St. Paul’s clergy dropping like flies

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The first to go was the cathedral’s canon chancellor, Giles Fraser, then Fraser Dyer the cathedral chaplain and now Graeme Knowles, the Dean.

After repeated criticism of profiteers and ‘bank robbers’ the Church of England is now hoist with its own petard. If only Rowan Williams would do the decent thing and follow the example set by St. Paul’s clergy.

From here:

The Church of England is facing an escalating crisis after a third senior cleric resigned over the Occupy movement’s protest camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral.

The Rt Rev Graeme Knowles, the dean of St Paul’s, announced he was resigning with immediate effect, saying that the row over the Occupy London site had made his position “untenable”.

Knowles said he was “no longer the right person to lead the chapter of this great cathedral” and that his departure could provide the opportunity for a “fresh approach” to the crisis. On Friday, he took the first service at the cathedral after it reopened its doors after a week-long closure.

Last week, Giles Fraser, the cathedral’s canon chancellor, and Fraser Dyer, the cathedral chaplain resigned.

Reacting to the latest resignation, Rowan Williams has issued a statement, continuing the familiar theme of lamenting the collective transgressions of the financial industry while ignoring the church’s primary purpose of offering salvation through Jesus Christ:

“The urgent larger issues raised by the protesters at St Paul’s remain very much on the table and we need – as a Church and as society as a whole – to work to make sure that they are properly addressed.”

 

Why are religious leaders not decrying the violent end of Muammar Gaddafi?

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When Osama bin Laden was killed, prominent bishops and clergy were falling all over themselves to denounce the injustice, warn against Western rejoicing, and fulminate against militarism.

When Gaddafi was summarily despatched, there was silence in the ecclesiastical ether.  It seems Gaddafi was sodomised with a stick to cries of “Allah Akbar” shortly before the final bullet. Those who are into that kind of thing can find the video here.

Is it the cry of “Allah Akbar”, the sodomy, indifference to Arabic Islamists murdering one another or all of the aforementioned that has prevented the tut-tutting of pious clerics?

We may never know. One thing is certain: if an American had delivered the coup de grâce – or the stick – the ecclesiastical screeching would have been deafening.

Climategate 2

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The global warming alarmists have been telling porkies again, this time, Professor Richard Muller who portentously announced the demise of global warming scepticism in the Wall Street Journal recently.

Following this revelation, Prof Judith Curry from the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology accused Muller of hiding the fact that there has been no warming for the last 13 years.

Ironically, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, of which Muller is founder and chairman, has “A transparent approach based on data analysis”, emblazoned on its web page.

Read more here:

It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, ‘proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer’.

Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.

[…..]

a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.

Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.

[…..]

As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: ‘This is “hide the decline” stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline.

 

 

The St. Paul’s occupation

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From here:

Fears that St Paul’s Cathedral will become a ‘new Dale Farm’ deepened today after a legal battle began to evict protesters camped outside.

The City of London Corporation and cathedral officials each decided to go ahead with court actions as the landmark reopened after being closed for a week because of the anti-capitalist demonstration.

I’m surprised no-one has thought of the obvious solution. Get Canon Giles Fraser back to preach non-stop outdoor sermons to the occupiers. They would be gone within the hour.

Here is the Guardian’s latest comment on the attempt to oust the protesters. For once, they have it about right.

 

The whole episode reminds me a little of the delightful 1963 film, Heavens Above: in it the new vicar played by Peter Sellers invites a group of displaced gypsies to live in the vicarage with the inevitable consequences. The whole thing is on Youtube. Here is part 4:

 

The disaster presidency

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From here:

Whether it was the bitter cold or the wrath of Hurricane Irene, a major weather alert never seemed to be far away in 2011.

Tropical Storm Lee prompted President Barack Obama to pledge disaster aid to the areas of Louisiana battered by the storm last month.

That makes 90 disasters declared by the commander-in-chief, a new record in yearly disaster declarations – and 2011 isn’t even over yet.

And the biggest disaster has yet to be declared: Obama.

Satan prevented from speaking at Tyndale University, Toronto

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Well, the next best thing: George Bush.

The Canadian Evangelical Left has blocked former President George W. Bush from speaking at evangelical Tyndale University in Toronto, deriding him as a virtual war criminal.

An online petition by faculty and students, fueled by reporting by the Toronto Star, evidently ensured the event’s cancellation last month. One Tyndale professor, in his own anti-Bush op-ed, implicitly accused the former president of “blasphemy” and “heresy’ for daring to have employed scriptural language in citations of dreaded American exceptionalism during his administration.

Apparently, Dr. Arthur Paul Boers is heartbroken over the absence of careful deliberation, discernment or debate about the arrogant theological actions and assertions of George W. Bush. If only Bush had attended Tyndale University, he would, no doubt, have emerged with his theology conformed to the received leftist Tyndale dogma, whereupon he would have metamorphosed into Jimmy Carter and given interviews to Playboy to discuss lust instead of invading Iraq.

Perhaps Boers and Bush could come to an agreement: Bush is not a theologian, so he will cease all theological utterances and Boers is not a politician (thank God), so he will keep his nose out of politics, confining himself to mystical mutterings in the comfort of his sacerdotal ivory tower.

Anglicans have a liturgy for everything

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According to the WHO:

  • HIV/AIDS kills 1.78 million people per year.
  • Diarrhoeal disease kills 2.46 million people per year, many of them children and is easily treatable.

Guess which gets a day dedicated to it? The former: World Aids Day is coming up on December 1st.

Guess which disease the Anglican Church of Canada has taken upon itself to enshrine in liturgy? I know, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel: Aids.

Guess the reason for this – choose one of the following:

  • The Anglican Church of Canada is more interested in sexually transmitted diseases than other diseases that kill more people, especially if the other diseases involve diarrhoea. That is because sex is a part of the Anglican spiritual journey and diarrhoea is just yucky.
  • The Anglican Church of Canada is obsessed with the Anglican spiritual journey, therefore it is obsessed with sex. At the outer reaches of the Anglican spiritual journey we find homosexual sex. So it is particularly obsessed with that.
  • The Anglican Church of Canada has so many homosexual priests that their interest in Aids is really the expression of a desire for self-preservation: homosexual sex is still the preferred way to contract Aids.
  • All of the above.

 

 

 

Blenheim, lesbians and Tim Hortons

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Blenheim is a small town in Ontario where the major source of entertainment on a Saturday night is cow tipping – so my wife, who knows more about sleepy Canadian towns than I, tells me.

Nevertheless, the town is big enough to have a Tim Hortons and at least two lesbians who, while on a quest to find a more stimulating form of entertainment than bovine unbalancing, decided to grope one another in full view of  those partaking of Tim Hortons’ more modest delicacies.

We may never know whether the negative reaction from a local pastor and the restaurant’s manager was due to Blenheim being a hotbed of prudishness or whether the titillation that men supposedly experience when women kiss was outweighed by the undeniable ugliness of the specimens in question, but the pair was asked to leave.

There aren`t many things more faddish than lesbians but the occupy something to protest the impalpable  with a view to changing the intangible movement is one of them. So now we have Occupy Timmies. This is almost certainly a self defeating effort since Timmies will  double their intake selling coffee and doughnuts to imported well-heeled yahoo occupiers  – while the rest of the sleepy town goes back to cow tipping.