Monthly Archives: October 2009

Not a lot happens in this diocese

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The Diocese of Brandon has a strange website; its creator appears to be proud of the fact that the main page “reflects neither diocesan nor any other policy”:Add an Image

The Brandon diocesan website is a pro bono site. It neither captures nor stores any information about those browsing it. Not a lot happens in this diocese. The purpose of this main page is to provide a worldwide snapshot of matters judged to be of Christian concern, useful for sermon and intercession material and culled from responsible sources. The very contradictory nature of some of the articles should make it plain that it reflects neither diocesan nor any other policy.

But then, the diocese has a pretty strange bishop too: Jim D. Njegovan. Some of his bizarre antics are chronicled in Zoominfo where this champion of tolerance and inclusion declared:

Bishop Jim Njegovan of the Diocese of Brandon, Manitoba made it clear that neither Anglican Essentials literature nor The Anglican Planet, Canada’s alternative to the officially-sponsored Anglican Journal newspaper would be tolerated in his diocese.

I think the author of the diocesan website has it wrong: a lot happens in the Diocese of Brandon, but not much of it makes sense.

Defaming Jesus in Scotland

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When Jesus asked Peter “who do you say that I am?” Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Matt 15:16.

He asks us the same question: whoQueen do we believe he is?

Apparently, Jo Clifford thinks he is a transsexual woman and is performing a play about it at the Tron theatre, Glasgow, Scotland:

JESUS, QUEEN OF HEAVEN WRITTEN + PERFORMED BY JO CLIFFORD

Jesus is a transsexual woman. And it is now she walks the earth.

This is a play with music that presents her sayings, her miracles, and her testimony.

And she does not condemn the gays or the queers or the trans women or the trans men, and no, not the straight women nor the straight men either. Because she is the Daughter of God, most certainly, and almost as certainly the son also. And God’s child condemns nobody. She can only love…

It isn’t particularly surprising to note that the Tron theatre is not only a Scottish registered charity – a word whose use is replete with irony, considering its agape etymology – and a beneficiary of the Scottish Arts Council, or the Scottish taxpayer.

Other than the obvious blasphemous aspects of this, what makes it such bad art is, first, it is cowardly: Christianity is an easy target – too easy. A play entitled “Mohammed the Paedophile” might not appeal to everyone, but at least it would take guts and have the potential for being historically accurate. Second, anything masquerading as art that has to resort to such politically correct perculsion, is sufficiently devoid of imagination that the only way it could survive is through grants from intellectually bankrupt Arts Councils. Third, it is part of the Glasgay festival, whose purpose is to:

… celebrate all things FAMILY and FEMININE. From trapped lovers to mothers on the verge, Hollywood legends, old queens, random storks, transgender goddesses and ginger stereotypes.

a statement which, as far as I can tell, is completely without meaning.

The 17 year old convert from Islam to Christianity to be sent back to Ohio

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The 17 year old who fears for her life is to be sent back to the place she fears will lead to her death:Add an Image

A 17-year old girl who fled from her home, fearing her Muslim parents would kill her for converting to Christianity, must go back to Ohio, a Florida judge ruled Tuesday.

Judge Daniel Dawson ruled Ohio has jurisdiction over the case involving the teen, Rifqa Bary.

Before the girl gets sent back, the judge says he needs immigration papers proving her status in the U.S. and proof from the state of Florida that she can continue her virtual schooling and receive credit in Ohio.

She is expected to be placed in foster care when she returns and will also be provided with psychiatric evaluations. Her parents will also receive psychiatric evaluations.

“If I had stayed in Ohio, I wouldn’t be alive,” she said. “In 150 generations in family, no one has known Jesus. I am the first — imagine the honor in killing me.”

If an attempt is made on this girl’s life, perhaps judge Daniel Dawson will be sent for a psychiatric evaluation.

Decarbonising with Rowan

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Rowan Williams shows us the way to become fully human:

People should use the climate change crisis as an opportunity to become human again, setting aside the addictive and self-destructive behaviour that has damaged their souls, the Archbishop of Canterbury said today.

Dr Rowan Williams, head of the Church of England and leader of the worldwide Anglican communion, told an audience at Southwark Cathedral that people had allowed themselves to become “addicted to fantasies about prosperity and growth, dreams of wealth without risk and profit without cost”.

The consequences of such a lifestyle meant the human soul was “one of the foremost casualties of environmental degradation”.

Small changes, such as setting up carbon reduction action groups, would help them reconnect with the world in addition to repairing some of the damage to the planet, because it was too much to expect the state to provide all the solutions.

It’s such a relief to realise that when Jesus said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery,  coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” – Mark 7:20ff, he got it all wrong. It’s taken 2000 years for a bearded Welsh Archbishop to get to the root of things: what defiles us comes from the outside and it’s all tied in with carbon.

I’m going to turn the lights out, set fire to a scented candle and form a carbon reduction action group – phooey to suppressing all that theft, murder and adultery stuff – this is much easier. I’m reconnecting with the world; I feel more human already.

The John Shelby Spong Delusion

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Just what we need, another anti-God apologist: retired Anglican bishop John Shelby Spong. Move over Dawkins:

There is no God, there is no heaven and there is no afterlife. At least, not in the way we have traditionally thought of such things.

These days, with atheist arguments topping bestseller lists, such statements might not seem all that contentious.

But when a retired bishop says it, it’s worth noting.

“The institution of the church is more about seeking security than finding the truth,” he says. “It’s tough to be a human being. We seek security, and religion is a coping mechanism.”

But such notions, he says, cannot survive the insights of astronomer Galileo, physicist Isaac Newton and evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. Through them, says Spong, we discovered that the Earth is not the centre of the universe and that there’s space (not heaven) above us, that the workings of the world are due to basic physics (not Godly intervention) and that humans evolved from other creatures.

In his reasons for discarding 2000 years of Christian thinking Spong exhibits a theological naivety that makes the most fervent of fundamentalist atheists look like Thomas Aquinas. Only in Spong’s demented little pataphysical universe do Christians believe that heaven is contained in the material or that there are no physical laws to which the universe conforms. How did this nutter become a bishop?

One presumes that when Spong eventually finds himself in hell – or heaven – he will continue to stoutly maintain that he does not believe in the afterlife; just like the damned Anglican cleric in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce who didn’t believe in hell even though he inhabited it.

A change of climate at the BBC, but not in the Anglican church

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That bastion of meteorological political correctness, the BBC is backpedalling on climate change:

What happened to global warming?

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

Mere facts are insufficient to deter the pontificating padres of the Anglican Church, though, who continue to decry the “moral consequences of climate change”. And all this as, in Canada, icicles begin to form in the nostril hairs of trendy bishops who can no longer afford to heat the buildings from which they have purged their flocks in increasingly enthusiastic spasms of zealous heathenism.

Surprise: the World Council of Churches approves of Obama’s Nobel Prize

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Having abandoned the Triune God, I suppose the WCC’s thoroughly nauseating, grovelling anthropolatry was rather to be expected:

It is with great joy that I take this opportunity to express my profound satisfaction at the decision of the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award you this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, the general secretary-elect of the World Council of Churches, who will succeed me in January 2010, joins in offering you our heartfelt congratulations on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. As citizens of Norway and Kenya, we take pride in our two nations’ particular connections to this event.

The Nobel committee’s decision honours you as a statesman who demonstrates a deep commitment to the cause of peace with justice, and hope for a transformation in this world. This quality of yours was eloquently recognized by the Nobel committee when it stated that only very rarely has a person captured the world’s attention to the extent that you have done already, and given the world’s people hope for a better future. You have shown the world your readiness to set aside serious ideological, political and cultural differences in the pursuit of peace and reconciliation. I am confident that this approach will ensure positive new developments in international relations and diplomacy. Your endorsement of the United Nations resolution on nuclear non-proliferation, your decision to discard U.S. plans to build a missile shield for Eastern Europe, your call to curb greenhouse gas emissions to prevent global warming and your eagerness for easing conflicts with Islamic nations demonstrate your deep commitment to promote peace and reconciliation in today’s troubled world. In all these matters, your administration affirms long-held positions of the World Council of Churches.

Your initiatives for promoting a new ethos and values in international relations based on a diplomacy of mutual recognition and shared responsibilities are vital in our contemporary situation. I am confident that the decision of the Nobel committee to confer this year’s peace prize upon you will go a long way toward accelerating your relentless efforts to contribute to peace. The award is a call and encouragement to build upon the important work you have already initiated.

The WCC seems to be among the Obamania beguiled that have failed to notice that he hasn’t actually accomplished anything to further peace – other than not being George Bush.

Expunging the Cross from our civilisation

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For once I agree with the ACLU – sort of:

Perched high above the ground in the middle of California’s Mojave National Preserve is a two-metre-tall structure known simply as the cross in the desert.

The white cross, erected 75 years ago by veterans to honour soldiers killed in the First World War, has plunged the U. S. Supreme Court once again into a debate on the separation of church and state.

In trying to defend the cross that sits atop Sunrise Rock, Justice Antonin Scalia has raised a far thornier issue: What does the cross represent? Is it a religious symbol of Christianity, and therefore an affront to other religions? Or is it simply a common symbol marking the place of the dead, which therefore transcends religiosity?

For now, the cross — made out of metal pipes — is covered with plywood to hide its significance.

The Supreme Court case, which is actually over complex land transfer rules, has prompted a fascinating philosophical exchange.

Peter Eliasberg, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California, told the Supreme Court many Jewish war veterans would not wish to be honoured by “the predominant symbol of Christianity” and that the cross “signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind.”

The lawyer is right: of course the cross “signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind.” To pretend otherwise in an effort to surreptitiously slip Christian symbolism into public life is less than honest. The real problem is, the Cross and what Jesus bought for us when he died on it, is the foundation upon which Western civilisation was built: remove it and our concepts of good, evil, justice, charity, fairness, the sanctity of life and human dignity will all be blown away by the first puff of wind.

It has already begun: scientist, Peter Singer advocates infanticide for “defective” babies; situational ethicist Joseph Fletcher advocated decontaminating our gene pool by weeding out “idiots” and the “diseased” through compulsory abortions; Linus Pauling proposed a policy of segregating genetic “inferiors” by branding them with indelible marks; transhumanists like Lee Silver wish to develop human chimera (something that has already been done in the UK) by combining human and animal DNA to “improve” the species. These ideas have infiltrated today’s society, unfettered as it is by the restraints once imposed by the morality of the Cross. What a nightmare.

Rowan Williams and the Devil

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Rowan Williams strongly disagrees with the Iraq war and seems to think the Devil was behind it:

Williams cites the Devil in attack on invasion ‘spin’

The bitterness, recriminations and accusations of betrayal which enmeshed the Iraq war surfaced unexpectedly and powerfully at a memorial service for the fallen yesterday.

Dr Williams said: “The invisible enemy may be hiding in the temptation to look for shortcuts in the search for justice – letting ends justify means, letting others rather than oneself carry the cost, denying the difficulties or the failures so as to present a good public face.” In this context, “the invisible enemy” denoted the Devil.

It’s a shame that Rowan can only spot the Devil at work in government when he is working to such dramatic effect in Rowan’s own denomination.