An eco-Ash Wednesday

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Rowan Williams and sundry lesser clerics have decided that Ash Wednesday is really all about condemning consumerism and fossil fuels. Let’s hope the ashes they use are not the product of a carbon spewing conflagration.

From here:

Rt Hon Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury; Rt Rev Richard Chartres, Bishop of London; Most Rev Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales; Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh and leaders of the Methodist, Baptist and URC churches are among those signing Operation Noah’s Ash Wednesday Declaration.

[….]

“Traditionally, Christians commit themselves to repentance and renewed faith in Jesus Christ on Ash Wednesday,” said David Atkinson, Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of Southwark. “We must live out that faith in relation to our damaging consumer economy, over-dependence on fossil fuels and the devastation we, as a species, are inflicting on God’s world. We believe that responsible care for God’s creation is foundational to the Gospel and central to the Church’s mission.”

St. George's Anglican Church, Montreal to receive government hand-out

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From here:

Media Advisory: Government of Canada to Announce Support to St. George’s Anglican Church National Historic Site

MONTREAL, QUEBEC, Feb 21, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — On behalf of the Honourable Peter Kent, Canada’s Environment Minister and Minister responsible for Parks Canada, the Honourable Judith Seidman, Senator, will make an infrastructure announcement regarding the conservation and presentation of the St. George’s Anglican Church National Historic Site.

St. George’s, is an historic site and will be a recipient of government largesse; to put it another way, taxpayers will pay for its upkeep.

I’m not averse to paying for the upkeep of an historically or aesthetically significant building, but there is a degree of irony in a church degenerating to this status: the activity for which it was built – housing worshipping Christians – can no longer attract enough people to pay for its upkeep. Or, more correctly, the Anglican Church of Canada’s confused, sub-Christian concoction of neo-paganism and eco-cultism is not attracting enough people.

The irony is reinforced by that fact that the Anglican Church of Canada has recently spent a great deal of money on lawsuits to wrest the ownership of buildings for which it has no use and can’t afford to maintain from those who could both use and maintain them.

How long before Bishop Michael Ingham declares St. John’s Shaughnessy an historic site worthy of taxpayer support? It’s running a deficit of $20,000 per month at the moment.

I perceive, therefore I am

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Gender Identity Disorder (GID) is a term used by psychologists to describe a person who is convinced his mind has a different gender to his body.

To treat GID, the body is modified to fit the mental perception the person’s gender.

If this seems a little odd – or even preposterous – it is because it is. Why do psychologists assume that the disorder is in the body rather than the mind? If a person decides he is Napoleon, does his psychologist prescribe a series of operations to transform the patient’s body into a passable likeness of Napoleon? Of course not.

The difference in the case of GID is that the treatment is grounded in ideology, not medicine.

Tragically, even children are being sacrificed to the lunatic cult of gender-fluidity.

From here:

A small but growing number of teens and even younger children who think they were born the wrong sex are getting support from parents and from doctors who give them sex-changing treatments, according to reports in the medical journal Pediatrics.

It’s an issue that raises ethical questions, and some experts urge caution in treating children with puberty-blocking drugs and hormones.

An 8-year-old second-grader in Los Angeles is a typical patient. Born a girl, the child announced at 18 months, “I a boy” and has stuck with that belief. The family was shocked but now refers to the child as a boy and is watching for the first signs of puberty to begin treatment, his mother told The Associated Press.

 

 

Anglicans invent a new god: Common Ground

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Giles Fraser doesn’t like the Anglican Covenant because it attempts to define what an Anglican is by asserting what an Anglican must believe. Since being a Christian is defined by what one believes, this doesn’t seem like a particularly unreasonable limitation – but, then, for the anti-Covenant anti-confessional muddled middle ground brigade, Christianity may well not be a prerequisite for Anglicanism.

What is important to Fraser and his ilk is to eschew all things binary – a perversely obtuse eccentricity in the digital age. There must be no Either/Or, no Black or White no certainties, no definitiveness. No truth; instead, let there be Common Ground.

From here:

The reason why the Covenant is such a terrible idea is that it replaces the search for common ground with a fear that the Other is out to get me. It gives the Other a means of my exclusion, and thus turns the Other into the enemy.

The Covenant contains the idea of a two-tier Communion — those who signed up being on the inner tier; those who do not being on the outer tier — which is not quite the ecclesiastical equivalent of outer darkness. The idea that the C of E itself might be in the outer tier makes a nonsense of the whole Covenant idea. Communion with the see of Canterbury has always been the defining feature of what it means to be an Anglican.

The Richard Dawkins family slave business

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Richard Dawkins’ ancestors were slave owners it seems and some of his inherited wealth came from them.

From here:

He has railed against the evils of religion, and lectured the world on the virtues of atheism.

Now Richard Dawkins, the secularist campaigner against “intolerance and suffering”, must face an awkward revelation: he is descended from slave owners and his family estate was bought with a fortune partly created by forced labour.

One of his direct ancestors, Henry Dawkins, amassed such wealth that his family owned 1,013 slaves in Jamaica by the time of his death in 1744.

The Dawkins family estate, consisting of 400 acres near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, was bought at least in part with wealth amassed through sugar plantation and slave ownership.

Over Norton Park, inherited by Richard Dawkins’s father, remains in the family, with the campaigner as a shareholder and director of the associated business.

Dawkins is a bit upset about this revelation and this was part of his exchange with the journalist who wrote the Telegraph article:

“Darwinian natural selection has a lot to do with genes, do you agree?” Of course I agreed. “Well, some people might suggest that you could have inherited a gene for supporting slavery from Henry Dawkins.”

“You obviously need a genetics lesson,” I replied. Henry Dawkins was my great great great great great grandfather, so approximately one in 128 of my genes are inherited from him (that’s the correct figure; in the heat of the moment on the phone, I got it wrong by a couple of powers of two).

Setting aside his scientific illiteracy and his frankly defamatory insinuation that I might condone slavery, the point about powers of two is interesting enough to warrant a digression.

Much as I enjoy witnessing any discomforting of Dawkins, this particular exercise seems rather silly, since with sufficient digging we would probably find that Mother Teresa had slaver ancestors and Christopher Hitchens was remotely related to Thomas Aquinas.

Nevertheless, Dawkins’ indignation is instructive since he obviously thinks his moral credentials have been called into question – yet he believes in no morality other than that derived from genetic accident. He has no way of proving that not owning slaves is morally “better” than owning them: by his lights, if a society is more likely to survive because of a thriving slave industry, it is a “better” society than one which perishes because of a lack of slaves. For Dawkins, survival is the only “good” there is.

Richard Dawkins believes that a gay gene exists even though there is no scientific evidence for it. Why could there not also be a slaver gene even though no scientific evidence exists for it? And why would Dawkins be upset to find he possessed it – after all, it’s only a gene?

Courageous Canadian artist mocks religion

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No, no, not Islam, Christianity: Bruce LaBruce isn’t that courageous.

From here:

Photographs of women posing sexily as nuns and in various stages of undress wearing Catholic symbols have sparked outrage and complaints of blasphemy from Catholic and conservative groups after they were displayed at an exhibition on Thursday.

‘Obscenity’, an exhibition of 50 photographs by the Canadian artist Bruce LaBruce, opened in Madrid, Spain, yesterday to much protest.

The audacious Mr. LaBruce is also writing a film script about a “beggar saint who performs miracles and heals people through sexual acts”. I’m sure the lady priests of Diocese of Niagara are eagerly awaiting its completion so they can perform it in Christ Church Cathedral.

 

7 year old announces he is gay, mother believes him

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From here:

Considering that my son has a longstanding crush on Glee‘s Blaine and regularly refers to him as “my boyfriend,” I thought there was a fair chance that he would someday say, “I’m gay.” But my kid is only 7 years old. I figured I had a few years before we crossed that threshold (if we ever did), probably when he was 14 or 15. I never thought it would happen this soon.

[….]

It’s amazing, but it’s also shocking. How many people have a 7-year-old come out to them? A lot of people don’t know how to react, and I don’t blame them. Before my son, I’d never met a child who came out this young — and we don’t know anyone else who has. The mere idea of children having a sexual orientation makes people uncomfortable. It’s something we don’t think about (or just don’t like to).

Yes, it is shocking: why would a mother allow her 7 year old to watch Glee and why would it amaze her that junior has been influenced by Glee’s glamorisation of homosexuality?

The Anglican Church of Canada self-destructs over 0.1%

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According to Statistics Canada there are 45,345 same-sex couples in Canada and about 7,500 of them are married – 0.1% of all married couples. 37,900 are same-sex common-law couples.

Heretical ideas have been allowed to roam unchecked in the Anglican Church of Canada for decades, but it was the blessing of same-sex couples that was the last straw that finally drove many orthodox parishes to separate from their dioceses.

The Anglican Church of Canada likes to claim that this is a “justice” issue; but is it really – the church has torn itself apart for the sake of 0.1% of married couples?

I am convinced that the percentage of same-sex partnered priests in the ACoC is higher – far higher – than the national average. The real reason for the church’s obsession with blessing same-sex couples is self-interest on the part of homosexual Anglican priests: they refuse to mend their ways and they seek justification for not doing so.

Here is a graphic from the CBC:

 

 

 

Being for the Anglican Covenant is anti-American, apparently

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From here:

For his part, the Rev. Malcolm French, the coalition’s [No Anglican Covenant Coalition] Regina-based Canadian convenor, points to an inherent anti-American bias at the heart of the covenant. “Certainly the venom level went up once the Episcopal church had a female presiding bishop and, oddly, this is why the covenant has appealed to some people in the U.K. who would otherwise be seen as perhaps politically on the left. It connects to a larger anti-Americanism that has nothing to do with church politics.”

This is rather an odd statement coming as it does from the political leftist and theological liberal, Rev. Malcolm French. Up until now, being anti-American was the sine qua non of the French id, it was what brightened his day, put a spring in his step and lent fuel to his rejoicing at living in the country of the sainted Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton rather than the land of the devil worshipping George Bush.

What Rev. French really means, of course, is that the Anglican Covenant is against the heretical theological meanderings which are afflicting American Anglicanism. The Covenant, even if adopted, is insufficiently potent to do much about that, but even a whiff of rebuke is enough to start Anglican liberals foaming at the mouth in indignation.

This almost makes me want to support the Covenant.

Homosexual priests in long-term committed relationships

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Here are two who were “close friends” in the Roman Catholic Church. Their relationship was long term, but the commitment was sufficiently loose to allow them to haunt “places frequented by gays” where one of them acquired AIDS and syphilis.

The pair decided to jump off a cliff together but, lacking the nerve, decided, after planning a list of hymns for their funerals, to hire hit men to finish them off instead.

This amalgam of comic pantomime and maudlin tragedy is brought to you courtesy of a church – the Roman Catholic Church this time – which turns a blind – or winking – eye to what used to be called sin.

Two gay Roman Catholic priests hired hitmen to kill themselves after one of them discovered he had Aids.

Rafael Reatiga, 35, and Richard Piffano, 37, who had been close friends since training, were discovered shot dead in a car in Southern Bogota, Colombia, in January last year.

Authorities initially suspected robbery but this week prosecutor Ana Patricia Larrota said investigators had determined that it was a case of suicide by hitmen.