LeRoy Carhart, a practitioner and advocate of late term abortions is sprucing up his clinic – a literal example of a whited sepulchre – and is in dire need of rather more articulate and reasonable employees.
Here is an exchange between a pro-life protester and one of Carhart’s minions:
[youtube= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4UK8v7_znA]
Recently, a British MP “stormed out” of a Muslim wedding because the men and women were segregated; unsurprisingly, his action has resulted in heated debate on both sides of the issue. One of the more parochial opinions has come from a liberal Anglican priest:
First, would he have walked out of a Christian wedding, in a catholic or evangelical church that subscribes to scriptural injunctions regarding the inferiority of women? Before we get too smug about Muslim gender segregation, let’s remember that St Paul was no slouch when it came to apparent misogyny. Take a look at Ephesians 5:23 (”The man is the head of the woman”) or 1 Corinthians 14 (”Let the women keep silent in churches…For it is a disgrace for a woman to speak in church.”).
Paul was of course a Jew in a very patriarchal society and his social attitudes must be seen in that context. Some biblical scholars claim that the women of his age were not educated and couldn’t understand the Greek in which church services were conducted, so they sat together and chatted. Paul wanted them to keep quiet. So it wasn’t so much an issue of religious discrimination as lack of education. Or “education, education, education” as Mr Fitzpatrick’s Government would have it.
George Pitcher is an Anglican priest in the CofE and evidently has a very narrow, illiberal view of conservatives Christians. The bible does indeed prescribe different roles for men and women, but no Christian denomination, conservative or otherwise, thinks that the exhortation is a result of women’s “inferiority”.
Pitcher surely knows this but seems to be determined to use any opportunity to take poorly aimed pot-shots at Christians who believe what he is paid to believe, but apparently doesn’t.
Not for this, surely:
An Afghan bill permitting a husband to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex has become law.
The original bill caused international outrage earlier this year, forcing Afghan President Hamid Karzai to withdraw it.
But critics say the amended version of the law, brought into effect on July 27, remains highly repressive.
They accuse Mr Karzai of selling out Afghan women for the sake of conservative Shia support ahead of this week’s presidential election.
A. C. Grayling wants a good world with peace and freedom for all. According to him, the way to achieve this is to throw out religion and concentrate on science. This is an odd contradiction for someone who claims to place reason over revelation: science is concerned with the investigation and explanation of physical phenomena and has nothing to say about the value of the phenomena. Goodness, peace and freedom are values that existed long before science and will exist long after it; they are outside its purview.
He has written an extraordinarily foolish article in the Guardian; there are so many errors in it that it is hard to know where to start. One stands out in particular because it is in the title: he quotes incorrectly from the bible:
Someone once said “by their works ye shall know them”.
I’m not sure who the someone was, other than Grayling, but Jesus said, Ye shall know them by their fruits (Matt7:16). If he can’t even get the title of the article right, can we expect much better from the body. Here’s another tidbit:
the battle that underlies it all: the battle (to put it in Voltaire’s terms) between those who seek the truth and those who claim to have it.
Voltaire actually said:
Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.
Good advice, since, by Voltaire’s standard, we should beware the likes of Grayling and Dawkins as they and other devout atheists of their ilk are adamant that Darwin found, in evolution, the truth about how life appeared. Christians would not claim to either have the truth or to have found it; truth is revealed to humanity by God, principally through the incarnation of his Son and through the bible.
There is a lot more nonsense including the usual accusation that religion produces violence – even though the 20-21stC atheist regimes have killed more people than all religions put together; religion stifles science – even though many of the greatest scientists were Christians; and proponents of intelligent design are all half witted even though some of the brightest minds of today argue in favour of it.
The entire article by this bombastic phlyarologist is here, for those who have the stomach for it.
A 17 year old Muslim girl in the US converts to Christianity and runs away from home, terrified that her parents will kill her.
Watch the video here
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gmzfKoEWig]
If Islam were true, it would not need to use fear to keep its followers.
In a subtle move to counter their overly butch image, the police in the UK have come up with this:
The trans-gender police roadshow spreading the word at a gay festival.
Dressed in matching black t-shirts and handing out balloons, these are trans-gender members of the National Trans Police Association.
They were pictured at the recent Sparkle 09 festival in Manchester’s Gay Village in a bid to encourage the trans community to report more incidents to the police.
I understand the next pioneering effort will be to dress like criminals complete with tattoos and piercing, get to know the criminal community, hand out ducky little switchblade and lock-pick sets and encourage thugs to give themselves up on their own.
After George Tiller’s murder, LeRoy Carhart is one of the few remaining doctors in the US who are willing to do late term abortions. According to Newsweek, he is eager to train other doctors in his grisly trade:
The Abortion Evangelist.
LeRoy Carhart is determined to train as many late-term-abortion providers as possible—or the practice just might die with him.In the wake of Tiller’s assassination, Carhart began offering late-term abortions in his own practice—before, he’d done so only at Tiller’s Wichita clinic—and started planning a new late-term clinic to replace Tiller’s, where he could see women in the late second and early third trimesters. He’s fielded calls from three physicians who want to learn how to do abortions. Two have already begun training. “I think the only thing I can do…is just train as many doctors as I can to go out on their own and provide abortions and get enough people providing them,” says Carhart. “That makes [the anti-abortion activist’s] job 10 times harder because there are now 10 times more of us.”
In case anyone thinks that what Carhart is doing to make money is not murder, read what he himself says about it:
• “I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound… I think brain death would occur because the suctioning to remove contents is only two or three seconds. So somewhere in that period of time—obviously not when you penetrate the skull, because people get shot in the head and they don’t die immediately from that, if they are going to die at all—so that probably is not sufficient to kill the fetus. But I think removing the brain contents eventually will… My intent in every abortion I have ever done is to kill the fetus and terminate the pregnancy.”
-LeRoy Carhart, testifying under oath in 1997 about what he does to facilitate abortion, quoted in the Asheville Tribune.• “The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: it bleeds to death as it is torn from limb to limb… The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.”
-LeRoy Carhart, as quoted by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in Carhart v. Stenberg• “This act covers every D&E [dilation and evacuation] that I did. Everything that I do to cause an abortion is an overt act. . . The fetuses are alive at the time of delivery. [There is a heartbeat] very frequently.”
-LeRoy Carhart, testifying under oath that language in the partial-birth abortion ban act bans more than just partial-birth abortion, Carhart v. Ashcroft (April 1, 2004).• “Well, I was telling Ms. Smith at lunch today that we’re talking about a fetus that’s not only been dead for 48 hours, but we’re talking about a fetus that has been dead for 48 hours in essentially a warming oven or crock pot. It has been kept at a hundred degrees for 48 hours. And that’s enough temperature to cook meat. So we are not only dealing with a fetus that has been dead in my practice, we are dealing with a fetus that’s both dead and soft—so it’s much more pliable.”
-LeRoy Carhart, testifying under oath on the safety of his abortion methods, in a deposition taken for Carhart v. Ashcroft, April 1, 2004.• Carhart said at least once a month, an entire fetus is expelled from the mother during a D&E he is performing. “The fetuses are alive at the time of delivery,” he said. There is a heartbeat “very frequently.”
-LeRoy Carhart, The Associated Press, April 1, 2004, “Doctor: Law Would Outlaw Many Abortions”
Does a civilisation that tolerates something so monstrous deserve to survive? No.
Judging by its 40th General Council, the United Church of Canada has become a concoction of self-loathing:
Apologies were offered first to aboriginals forced to attend residential schools in Canada
There was formal recognition this week of an apology made in June, for the church’s confiscation of Japanese-Canadian property during the Second World War.
We confess that the church, too, was tainted by the prejudices and fears of that era, and that even best intentions were warped by often-subtle forms of racism.
I’m sorry,” offered a church official. “If I said something that sounded like an accusation, I apologize for that.
anti-Christian – no, make that anti-God:
Gretta Vosper is the minister at West Hill United Church in Toronto and author of With or Without God: Why the way we live is more important than what we believe. She explains that she doesn’t refer to God anymore “because there is no single meaning for the word.”
lunatic-fringe, gaia worshipping, gobbledygook spouting eco-bigots bent on making David Suzuki look moderate:
The kind of old assumptions of the United Church are falling away,” answered Russell Daye, an ordained minister from the Maritimes. “New archetypes are starting to emerge,” he added. “I think we’re finding a language that is grounded in Earth and some kind of eco-feminism, in a way…I think our new paradigm, if you want to use that, is going to be ‘wholographic.’
thinly disguised anti-Semites:
Hoping to stop a fire from spreading through their ranks, delegates at a major United Church of Canada conference decided on Thursday to put on hold a proposed boycott of Israel and to side-step anti-Israel resolutions put forward by church activists.
What is truly baffling, though, is that the United Church is dwindling, having lost half its members since 1965; why is that, one wonders.
After a diligent search for a Director of Lost Causes, the Anglican Church has found its woman:
Canadian woman priest appointed to prestigious Communion position.
Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan has been appointed director for Unity, Faith and Order for the Anglican Communion.
Good luck, sweetie.
It’s not safe for a goat in Texas:
Jose Merced seems like an average Texan: He has a good job with an airline, a house in a suburban cul-de-sac, three chihuahuas and strong religious faith.
It is what transpired in a bedroom attached to his garage, however, that piqued his neighbours’ interest about five years ago. Police in Euless, a suburb of Fort Worth, received two anonymous calls warning that Mr. Merced, 46, was preparing to slit a goat’s throat.
When officers arrived at his door in 2004, they learned that for the past 16 years, Mr. Merced had been sacrificing more than goats — ducks, chickens, doves and turtles had all been brought to his door, and killed at the same time in ceremonies for a little-known religion.
Jose Merced astutely acknowledges that Goat sacrifice is never going to be popular in Texas; nevertheless, he is insisting that he has a right to practice his religion in spite of what the neighbours think. Curiously, the law is agreeing with him – which goes to show that the law, once freed of its tether to Judeo-Christian morality, has become just as deranged as Mr. Merced and his exsufflicate god.
In addition to the occasional goat and chicken, during 2005, with the law’s permission, the good people of Texas also sacrificed 77,374 babies to the god of convenience in abortion clinics – which goes to show that the law is not just daft, but scelestious.