Fresh Expressions in the Anglican Church of Canada

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From here:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has expressed hope that the Fresh Expressions initiative will flourish in the Anglican Church of Canada as it has in the Church of England.

[….]

Fresh Expressions “encourages new forms of church for a fast changing world, working with Christians from a variety of denominations and traditions,” according to the Fresh Expressions U.K. website.

The question is, fresh expressions of what? The fact that heretical dioceses like Niagara and New Westminster have launched into Fresh Expressions is hardly reassuring.  Both dioceses are willing to try anything to boost their flagging numbers but a fresh expression of diocesan baloney isn’t likely to help.

While on the subject of baloney, here is Rowan Williams explaining what Fresh Expressions is all about. Among other things it invites us “to explore one another” – anything to get people in the door.

Pornographic vegetarianism

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PETA, in a flash of marketing insight, has decided that treating women as pieces of meat will prevent cows suffering a similar fate.

From here:

An animal rights group, which is no stranger to attention-grabbing campaigns featuring nude women, plans to launch a pornography website to raise awareness about veganism.

[….]

Visitors to the X-rated site will initially be presented with pornographic content as well as images from PETA’s salacious ads and campaigns, Rajt said. Those images will be followed by pictures and video shot undercover of the mistreatment of animals. The site will also include links to vegetarian and vegan — using no animal products — starter kits as well as recipes.

No doubt pornography addicts will be lining up in droves for their vegetarian starter kits.

N. T. Wright on abortion, the death penalty, Iraq and 9/11

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From here:

You can’t reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty. Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty, even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world. As far as they were concerned, their stance went along with the traditional ancient Jewish and Christian belief in life as a gift from God, which is why (for instance) they refused to follow the ubiquitous pagan practice of ‘exposing’ baby girls (i.e. leaving them out for the wolves or for slave-traders to pick up).

Mind you, there is in my view just as illogical a position on the part of those who solidly oppose the death penalty but are very keen on the ‘right’ of a woman (or couple) to kill their conceived but not yet born child…

From where many of us in the UK sit, American politics is hopelessly polarized. All kinds of issues get bundled up into two great heaps. The rest of the world, today and across the centuries, simply doesn’t see things in this horribly oversimplified way…

While we’re about it, how many folk out there were deeply moved both by the reading of the 9/11 victim names and by the thought that if they’d read the names of Iraqi civilians killed by your country and mine over the last ten years we’d have been there for several days?

To summarise:

  1. The execution by the state of a person guilty of the crime of murder is equivalent to the killing of an innocent baby for the sake of convenience. Therefore, the only consistent position is a polarized one where either abortion and capital punishment are both permitted or neither are permitted.
  2. The polarization of American politics is all wrong – except for point 1 above where it is obligatory because it is the Wright kind of polarization.
  3. If you are moved by remembering the deliberate murder of 3000 of your own countrymen, you must be equally moved by the wartime deaths of enemy civilians, even though you tried your best to minimise such casualties. This may appear to be a yet another polarized viewpoint, but it’s fine since it is an example of a number of issues piled into one great Wright-approved heap, not two.
  4. The rest of the world isn’t deceived by American Horrible Simplifications. That’s why, for example, UK sophisticates riot at the slightest pretext, routinely indulge in binge drinking and erect sharia controlled zones  –  all horrible, but at lease not horrible simplifications.

I get the impression that N. T. Wright doesn’t much like America; oops – that’s another hopelessly polarized opinion.

 

Taking pride in the Anglican processes

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While I worked for IBM I was an avid follower of Dilbert, the cartoon character who seemed to understand how IBM works better than the executives who pretend to run it. One of my favourites was pinned to my office wall. In it, Dilbert spent his entire week accomplishing nothing other than fulfilling the demands of the institutional processes surrounding the task – the actual task was never completed. At the end of the week, he concluded that, if he was to take pride in anything, he had to take pride in the processes. The strip was entitled, “We take pride in our processes.”

Such is life at IBM: few executives care what gets done as long as the attempt adheres to the process. To accomplish anything worthwhile demands an intricate knowledge of an underground network of people willing to conspire together to circumvent the elaborate obstacles erected by entire divisions of bureaucrats, the object of which is to prevent anything happening any faster than the pace of continental drift.

I sometimes think that Rowan Williams, with his indabas and listening process, should work at IBM after he retires: he would fit right in.

Here is an article by the ever perceptive Charles Raven:

The strategy behind Williams’ address was not to promote his views on homosexuality directly, but to reflect on the process by which moral decisions in general should be made – not so much to play the game, so to speak, as the more ambitious task of actually trying to define what the playing field should look like. And this is the enduring significance of his address thirteen years later as he continues to promote ‘indaba’ and ‘listening process’ strategies which focus on the process of decision making, while all the time kicking the can down the road in the hope that the institutionally messy consequences of closure can be avoided.

Reminders being sent for abortion appointments because the prospective mothers are forgetting to show up

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From here:

Britain’s largest abortion provider said it is introducing reminders because some girls and women had forgotten about their procedures.

Critics said the move, by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), gave a disturbing insight into casual attitudes to abortion.

BPAS, which carries out almost one third of NHS-funded terminations, likened the service, which begins in November, to reminders sent out by dentists before check-ups.

[….]

Stewart Jackson, Conservative MP for Northampton, who supported an amendment earlier this month by Nadine Dorries to introduce independent counselling for abortion, described the initiative from BPAS as “morally squalid”.

If an unborn baby is a non-human with no soul, not bearing the image of her Creator, then dismembering her in the womb and scraping out the broken parts is of no more significance than a tooth extraction, so sending a reminder is simply – practical.

If an unborn baby is a human, then a reminder to keep an appointment to murder could hardly be more morally squalid than the decision to murder or the act of murder.

The pro-abortion contingent can’t have it both ways.

How to make yourself even more unelectable than you already are

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It isn’t an easy job to further reduce the election chances of the Halton Family Coalition candidate but, with a few well-chose words, Tony Rodrigues proved himself up to the daunting task. There are many reasons for suspecting that the received dogma on global warming is incorrect, so why did Rodrigues have to support an even less plausible theory?

From here:

Family Coalition candidate Tony Rodrigues got the panel off to a unique start stating he does not believe in climate change, but feels the severe weather irregularities around the globe are due to a large dam in China is [sic] tilting the earth off its axis.

The dam does have the potential for increasing the length of day by 0.06 microseconds – around the same length of time Rodrigues spent pondering his environmental platform – but earthquakes have a far greater effect on the earth’s rotational speed.

Apparently, gender is irrelevant and those who don’t agree should “die off”

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That is the view of the exemplar of tolerance, Glenn Close, who plays a cross dresser in her new film.

From here:

Glenn Close is not a man. And she is not gay. But she so fully assumes the bizarre form of an Irish woman who hides her sex beneath stiff collars and black suits in the new film Albert Nobbs, that you have to recalibrate all notions of gender by the final credits.

Close says that was pretty much the whole idea behind bringing her Obie-winning role to the screen: “Gender is irrelevant. It basically should be irrelevant.”

[….]

Some people will change their point of view, and those who are either too old, or too blinkered, to accept the beauty of difference will just have to “die off,” she says.

Hiding one’s sexual identity by dressing as a member of the opposite sex expresses the irrelevance of gender as effectively as a man in a wig expresses the irrelevance of baldness.

And since cross-dressing seeks to disguise a difference, it’s difficult to see how it enhances the “beauty of difference.”

Perhaps it is Ms. Close’s brain cells that have died off.

In Australia you can now be male, female or X

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From here:

Australian passports will now have three gender options – male, female and x.

The new category is only for use by intersex people – who are not biologically entirely male or female.

Trangendered passport-holders – who have changed gender but not had surgery – will be free to choose either male or female, but will not be allowed to select ‘x’.

[…..]

She said: ‘”X” is really quite important, because there are people who are indeed genetically ambiguous and were probably arbitrarily assigned as one sex or the other at birth.

‘It’s a really important recognition of people’s human rights that if they choose to have their sex as “indeterminate”, they can.’

In Western society, being inter-something is an increasing obsession. Interfaith services commemorating 9/11 were popular and were attended by people who believe that proclaiming their non-adherence to any specific religion is more virtuous than espousing the truth of one to the exclusion of the others. The objective reality that if one religion is true the others must be false, has to be resisted at all costs since that would foster exclusiveness and inequality – the antithesis of the only permitted absolutes, inclusiveness and equality.

As the article notes, it has become a human right to deny objective reality. Thus, to insist on the objective existence of a person’s gender is now gauche: a person’s sex is determined existentially. A person doesn’t behave like a man because he is one, he is a man because he behaves like one: behaviour precedes essence.

What next, I wonder: an interspecies category for those whose sexual excess is behavioural evidence of their being rabbits?