A new hate crime: hijab pulling

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From here:

Kingston, Ont., police are asking for the public’s help after a woman allegedly pulled on another woman’s hijab, which police are calling a hate crime assault.

Police said a woman was finishing her grocery shopping at a store around 5 p.m. ET on Jan. 28 when another customer came from behind her and pulled on her hijab.

This opens exciting new vistas for innovative hate crimes: sporran pulling; turban tugging; fez fondling; dislodging busbies with snowballs.

The possibilities are endless.

A glimmer of sanity from Afghanistan

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Humour is a wonderful gift from God. It can be used to puncture the pomposity of self-righteous bombasts and it is particularly satisfying to see it wielded against that most perfect paradigm of pretentious self-righteousness, the Islamist Mullah.

From here:

After a council of Afghan clerics issued restrictive guidelines for women, later embraced by President Hamid Karzai, young Afghans streamed to social media sites to lampoon the rulings, reports BBC Persian’s Tahir Qadiry.

“It’s outrageous,” wrote one young Afghan on his Facebook page.

“The next thing they’ll be saying is that Afghanistan needs to be divided up in two – one half for men and the other half for women.”

This was just one of thousands of comments posted on social media sites by young Afghans this week, after their country’s top religious council said that men and women should not mix at school, work or in other everyday situations.

[…..]

“Ladies, you should not surface on Facebook without a male partner,” wrote Mahnaz Afzal, an Afghan woman currently working in London.

“We have asked the Facebook administrators to create separate profiles for women. You are not allowed to ‘like’ or ‘poke’ someone on Facebook or you will be cursed.”

“Could I please ask the Afghan girls not to comment on my posts unless they have permission from their fathers or husbands or the Ulema council?” one man tweeted.

“Girls are only allowed to access Facebook if they are wearing their burkas!” tweeted another.

Rev. Katherine Ragsdale would break the law to help a minor get an abortion

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Rev. Ragsdale is president and dean of the Episcopal Divinity School and a lesbian. No-one was shocked by that, but she did cause a bit of a stir when she called abortion a blessing.

The best thing I can think of to say about her is: at least she is consistent. Consistently wicked.

From here:

(CNSNews.com) – Were Congress to outlaw the transporting of a minor without her parents’ permission across state lines to get an abortion, an abortion- and gay-rights activist testifying on Capitol Hill Thursday she would break the law to continue to help girls end their pregnancies.

Appearing as a Democratic Party witness at a hearing of the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, president and dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. recalled the time she took a 15-year-old girl she had never met before to get an abortion.

 

What does the average candidate for the Episcopal priesthood look like these days?

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John Laubach regularly had sex with other men, wandered around his neighbourhood with a parrot on his shoulder and met his demise tied to a bedpost with electrical wire while engaging in a little recreational – if unconventional – sex. In his spare time he was studying to become an Episcopal priest. Anyone surprised by this? No? Me neither.

I want to know what happened to the parrot.

From here:

Police hunting new suspect after Chelsea businessman, 57, who ‘liked to bring young men home’ found bound, gagged and dead in his home.

Known in the Chelsea neighbourhood for carrying his parrot Bolo on his shoulder, Laubach was tied to a bedpost with an electrical cord.

He was found by a female friend with his hands and feet bound and duct tape over his mouth in what may have been a sexual tryst gone wrong.

Sources told the New York Post that Mr Laubach often met young men for sex and cops are investigating whether his death was part of a sex game gone wrong.

Pat Robertson wants to legalise pot

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From here:

Of the many roles Pat Robertson has assumed over his five-decade-long career as an evangelical leader — including presidential candidate and provocative voice of the right wing — his newest guise may perhaps surprise his followers the most: marijuana legalization advocate.

“I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol,” Mr. Robertson said in an interview on Wednesday. “I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.”

This libertarian position – one I have a passing sympathy for – reminds me of William F Buckley’s staunch support for legalising all drugs on the grounds that it isn’t the government’s job to limit people’s freedom to choose their agent of stupefaction – lethal or not.

The problem is, if government does not make legislation that limits freedom in order to encourage a functioning society, if its legislation is not grounded in a moral framework,  then it should also not legislate against things like gay “marriage”, polygamy, polyamory, bestiality and bawdy houses.

I wonder if Pat Robertson would go along with that?

On hating God

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The ten commandments popped up as part of my regular Bible reading this morning and Ex 20:5-6 struck me:

You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

“Who”, I thought to myself, “could possibly be stupid enough to hate God?” Even though I now believe atheism to be illogical, I can empathise with being an atheist, since I once was one; being oblivious to God I can understand because even after I thought the idea of his existence was at least plausible, I didn’t want to have much to do with him. But who could hate God? If nothing else, a sense of self-preservation ought to keep one from such folly.

Not so, however. The so-called new atheists don’t so much disbelieve in God as loath him. Christopher Hitchens, shortly before his death, paraphrased the famous C. S. Lewis proposition: “if Jesus isn’t the Son of God, he is a hideous wicked imposter; his words were vane, empty and intended to deceive.” Lewis concluded that Jesus, therefore, was the Son of God, Hitchens that he was…..  a hideous wicked imposter. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris et al echo similar sentiments.

Blinkered fools!

I am Anglican

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But first and foremost, I am a Christian and don’t normally feel inclined to harp on about something that is peripheral to the kingdom of heaven, salvation, eternity and the forgiveness of sins.

I am going to make an exception for the moment, though. I belong to an ANiC parish that is a part of ACNA, the Anglican Church of North America. ACNA has not yet been recognised by Lambeth as an official Anglican body but, on February 10, 2010, the Church of England Synod passed a resolution that recognized the desire of ACNA to remain within the “Anglican Family.” This was not all ACNA hoped for, but it paves the way for full communion with Lambeth at some point.

While the Anglican Church withers in the West, it flourishes in Africa and most African Anglicans have declared full communion with ACNA: ACNA is in communion with 70% of the world’s Anglicans.

Does any of this really matter? As I remarked above, it is not of lasting significance, but I decided to make the point, nevertheless, because an Anglican priest from the Diocese of Niagara – who will remain nameless for the moment – on noting that the Niagara ANiC parishes intend to hang on to their prayer books, intoned: “you don’t need those, you are not Anglican”.

Contrary to the wish-fulfillment wet-dreams of this priest, ACNA is Anglican; ANiC is Anglican; I am Anglican.

The more important question is: “is the Diocese of Niagara Christian?”

The Anglican Church of Canada appoints a special government advisor

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“Special government advisor” is an odd title since it seems to imply that the Canadian government is seeking advice from the Anglican Church; I know we are in difficult financial times, but surely Ottawa is not that desperate.

The Rev. Laurette Gauthier Glasgow will agitate for “peace and justice” in the form, I imagine, of the Millennium Development Goals.

When she was assistant rector of All Saints, Belgium, she was already eager to advise the government on how to govern:

Let us encourage governments, business leaders, and members of civil society to be inspired by our more dynamic concept of abundance. As they seek to reform the global system and address global challenges, may they find true abundance in the midst of need so that we might eradicate need in the midst of abundance.

One presumes that the Belgian government was not entirely receptive to Rev. Glasgow’s “encouragement”, so now she is going to give the Canadian government the benefit of her insights. This doesn’t have much to do with the gospel of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, of course, but there is little left in the Anglican Church of Canada that does.

From here:

The Rev. Laurette Gauthier Glasgow has been appointed Special Advisor for Government Relations for the Anglican Church of Canada (The General Synod and the Diocese of Ottawa) while also continuing as Incumbent for the Parish of St. James, Leitrim, in the Diocese of Ottawa.

In a joint announcement, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, and Bishop John Chapman of Ottawa, expressed delight in co-sponsoring this half-time position that responds to a long-standing desire on the part of the church to establish a government relations presence in Ottawa. This was also a key recommendation from Vision 2019, endorsed at General Synod 2010.

 

Jesus may have been a hermaphrodite

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According to Dr. Susannah Cornwall, Manchester University’s Lincoln Theological Institute.

It takes the perspective of a 21st century theologian to come up with the cockamamie idea of studying Jesus’ genitals rather than his divinity, resurrection or atoning sacrifice and then to compound the tommyrot by suggesting that, because it is impossible to prove otherwise, he may have had a duplicate set of them.

I bet Michael Ingham wishes that he had thought of it first.

From here:

Dr Susannah Cornwall claimed that it is “simply a best guess” that Jesus was male.

Her comments, which are bound to provoke fury in some quarters, were published in response to the ongoing debate about women bishops in the Church of England.

Dr Cornwall, of Manchester University’s Lincoln Theological Institute, describes herself on her blog as specialising in: “Research and writing in feminist theology, sexuality, gender, embodiment, ethics and other fun things like that.”

In her paper “Intersex & Ontology, A Response to The Church, Women Bishops and Provision”, she argues that it is not possible to know “with any certainty” that Jesus did not suffer from an intersex condition, with both male and female organs.

In an extraordinary paper she says: “It is not possible to assert with any degree of certainty that Jesus was male as we now define maleness.

h/t: mcj