Ashura is a Muslim holy day that commemorates the 7th-Century death of the grandson of Islam’s prophet.
“It’s about standing up for justice, standing up for democracy, standing up for peace and equality,” Mohamed Al-Najjar explained at the Karbalaa Islamic Education Center in Dearborn. The center is named after the city in Iraq.
In reality, it’s an expression of demonic barbarism:
Professor Andrew Watson – who bears an eerie resemblance to Richard Dawkins – is a professor in the University of East Anglia, School of Environmental Sciences; thus everything he says is weighed dispassionately in the scales of scientific methodology and evidence. In this exchange, Professor Watson demonstrates the clinical objectivity of a scientist by calling Marc Morano an “asshole’.
The least Watson could have done is use the Queen’s English and say “arshole”.
[youtube= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8WDcQon9DY]
Silent Night:
The First Nowell:
Once in Royal David’s City:
Hark, the Herald Angels Sing:
Away in a Manger:
O Come, all Ye Faithful:
While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night:
See Amid the Winter’s Snow:
The White House Christmas tree has a Christmas ornament with a picture of Mao Zedong on it. I’m not sure exactly what it takes to rate a mugshot on the White House Christmas Tree, but Mao earned it by murdering around 50 million of his own people; next year, for a more inclusive Christmas, there will also be Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot Christmas ornaments.
I had the misfortune of attending a funeral at a United Church (of Canada) a while back; the disagreeable aspect of the service lay not in lamenting the demise of the person in the coffin, but in being exposed to the United Church’s butchery of the hymns. Lines such as:
Father-like, he tends and spares us;
well our feeble frame he knows;
were expunged and replaced with the atrocious mother-like God gently bears us (that is the gist of it – I am going by memory). I expressed my contempt for the deranged alterations by singing the correct words with a gusto sufficient to drown the tentative efforts of the others in my pew; I think there were a few conversions.
Christmas carols are being subjected to a similar assault:
Christmas carols are being re-written to make them politically correct, a music teacher has claimed.
Nic Robinson was surprised to find the words to Hark! The Herald Angels Sing have been changed to be ‘gender inclusive’ by removing the words ‘man’, ‘men’ and ‘sons’.
Attending a carol service at his 13-year-old daughter Hannah’s school, he noticed that in verse two the line ‘Pleased as man with man to dwell’ was changed to ‘Pleased with us in flesh to dwell’ on the printed sheet.
Then in the next verse the lines ‘Born that man no more may die, Born to raise the sons of Earth, Born to give them second birth’ were changed to ‘Born that we no more may die, Born to raise us from the earth, Born to give us second birth.’
The disgruntled parent went on to note:
I am sure some bishop will write now, explaining, kindly, that hymns have been evolving throughout the ages and that this one, in particular, has known many versions,’ he said.
‘May I ask the bishop not to bother, but rather to spend his time in contacting the people who have defaced my favourite carol. They need to be told of one glaring omission in their revision, namely the line which follows the one quoted above. This should surely now read ‘Jesus our Epersonnuel’.
Bishops get no respect these days. I wonder why.
George Pitcher is a liberal Anglican priest who writes for the Telegraph and doesn’t believe in the devil in spite of living in the country that produced the Guardian.
He rightly points out that equality legislation doesn’t work and, ironically, can penalise Christians who hold that every individual is equally loved by and valuable to God:
This Government has never learnt that you can’t legislate for equality and freedom. You can pass laws that protect people from specific harm. You can make it illegal to do harm to others or to their property. But fuzzy, feel-good laws, under which we’re generally enjoined to be nice to one another, are too easy to draft and dangerous to implement.
There’s a delicious irony in equality being thrust upon the household of faith. Because equality before God, all humanity being created equally in the image of that God, a God, as we say, who “has no grandchildren”, is a central tenet of the Christian faith. For orthodox Christians, equality really is not the issue. For them, gay people are equally loved of God; it’s their homosexuality that is sinful in that it is contrary to God’s will. For Catholics, women are every bit the equals of men, indeed they often seem to be venerated above men; it’s their supposed exercise of fatherhood that is an abomination.
Luckily, just as I was getting the uneasy feeling that I was about to agree with an entire article by George, to my relief, he came up with this:
As it happens, I don’t believe there are theological, scriptural or ecclesiological grounds for barring women or homosexuals from priesthood or bishoprics, any more than there is a case for barring newspaper columnists from them.
The bible makes the case for the first barring, and Pitcher himself makes the case for the second.
But at least they were early for church:
It’s one of the oldest celebrations in the world and has drawn visitors to Stonehenge for centuries.
But 300 pagans were left red-faced yesterday after they arrived at the prehistoric monument a day early for the winter solstice.
The crowd had met at the mystical site in Wiltshire to mark the shortest day of the year, normally December 21, but this year the solstice did not become official until the early hours of this morning.
So they were forced to spend a cold night shivering outside in their full-length cloaks.
Rowan Williams wasn’t there – no, really, he wasn’t.
And for Philip Pullman, it isn’t because it is hitting him in the pocket book:
Philip Pullman, crusader for atheism? Not when it might hurt him at the box office.
The problem with Philip Pullman is not that his kids’ books sometimes peddle subversive propaganda but that he seems to shift his position to suit the occasion.
Last week he was all over the papers insisting that the film The Golden Compass, which is an adaptation of part of his series of books, His Dark Materials, absolutely does not attract children to atheism. This despite the fact that he has been quoted as saying on the record that he is “trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief” and that he says currently on his website that he is an “enemy” of organised religion. He is, by the by, a leading light in Humanist circles (although he did read a lesson at one of his children’s church weddings).
The reason for his proclamation that the film doesn’t attract children to atheism isn’t known, but it’s notable that it comes shortly after the news that the rest of his books are not going to be filmed on account of bad box office takings… largely thanks to its boycott in America by religious types.
Back when Pullman was branding himself an atheist crusader, he admitted that he knew the controversy would lead to media coverage and that in turn brings book sales… But now he seems to be trying to have it all un-said when that same controversy leads, as in the case of the film, to a decline in profitability.
Watch out, Philip. You run the risk of appearing simply mercenary: neither a warrior for Humanism nor a simple story-telling artist, but a wind-up merchant and peddler of anything that’ll sell. That can’t be right, can it?
Dostoevsky was right, for atheists anything is permitted; self interest is all there is.
Mark Tooley’s remarks on Rowan’s Copenhagen performance:
Church prelates at Copenhagen like Rowan Williams and Desmond Tutu spread climate fears, tiresomely echoing secular European conventional environmentalism.
Harsh prophecies of climate catastrophe need to be weighed against the impact on still-developing nations. Environmental fears should not excuse perpetuating poverty.
The primary religion on display at the Copenhagen summit often resembled Earth worship. Christians are called to guard God’s creation while not deifying the Earth or prioritizing nature over humanity.
Whether waving hammer-and-sickle flags or calling for a worldwide one-child policy of strict population control, many activists in Copenhagen seemed more self-absorbed than actually concerned about helping the poor.
Archbishop Williams professed to witness to God’s hope, but once there, he merely echoed secular rants about endless environmental degradation.
I put it down to the fact that Rowan comes from Swansea. I attended university in Swansea and the weather was consistently dreadful: I remember it snowed in June once – it really did. Rowan is trying to Swansify the rest of the world.
For the most part, the Diocese of Niagara no longer believes the gospel: its priests don’t believe the creeds, that the bible is the inspired word of God, in the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement of Christ or his physical resurrection. Unsurprisingly, Christians are fleeing the diocese.
The editor of the Niagara Anglican, Christopher Grabiec, ever intent on keeping a firm grip on his blinkers, does not see the obvious connection between a benighted theology and mass exodus. Instead, it is a time of testing, even a dark night of the soul.
The corrective action suggested by Mr. Grabiec is to more thoroughly abandon historic creeds and orthodox Christian beliefs (page 1):
It’s time to hang up our past prejudices and our insistence on things being the way they were. Christ, born among us, entered a world that was smug and sure of itself and its religious systems. He turned over their tables. Who is to say that our systems, our creeds, our beliefs as we understand them, are for all time? Our chosen bishop and spiritual leader has asked us to look at everything and to grow in Christ, pursing excellence as a community and as ministers of Christ in the world.
As the 4 Niagara ANiC parishes brace themselves for the next legal onslaught from a diocesan administration bent on exacting revenge for the affront of being told they have abandoned the Christian religion, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the predicament of Christopher Grabiec and his master is a contemporary exposition of Exodus 4:21.