Diocese of Niagara: Repugnant ritualistic practices

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One comes across interesting snippets when browsing old newspapers. The following is taken from the Qu’Appelle Didette, Thursday February 7th, 1889:

The Ritualistic movement in the neighbouring Anglican diocese of Niagara has led to the formation of an association for adherence to evangelicalism. Hartley, Carmichael and several clergymen waited upon the Bishop of Niagara and declared the introduction of ritualistic practices to be repugnant to the majority of the members of the diocese.

It was a valiant effort by Hartley and Carmichael but it didn’t last: today in the Diocese of Niagara there is little left but “ritualistic practices”. “Adherence to evangelicalism” has all but been stamped out by the concerted efforts of Bothwell, Spence and Bird and the only thing that is repugnant to the diocese is the Gospel.

Calgary church feeds 150,000 people a year. Loses charitable status.

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Because, even though it happily feeds anyone in need – including homosexuals – it has the gall to disagree with abortion and homosexual activity:

Calgary church loses charitable status for its “non-partisan political activities”.

A Calgary church has lost its charitable status in part because it spends too much of its time advocating on social issues such as abortion and marriage.

In October, the Kings Glory Fellowship Association, a non-denominational Protestant group, was told by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) that for several reasons, including a lack of clarity on how it spends it money, they could no longer issue charitable receipts.

But the letter highlighted that the group spent more than 10% of its time on “non-partisan political activities and therefore strayed into activities “outside its stated purpose.”

“We note … the members of the Board of Directors espouse strong negative vies about sensitive and controversial issues, which may also be viewed as political, such as abortion, homosexuality, divorce, etc.”

The CRA allows charitable organizations to spend some time on “political activities,” but the cutoff is 10%. A spokesman for the CRA was not immediately available to explain how the percentage of time a group spends on non-charitable works is determined.

Artur Pawlowski, the head of the Kings Glory Fellowship, said his group “has nothing to do with politics and we do not advertise for a party or a candidate. The only political activity you can connect us to is defending our right to speak.”

Mr. Pawlowski said the primary mission of his church is to feed homeless people. He said this group supplies food for about 150,000 a year, mainly to people “that no one else wants to deal with.”

“When we feed people we don’t care whether they are homosexuals or have had abortions or been divorced but we preach what the Bible says about those issues.”

He said the financial issues are just a “smoke screen” and the real agenda is to “keep us quiet.” Mr. Pawlowski also noted that his church has never been audited by the CRA.

I do hope that Archbishop Fred Hiltz leaps to the defence of Artur Pawlowski, since one of the Famous Five marks of mission is to respond to human need by loving service. Fred, are you there? You’re breaking up, Fred.

I wonder why the Anglican church of Canada still has tax free status, since it is almost exclusively a politically motivated organisation that is constantly petitioning the government over one thing or another while actually doing almost nothing useful itself.

The Kings Glory Fellowship Association feeds 150,000 people a year, espouses politically incorrect causes and loses its tax exempt status as a charity.

The Anglican Church of Canada, a national organisation, by comparison feeds almost no-one, peddles politically correct banalities and, mysteriously, still has charitable status.

Toronto: uncaring public laugh at sleeping TTC ticket collector

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The Amalgamated Transit Union competes with the soporific ticket collector to see who can be funnier:

The Amalgamated Transit Union says it is ‘‘discouraging’’ that TTC riders did not check on the well-being of a collector at the centre of a media firestorm after he was photographed apparently asleep on the job……. The reports that passengers were laughing at him as they passed by the booth makes this even more disturbing.

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The Amalgamated Transit Union want to reassure the public that the tram drivers never fall asleep on the job and are disturbed that anyone would have the effrontery to suggest it.

UK terror alert raised to severe. No Muslims will be involved

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From here:

The UK’s terror threat level was tonight raised from substantial to severe, meaning an attack is ‘highly likely’.

There is only one higher threat level: critical, which means an attack is expected ‘imminently’.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson said the public needs to be vigilant, but stressed there was ‘no intelligence to suggest an attack is imminent’.

He said: ‘The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre has today raised the threat to the UK from international terrorism from substantial to severe.

‘This means that a terrorist attack is highly likely, but I should stress that there is no intelligence to suggest than an attack is imminent.

Just in case anyone jumps to the rash conclusion that Muslims could possible have a tenuous connection to UK terror plots, Muslim police – who have no axe to grind whatsoever and are dedicated to routing out all non-Muslim terrorists, especially those on the far right – warn against Islamophopbia:

Britain’s Muslim police fear real terrorist threats coming from growing far-right movement.

LONDON – Muslim police in Britain have attacked the government’s anti-terrorism strategy for triggering an upsurge in Islamophobia and deepening divisions in communities.

The National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) warned that the Prevent programme, which aims to combat violent extremism, was “stigmatising” Muslims by focusing on “so-called Islamist extremism.”

No Muslims were stigmatised during the writing of this post.

How To Live A Simple Life: The Little Flowers of St. Jones

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An Anglican priest is trying to live a simple life just like St. Francis of Assisi. While making this attempt he will be followed around by a full BBC production crew, sound equipment, Add an Imagecameras and computers recording his every excursion into an urban dustbin. Can’t get much simpler that that. Nice simple hat too.

Anglican priest Peter Owen Jones has gone back to basics in the search for a simpler way of living life for a new BBC Two series.

How To Live A Simple Life is inspired by St Francis of Assisi who entered into a life of voluntary poverty after hearing a sermon on Matthew 10, in which Jesus tells his disciples to go and proclaim the Kingdom of God without taking any money or other possessions with them.

The series was filmed over eight months in Jones’ small country village of Firle, in Sussex and sees him grow his own crops and raise chickens.

Taking to the road without any cash, Jones has to barter his skills for scraps of food and throw himself at the mercy of his community as well as strangers.

Jones sees the programme as a personal challenge to discover whether the best things in life are really free after feeling like he had become caught in mindless spending.

“I want to see if there is another way,” he said.

“All the great religions say don’t rely on money – it is too much the measure of a life. And I’m addicted to the stuff!

“I want to see if I can wean myself off it and live a different life.”

The rise of the phylactery bomber

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And the demise of common sense:

A US Airways flight was diverted to Philadelphia after a young Jewish man’s prayer items triggered a bomb scare, Philadelphia police said.

The incident arose when the man used a phylactery, a small black box Orthodox Jews strap to their head as part of their rituals, police said.

The man was not arrested and the plane landed without incident.

US airports are on high alert after a Nigerian man was held over an alleged bomb plot on a plane last month.

His device allegedly malfunctioned and he was quickly overpowered by passengers and crew on the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

The latest incident took place on a 50-seat regional jet originally bound for Louisville, Kentucky from New York’s LaGuardia airport. It landed in Philadelphia at about 0900 local time (1400 GMT).

I can understand the concern, considering the alarming epidemic of young Jewish men strapping phylacteries to their heads and blowing themselves up. Scarcely a day passes without another occurrence. It’s a new and devious strategy: forget about secreting explosives next to your testicles where anyone could find them –  put them in plain sight on your head.

Christendom’s aid to Haiti

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It would appear that the decadent West has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to assist Haiti and the oil-rich Islamic nation of Saudi Arabia – nothing. Perhaps Allah is a racist.

What do Alyssa Milano, Sandra Bullock, Lance Armstrong, Gisele Bundchen, the country of Senegal and — very possibly — you have in common?

All — including you — have donated more funds to the Haitian relief effort than oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

That’s right … if you personally have donated money to help the earthquake-stricken people of Haiti, then you have contributed more money than the governments of Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose combined dollar donation is a big fat zero.

As Haiti slowly recovers from last week’s earthquake, nearly $400 million has been donated by countries, individuals and organizations to the devastated nation, accordign to United Nations documents.

But the goodwill has been far from balanced. India, which has one of the world’s largest gross domestic products, has donated $1 million, a figure matched or eclipsed by much smaller economies like the Czech Republic ($1.1 million), Botswana ($1.1 million) and Senegal ($1 million).

And those donations have been matched or topped by individuals like Bill Gates, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.

And, within days, Israel had set up a field hospital:

IDF Medical and Rescue Team has set up a Field Hospital, Beginning to Rescue and Treat hundreds.

The IDF Medical and Rescue Team has arrived in Haiti, set up a field hospital in Port-Au-Prince and is beginning to treat patients there. In addition, the forces are locating and rescuing survivors trapped in ruined buildings, including many who were injured during the collapse of the UN headquarters.

Apoplectic Atheists

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Atheists seem to get angry easily. They get angry because they think Christians look down on them as Bad, angry because Christians can’t put themselves in their position, angry because they are misunderstood and angry because we Christians don’t agree with them and, after all, atheism is so obvious.

To clear up some of this:

Christians do think atheists are, in a sense, Bad; that is because we think everyone, in a sense, is Bad. To put it into Christian terms, everyone has sinned and needs a Saviour to redeem them from their sins.

Many Christians do understand atheism; that is because some were atheists themselves at some point – I was – and because, since Christianity is attacked from all sides in our culture, Christians have been forced to inspect their basic assumptions and how their beliefs logically follow from them. From the occasional exchange with atheists on this blog, it appears that many atheists have not done the same.

Here are some of the basic assumptions that accompany atheism and some of the unavoidable consequences of those assumptions:

There are some variations in atheism. A negative atheism would claim an absence of belief in God and make it a default position: in the absence of good evidence for God’s existence, negative atheism is the logical choice – the burden of proof is on the theist. Others would argue that this is really agnosticism in disguise and that true atheism is positive atheism which asserts the statement “God does not exist”. I am inclined to the latter view.

Either variety of atheism has some unavoidable consequences:

There is no objective standard for morality. That is not to say that atheists cannot do “good” or be “moral”, using those words in the context of Judeo-Christian ethics; they can. It does mean, though that the “good” or “evil” that an atheist may believe exists has no objective realty: “good” and “evil” are subjective – no one person’s view of what is “good” has any more validity than any other person’s. Dostoevsky summed this with “if God does not exist everything is permitted”

Atheists are materialists: that is to say, they believe that the material universe is all that exists; without God there is no supernatural, nothing outside of the material exerts any influence on the universe. Christopher Hitchens seems to want to dodge this by contending that the numinous does exist, apparently as a by-product of the human mind – most atheists would not go along with this, though. As a result, the human mind is entirely subject to the material. This leads to the following problem for the atheist:

  1. If God does not exist, a person’s thoughts are the result of interactions in the material universe.
  2. Some people believe the following statement to be true, while others believe it to be untrue: God does not exist.
  3. The same material universe produces opposite conclusions on the truth of the statement in 2.
  4. If God does not exist, human thought processes are unreliable.
  5. If God does not exit, my belief that he does not exist is unreliable.

If human existence ceases at death, life has no lasting objective purpose or meaning. Atheists will protest that they do find purpose and meaning in life; Richard Dawkins goes to considerable length to expound on the beauty and the grandeur of the universe. Without God, though, such perceptions are subjective and, for an honest person, inadequate. Atheistic existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre were more direct: Sartre recognised that without God life has no purpose. His solution was to invent a purpose and pretend that it has significance – just to get through life. Sadly, modern atheists are doing much the same thing without the benefit of the introspection necessary to recognise why.

Atheists are evolutionary Darwinists but generally not social Darwinists, preferring instead to adopt the mores of the Judeo-Christian heritage that they despise. The problem for the atheist comes when confronted by a social Darwinist who might advocate, for example, the extermination of the old, infirm, disabled and deformed; an atheist has no convincing argument to offer on why this is a bad thing to do. Without God, values are subjective, one person’s view of what is right is as good as any other’s.

A popular contemporary conceit of atheism is that science has disposed of religion. John Lennox in his book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? argues eloquently that, far from burying God, science depends on the assumption that the universe has rational laws – rational laws that owe their existence to a rational Creator. Additionally, there is no reason to trust the rationality of the minds of scientists if they are products of a potentially irrational universe.

There; now I expect atheists reading this will become angry.

Rifqa Bary and parents end dispute

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Which on the face of it seems like good news – too good; but perhaps I am just naturally suspicious:

The long legal dispute over runaway teen convert Fathima Rifqa Bary apparently ended in Franklin County Juvenile Court late this afternoon when the girl and her parents agreed that she’ll stay in the custody of Children Services and the family will try to resolve their issues with counseling.
That leaves two options for Rifqa, who is in foster care: She could eventually reconcile with her parents and go home or stay in foster care until her 18th birthday on Aug. 10.

Rifqa admitted she was unruly when she fled her parents’ home last July to live with a Christian pastor and his family in Florida. She said at the time that her father, Mohamed, had threatened to kill her for abandoning the family’s Muslim faith, although authorities say they never found credible evidence that that was true.

Mohamed and Aysha Bary and their daughter all agreed today not to continue with the Juvenile Court dependency case. The next hearing, besides a minor hearing regarding a gag order on Monday, is set for her birthday.