Don’t Ask don’t Tell: The Next Generation

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We all knew that the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell wasn’t the end of the military’s ever onward march towards sexual enlightenment: soon it will be legal for soldiers to have sex with animals. Consensual sex, of course.

Churches will be able to offer liturgical solemnisation of human-beast partnerships as a generous pastoral response for those who seek to live in mutual love and faithfulness in a stable, long-term committed relationship with their camels.

From here:

The Senate on Thursday evening voted 93-7 to approve a defense authorization bill that includes a provision which not only repeals the military law on sodomy, it also repeals the military ban on sex with animals–or bestiality.

On Nov. 15, the Senate Armed Services Committee had unanimously approved S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a provision to repeal Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

Article 125 of the UCMJ makes it illegal to engage in both sodomy with humans and sex with animals.

[…]

Former Army Col. Bob Maginnis said some military lawyers have indicated that bestiality may be prosecutable under another section of the military code of justice – the “catch-all” Article 134 for offenses against “good military order and discipline.”

But don’t count on that, he said.

“If we have a soldier who engages in sodomy with an animal – whether a government animal or a non-government animal – is it, in fact, a chargeable offense under the Uniform Code? I think that’s in question,” Maginnis told CNSNews.com.

The question is, will non-government animals still receive survivor benefits?

The Ten Commandments: please attempt five

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The editor of the Diocese of Toronto’s paper, Stuart Mann, thinks that the Ten Commandments are too judgemental: they are not there to keep us on the “straight and narrow” but are there to make us “free.’

The problem is, if God is not “judgemental”, if he doesn’t pass judgement on evil and sin, then there was no reason for Jesus to take our punishment by dying a horrible death on the cross. There is no reason to believe that we need Jesus in order to be saved, no reason to call ourselves Christians and no reason to attend a Christian church.

If a church teaches this, then people will stop attending and the church will die. And that is what is happening to the Anglican Church of Canada.

From here (page 5):

“You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol.

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.

Honour your father and your mother. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery.

You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness.

You shall not covet your neighbour’s house, your neighbour’s wife or anything that belongs to your neighbour.”

When I was younger, I would have recoiled at such a passage. It seems so harsh and judgemental, like a parent scolding a child. But I’m beginning to look at it in a different way. Rather than keeping his people on the straight and narrow, perhaps God is telling them how to be free.

When you add up all the complications that arise from some of the things God is warning us about—greed, envy, false gods, lust, lying— is it any wonder people are stressed out these days? Even if we kept half of God’s commandments, we would lead simpler—and happier— lives. It would free us up to think and dream and enjoy each other’s company—in short, to be closer to God.

The 10 commandments have been much maligned and ridiculed over the years, but there is great wisdom in them. Can we keep some of those commandments?

I think we can. You could probably cross a few off the list right now.

Survey finds that atheists are perceived as untrustworthy as rapists

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From here:

Atheists are almost universally perceived as untrustworthy, and only rapists rate as low, a new study has found.

“Where there are religious majorities — that is, in most of the world — atheists are among the least trusted people,” said lead author Will Gervais, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of British Columbia. “With more than half a billion atheists worldwide, this prejudice has the potential to affect a substantial number of people.”

The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, combines information collected from six different surveys.

This should not come as a surprise.

After all, if atheists are correct and there is no God, then trustworthiness is merely a genetic accident which would generally be overridden by the callous self-interest that inevitably results from natural selection – and who better to indulge callous self-interest than those who wholeheartedly embrace this view.

If atheists are not correct and there is a God, why trust a group of people who base their entire lives and behaviour on a monumental error of judgement?

Diocese of Niagara: distributive justice is the primary message of the Bible

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Forget about individual sin, eternity, Jesus dying for our sins, reconciliation with God, the cross, the Atonement, the Resurrection, glorifying God as a purpose for living. At last the true message of the Bible can be revealed, courtesy of the Niagara Anglican. It’s all about the government taking money from people whom it thinks have too much and giving it to people who have too little – in practice, government employees.

The Bible is full of examples of Jesus petitioning the Romans to take money from the wealthy and give it to the poor; I just can’t put my finger on any at the moment.

As Jesus said in Luke 6:20: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of the welfare state.”

From here (page 8):

On the weekend in mid-October when the Occupy Wall Street movement appeared in cities in Canada and around the world, a Biblical scholar explicated the timeless message of God’s will, as taught by Jesus, Paul and the Old Testament prophets, for distributive justice for all peoples. His key phrase, distributive justice, refers to a peaceful, democratic community with an economy characterized by a just distribution of the essentials of life, as opposed to the injustice that characterizes a military dictatorship claiming to bring peace through victory.

[….]

The necessary revolution in our age, as in Jesus’ time, is to create God’s kingdom of distributive justice in our earthly societies. This is also the primary message of the Bible.

 

Rowan Williams is the only Anglican left who still remembers the “moratoria”

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For those who wish to brave the fog of  the Windsor Continuation Group Report and peruse the moratoria, they can be found here.

In summary, “gracious restraint” (a phrase subsequently mangled into meaninglessness) was asked for:

  • Consecration of Bishops living in a same gender union
  • Permission for Rites of Blessing for Same Sex unions
  • Interventions in Provinces

Since the forming of ACNA and ANiC, no further “interventions” have occurred, so that leaves the other two – which have never stopped occurring.

This has led Rowan Williams to have an Advent Moan:

These questions are made all the more sharp by the fact that the repeated requests for moratoria on problematic actions issued by various representative Anglican bodies are increasingly ignored.  Strong conscientious convictions are involved here.  No-one, I believe, acts out of a desire to deepen disunity; some believe that certain matters are more important than what they think of as a superficial unity.  But the effects are often to deepen mutual mistrust, and this must surely be bad for our mission together as Anglicans, and alongside other Christians as well.  The question remains: if the moratoria are ignored and the Covenant suspected, what are the means by which we maintain some theological coherence as a Communion and some personal respect and understanding as a fellowship of people seeking to serve Christ?  And we should bear in mind that our coherence as a Communion is also a significant concern in relation to other Christian bodies – especially at a moment when the renewed dialogues with Roman Catholics and Orthodox have begun with great enthusiasm and a very constructive spirit.

The fact is that the North American Anglican Provinces aren’t interested in theological coherence, are continuing to press ahead with same sex blessings – full blown marriage to follow shortly – the ordaining of actively homosexual clergy and the legalised persecution of those who refuse to go along with them. The word “moratorium” is never mentioned.

It’s hard to take Rowan Williams’ complaining about everyone ignoring the moratoria too seriously, when he himself not only welcomes Bishop Michael Ingham, who has a same-sex partnered Dean and continues to bless same sex marriages, to Lambeth for a pally chat, but offers to look for a replacement priest for St. John’s Shaughnessy on Ingham’s behalf.

Lambeth launches a Hindu Christian forum

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From here:

Canterbury, England  – In a move to create an “opportunity for dialogue and depth,” the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and Sri Shruti Dharma Das Ji launched the Hindu Christian Forum today at Lambeth Palace, according to a Church of England news release.

“The conversation of interfaith dialogue is always one where we look eagerly and expectantly for enrichment. We’re not playing for victory, we’re seeking understanding from one another…by learning the depth of one another’s commitment and vision; dialogue and depth is what we all hope for,” said Williams.

Perish the thought of “playing for victory”, that would imply that Christianity is true and Hinduism isn’t, an idea whose insensitivity would shrivel the inclusion addicted sensibilities of Anglican prelates from coast to coast.

The state of Global Warming

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With the release of 5000 new Climategate 2 emails, it has become even more apparent that data has been falsified, the issue politicised and the science as unsettled as my Aunty Ethel’s homemade blancmange.

From here:

Global-warming skeptics spend much of their time knocking down the fatuous warmist claim that the science is settled. According to the warmists, this singular piece of settled science is attested to by hundreds or thousands of highly credentialed scientists. In truth, virtually the entire warmist edifice is built around a small, tightly knit coterie of persons (one hesitates to refer to folks with so little respect for the scientific method as scientists) willing to falsify data and manipulate findings; or, to put it bluntly, to lie in order to push a political agenda not supported by empirical evidence. This is what made the original release of the Climategate e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia so valuable. They clearly identified the politicized core of climate watchers who were driving the entire warmist agenda. Following in their footsteps are all the other scientists who built their own research on top of the fraudulent data produced by the warmist core.

Canada is standing up for sanity by refusing to participate in the Kyoto protocol and, excluding flights for the participants, around 15,000 tonnes of CO2 is being dumped into the air in Durban City at the conference to discuss how to dump less CO2 into the air.

Meanwhile, Rowan Williams is promoting his solution to the problem: grow your own potatoes. I am all for home grown vegetables since they taste very good and, I have to admit, it’s a pretty harmless solution from a person no-one listens to, to a problem that doesn’t exist.

 

The Bishop of Sheffield doesn't like the economic system

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From here:

THE Bishop of Sheffield has spoken out against an economic system “shaped by the ethics of greed and everyone for themselves”.

As the ‘Occupy Sheffield’ protest continued on the forecourt of the Cathedral, the Rt Rev Dr Steven Croft said: “We may want to agree with the questions which are being raised whilst disagreeing with the methods of the protesters in raising them.”

Addressing the Sheffield Anglican Synod last Saturday, the Bishop said the Church’s voice needed to be heard as the economic crisis continues and deepens.

People, not economic systems are greedy. If the Church had a firm grip on the notion that we are all sinners – greedy sinners – and did its job to spread the good news that there is a remedy for sin in Jesus Christ, people would be less greedy and the economic system that so preoccupies trendy western bishops would be less “shaped by the ethics of greed”.

The Diocese of Toronto is not just about composting

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I thought it was, but apparently, it isn’t. As Bishop Colin Johnson tells us in this address to synod, it’s also about things like Occupy Toronto slogans and living simply.

This is not just about recycling or composting, although that might be a good start for some people. Most of us need to learn to live simply, so that others can simply live. The Occupy movement’s slogan, I think, might be more useful: “A few might be guilty, but all of us are responsible.” And so we spend time at this synod considering our environment, our place in it, our responsibility, how it is part of God’s mission.

Now he has inspired us with his address, I would like to encourage Bishop Colin to simplify his life by moving into a one room tent in St. James’ park where he will be able to continue his “long-standing work of advocacy and direct service regarding poverty, [and] homelessness” unfettered by the constraints of ecclesiastical bureaucracy.

Bishop Colin astutely notes that Occupy Toronto has managed to achieve something that has eluded the Diocese of Toronto for decades. It has:

touched something real and deep in the psyche of our world today, an anxiety and a disenfranchisement and a sense of huge loss, but what they also touched was really an active hope. That the world as it is, is not the world as it should be. One of the slogans that I saw at one of the tents really struck me. It said: “As you look around the world, does it feel right?”

The slogan was quite true, of course, although it would have been less so had the occupiers made more use of the toilets instead of the grass.