Beast. We also don’t need a Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, and god forbid someone try again with Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood. Rather than returning to the same well-worn stories, here are ten slightly lesser-known fairy stories worthy of Hermoine and the Hellboy director, as well as anyone else in Hollywood. Read full story from io9.com

News:

S.African ‘corpse’ wakes up, scares off morgue staff: report
A 50-year-old South African man thought to be dead woke up in a chilly morgue on Sunday and shouted to be let out, scaring off two attendants who thought he was a ghost, local media reported.

“His family thought he had died,” health spokesman Sizwe Kupelo told the Sapa news agency.

“The family called a private undertaker who took what they thought was a dead body to the morgue, but the man woke up inside the morgue on Sunday at 5:00 pm and screamed, demanding to be taken out of the cold place.”

This caused two mortuary attendants on duty to flee the building in the small town of Libode in the rural Eastern Cape as they thought it was a ghost. Read full story from yahoo.com

Saudi Arabia’s ‘Anti-Witchcraft Unit’ breaks another spell
The unit, established in 2009, is charged with apprehending sorcerers and reversing the detrimental effects of their spells in the Gulf country.

When the severed head of a wolf wrapped in women’s lingerie turned up near the city of Tabouk in northern Saudi Arabia this week, authorities knew they had another case of witchcraft on their hands, a capital offence in the ultra-conservative desert kingdom.

Agents of the country’s Anti-Witchcraft Unit were quickly dispatched and set about trying to break the spell that used the beast’s head. Read full story from jpost.com

Photography:

Photographers Capture Mysterious, Beautiful Patterns in Sand
One day these shells and rocks will be sand. See photos at wired.com

Religion:

Atheist group wants to stop World Trade Center cross
(CNN) — A group of atheists has filed a lawsuit to stop the display of the World Trade Center cross at a memorial of the 9/11 terror attacks.

The “government enshrinement of the cross was an impermissible mingling of church and state,” the American Atheists say in a press statement.

The group says it filed the lawsuit this week in state court in New York and posted a copy of the lawsuit on its website. Read full story from cnn.com

Anders Behring Breivik: Christian terrorist? Right-wing extremist? Madman?
When news broke about the bombing in Olso, many commentators assumed links with Islamic extremism. When reports came of the massacre on Utøya island, perpetrated by a “tall, blonde, Nordic, man,” speculation quieted down until Anders Behring Breivik was identified. News reports first described Breivik as a “Christian terrorist,” largely on the basis of his Facebook profile and his postings to Christian fundamentalist Web sites. After his manifesto became public, Breivik was characterized as a “right-wing extremist.” To most, the Christian terrorist/right-wing extremist distinction makes little real difference: Only a madman could engage in such wanton killing. REad full story from washingtonpost.com

Science:

The Science Behind Dreaming
For centuries people have pondered the meaning of dreams. Early civilizations thought of dreams as a medium between our earthly world and that of the gods. In fact, the Greeks and Romans were convinced that dreams had certain prophetic powers. While there has always been a great interest in the interpretation of human dreams, it wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung put forth some of the most widely-known modern theories of dreaming. Freud’s theory centred around the notion of repressed longing — the idea that dreaming allows us to sort through unresolved, repressed wishes. Carl Jung (who studied under Freud) also believed that dreams had psychological importance, but proposed different theories about their meaning. Read full story from scientificamerican.com

“Spectacular” Double Meteor Shower This Week
A celestial traffic jam may be on tap this week as two meteor showers combine forces to put on a brilliant sky show.

One of the best shooting star events of the year is the annual August Perseid meteor shower. (See Perseids pictures.) However this year’s peak, on August 12, happens to coincide with a bright full moon—drastically cutting down the number of meteors visible to the naked eye.

Yet while the main event might be blocked out by the blinding moonlight, the opening act promises to be much better. Read full story from nationalgeographic.com

Where House Cats Roam: Researchers Compare the Mysterious Wanderings of Pet and Stray Felines
Anyone who has ever owned an outdoor cat knows that it tends to disappear for hours, sometimes days, at a time. Where do cats go when they are lurking out of sight? The question is of interest not just to pet owners but also to conservation scientists who study the impact of free-roaming cats on wildlife populations.  Scientists at the University of Illinois and the Illinois Natural History Survey recently attached radio transmitters to the adjustable collars of 18 pet and 24 feral cats in southeastern Champaign-Urbana and tracked the animals by truck and on foot for more than one year. Read full story from scientificamerican.com

Media:

Norway attacks show why you can’t blame the muslims
In the immediate aftermath of 1995’s Oklahoma City bombing, much of the news media rushed to suggest that a Muslim, or at least a Middle Eastern connection, was behind the attacks.

News reports on television and in print featured Middle East terrorism experts claiming the Oklahoma City attack echoed a World Trade Center bombing two years earlier and that it contained parallels to recent Mideast attacks.

The FBI picked up Ibrahim Ahmad, a Jordanian American, for questioning in an initial dragnet.

Does ‘Christian fundamentalist’ label fit Norway terror suspect? Read full story from cnn.com

Breivik Attorny Speaks Out (Source – CNN)

Blogspot:

• Capital Witch – Declaring War on Columbia
• The Pagan Household – Family Tradition — Break Some Bread
• Patheos – Pagan Existentialism: An Interview with Brendan Myers
• The Wild Hunt – Polygamy Decriminalization and Polyamorous Pagans
• The Witch of Forest Grove – Poisonous Flowers, Stowaways, and Newcomers

Thanks for stopping by! Well wishes to you all, have a great day!

Lisa