From PMW
The Hamas TV children’s program Tomorrow’s Pioneers produced a special broadcast in which the two young children of a female suicide terrorist were invited to the TV studio to watch a video re-enactment of their mother’s suicide bombing. The terrorist, Reem Riyashi, killed four Israelis in a suicide bombing in 2004:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XELcNMhkKCo]
Heading to a seminary near you:
A little over a decade ago, ex-MI5 agent David Shayler was facing prosecution under the Official Secrets Act as a whistleblower.
Today the 43-year-old is a squatter who declares that the ‘world will end in 2012’ and dresses as a transvestite called ‘Delores Kane’ complete with false breasts, mini-skirt and ginger wig.
Yesterday, posing in a wig and miniskirt and wearing false breasts, he said: ‘I know in my heart that I am Christ and I am here to save humanity.’
In fact, judging by that last sentence, he’s after Katharine Jefferts-Schori’s job.
Mr. Plod the pagan:
We’ve got a Black Police Association, a Gay Police Association, a Muslim Police Association and now – stop tittering at the back – a Pagan Police Association.
The Home Office has agreed to the establishment of a support group for officers who practise Paganism and witchcraft. Druids and Wicca worshippers will also be welcome to join.
A spokesman said: ‘The Government wants a police service that reflects the diverse communities it serves. It is down to individual forces to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate the religion or beliefs of individual officers.’
I notice that no mention is made of a Christian Police Association; perhaps it does exist but is in hiding. After all, Christians in Britain get arrested for the hate crime of passing out gospel tracts:
A police community support officer ordered two Christian preachers to stop handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham.
The evangelists say they were threatened with arrest for committing a “hate crime” and were told they risked being beaten up if they returned.
Left wing politics, of course:
The 2 million member and fracturing Episcopal Church is currently convened in its governing General Convention in Anaheim, California, and seemingly poised, in between affirmations of same-sex unions and transgenderism, to condemn Israel as the focus of Middle Eastern strife.
There are no resolutions currently before this year’s Episcopal General Convention directly criticizing any government in the world, except two: Israel and the United States. Resolutions mention human rights abuses in the Philippines and strife in southern Sudan but decline to criticize governments there, though surely Sudan’s Islamist regime, dripping with blood of millions of victims, might merit some disapproval. There is no criticism of any Muslim or communist dictatorship around the world, though Cuba’s Marxist regime is portrayed by one resolution as the victim of U.S. sanctions. In contrast, about a half dozen statements for consideration before the General Convention are aimed at Israel.
I only wish someone had told me this when I was a teenager; I had no idea:
A leaflet promoting the idea that sex is fun sounds like a waste of taxpayers’ money. Uh, tell us something we don’t know.
But a sex education leaflet telling teenagers that sex is fun – in a bid to prevent underage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections – is not only a waste of taxpayers’ money, it’s misguided do-gooding gone crazy.
And yet that’s exactly what NHS Sheffield has just published.
The leaflet, entitled ‘Pleasure’, advises school kids that they not only have a ‘right’ to an enjoyable sex life, but also that regular sex is good for their health.
Its authors believe it’s time to update the sex education message, which they say has for too long concentrated on contraception and the need to be in a loving relationship, and ignored the main reason people have sex — because it’s jolly good fun.
From here:
The consecration of homosexual bishops is a matter of justice.
The Episcopal Church in the United States voted last week to overturn a moratorium on the ordination of gay bishops. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, told the General Synod yesterday that he regretted that decision.Those member Churches, including many in Africa, who conscientiously cannot accept homosexual bishops, should not have appointments forced upon them. But the issue is not one of denominational preference alone. It is also a matter of justice.
The liberal elite who run Western Anglicanism would not admit that they are consciously bent upon the destruction of their denomination – and I don’t believe they are. Subconsciously, it is another matter: to adapt an old proverb: those whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad.
The reason given for the ordaining of homosexuals is that it is a matter of justice; to exclude homosexuals from holding clergy positions would be unjust. But what do liberals mean by justice in this context?
Of the various shades of meaning of justice – fair, morally right, lawful – the meaning cannot be morally right or lawful, since the bible clearly condemns homosexual activity. That leaves us with fair. But fair to whom? Certainly not fair to the homosexuals who struggle with temptation yet remain celibate, and not fair to orthodox Christians who are committed to following the bible and expect their leaders to do the same. It is also not fair to the run-of-the mill sinner sitting in the pew who, instead of trying to convince the church to bless his sins, is struggling to overcome them.
It is not even fair to practising homosexual clergy, since it confirms as right behaviour that is actually wrong.
In truth, this has nothing to do with justice: it has everything to do with selfishness wanting its own way.
Between 1100 and 1600, the emphasis on reason in the learning and intellectual life of Western Europe became more pervasive and widespread than ever before in the history of human civilization. This led to the Enlightenment or Age of Reason which began in the mid-1600s and had its origin in Descartes’ Discourse on the Method published in 1637. Descartes is famous for the idea that one cannot doubt the existence of the thing that is doing the doubting – I think, therefore I am. Further, he argued for the existence of God along these lines:
Now whether one finds this argument convincing or not, it is nevertheless interesting that it was made at the outset of the Age of Reason: for Descartes, unlike Dawkins, the notion of God’s reality is not equivalent to a belief in fairies.
Sadly, today we had moved beyond the Age of Reason: as G. K. Chesterton observed, when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.
So, having abandoned God, we have left the Age of Reason and have entered the Age of Credulity. The familiar benchmarks of credulity that have hitherto set the standard for vacuous callowness – astrology, crystals, alien abduction, self-help, Oprah, atheism – have been trumped by a remarkable new discovery: Quantum Jumping.
H/T to Kate for pointing me in the direction of Multiverse enlightenment
On further inspection of this site, I discovered that the secret to jumping into other universes can be mine for a mere $97 in downloadable format or $197 in CDs. Needless to say, I find this so enticing that my download will begin as soon as I finish typing; don’t be surprised if, in the future, I seem different.
The Church of England needs more bishops not fewer, its governing body heard.
Despite dwindling congregations, worsening finances and a fall in the number of vicars, speakers told the gathering of the General Synod in York that radical plans to cut senior clergy posts were misguided.
They argued that bishops have far more work to do than in years gone by, and that greater expectations are placed upon them.
Prof Glynn Harrison, from Bristol diocese, said: “There may indeed be a case for increasing rather than decreasing senior oversight appointments.”
He said he did not know how diocesan bishops tolerate the growing weight of expectations placed upon them.
This all makes sense: as people “flee from the midst of Babylon” or the CofE, more bishops are needed – to control the traffic congestion created by of the departing hordes, presumably.
In the Western Anglican Church, as the number of members approaches zero, the number of bishops will approach infinity.
Contrary to contemporary atheist superstition, a scientist can be a Christian:
Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, has been named by President Obama to head the National Institutes of Health. What makes this news is the breathtaking idea that someone could be both a scientist and a believer in God.
Like Isaac Newton. Or Johannes Kepler. Or Galileo Galilei. Or most of the other leaders of the Scientific Revolution. And a large number of scientists today.
This isn’t news. What is news instead is the continuing ignorance of people who think that science and belief in God are incompatible. They are not.
In the early 1980s I encountered a Christian who left the Dutch Reformed Church because it was insufficiently Calvinist. He and a few others formed a new church where they would be free to adhere more exactly to the Calvinist principles of which they were so fond. This sticks in my mind mainly because he was the first person I had encountered that believed some babies are predestined to hell and if they die as babies, that’s where they’ll end up – for God’s greater glory. He took his Calvinism seriously. I was taken by surprise at the enormity of the consequences this belief and I don’t think I gave a very coherent response to what seemed to me to be an abominable idea. I knew Calvin and I would have problems.
Subsequently I read some of Clark Pinnock’s books including essays of his where made the case for Arminianism and others for Calvinism; I found Clark’s to be the more convincing case although I was not swayed entirely to his point of view. I later became acquainted with Clark because he occasionally attended my church and I remember questioning him on a point he made that seemed extreme; he gave me a worried look and said “do you think I’ve gone too far?” I wanted to say “how the hell should I know, you’re the theologian” – but didn’t. I think it was something to do with the final destruction – rather than torment – of the lost.
Leaving aside damned babies, David Bentley Hart succinctly sums up the problem:
I quite explicitly admit in my writing that I think the traditional Calvinist understanding of divine sovereignty to be deeply defective, and destructively so. One cannot, as with Luther, trace out a direct genealogy from late medieval voluntarism to the Calvinist understanding of divine freedom; nevertheless, the way in which Calvin himself describes divine sovereignty is profoundly modern: it frequently seems to require an element of pure arbitrariness, of pure spontaneity, and this alone separates it from more traditional (and I would say more coherent) understandings of freedom, whether divine or human.
This idea of a God who can be called omnipotent only if his will is the direct efficient cause of every aspect of created reality immediately makes all the inept cavils of the village atheist seem profound: one still should not ask if God could create a stone he could not lift, perhaps, but one might legitimately ask if a God of infinite voluntaristic sovereignty and power could create a creature free to resist the divine will. The question is no cruder than the conception of God it is meant to mock, and the paradox thus produced merely reflects the deficiencies of that conception.
Frankly, any understanding of divine sovereignty so unsubtle that it requires the theologian to assert (as Calvin did) that God foreordained the fall of humanity so that his glory might be revealed in the predestined damnation of the derelict is obviously problematic, and probably far more blasphemous than anything represented by the heresies that the ancient ecumenical councils confronted.