In Nepal, there is the ancient custom of choosing a young virgin goddess, who reigns until she reaches puberty. Rashmilla Shakya was taken from her family at when she was 4 and enthroned as the Kumari in an ancient palace, where she was worshipped by both Hindus and Buddhists. But once she started menstruating, she was sent back home and is now a college student.
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In Can Science Explain the Bible, we told about some scientific explanations for Biblical stories that may or may not be true. Now two Italian journalists say the Bible is filled with mistakes. They claim Eve didn’t eat an apple and Jesus didn’t die at the age of 33 and wasn’t born in the first year AD. The Jews didn’t escape by walking across the floor of the Red Sea, there were eleven or twelve commandments, manna didn’t fall down from heaven, and Jonah’s whale didn’t exist. The three Wise Men weren’t really wise, and there weren’t three of them. Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th, and the apostle Paul didn’t fall off a horse on his way to Damascus. And this is being reported by journalists from the Pope’s official newspaper!
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Sociologists have long known that there are more religious women than men. Professor Rodney Stark thinks we should not ask why women are more religious, but why men are less interested in religion. “When you turn the question around it starts to get us somewhere and the evidence pretty strongly points to physiology, not socialization,” he says. He says some men are shortsighted and don’t think ahead, and so “going to prison or going to hell just doesn’t matter to these men.”
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The Vatican today published what is purported to be the Third Secret of Fatima. The “secret” included vague references to some sort of apocalyptic vision, but the Vatican said that the events appeared to have already happened. Why the Church took so long to reveal this story is not clear. In 1987, Fr. Malachi Martin told this author that the Third Secret was that the oceans of the world would rise and inundate the coastlines. Martin had been privy to the secret when it was opened by Pope John XXIII. I published this interpretation of the secret in my book Transformation in 1988.
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