Anglican Church of Canada: Vision 2019

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It seems to be disappearing more rapidly than I anticipated. The main page, which on December 15th yielded:

Now shows:

One can only assume that the Anglican Church of Canada has decided to bury the corpse before it begins to stink.

All is not lost, however: the Vision 2019 report lives on – for now.

Among my favourite sections is the timeline appendix where the plan for promoting the Five Marks of Mission can be found. The ambitious scheme suggests that by 2019:

“Most Anglicans know of the Marks, and half can name three.”

Very much like Moses and the 10 commandments. Moses presents his plan to God:

“In 10 years most Israelites will know of the commandments and half of them will be able to name 6”

Christian assemblies in school are infringing on school children’s “rights”

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I went through high school in Wales when attending “morning assembly” was compulsory. The predominant effect of watching bored teachers, who evidently did not believe in what they were doing, go through the motions every day was to engender in me a revulsion to Christianity: as far as I was concerned Christianity was an exercise in hypocrisy and tedium.

A couple of teachers who partially reversed this effect were a chemistry teacher who was an evangelical Christian – and a prim fusspot – and a math teacher who quietly subverted the establishment efforts to Christianise the school population. The former was not afraid to engage in debates with students about his faith and the latter – who called himself a “seeker” – tried to make us think about the consequences our beliefs.

Having adopted the affectation of devout atheism in my teens, I tried to extricate myself from the compulsory assembly by cajoling my parents into writing a letter asking for me to be excused.

If the National Secular Society gets its way, all that is about to end and, from the perspective of someone who found meaning in rebelling against morning assembly, I can’t help thinking that it will be a shame if it does.

From here:

Christian assemblies in schools face axe over claims they infringe children’s human rights.

Christian assemblies in schools could be scrapped it campaigning atheists and teachers get their way.

According to the National Secular Society, a legal requirement for schoolchildren to take part in a daily act of collective worship ‘of a broadly Christian character’ discriminates against young atheists and non-Christians, and infringes human rights.

And the campaign has support from headmasters who claim that many schools already ignore the requirement, despite it being set in stone since the passing of the 1944 Education Act.

Global warming is making things colder

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When I had my annual Christmas chat with a friend in the UK, he mentioned that where he lives in South Wales the temperature has been hovering around -20 degrees C, colder than he ever remembers. Naturally, colder winters are due to global warming – that’s why it’s called global warming.

Scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming isn’t as convincing as, say, the empirical evidence that the earth isn’t flat; if it were that simple, everyone but the most obdurate contrarian would believe it.

What is in little doubt, though, is that politics plays a significant part in global warming hysteria.

From here:

The Abiding Faith Of Warm-ongers

Got that? No matter what the weather, it’s all due to warming. This isn’t science; it’s a kind of faith. Scientists go along and even stifle dissent because, frankly, hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants are at stake. But for the believers, global warming is the god that failed.

Why do we continue to listen to warmists when they’re so wrong? Maybe it’s because their real agenda has nothing to do with climate change at all. Earlier this month, attendees of a global warming summit in Cancun, Mexico, concluded, with virtually no economic or real scientific support, that by 2020 rich nations need to transfer $100 billion a year to poor nations to help them “mitigate” the adverse impacts of warming.

This is what global warming is really about — wealth redistribution by people whose beliefs are basically socialist. It has little or nothing to do with climate. If it did, we might pay more attention to Piers Corbyn, a little-known British meteorologist and astrophysicist who has a knack for correctly predicting weather changes. Indeed, as London’s Mayor Boris Johnson recently noted, “He seems to get it right about 85% of the time.”

How does he do it? Unlike the U.N. and government forecasters, Corbyn pays close attention to solar cycles that, as it turns out, correlate very closely to changes in climate. Not only are we not headed for global warming, Corbyn says, we may be entering a “mini ice age” similar to the one that took place from 1450 A.D. to 1850 A.D.

We don’t know if Corbyn’s right or not. But given his record, he deserves as much attention as the warm-mongers whose goal is not to arrive at the truth but to reorganize society in a radical way.

The history of spam

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There was a time when spam didn’t denote unwanted email from vendors of products designed to enlarge parts of the anatomy not usually discussed in polite company.

Just as now, I don’t remember spam ever being rationed – I’m not sure why – but I do recall enjoying it fried.
From here:

How the US cemented its worldwide influence with Spam.

[T]he flagship of American influence in my own life was Spam, the bright-pink pork luncheon meat that was a staple of the British working-class diet for several decades.

It’s still going strong in many markets around the world – including the United States – and although the odd concession has been made to changing times (it’s less fatty and salty than it used to be) it’s still essentially the same as it always was.

I came to know it in the early 1960s, in the days before the invention of obesity. In common with millions of other British families we used to slice it, coat it in batter and then deep-fry it, thus producing that miracle of British culinary ingenuity known as the spam fritter.

So when the time came to find a way to round off my three years as the BBC’s North America correspondent, it seemed somehow fitting to head not for the bright lights of New York or Chicago but for the less showy charms of Austin, Minnesota, home of the Hormel Food Company. Spam Central, in short.

It would be fair to say that Austin, like a lot of cities in the northern Mid West, is not flattered by the grim, flat light of early winter. But the Spam Museum, which is its main tourist attraction, is a riot of cheery colour.

Inside you are treated to the services of a “Spambassador” (I said it was colourful, not subtle) and you enjoy a movie presentation that draws heavily on the musical work of a group of ladies called the Spamettes.

And it turns out that it’s not fanciful at all to see Spam as a symbol of the spread of American influence.

Our Spambassador Chris George tells us that the product was already popular in the United States in the 1930s – the first radio jingle, in fact, is a kind of ode to Spam set to the tune of My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean.

This, of course, is the definitive ode to spam:

Not even the weatherman believes in global warming

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From here:

The founder of The Weather Channel in the US has described the concept of global warming as ‘the greatest scam in history’ and accused global media of colluding with ‘environmental extremists’ to alarm the public.

“It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM,” John Coleman wrote in an article published on ICECAP, the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, which is known for challenging widely published theories on global warming.

The World Council of Churches, having largely abandoned the Gospel in favour of almost anything that is sufficiently outlandish, is one of the dwindling numbers of organisations that is sufficiently gullible to cling tenaciously to the fantasy of anthropomorphic global warming.

Perhaps the member churches of the WCC have succumbed to nostalgia and, no longer believing in hellfire and damnation in the next life, feel they must preach it in this one.

h/t my underpaid research assistant

A 1947 Christmas

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When I was a small child in the UK, rationing was still in force. Bread, meat, butter, potatoes were all rationed. In spite of that, at Christmas, we always seemed to have enough to eat and my parents managed to buy presents. My memory of my early childhood Christmases is not one of today’s excesses that don’t seem to particularly satisfy anyone, but of warm, cheerful (well, apart from my aunt Ada) family gatherings. I didn’t know it then, of course, but my parents made the necessary sacrifices to create a merry Christmas.

From the BBC:

[flv:https://anglicansamizdat.net/wordpress/videos/Christmas1947.flv 760 440]

Archive footage shows how British people experienced the run up to Christmas in 1947, one of the toughest of the post-War ‘Austerity’ years.

Bread became rationed, joining other staple items like meat, butter and potatoes, and queues in shops were common.

Sterling was also experiencing a currency crisis, resulting from the UK’s post-War debt to America.

Contrast that with Rowan Williams’ Christmas meanderings in which he bemoans the plight of today’s poor – who are actually considerably more wealthy than even the moderately well-off in the late 40s.

‘No government in its right mind wants poverty. One positive thing about aspects of the current spending review is a clear intention to put things in place that will actually reduce poverty and help people out of the traps of dependency.

‘But also we need to beware of the real temptation to take it for granted that if people still suffer, even after reforms undertaken with good intentions, then somehow it is their fault.

‘Life at the grass roots is always going to be less black and white, and it isn’t surprising if a lot of people, already insecure, start feeling even more insecure. At the very least, there’s a job of communication to do.

‘Hard-working and honest people who do their best really do face problems; so do people with disabilities, with mental health issues or limited mobility.
‘There are doubtless some who make the most out of the benefits culture (just as there are some who have made the most out of other kinds of perks available to bankers or MPs).

Dr Williams returned to the theme in his Christmas Day sermon in Canterbury Cathedral, in which he said society would stick together in hard financial times only if people felt the burden was being shared.

‘That confidence isn’t in huge supply, given the crises of trust that have shaken us in the past couple of years and the sense that the most prosperous have yet to shoulder their load.’

It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that what really irks Rowan Williams is the fact that the government is not redistributing wealth more vigorously. Unfortunately at Christmas, just as at any other time, if a person cannot be content with what he has, he won’t be content no matter how many free Xboxes are showered upon him. It’s a shame that rather than point that out, Rowan chose to preach leftist politics instead. He also could have said a few words about the relatively significant Incarnation event.