Liberals rejoice at the death of Andrew Breitbart

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I presume nobody is particularly shocked, disturbed, surprised, stunned or flabbergasted to discover that peddlers of ideologically inspired ersatz tolerance and love are practically dancing in the streets to celebrate the death of conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart.

From here:

The most influential tweet came from Slate’s Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias), who tweeted: “Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBrietbart dead.”
AlmightyBob ‏ @AlmightyBoob : @AndrewBreitbart haha youre dead and in hell being a gay with hitler

Jeff Glasse ‏ @jeffglasse : Andrew Breitbart now enjoying afternoon tea with Hitler #goodriddanceyouhack

@darrenfiorello: Andrew Breitbart died? Is it wrong that I’m happier about that than when they got bin Laden and Saddam?

Kellie Allen @thirtyseven : Breitbart helped destroy the career of someone I know. Good riddance, scumraker.

Scott On Da Rox  @ridinchillwaves : RT GOOD RIDDANCE..fascist prick @Gawker: Andrew Breitbart Dead? gawker.com/5889586/

Josh M ‏ @TheSocialest : Good riddance Breitbart. Hopefully they put James O’Keefe in your casket.

John Kapp ‏ @johnkapp : Andrew Breitbart was a racist, sexist, homophobe. Good riddance.

 

Researcher who suggested infanticide might be justifiable gets death threats

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The truly strange thing about this is that Francesca Minerva, the author of the paper, is surprised by the death threats. After all, she says, “this is pure academic, theoretical discussion.” It obviously hasn’t occurred to her that the death threats were probably just academic and theoretical.

As the journal’s editor, Professor Julian Savulescu noted,  Minerva’s argument that a newborn baby is not an “actual person” and, therefore, can be used, abused, killed and discarded is “largely not new”. It was used before in the Final Solution.

From here:

A researcher at the University of Melbourne has been the target of numerous death threats after she published a theoretical paper which argued killing newborn babies is no different from abortion.

The paper, written by Francesca Minerva and Monash University teaching assistant Alberto Giubilini, was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics last week and is titled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”

It suggests newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life” because they “both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life of an individual”.

Dr Minerva, who said the last four days have been the worst in her life, has asked for people to understand the perspective of her work.

“This is not a political paper, this is not a proposal for a law,” she told ninemsn.

“This is pure academic, theoretical discussion.”

Dr Minerva said the paper was based on thirty years of medical ethics discussions.

“Both a foetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of a ‘subject of a moral right to life’,” the paper states.

“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”

They conclude their argument by stating: “What we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”

Dr Minerva said she was not expecting the overwhelmingly negative reaction and believes her argument has been taken out of its academic and theoretical context.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien wants us to repent over indifference to global warming

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From here:

Cardinal Keith O’Brien of St. Andrews and Edinburgh has joined other Christian leaders, including Anglican Archbishops Rowan Williams and Desmond Tutu, in calling for repentance over indifference to climate change.

Here I am, repenting over my indifference to global warming:

The bishop who doesn’t believe in God

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Richard F. Holloway stopped believing in God in the mid ‘60s but this didn’t prevent his becoming bishop of Edinburgh in 1986 or Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church in 1992. Who knows, perhaps it was a requirement.

He decided to become a “funny existentialist” and behave as though God does exist. Evidently he didn’t try too hard to pretend God exists, since  he wrote a book called Godless Morality, where he argued: “It is better to leave God out of the moral debate and find good human reasons for supporting the system or approach we advocate, without having recourse to divinely clinching arguments.”

He is patron of LGBT Youth Scotland and supports abortion and legalised euthanasia.

All in all, a pretty typical Anglican bishop.

From here:

THE bishop who stopped believing in God, Richard Holloway doesn’t pray any more but his moving memoir makes it clear that he’s lost none of his faith in humanity

[….]

He lost his faith five years after he left Kelham. There had been struggles even when he was there – sexual urges didn’t go away, and even though these were heterosexual, his first real crush was for a fellow novice. (Although that relationship remained entirely chaste, when the two men met up decades later and reminisced, his colleague admitted that they must have been in love).

None of those early struggles, though, had been about belief itself. Yet in the mid-Sixties, when he was working in a parish in the Gorbals, his faith in God ebbed away. “I ended up with this funny existentialism – that there may be no God in the universe, but let’s live as though there is

The Diocese of Niagara is Tweeting

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The diocese has announced that:

[The] Niagara Diocese has “entered the 21st century and now have Twitter and Facebook accounts,”

Archdeacon Michael Patterson announced. He is the administrator of the Twitter account

The twitter account is @NiagaraAnglican, so naturally, I clicked on “follow”, only to discover that I have already been blocked! I feel so excluded.

 

I would like to point out to Archdeacon Michael Patterson that  is he is welcome to follow me on twitter, @anglicansam. In fact, I look forward to it.

Diocese of Niagara: the secret to church growth is to ditch the creeds

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A couple of luminaries writing in the Niagara Anglican reckon that churches are emptying because the diocese is determined to hold on to such outmoded esoterica as the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Christ.

This is odd, since all the priests who still believe these arcane curiosities left the diocese around 2008 – and the churches are still emptying.

From here (page 3):

Visitors to a church service from the secular world, hearing the creeds, listening to priests threatening Judgment Day, claiming that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, asserting that Jesus was literally born of a virgin and literally raised from the dead, must shake their heads in astonishment. Those who cannot tolerate what they consider hopelessly out-of-date do not return.

Gay tea launched in Australia

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From here:

The new DiversiTEA range features eight blends: B!tch Please, Disco Ball, D.R.A.M.A Queen, F@g H@g, French Tickler, Pearl Necklace, Pinkies Up and Pride.

B!tch Please includes chilli for a fiery drinking experience, D.R.A.M.A. Queen is blended with lime, lemon peel, and daisies in order to relax the het-up drinker.

Pearl Necklace is a night-harvested jasmine bud tea described as a “pleasure to watch”, with the tagline “Who doesn’t want a pearl necklace?”

However did Australia manage before the availability of this refined selection of rarefied pekoes?

Like this:

Rowan Williams and miracles: a response to John W Martens

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This is a reply to an article by John W Martens. For it to make sense, you should read his article first.

John,

Thank you for the response to my comments.

I attempted to post this reply to your article on your blog, but it seems that Blogger has a maximum of 4096 characters in the response box, so I have had to write my reply here. I didn’t want to do that since I thought it would create too much jumping around in the unlikely event that someone might want to read through the whole exchange.

I’ll start by returning to my suspicion that when Rowan Williams uses the word “miracle” he means something different to what I mean when I use it.

I am willing to go along with the plausibility of the idea that the transition from proto-humans to humans occurred when they became aware of a call from God. What eludes me is how this “call” could be anything other than supernatural.  If it was supernatural, it was outside nature and was an intervention in the normal processes of nature: it “tinkered” with nature. If it was not outside nature, yet still came from God, it means God himself is subject to his creation and its laws: he is a victim of its causal phenomena.

I’m not sure your saying:

“Williams is asking for us to see God as immanent and always present and always active in the processes of nature and being and not intervening from “the outside,” a trap into which I think David Jenkins falls.”

helps much in resolving that problem since God’s immanence and resulting activity in the processes of nature either has to be contained by nature and thus subject to it or not. If not, then it is still intervening from “the outside.”  From the confines of my “outside” trap, I would suggest that if you “den[y] the separation of God from nature” you teeter perilously close to a different trap: pantheism.

When Terry Nichols says “nature is not a closed system but an open system within a larger, divine context”, I think he is assisting my case, not yours. A system being “open”, implies that there is something outside the system which could influence it. When a door to my house opens, a breeze is likely to enter; if there is nothing outside my door – a vacuum – the reverse would happen. Either way, there has been intervention in my system. That is, unless Nichols wishes to render the same service for the word “open” as Williams seems to want to do for “miracle”: reduce it to unintelligibility.

Your use of the word “arbitrary” in relation to God’s action in the world puzzles me. Why would one assume that when God intervenes, it must be “arbitrary”? To say that implies action without thought – capricious as Rowan Williams puts it – a sort of divine flailing about. I presume you would admit that a human mind acts with a degree of free will in the universe? My intention in typing this sentence originates in an immaterial part of me – my mind or soul – and has physical results in the material world. If that is not arbitrary and capricious (I’m presuming on your generosity in granting me that it isn’t), why must God’s acting in the world be arbitrary and capricious? God is a person and, as such, must be able to act in the world to a much more sophisticated degree than the people who bear his image.

I would agree that “miracle” as defined by David Hume, a violation of the laws of nature, is something that Rowan Williams has an aversion to, but I would argue a few things: first that God’s acting in the universe does not necessarily violate the laws of nature any more than the acts of any immaterial free agents – human minds – do. The Hume objection only makes sense for an isolated or closed system: if the universe is not causally closed, the Hume definition doesn’t hold. Second, this type of objection is only relevant to a Newtonian view of the universe. Quantum Mechanics describes the universe as a system constrained by probabilities rather than laws. Bradley Monton (philosopher of religion and science) pointed out:

“I think that all miracles are pretty unproblematically compatible with the GWR [Ghiradi-Rimini-Weber] theory….. So for changing water into wine, it’s not a big deal – you’ve got a bunch of individual particles (electrons, protons etc.) that are composing the water, and they can all have GWR hits such that their positions are redistributed to the locations that would be appropriate for them to compose wine”.

That still would take God’s intervention, of course.

In conclusion then, I’ll repeat the definition of miracle that I made in one of my earlier comments: “an event in the external world brought about by the immediate agency or the simple volition of God.” I still think my saying that Rowan Williams’ remarks imply that he does not believe in miracles is justified on the grounds that he has redefined “miracle”: that is cheating. I would say the same for Christian thinkers who reason along the same lines.

Diocese of Montreal gets everything backwards

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The synod of the Diocese of Montreal voted to support keeping the long gun registry, which would  cost Canadian taxpayers another billion dollars and criminals nothing at all. The synod also voted to oppose “tough on crime legislation” which would most probably expose Canadian taxpayers to more crime, leaving them less money to pay for the long gun registry, and ease the burden on criminals trying to make a dishonest living.

There was also broad support for the objectives of the Occupy Movement – whatever they are.

It appears that God did not intrude upon the meeting in any way.

Not bad for one synod.

From here:

Delegates to the 152nd synod of the Diocese of Montreal voted by strong majorities to urge the federal government to rethink its plans to abolish the long-gun registry and to adopt tough-on-crime legislation expected to greatly increase the prison population.

[….]

Another resolution, with support from the Revd Canon David Sinclair among others, gave some support to the objectives of the Occupy Montreal protestors against income disparity and other social ills. It supports “Occupy Montreal and all others who have drawn attention to the grave disparities of the current economic systems.”

On Koran burning

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Burning Korans is never out of the news for very long. Most recently, rioters in Afghanistan killed 12 people after four Korans were burned by the U.S. military because imprisoned terrorists were using them to exchange clandestine messages. That’s three people per Koran. Before that, Pastor Terry Jones decided to burn a Koran for reasons never satisfactorily explained and we have enjoyed a few Burn the Koran days since then.

The Koran is Islam’s “holy book”. What does that mean? Islam’s claim is that the words of the Koran are Allah’s words: it is holy – sublime and pure – because it contains God’s words. Of course, if it doesn’t contain God’s words, it isn’t holy at all: it is a vile deception which contrives to lead those who read it into confusion and perdition – burning is too good for it. As a Christian, I am inclined to the latter view. There may be a middle ground between these extremes, but I suspect not.

We are frequently enjoined to respect Islam; as a Christian, I feel beholden to respect Muslims since they, like everyone else, are made in God’s image. I can’t see much reason to respect the transparently arrant nonsense that is Islam, though.

So, if Islam is not true and the Koran is not holy, there is no more reason to avoid burning it than to avoid burning the Tropic of Cancer and Muslims really should grow up and stop being so over-sensitive. Many won’t, though and that’s why most people would prefer to stick a firecracker up a bull’s nose than burn a Koran.

Nevertheless, occasionally Korans are burned; why?

Sometimes it is accidental; that was probably the case for the latest conflagration in Afghanistan. Its being an accident didn’t lessen the fury of those who were waiting patiently for an excuse – any excuse – to riot, shoot guns in the air, scream, burn flags and murder people.

Sometimes it is an expression of contempt for Islam. That appears to be the case for both Terry Jones and the Burn the Koran crowd. Since Christians are supposed to draw people to Christ through their words and example, it’s difficult to see why a Christian would view burning the Koran as anything but counter-productive to his primary calling. Even burning the Origin of Species to irritate an atheist, although tempting, is something Christians should avoid. Especially during Lent.

A secularist burning a Koran to demonstrate his contempt for all it represents doesn’t seem to me to be such a bad way to exercise freedom of expression, especially since the pyromaniac would be demonstrating the virtue of bravery (or possibly the vice of stupidity) by doing it in the full knowledge that his days of incendiary exploits were likely to be summarily curtailed by those he seeks to enlighten.

To come back to Afghanistan: the latest incidents have persuaded me that, worthy though the attempt to introduce civilisation to barbarism may be, the West no longer has the stomach to exert the force necessary to bring the effort to fruition. Without that, it’s all a tragic waste.