will be held on November 13 2010
Please mark your calendars because there will be a great earthquake. The sun will become as dark as black cloth, and the moon will become as red as blood. Then the stars of the sky will fall to the earth like green figs falling from trees shaken by mighty winds. And the sky will roll up like a scroll and be taken away. And all of the mountains and all of the islands will disappear.
And all while Bishop Michael Bird plays his bagpipes.
Not for the better, one presumes; in fact, as soon as I read this, I had a vision of the ACoC transforming into the Ungeziefer from Kafka’s Metamorphosis. That’s probably optimistic, though.
From June 3 to 11, 2010, more than 300 delegates will gather in Halifax, N.S. for the Anglican Church of Canada’s national meeting, General Synod, held once every three years. This web forum is a place to discuss the major topics that will arise at General Synod—from governance to sexuality. You are invited to join the conver
sation.
At this General Synod, there will be change—change in how we gather as a governing body, change in how we dialogue, and change in our vision. Those who gather in June will consider both how God is acting in our midst and what God is calling us to do differently. It may mean changing a light bulb or two. But imagine how much more brightly the light may shine if that happens.
What’s your attitude towards change in the church?
What never ceases to amaze me is that the ACoC appears to suffer from the delusion that the process of change is the problem, not what it is changing into.
Anti-theists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins take considerable delight in declaring that atheists can be as moral as theists. They remain obstinately impervious to the observation that atheistic morality has no objective standard by which to be judged, no frame of reference, and no foundation other than the vapours generated by the heat of Dawkins’ rodomontade; they prefer to ignore this and proclaim stoutly that they are just as good as the God crowd. It turns out that they’re not:
These are not the brightest days for organized religion. Pope Benedict XVI has come under sustained scrutiny for his role in the investigation of sex abuse scandals tarring the Catholic Church. The practices of fundamentalist Muslim women are being attacked by the Quebec government as uncivilized. And, more broadly, many traditional and long-standing congregations across the country must face the reality of their own worldly demise due to substantial declines in Sunday attendance.
Despite all this bad news, however, there remains much to celebrate about religion and its relationship with society at large. Not the least of which is that those who attend religious services are the most charitable in their donations and the most eager to volunteer. Without organized religion, the world would be a much poorer and less comfortable place for those less fortunate.
Last summer, Statistics Canada released a survey on Canadians and their charitable habits. While less than one in five attend church regularly, those who do are far more likely to give to charities, and are substantially more liberal in the size of their gifts to both religious and non-religious organizations. The average annual donation from a churchgoer is $1,038. For the rest of the population, $295.
With respect to volunteer effort, two-thirds of churchgoers give their time to non-profit causes while only 43 per cent of non-attendees do likewise. And churchgoers put in twice as many hours volunteering.
All this munificence is in stark contrast to complaints from anti-religion authors such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Philip Pullman, all of whom have found themselves getting substantially more ink in the wake of the Catholic Church’s sex scandals. “I’m an atheist,” Hitchens once said. “I’m not just neutral about religion, I’m hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one.” Pullman has claimed religion is “the most wonderful excuse for behaving extremely badly.” Their argument: the world would be a better place without churches.
Not justice for the unborn, of course, he is leaving that to Stephen Harper; the deliberate slaughter of babies seems to be of little interest to Hiltz and his abortion-happy breed of Canadian faux-Anglicans. Instead, Fred is getting together with a like-minded assortment of shamans, misfits and verbally incontinent leftists to badger the G8 nations into adopting the idiotic Millennium Development Goals. The MDGs are quixotic and self-defeating: they can never be achieved; the call to meet them will be endlessly renewed; their failure is always blamed on Western governments and, best of all, they divert attention away from the theological, financial and spiritual bankruptcy of those doing the calling. This all suits Fred to a tee.
Archbishop Hiltz, who has made the MDGs a hallmark of his primacy, has been chosen to lead the Canadian interfaith delegation.
At the Winnipeg summit, leaders from 10 different faith traditions-including Muslim, Christian and Shinto-will listen to and report to one another about important issues in their nations. They will hear several high-profile speakers including Canadian senator Romeo Dallaire; the Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine, USA; and H.E. Sheikh Shaban Mubajje, grand mufti of Uganda.
My 6 year old granddaughter donned her new angel dress, looked in the mirror and, in a loud voice proclaimed, “I look so good”. I couldn’t disagree – even with the remnants of dinner on her face.
Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth used a naughty word to chastise a meeting of international women’s equality – a nomenclature guaranteed to send shivers up the spine of sane people everywhere – rights groups. Ruth, a feminist and supporter of a woman’s right to murder her unborn child, fears that this could become an election issue. Perish the thought of the most pressing ethical outrage of our time becoming an election issue; whatever next.
“We’ve got five weeks or whatever left until the G8 starts. Shut the fuck up on this issue,” she says. “If you push it, there’ll be more backlash. This is now a political football. This is not about women’s health in this country.”
She went on to say, “Canada is still a country with free and accessible abortion. Leave it there. Don’t make this an election issue.
Michael Ingham would like us all to believe that African Bishops such as Akinola and Orombi are mere puppets of sinister “elements” in the US that are, for their own nefarious, colonial and probably profit-inspired motives, opposed to sodomy. Such is the miasma currently wafting from the Twilight Zone:
There are definitely those in Africa who believe that the constant references to issues of human sexuality are the hobby horse of a handful of bishops. There are also those who can tell when an African voice delivers a message that has been crafted in the “west.” Many African bishops feel that a few of their colleagues are being used by elements from the United States to continue an American agenda. They are increasingly frustrated by this colonial dynamic.
Particularly not homosexual sex.
As Bishop John Chapman says:
It may be a hot-button topic in the mainstream media but the issue of human sexuality – including homosexuality – hardly saw the light of day at the gathering in England Feb. 24-26 of six African bishops and five Canadian bishops, including Bishop John Chapman. “We had an initial conversation on human sexuality on the first evening together and that was the last time we talked about it,” said the bishop in a recent Crosstalk interview.
It’s true that Bishop Michael Ingham has a web site dedicated to the subject and John Chapman hit the headlines of the Ottawa Citizen – but that was just a media plot to make him look as if he thinks about little else. The Anglican Church of Canada has a similar problem; this extensive Wikipedia article is clearly part of the same plot.
To show how far the enemies of the ACoC are prepared to go to make it look ridiculous, here is a remarkably lifelike simulacrum of Fred Hiltz describing how he went all the way to the UK to discuss unnatural sex with Rowan Williams. In spite of the patent absurdity of this hoax, it presents conclusive evidence that the concocters of this devious conspiracy have reached a worrying level of technical sophistication. You can see from this video that the counterfeit is almost as dull as the real thing; an astonishing achievement.
Having worked on mainframes for over over 40 years, the idea, proposed 20 years ago, that much of a computer’s processing power would be devoted to the user interface seemed to me to be derisory; real computer users don’t need a fancy user interface, they type into a monochrome 3270 terminal.
That is what has happened, of course, and the iPad is a good example: it doesn’t really do much, but it does it with such flair that both computer nerds and normal people want one.
BumpTop outdoes the iPad, it is Canadian, and it has been bought by Google:
Google has acquired BumpTop, a Toronto-based tech startup that built a 3-D computer desktop that makes files behave like physical objects.
Neither Google nor BumpTop disclosed details of the deal, but the Globe and Mail said the purchase price was believed to be between $30 million and $45 million.
From the garden:
