Says the Guardian
According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the “licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour”, otherwise known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics”.
This goes go a long way to explain the behaviour of the Anglican Church of Canada, which is very keen on green.
Where the Letter from Michael Bird went: it has gone into the digital dustbin, I’m afraid. As to the reason, Basil Fawlty says it best:
[youtube= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz1O6zu1AR8]
The ACoC and ELCIC have been unified in their determination to continue a Gadarene plunge into the oblivion of diverse, inclusive neo-pagan Gaia worship and left wing political agitation. So it is only fitting that, as each becomes increasingly financially embarrassed, their leaders share an office.
In other business, CoGS voted to authorize Archbishop Fred Hiltz, in consultation with Susan Johnson, the national bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, and the co-chairs of the Canadian Joint Anglican Lutheran Commission to explore the pros and cons of sharing a national office in Ottawa.
Archbishop Hiltz, who is primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, added that a greater presence in the nation’s capital could “position us in new and different ways in terms of our work with government leaders and our capacity to have influence and shape public policy.”
I’m all for Fred and Susan positioning themselves in new and different ways; it should prove most entertaining.
Once again the Force has bent the will of its detractors – insufficiently inclusive government employees in this case – into submission:
As any Star Wars fan knows, the Force is a powerful tool that can be harnessed to control the minds of weak-willed individuals.
So when Jedi believer Chris Jarvis was told to remove his hooded top at a Jobcentre, its staff must have been made of stern stuff.
Despite explaining he wears a cowl as part of his faith, the 31-year-old was marched off the premises by security guards after refusing to comply.
Infuriated by his treatment, he wrote a letter of complaint to the branch in Southend, Essex, and was surprised to receive an apology which said the service ’embraces diversity and respects customers’ religions’.
Despite the olive branch, the disabled father of three is planning to sue Jobcentre Plus for discrimination.
One wonders what organisation could possibly want to employ him. Hmmm.
The blustering rudeness of contemporary atheists appears to have driven at least one person closer to God:
THE Global Atheists Convention in Melbourne last weekend worked a miracle on me.
I’ve never felt more like believing in God. Especially the Christian one.
My near conversion occurred because the convention’s speakers managed to confirm my worst fear.
No, it’s not that God may actually exist, and be cross that I doubted.
It’s that if the Christian God really is dead, then there’s not much to stop people here from being barbarians.
I’d have hoped that the Atheists Convention’s speakers would have reassured me not just by fine words but finer example that a godless society will nevertheless be a good one.
But what did they show me instead? First there was the world’s most famous atheist, former Oxford don and Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins, who smeared Joseph Ratzinger as the “Pope Nazi” and mocked Family First Senator Steve Fielding as dumber than an “earthworm”. The insult to the Pope (right) is truly vile. As a 14-year-old, Ratzinger was conscripted by the Nazi regime into the Hitler Youth, then compulsory for all German boys.
Yet Dawkins was far from the only speaker to unleash the hatred he claimed Christianity inspired. ABC Science Show presenter Robyn Williams boasted he could mount “a devastating argument against religion in two words: ‘Senator Fielding”‘, an insult which the hooting crowd clapped.
Added Williams: “Richard Dawkins said his IQ is lower than an earthworm, but I think earthworms are useful.”
Rationalist Society president Ian Robinson joined in, asking if there were any believers in the audience, adding: “OK, I’ll speak really slowly.”
The fourth speaker, Age columnist Catherine Deveny, saved her worst for the ABC’s Q&A show on Monday, tweeting from the set that fellow panellist Peter Dutton, the Opposition health spokesman, had “a face of a rapist”.
My grandparents used to say to my parents, “I’m glad I’m not bringing up children in this day and age”; to gain perspective, “this day and age” was when I was young and we had no TV, no car, no telephone, the milk was delivered by horses pulling a cart and we learned to write with a scratchy pen that had to be dipped in an inkwell.
In their turn, my parents said the same thing to me; in the early days, we still had no car or telephone.
Now I look at my grandchildren and say to their parents, “I’m glad I’m not bringing up children in this day and age”.
There are many reasons; here is one:
TORONTO, Ontario, January 7, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Ontario Ministry of Education has mandated that every school board in Ontario, Catholic and public, implement a new equity and inclusiveness policy by September 2010.
While the new initiative was devised with participation from the curriculum arm of the Ontario Bishops’ Assembly, it nevertheless would force Ontario’s Catholic school boards to recognize “sexual orientation” as a ground protected from discrimination. The Vatican has warned, however, that such a recognition is usually part and parcel with the outright promotion of homosexuality. One prominent Catholic commentator and priest has said that this is indeed the Ministry’s aim.
The Ministry’s new initiative, called the Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy, requires school boards to address areas such as religious accommodation and the prevention of discrimination, which includes combating “homophobia.”
The Roman Catholic Church likes to think of itself as the one true church, a notion that does not sit particularly well with most non Roman Catholics, including me. Understandably, people expect an institution that makes such an audacious claim to hold itself to high standards; when, instead, they find child abuse, systematic cover-ups and hypocrisy, it does little for any of the RC Church’s claims, let alone the pretension that it is the one true church.
Ruth Gledhill reports the imminent implosion of the RC church:
Catholic Church ‘imploding’ over child sex abuse.
That is the view of a senior journalist in Rome over the latest round of revelations of the extent of paedophilia among Catholic clergy.
Unsurprisingly, no-one is more smugly satisfied over the troubles in the RC church than Christopher Hitchens:
The Great Catholic Cover-Up
The pope’s entire career has the stench of evil about it.
On March 10, the chief exorcist of the Vatican, the Rev. Gabriele Amorth (who has held this demanding post for 25 years), was quoted as saying that “the Devil is at work inside the Vatican,” and that “when one speaks of ‘the smoke of Satan’ in the holy rooms, it is all true—including these latest stories of violence and pedophilia.” This can perhaps be taken as confirmation that something horrible has indeed been going on in the holy precincts, though most inquiries show it to have a perfectly good material explanation.
Hitchens, as an atheist, likes to indulge in play-morality, and, so, is eminently unqualified to give an opinion on what is evil; for an atheist, such categories are merely preferences induced by the occasional stray spasm of a neuro-mechanism. The fact that Hitchens has said something about a church that is not all wrong, in itself means that there must be something really rotten afoot.
At the moment, the storm for the RC Church has just begun; for the institution to survive, it will need a long-overdue pruning – a pruning that would have to remove and bar homosexuals from the priesthood (60% of the cases involved priests who were sexually attracted to male adolescents). If it happens, there will be great wailing and gnashing of teeth among liberals.
From the CBC:
NDP human rights critic Wayne Marston tabled a private member’s bill in the House of Commons on Monday that he says would prevent any government complicity in torture.
This is excellent news: it will prevent Jack Layton from making any more speeches.
Melanie Phillips has an excellent article on the recent Australian atheist convention:
Dawkins preaches to the deluded against the divine.
LIKE revivalists from an alternative universe, 2500 hardcore believers in the absence of religion packed into the Global Atheists Convention in Melbourne last weekend to give a hero’s welcome to the high priest of belief in unbelief, Richard Dawkins.
The bestselling author of The God Delusion was similarly fawned over by the Australian media, which uncritically lapped up everything he said.
This was even after (or perhaps because) he referred to the Pope as a Nazi, which managed to combine defamation of the pontiff with implicit Holocaust denial.
By comparison, Family First senator Steve Fielding may feel he got off lightly when Dawkins described him merely as more stupid than an earthworm.
For someone who has made a career out of telling everyone how much more tolerant the world would be if only religion were obliterated from the human psyche, Dawkins manages to appear remarkably intolerant towards anyone who disagrees with him.
Today’s anti-theists resort to insulting their opponents, are sanctimoniously self-righteous about atheistic morality, are irrational, fundamentalist, angry, untruthful, bigoted, arrogant and intolerant. And, according to Melanie Phillips, insecure.
Other than that they are a lovely bunch.
As they meet in Melbourne to celebrate their lack of faith:
More than 2,000 atheists from around the world are gathering in Melbourne, Australia, to celebrate their lack of religious belief.
It is thought to be the world’s largest gathering of atheist thinkers. There is a determination to avoid what one session calls Atheistic Fundamentalism, says our correspondent.
Participants will be urged to avoid “missionary zeal” in their determination to promote their non-religious message to the world.
As this article notes, Dawkins’ brand of neo logical positivist scientism rests as much on faith as Christianity, Judaism or the foam-flecked ravings of a benighted pagan animism – also known as Anglican-nouveau:
The truth is that science, like religion, starts off beyond reason and then becomes rational. Science is based on faith that the universe is rational. No scientist would begin to do science if they presupposed the universe is beyond understanding. The scientific search for the most simple and elegant theory is motivated by faith that such a theory exists. Charles Townes, a Nobel Prize winner for physics, said: “Science is so successful we are enthralled. Many people don’t realize that science basically involves assumptions and faith . . . nothing is absolutely proved.”