The 39 articles, Readers’ Digest version

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From here:

The Executive Council of the Episcopal Church issued the following message at the conclusion of its three-day meeting in Linthicum Heights, Maryland

A Message from Executive Council
January 29, 2012
Linthicum Heights, Maryland

God is awesome
The Good News is not fair
God always acts first

So there you have it: the Anglican Credo circa 2012, the 39 articles in a shrunken trivial trinity, a tertiary triteness, a bromidic banality, a diabolical dephlegmation.

Or perhaps it’s so profound, I missed the point and should repeat it:

God is awesome
The Good News is not fair
God always acts first

I might set it to music to see if that helps.

The definitive marriage of convenience

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From here:

A gay air steward for the Russian carrier Aeroflot was forced to marry a woman in order to keep his job, campaigners say.

GayRussia.eu reported that campaigners had filed notice of a demonstration after gay employee Maxim Kupreev suffered unusual kind of discrimination by his employer.

When Kupreev, 25, tried to found a gay support network at the airline, he was seemingly ordered to marry.

The gay steward tied the knot with his school friend Sofia Mikhailova so he could keep his job at the end of last year, reportedly to minimise publicity for his attempted LGBT network.

What did Sofia Mikhailova get out of this arranged marriage, one wonders. Airmiles? An upgrade to Aeroflot first class with unlimited inflight borsch soup (I had it almost every day when I was in Russia; it’s not that bad – really)?

I know: free stock in Aeroflot.

 

Canadian understatement of the year

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The Shafia murder trial has tarnished the image of Muslims in Canada.

From here:

TORONTO — The Shafia murder trial has cast a shadow over Canada’s Islamic community, further tarnishing an image that has not yet recovered from the events of 911.

Muslims across the country, however, say the revelations in a Kingston, Ont., courtroom have shone a light on problematic aspects of their culture and illuminated new ways to tackle the issues.

The “issues” are: honour killing – what used to be known as cold-blooded murder; polygamy; misogyny and wife abuse, all of which appear to be inexorably intertwined with Islam.

In the absence of Muslims acknowledging this, what “new ways to tackle the issues” could there possibly be?

Requests to nullify Baptism on the rise

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From here:

An elderly French man is fighting to make a formal break with the Catholic Church, in a case that could have far-reaching effects.

Rene LeBouvier, 71, has taken the church to court over its refusal to let him nullify his baptism after losing his faith in the religion.

Though he was raised in a community where Catholicism dominated every walk of life, Rene changed his views in the 1970s after spending time with ‘free thinkers’.

On first glance this seems plain silly – on second glance too, come to think of it.

After sober reflection, though, it occurred to me that perhaps LeBouvier has a point. I was confirmed by the Diocese of Niagara: I will be applying to be de-confirmed forthwith.

 

Atheists for church burning

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Having no rational argument to support their belief system, atheists in Fort Bragg are resorting to a video that celebrates church and book burning to advertise an atheism festival. Christians, being considerably more civilised, intelligent and emotionally secure are not advocating burning The God Delusion or this in retaliation.

From here:

Atheists are using a music video that celebrates the burning of churches and synagogues to promote an upcoming atheist-themed festival at Fort Bragg.

“Rock Beyond Belief” is scheduled to be held on the parade field at Fort Bragg in March. The event was created in part as a response to a Billy Graham Evangelistic Association event that was held last year.

Here is the video (notice, I didn’t call it a music video):

St. John’s Shaughnessy is like a mausoleum

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Since the Diocese of New Westminster won the court battle for the buildings of parishes that left the diocese and joined ANiC, St. John’s Shaughnessy, once the largest Anglican parish in Canada, has gone downhill a little. Sunday attendance has dropped from 850 to between 3 and 13; the parish is running a deficit of $20,000 per month and in the week, the building, according to the treasurer, is like a mausoleum.

This was discussed is a parish meeting in November 2011.

Here is the mausoleum remark:

And the $20,000 per month deficit:

Who is paying for this deficit, you might be wondering? The well known philanthropist, Bishop Michael Ingham:

You can listen to the whole meeting here:

A triumph of Pyrrhic proportions for Bishop Michael Ingham.

Deifying atheism

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Alain de Botton wants something awe inspiring in his life, something to foster love, friendship, and goodness. Something transcendent one might be tempted to think if it were not for the fact that Botton is an atheist and so is compelled to reach the obtuse conclusion that his longing for transcendence is evidence that it doesn’t exist.

Not to be deterred, he has decided to build a temple to his god: atheism. It purports to be a celebration of life on earth, culminating in the human genome sequence inscribed in binary on the outside walls – a tribute to man’s ego as much as atheism.

Botton’s atheism purports to be a more positive form of atheism than that of Richard Dawkins, but adopting the aesthetics of religion while denying its truth doesn’t seem to me to be much less misguided than rejecting both.

Rev. George Pitcher seems to think it is a good idea – a sure indicator that it isn’t

From here:

Plans to build a £1m “temple for atheists” among the international banks and medieval church spires of the City of London have sparked a clash between two of Britain’s most prominent non-believers.

The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre (151ft) tower to celebrate a “new atheism” as an antidote to what he describes as Professor Richard Dawkins’s “aggressive” and “destructive” approach to non-belief.

Rather than attack religion, De Botton said he wants to borrow the idea of awe-inspiring buildings that give people a better sense of perspective on life.

“Normally a temple is to Jesus, Mary or Buddha, but you can build a temple to anything that’s positive and good,” he said. “That could mean a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective. Because of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens atheism has become known as a destructive force. But there are lots of people who don’t believe but aren’t aggressive towards religions.”

Is Richard Dawkins intelligently designed?

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I have to admit, the evidence from his own lips suggests not.

From here:

“We still don’t know what exactly happened at the time of the Big Bang, 13.72 billion years ago. Cosmologists and physicists now have good ideas which are yet to be proved definitely, that the whole universe came into being as a quantum event out of literally nothing,” he said, according to the Times of India.

“This leaves religion with nowhere to go. Because however difficult it may be to explain the origin of the cosmos, it would be even more difficult to explain the origin of a designer who made the cosmos.

“So you have absolutely nothing to gain by postulating any kind of intelligent designer, because that simply evades the question we’re trying to solve. If you want to believe in some kind of god, don’t look to science.”

There are three problems with this.

First, it confuses the categories of things that have an origin – like the universe – and things that don’t – like God. God, by definition is a necessary not a contingent being: he does not depend on something else for his existence. To look for a cause for the universe’s coming into being makes sense, to look for a cause for God’s coming into existence has no meaning because, in order to be God, he must have always existed.

Second, saying: “the whole universe came into being as a quantum event out of literally nothing” doesn’t solve the problem of how something that requires a cause for its existence arrived, apparently, without a cause: what caused the “quantum event”?

Third, since Richard Dawkins’ atheism is a presupposition not something that has been demonstrated logically or empirically, it isn’t surprising that science can’t help him find something he is already convinced isn’t there. Scientists who do not start out with a belief that God does not exist see a great deal of evidence for a universe that has been designed.

The future of Anglican church buildings?

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An Anglican priest in the UK wasn’t happy with the liberal drift of the Church of England, so he has converted his garden shed into a church.

His new church is part of the Orthodox Church, but the idea could be adopted by displaced Anglicans who have lost their buildings in Canada. We’ve exhausted  the fads of the Emerging Church, the Missional Church, the loony fringe Prophetic Social Justice Making Church, now we have finally arrived at the Garden Shed Church.

From here:

St Fursey’s is so small the holy processions carried out during each service only take worshippers ten steps along and two steps across.

There is no room to sit and after services the congregation step through a door into the priest’s living room for a cup of coffee.

But the Antiochian Orthodox church – very similar to the Greek Orthodox but English speaking – is an official place of worship after it was blessed by a bishop.

[….]

Father Weston served as an Anglican priest with the Church of England for 20 years before he became disillusioned with its ideals at the age of 50.

He says he was upset with the direction the Anglican Church was heading and admitted the ordination of women to the priesthood was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’.

Stephen switched to the Orthodox Church and short of an English-speaking venue, decided to build his own in the village of Sutton, Norfolk, in 1998.

 

No more prayers on Alaska Airlines

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From here:

Alaska Airlines is ending a decades-long tradition of handing out prayer cards with their in-flight meals because an increasing number of passengers were offended by them.

Offended because the inflight meals were so bad that one had to pray in order to digest them? Offended by the implication that the aeroplane needed prayer in order to land safely?

Of course not: offended because the cards contained a Christian message, Christianity makes some exclusive claims on truth and, today, there is nothing quite so offensive as announcing that everyone can’t be right.