Dialogue Ireland Forum Announcement

The Dialogue Ireland blog was initially established in early 2009 in response to our website being disabled due to a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack. Our blog platform, WordPress.com, is practically immune from DDOS attacks and this allowed us to continue publishing relevant materials dealing with issues of cultism.

Since that that time, some 1,194 posts and over half a million visits later, it is fair to say that our blog has greatly exceeded our expectations. One way in which this occurred was in how many comments that visitors to the blog have made – over 8,300 and counting. It certainly seems that people who visit our blog have a lot to say, and there have many threads filled with very lively discussion.

However, it is clear that due to how the blog software functions it is not an ideal platform for more in-depth discussion and commentary. With this in mind Dialogue Ireland has set up a forum to help facilitate such discussion.

The forum can be accessed here: http://dialogueireland.org/forum

Note that registration is required on the forum in order to post comments there.

Thank you to all our visitors, to all our commenters, to all those who have contacted us through the blog and to all those people who have contributed materials for the blog. We wish each and every one of you a peaceful and prosperous new year!

Happy new year,

Dialogue Ireland

How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body New York Times By WILLIAM J. BROAD January 5, 2012

 ”The damage yoga can do.”

On a cold Saturday in early 2009, Glenn Black, a yoga teacher of nearly four decades, whose devoted clientele includes a number of celebrities and prominent gurus, was giving a master class at Sankalpah Yoga in Manhattan. Black is, in many ways, a classic yogi: he studied in Pune, India, at the institute founded by the legendary B. K. S. Iyengar, and spent years in solitude and meditation. He now lives in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and often teaches at the nearby Omega Institute, a New Age emporium spread over nearly 200 acres of woods and gardens. He is known for his rigor and his down-to-earth style. But this was not why I sought him out: Black, I’d been told, was the person to speak with if you wanted to know not about the virtues of yoga but rather about the damage it could do.

BERNIE PURCELL’S DISGRUNTLED EMPLOYEES THE PHOENIX DECEMBER 2, 2011

Businesswoman, counsellor and occasional academic Bernie Purcell last hit the headlines in 2007, when it emerged that her Dublin-based counselling outfit, the Roebuck Centre, had been charging some of its clients up to €250,000 for courses (see The Phoenix 2/11/07). The centre closed down following the controversy but now Purcell faces other problems.

Some comments on the recent Irish Catholic article

This commentary is intended to address various points that were raised in the Irish Catholic article titled ‘Church sources claim ‘bullying’ and ‘intimidation’ by Labour’. You can read the full Irish Catholic article here. A full copy of the ‘Clontarf Report’ on which the article was reporting may be downloaded from here. Part of Dialogue Ireland’s mission is to promote people’s freedom to make informed choices about religious, spiritual and philosophical beliefs, and we feel that highlighting the issues raised in the Clontarf Report are germane to this goal.

Church sources claim ‘bullying’ and ‘intimidation’ by Labour by Michael Kelly – The Irish Catholic

The Irish Catholic

‘Religious ethos has no place in schools’ – Labour

A verdict on the ‘Mormon question’?

Washington Post

By Charles Lane, Published: January 16, 2012

In 1890, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that abolished the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ corporate charter and authorized the U.S. government to seize its property. This collective punishment was constitutional, the court ruled, because the Mormons’ crime, polygamy, was “barbarism” and “contrary to the spirit of Christianity.”

Pastor Thomas Cooney rejects Christian dialogue with the threat of recourse to law.

http://dialogueireland.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/what-has-victory-got-to-do-with-it/

After posting the above Thomas Cooney makes contact. On the one hand he says he has not read the posts but feels they are plain lies. The result is the letter below.

http://dialogueireland.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/open-letter-to-thomas-cooney-pastor-of-victory-galway-from-mike-garde-director-of-di/

I phone Thomas again wishing him a Happy New Year. He says he will get back to me. I do hear from him so get back to him and again he is concerned that inaccuracies are to be found on our blog but when pushed has to agree he has not read them! He also does not seem to understand that people are free to use our blog to comment without censorship, but if he finds anything incorrect he should either write up an article which we would publish in full or edit any inaccuracy he brings to our attention.

Again he agrees to go away and study things and get back to me. I raise with him the issue that it is difficult to understand his situation as because his Church is a Trust their accounts are not publicly available to evaluate his comments. He admits that he does drive a rather flashy car which confirms what was on our blog. He also tells us that his property was not purchased with Church funds and cost less than a €1m when he purchased it. Again I waited for a reply but on 17.01.12 I sent the following text to him: