The Catholic Church has had a bad couple of years with pedophile scandals. You had the revelations of alter boys abused in the United States, now revelations of *decades* of child abuse (physical and sexual) in Ireland, and now revelations of the same thing going on in Germany.

And then - there's the story of the Vatican itself caught up in the sex scandal. Basically, visitors to the Vatican were provided with gay male prostitutes.

It's probably the saddest stereotype of them all - in this case, Roy Ashburn, a California state representative who has campaigned against gay rights, arrested on a DUI after coming home from a gay nightclub. I really do feel sorry for him. Probably spent his whole life feeling that he was "evil" because of what his community/his faith told him that "if you like other boys you're bad".

The year is done, and it's time to say goodbye with this last episode. What will come next? Who can say.

http://blogthereligions.com/podcast/Episode_52_Final_Episode.mp3

You can watch the episodes on Youtube here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

http://blogthereligions.com/podcast/Episode_51_Chassidic_Orthodox_Judaism.mp3

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - I love having my expectations blown away. When I find a group of "Orthodox" Jewish members enjoying and laughing at life, I knew I was learning something interesting.

You can find out more at:

Young Israel of Tampa

Chabad Lubavitch Synagogue Tampa

http://blogthereligions.com/podcast/Special_Episode_01.mp3

This is a special episode! Why is it special other than being late and not about a religion at all? Because it is!

And you can watch this episode on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTCmgP_BcXs

Since the church itself has refused my interview, I had to go with the next best thing: me of 10 years ago. This interview is also available on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPxLVF5a5Jo

http://blogthereligions.com/podcast/Episode_50_LDS_Church_aka_Mormons.mp3

A double trip to Vishnu Mandir, and we learn all about Hindus, the religion, and more.

http://blogthereligions.com/podcast/Episode_49_Vishnu_Mandir_Hindu.mp3

Our shortest episode ever about the Church of God. That's about it.

http://blogthereligions.com/podcast/Episode_48_Church_of_God.mp3

Just a quick note - you probably noticed that there is now a Captcha system when you want to log in and leave comments - this is to prevent any kind of spammers, which haven't been a problem here.

Yet.

I've been noticing odd comments and logins, so rather than worry about policing the site myself, we now have reCaptcha, which will both let people do good things (by assisting with OCR of classic words efforts) and by verifying that they're an intelligent entity before they can leave comments.

Or, at least an entity that can read. Intelligence is another issue.

First we're going to talk about evolution of the whale and the hippopotamus. Then we talk about what Community of Christ is about. Hint: It's not a whale.

http://blogthereligions.com/podcast/Episode_47_Community_of_Christ.mp3