If it's not the Crusades, it's the cartoons

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I don’t really need any more reasons to like George W. Bush, but here is another one anyway from Mark Steyn:

I was among a small group of columnists in the Oval Office when President Bush, after running through selected highlights from a long list of Islamic discontents, concluded with an exasperated: “If it’s not the Crusades, it’s the cartoons.” That’d make a great bumper sticker: It encapsulates both Islam’s inability to move on millennium-in millennium-out, plus the grievance-mongers’ utter lack of proportion.

Melanie Phillips interviewed about her new book

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An interesting interview with Melanie Phillips on The World Turned Upside Down. Although an agnostic, she understands something that eludes the new atheists: our civilisation is build upon Christianity and Judaism; remove them and you lose the civilisation.

You don’t have to be a religious believer to understand that if religion — more specifically, the Hebrew Bible and the Christianity that built upon it — underpins Western civilization and the codes of right and wrong — putting others above yourself, freedom and equality, and belief in reason — that form the bedrock of that civilization, then eroding or destroying that religion will erode or destroy those virtues and the civilization they distinguish…

The real problem in Britain is not Islam but the vacuum in British culture which Islam is opportunistically attempting to fill. That vacuum has been caused by the retreat and surrender of the Christian church under the tide of secularism and aggressive atheism. This has opened the door not to an age of reason but to an epidemic of paganism — environmentalism, or worship of the earth, is the most conspicuous example, but there’s lots of other absurd stuff, too, such as seances, crystals, astrology, and the like.

And I fear that, along with other mainline churches, the Anglican Church – having helped create the spiritual vacuum in the first place – has not only thrown its hand in with paganism, but is vigorously promoting it. All in its increasingly futile attempt to remain relevant.

The Anglican Church of Canada in the bosom of Mother Earth

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Well, the armpit, at least. In the “News From our Partners” section of its web site, the Anglican Church of Canada has a pointer – actually, like so much else in the ACoC, the pointer is screwed up – to a document called Cochabamba – Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. In it you will find a Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, including:

Article 1. Mother Earth
(1) Mother Earth is a living being.
(2) Mother Earth is a unique, indivisible, self-regulating community of interrelated beings that sustains, contains and reproduces all beings.
(3) Each being is defined by its relationships as an integral part of Mother Earth……

Article 2. Inherent Rights of Mother Earth
(1) Mother Earth and all beings of which she is composed have the following inherent rights:
(a) the right to life and to exist;
(b) the right to be respected;
(c) the right to regenerate its bio-capacity and to continue its vital cycles and processes free from human disruptions;
(d) the right to maintain its identity and integrity as a distinct, self-regulating and interrelated being…….

Article 3. Obligations of human beings to Mother Earth
(1) Every human being is responsible for respecting and living in harmony with Mother Earth…..
(d) ensure that the pursuit of human wellbeing contributes to the wellbeing of Mother Earth, now and in the future;

The ACoC is a member church of Kairos, the organisation peddling this twaddle; I was surprised not to see “I am Fred Hiltz and I approve this message” at the end of the document.

Good news for the meteorological division of the Anglican Church of Canada

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After decades of painstaking research, the world renowned meteorologists of the Anglican Church of Canada have finally discovered something more to be shunned than unfashionably dated sins which, after all, merely imperil our immortal souls: carbon dioxide.

The science is clear: global warming is happening faster than ever and humans are responsible. Global warming is caused by releasing what are called greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The most common greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide. Many of the activities we do every day like turn the lights on, cook food, or heat or cool our homes rely on energy sources like coal and oil that emit carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. This is a major problem because global warming destabilizes the delicate balance that makes life on this planet possible. Just a few degrees in temperature can completely change the world as we know it, and threaten the lives of millions of people around the world.

They were tempted to say that we are headed for hell on earth, until the House of Bishops reminded them that the ACoC no longer believes in hell.

Fear not! It was all a mistake; Anglican clergy are being sent back to weatherman school – it’s actually getting colder:

Contrary to the commonly held scientific conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer, a scientist who has written more than 150 peer-reviewed papers has unveiled evidence for his prediction that global cooling is coming soon.

The hottest new trend in climate change may be global cooling, some researchers say.

Contrary to the commonly held scientific conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer, Dr. Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University and author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, has unveiled evidence for his prediction that global cooling is coming soon.

“Rather than global warming at a rate of 1 F per decade, records of past natural cycles indicate there may be global cooling for the first few decades of the 21st century to about 2030,” said Easterbrook, speaking on a scientific panel discussion with other climatologists. This, he says, will likely be followed by “global warming from about 2030 to 2060,” which will then be followed by another cooling spell from 2060 to 2090.

Easterbrook spoke before a group of about 700 scientists and government officials at the fourth International Conference on Climate Change. The conference is presented annually in Chicago by the Heartland Institute, a conservative nonprofit think tank that actively questions the theory of man’s role in global warming. Last year the Institute published Climate Change Reconsidered, a comprehensive reply to the United Nations’ latest report on climate change.

“Global warming is over — at least for a few decades,” Easterbrook told conference attendees. “However, the bad news is that global cooling is even more harmful to humans than global warming, and a cause for even greater concern.”

David Bentley Hart interview

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From here; Hart adroitly dissects Dawkins and Hitchens among other things:

The violence of Christian history from CPX on Vimeo.

The new atheists and an ugly God from CPX on Vimeo.

Ethics and the good life from CPX on Vimeo.

Nostalgia for a pagan past from CPX on Vimeo.

Gnosticism and alternative gospels from CPX on Vimeo.

Suffering and the problem of evil from CPX on Vimeo.

UK: deporting terrorists not allowed

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Melanie Philips writes:

The BBC reports:

The alleged leader of an al-Qaeda plot to bomb targets in north-west England has won his appeal against deportation. A special immigration court said Abid Naseer was an al-Qaeda operative – but could not be deported because he faced torture or death back home in Pakistan.

… ‘We are satisfied that Naseer was an al-Qaeda operative who posed and still poses a serious threat to the national security of the United Kingdom,’ the judgement said. It added: ‘Subject to the issue of safety on return, it is conducive to the public good that he should be deported.’

Question: if it is not ok to send al Qaeda operatives to far-flung places where they may be judicially killed, why is it ok for British forces to be hunting them down in far-flung places in order that they may be extra-judicially killed?

We all know the explanation for this. The immediate reason is the particularly obtuse interpretation of human rights law by the English judiciary, which has extended the definition of torture to include deporting anyone to any country whose standards of human rights are lower than in Britain. Which is just about everywhere on the planet.

Not so! Canada has a pretty good human rights record too. And we take anyone; we send terrorists to live in Brantford or Montreal where they are sponsored by the Anglican Church of Canada.

So ship your al-Qaeda operatives to us where they can join their friends: we’d love to have them.

The Anglican Church of Canada wants to have its cake and eat it

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Rev. Michael Thompson from St. Jude’s in Oakville has written a rebuttal to an earlier article in the Journal which plainly stated that, if the ACoC is honest, it cannot sign the Anglican Covenant and continue its present course.

Such stark Kierkegaardian either/or propositions tend not to sit well with Western Anglicans; they much prefer interminable Hegelian dialectic garnished with Rowanesque waffle-sauce. Rev. Michael is no exception. Unfortunately, he also seems to inhabit an insular suburban world that has little access to news outside Oakville; he hasn’t noticed that the vast majority of the Anglican Communion are seriously considering – many already have – breaking communion with the ACoC and TEC whether the ACoC likes it or not. The whole article is below, but to summarise, Rev. Michael is saying that the ACoC can sign the covenant, go its merry way, hide behind the ludicrous canard that it is contributing to “diversity”, ignore the protests of 70 million Anglicans – whose priests are wicked interventionists anyway – and pretend everything is just fine. The truly grotesque thing is, he appears to believe it.

In the work that bears his name, Gilbert and Sullivan’s wonderfully imagined Mikado purports “To let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime.” In their guest opinion column in the Anglican Journal (May 2010, p. 5), Catherine Sider-Hamilton and Dean Mercer have, on the other hand, already decided the punishment– “a second-tier status in the larger Anglican Communion.” It remains only to conjure up the requisite crime.

Their opening gambit is to accuse our church of a “willingness to walk apart from the universal church.” Never mind the long list of Canadian Anglicans who have served and are now serving the life of the Communion. The Anglican Indigenous Network (Donna Bomberry), The Compass Rose Society (Bishop Philip Poole), Theological Education for the Anglican Communion (Archbishop Colin Johnson), the Anglican Covenant Working Group (Dr. Eileen Scully) and Unity, Faith and Order (Alyson Barnett-Cowan) don’t count. And never mind those bishops who have abandoned almost 2,000 years of Catholic ecclesiology to interfere with the integrity of the local church in this and other provinces because they and they alone know how to receive and interpret God’s word revealed in scripture.

In 2004, General Synod heard both the Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Gregory Cameron, and the Bishop of Colombo, Duleep de Chickera. While Canon Cameron counseled caution, Bishop Duleep reminded us that not all voices in the wider Communion spoke as one and encouraged Canadian Anglicans to cherish our contributions to Anglican diversity. In 2007, the General Synod heard both Archbishop of York, John Sentamu and General Secretary of the Anglican Communion, Kenneth Kearon. Last year, Canon Isaac Kawuki-Mukasa of the Faith, Worship and Ministry Department of General Synod established personal contact among bishops and theologians in Canada and Africa, including a February gathering of Canadian and African bishops to build respect and mutual understanding. This is not a church as unable to embrace “a primary commitment to the universal and apostolic church” or as inimical to “the wider voice of the church.”

Next, the writers imply that the current conflict pits those who love and faithfully receive scripture against those who despise it, who find its teaching “oppressive and outdated.” But we know that those who support the blessing of committed monogamous same-sex relationships include many who know and love the Bible as living witness to the living God. And we know that as we receive and interpret scripture, the truth that emerges is often contested truth–as for example, we come to divergent conclusions about the response that the God revealed in scripture invites to a question of sexual ethics and Kingdom ethos in the 21st century. Conflict and contested truth are not unfamiliar to Jesus’ disciples, and need not tear apart the foundational covenant of our common baptism into one body. We could renew a healthier and more faithful discourse by acknowledging contested truth and engaging in honest and charitable conversation about the practices, values and contextual realities that shape our reception and interpretation of scripture.

In the communiqué issued from their 2000 meeting in Portugal, the Primates of the Anglican Communion said this:

We are conscious that we all stand together at the foot of the Cross of Jesus Christ, so we know that to turn away from each other would be to turn away from the Cross.

They went on to draw a bright line distinction as the only basis for a province or diocese being excluded from the Communion:

…the unity of the Communion as a whole still rests on the Lambeth Quadrilateral: the Holy Scriptures as the rule and standard of faith; the creeds of the undivided Church; the two Sacraments ordained by Christ himself and the historic episcopate. Only a formal and public repudiation of this would place a diocese or Province outside the Anglican Communion.

The Anglican Church of Canada has not turned away, either from those provinces whose leadership is visibly, even angrily, distressed by the divergence apparent in the current conflict, or from the Lambeth Quadrilateral. And we have not turned away from those among us whose lives of commitment we experience as vessels of God’s blessing.

Ms. Sider-Hamilton and Mr. Mercer argue that if we won’t turn away from those among us whose lives of intimate fidelity are shared with a person of the same sex, we must turn away from covenant revelation with those with whom we disagree on this singular issue. But in the Anglican Church of Canada, we turn away, not from covenant relationship, but from the sin that binds and blinds us, from the structures that impair justice and right relationship, and from the Adversary who resists the inbreaking kingdom of God. And as we turn to Jesus, we find him standing in the midst of the very community one part of which Mr. Mercer and Ms Sider-Hamilton insist we must abandon. There Jesus stands, in a community of divergent truths, worried suspicion, and fear, and begs us not to turn away from any of his sisters and brothers, but to accept the unity he offers up out of his own breath and blood.

One wonders why Thompson even wants the ACoC to sign the Covenant; it couldn’t be because the ACoC enjoys temporal power too much to be willing to let it go for its principles, could it? Surely not.

The church dumping ground

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At St. Hilda’s we have had sofas, office chairs, beer bottles and other sundry detritus left in our church grounds – the overflow of an affluent town that seems to be under the impression that the local Anglican Church can remove not only your sin, but your garbage. Last Sunday was a first, though: someone had left a puppy tied to the railings. Being a dog person, I approached the puppy – which was quite fearful – said hello and scratched her ears. It was quite obvious that the unfortunate dog had been sprayed by a skunk, a calamity that would make the passing of the peace even more entertaining than usual.

The dog garnered a great deal of attention, was fed, watered, spoiled and fussed over; the humane society was not called, at least five families offered to adopt the animal and she ended up attaching herself to a couple who took her home.

The undeserving owner of the puppy – who, as far as I am concerned, can’t have her back – at least had the sense to leave her pet at an ANiC parish on the correct assumption that it was full of warm-hearted generous people who cannot not resist dogs; I shudder to think of what might have happened had the dog ended up at the ACoC Church of the Epiphany down the road – it could have ended up as a pagan dog.