Nutty Roman Catholic Nuns

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Whenever I find myself mildly enticed by the Roman Catholic Church, I read something like this:

Dominican Sister Donna Quinn is serving as an escort at the ACU Health Center, a prominent abortion business in Hinsdale, Ill.

A recent photo in the Chicago Tribune pictured two older women, one of which was Sister Donna, wearing “Clinic Escort” vests outside the center, which proclaims on its website it “now offers the RU486 abortion pill.”

A check on Loyola University Chicago’s Women and Leadership Archives, Center for Women and Leadership and the National Coalition of American Nuns (NCAN) website, a group that opposes Church teachings on moral issues, finds Sister Donna helped to either co-found or organize different groups with feminist radical causes, actively advocating such causes as reproductive “choice,” specific rights for homosexual persons, and women’s ordination.

And I’m reassured that there is a flourishing barmy faction in the RC Church, much as Anglicanism – the difference in Anglicanism is that its Western expression is the barmy faction.

Northridge long-term care home and its lack of care

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I have chronicled the tribulations experienced by my father-in-law in an Oakville nursing home in an earlier post.

After the episodes I described there and numerous complaints, things seemed to improve – until last week when he was diagnosed with pneumonia.

The nursing supervisor – I’ll call her “Angela”, mainly because that’s her real name – informed us that John had not been taking his Tylenol to reduce his fever or his antibiotics to heal the pneumonia. The question and answer session then went something like this:

Us: Can you find some other way to give John his medicine – how about a suppository?

Angela: No we don’t do that – you would have to hire a private nurse. (when I asked if that was really the answer, Angela said “no” she was just “messing with our heads”).

Us: He has mouth sores – that is why he won’t drink. Can you wash his mouth with a salt solution?

Angela: we don’t do that.

Us: He looks dehydrated; can you put him on a drip to re-hydrate him?

Angela: we don’t have the staff to do that.

Us: This is a nursing home, isn’t it? What do you advise, should we call an ambulance and have him taken to hospital?

Angela: He’s a level 3: you have to decide.

Us: well can you phone the doctor on call so we can ask him?

Angela: No, I can only call the doctor if John is injured or if he falls out of bed [!]. He is quite comfortable; you can leave him until Monday if you like and the doctor can look at him then.

After a lot more arguing the doctor was called and he advised us to call an ambulance at once. The immediate reaction of the paramedics was disbelief that the nursing home hadn’t found some way to administer the medicine that John needed.

John has been in the hospital for a day and a night now and the doctor told us that he was severely dehydrated; I have a suspicion that, had we left him in the nursing home overnight, he would have been neglected and could have died from dehydration – which makes me wonder how many others have suffered this fate.

This is a photo of John taken before the ambulance arrived; he used to be fairly rotund  – here he looks more like a concentration camp survivor:

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Northridge is a Revera company which has as its banner headline, ‘Enhancing Lives’. Whose other than the shareholders, I wonder?

A church does euthanasia

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The Unitarian Church of Vancouver proudly proclaims that it is a community of diverse beliefs and shared values. I’m not sure exactly what this means, although I toyed with: we all believe something different and all beliefs are of the same value even when they contradict each other; thus they are all rendered equal but meaningless – relatively speaking; or We value the fact that everyone in our church believes something different because…. well, we’re daft or Our shared value is that we don’t care that no-one believes the same thing; we are a church with no duplicate beliefs!

Whatever the real meaning, a value that is not shared is the sanctity of human life:

A Vancouver church is stepping in to host a workshop by an Australian right-to-die doctor after the city’s public library cancelled the event over legal concerns.

Rev. Steven Epperson of the Unitarian Church of Vancouver said he believes Dr. Philip Nitschke, director of the pro-euthanasia group Exit International, has the right to free speech, even if he’s telling people how to kill themselves.

Musical torture

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Musicians are demanding to know if their music has been used to torture inmates at Guantanamo:

A high-profile coalition of artists — including the members of Pearl Jam, R.E.M. and the Roots — demanded Thursday that the government release the names of all the songs that were blasted since 2002 at prisoners for hours, even days, on end, to try to coerce cooperation or as a method of punishment.

The information has not yet been released, but I can assure the aforementioned that the use of their music for torture has spread far beyond Cuba. It is regularly employed by teenagers with IQ’s numerically lower than their age for tormenting the peace loving inhabitants of my neighbourhood; the bone rattling cacophony emanates from the subwoofers that seem to be concealed in every young person’s car trunk.

I normally respond with a healthy dose of J. S Bach at a similar volume but, alas, the tympana of most of these hearing damaged yahoos can only be stimulated by a full frontal 120 db assault of the raucous bedlam that passes for music in the 21st Century.

A circular argument from Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins frequently posits that the mechanism of evolution has made a world that presents the “illusion of design” and is “dripping with apparent design”. He does it here.

But there is no scientific evidence from which one can deduce that the appearance of design is an illusion created by natural selection – as if it were imbued with the purpose to deceive. It follows from the assumption that there is no God. The (unstated) reasoning is:

God does not exist;
the universe and especially life, presents the appearance of design by an intelligence – God;
since God does not exist the appearance of design is an illusion.

Yet Dawkins stoutly asserts that evolution removes all likelihood of the existence of God (the idea of God “goes out the window”): circular reasoning, since, in declaring the appearance of design a trick of natural selection, he as already made the assumption that God does not exist.

It is no more or less scientific to make the obverse case: God did indeed design life, but he used evolution to create the illusion – for the gullibly obstinate atheist – that life spontaneously developed without any assistance outside of the mechanism of natural selection. And people like Dawkins have fallen for it. Would God do such a seemingly absurd thing? Perhaps, since for those that wish to see, the evidence for his existence permeates the universe; he does allow those who wish to do without him to have their way, though and – Dawkins and his acolytes are having theirs.

The Church of England, heading for oblivion at full throttle

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The Roman Catholic church is poaching in Rowan’s Anglican empire. Rowan did not anticipate Rome’s offer to absorb disaffected Anglicans: it came as a shock, had nothing to do with ecumenism and certainly did not have Rowan’s consent.

Of course, Rowan has brought this on himself with weak – make that no – leadership, speeches that remain impenetrable even by Ephraim Radner standards and an ivory tower elitism that has placed his thinking out of reach and beyond the sympathy of the common  man.

Combine this with the mayhem in North America and it is clear that the Western Anglican Church is going under. What may have been forgotten is that, in addition to the woes of its spiritual and numerical decline, the clouded vision of the CofE led it to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management. The only individual who stands to benefit from this is hoax magnate and conman extraordinaire, Al Gore who is making money hand over fist.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cCxdT6Trko&feature=related]

So, Western Anglicanism: spiritually and morally bankrupt and soon to be financially bankrupt.

Vengeance is mine; I will repay saith the Lord.

Should we legislate morality?

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The answer used to be a unequivocal “yes” since the alternative is to legislate amorality; life is no longer so clear-cut:

Lorne Gunter: Prostitution may be immoral, but it shouldn’t be illegal

I have sympathy for the groups lining up in Ontario Superior Court to preserve Canada’s laws against prostitution.

As Derek Bell, a lawyer representing the Christian Legal Fellowship, the Catholic Civil Rights League and REAL Women of Canada told Madame Justice Susan Himel yesterday, “the prohibitions contained in [the Criminal Code] in part were designed to protect public morals and against moral corruption.”

These are important considerations. I don’t want my daughter or yours or any other young girl drawn into prostitution. Like the largely Christian groups asking the court to turn down a constitutional challenge of the ban on prostitution — brought by a dominatrix, a former sex trade worker and a working prostitute — I oppose prostitution on moral grounds.

But I am even more opposed to laws dictating morals between consenting adults. The state has no business proscribing what is right and wrong for people quite capable of making up their own minds. I would not, for instance, overturn laws against statutory rape, child pornography or bestiality; children and animals cannot give informed consent. Nor am I in favour of legalizing murder, assault, rape or robbery, because no one has a right to take another’s life, liberty, wellbeing, dignity or property without their consent.

Such is the argument of the Libertarian. The problem with it is this:

On the one hand, Gunter says prostitution, while immoral, should not be illegal, implying the legality of a thing should rest on something other than morality.

On the other, he asserts that laws that allow the harming of one individual by another must stand;  the difference is in the harming of an individual, something which he would view as, well… immoral.

This is not untypical of those who proclaim that we cannot “legislate morality”: the truth is, everyone wants to legislate morality. It’s just that the only moral imperative left in our civilisation is “do what you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone”; but it is still a moral imperative, albeit a narrow and short-sighted one. The Libertarian might make the argument that laws against murder, theft and so on are there merely to maintain order; but that doesn’t further the argument, since it assumes that order in human society is better – more moral – than disorder.

So Lorne, we do legislate morality and prostitution, if immoral, should also be illegal.

The World Council of Churches makes a fool of itself – again

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Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia, general secretary of the World Council of Churches shaking hands with the devil:

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In a recent meeting with a delegation from the World Council of Churches (WCC) visiting Pyongyang, North Korean president Kim Yong-nam said a significant impetus to solving the nuclear weapons stand-off in the region would be for North Korea and the U.S. to meet “face-to-face with each other”.

Kim, the president of the Presidium of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) Supreme People’s Assembly, said the region needs to be denuclearized. He alluded to a certain unfairness within the Six Party Talks, saying that the members of the talks are “all nuclear powers or enjoy nuclear protection by the United States” with the sole exception of North Korea.

He also said that the armistice agreement which effectively ended the Korean War but did not bring peace to the region “should be replaced with a peace agreement between North Korea and the United States”.

Kim’s comments were made during his 70-minute meeting with the WCC general secretary, the Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia, on Monday afternoon 19 October in Pyongyang.

What is wrong with this picture; well, this for a start:

In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 – North Korea’s largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held.

Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them.

Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.

Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il’s North Korean regime.

And this:

Grandsons are condemned to life-long terms as slave laborers alongside their grandfathers, both equally helpless in the brutal surroundings. Prisoners are arbitrarily murdered by security guards. Women suffer from forced abortions at the hands of unlicensed doctors. Newborn babies are beaten to death. And sons and daughters are publicly executed in front of their mothers.

And this:

WASHINGTON – A woman in her 20s executed by a firing squad after being caught with a Bible. Five Christian church leaders punished by being run over by a steamroller before a crowd of spectators who “cried, screamed out, or fainted when the skulls made a popping sound as they were crushed.”

These and other “horrifying” violations of human rights and religious freedom in North Korea are reported in a new study by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, titled “‘Thank You, Father Kim Il Sung’: Eyewitness Accounts of Severe Violations of Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion in North Korea.”