Paganism in the Diocese of Niagara

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Ever eager to jump on the latest cultural bandwagon, the Diocese of Niagara offers this thinly disguised Gaia worship as part of their Green Awakening.

The whole liturgy is here; this is the opening prayer:

Opening Prayer
One Beneath our toes
Beneath our shoes
Beneath floors
Beneath basement and cement and foundation
All We are still standing on holy ground
One Amidst cheerful chatter
TV drones and telephones
Planes and trains
Sirens, horns, and the squeal of tires
All We listen for the call of the Earth
One As square, grey scenery is photographed
Amidst trash, contamination, pits, pollution
Waste, seen and unseen
We are tired people, grasping for energy
All We are still standing on holy ground
One Bike riders and gardeners whisper alternatives
as creation groans beneath the weight of waste and
excess
Beneath even that sits holy ground
Firmly rooting all in the moving, shaping,
Cleansing powers of creation,
All We listen for the call of the Earth

What next, one wonders? Why this, of course:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etvjzVVfBa4]

Rowan Williams is out of touch with everything but his eyebrows

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A degree of sanity from a fellow Welshman

A CONSERVATIVE cleric warns that Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams could spark violence against Christians after repeating his claim that elements of sharia law could be incorporated into British justice.

Dr Williams revisited the issues on the first anniversary of the day he originally made the claim.

Now the Welsh head of the Church of England also insists public opinion is increasingly in favour of it.

But Dr Tudor Griffiths, rector of Hawarden, said if Dr Williams believes there is public enthusiasm for sharia law, he is desperately out of touch.

But Dr Griffiths, who is also canon chancellor of St Asaph, warned that when Swansea-born Dr Williams first made his comments it led to an outburst of violence against Christians in Nigeria.

He said: “Many will simply hear that the Archbishop has reiterated his support for sharia law and it will be used as propaganda and will feed violence in some areas of the world.”

How out of touch? Let me count the ways:Add an Image

The 911 way: “the terrorists had no choice”

The Druid way:”Archbishop becomes druid”

The Marxist way: “Face it: Marx was partly right about capitalism”

The Darwin way: “Anglicans back Darwin over ‘noisy’ creationists”

The gay way: “Rowan Williams: gay couples reflect the love of God”

The Zulu way: “Concerns are expressed over Indaba group ‘manipulation'”

How to get arrested in Britain: upset a drug dealer

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The blurb on the back of David Copperfield’s Wasting Police Time says this:

Ever wondered why you can’t find a policeman when you need one? PC David Copperfield has the answer… they’re all inside the station, writing reports, photocopying, stapling and filing – when they’re not getting caught up in the petty squabbles of the underclass. Wasting Police Time is his hilarious and shocking diary of life as a modern British bobby. It’s the first book to spill the beans about the way senior police officers waste our money while fiddling the crime figures and scrambling to meet bogus Home Office targets. Copperfield’s chief constable won’t like it, and neither will the government. But honest taxpayers, sick of being fleeced while criminals rule our streets, will relish every word.

Well, the police in the UK have found something else to do to take their minds off the fact that they are not fighting crime: arrest those who do. Peter Drummond confronted a drug dealer, John Nellies and flushed his heroin down the toilet. What was his reward? Two months in the slammer.Add an Image

Father-of-three jailed after confronting drug dealer who sold heroin to his family

Father-of-three Peter Drummond was so angry when he discovered someone had sold heroin to his family that he took matters into his own hands.

He confronted John Nellies in his home and flushed five of the drug dealer’s bags of heroin down the toilet.

But yesterday it was Drummond – not Nellies – who found himself being jailed in court.

The 26-year-old shook his head in disbelief as he was ordered to serve two months for breaching the peace by barging into Nellies’s home and threatening him.

In Les Miserable, the hero, Jean Valjean is imprisoned for five years for stealing bread while the policeman, Javert mercilessly pursues him after his release. While he was writing the novel Victor Hugo witnessed the fate of someone who stole a loaf of bread and this undoubtedly provided some of the inspiration for his great novel. Jean Valjean’s fate was harsher than Drummond’s, but considerably less bizarre.

Victor, if only you were alive today.

The truth is out there

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I’ve always enjoyed reading science fiction from H. G. Wells to Arthur C Clark; and now the BBC:

Alien life ‘may exist among us’

Never mind Mars, alien life may be thriving right here on Earth, a major science conference has heard.

Our planet may harbour forms of “weird life” unrelated to life as we know it, according to Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University.

This “shadow life” may be hidden in toxic arsenic lakes or in boiling deep sea hydrothermal vents, he says.

He has called on scientists to launch a “mission to Earth” by trawling hostile environments for signs of bio-activity.

“It could be right in front of our noses – or even in our noses,” said the physicist.

After a good deal of digging, I have discovered an alien life form that lives up people’s noses.

Here it is:birdie2

How counter negative portrayals of Islam and Muslims

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First start your own TV program that shows Muslims in a positive light.Add an Image

Second decapitate your wife.

Mission accomplished.

Prominent Orchard Park man charged with beheading his wife.

Orchard Park police are investigating a particularly gruesome killing, the beheading of a woman, after her husband – an influential member of the local Muslim community – reported her death to police Thursday.

The only question left to ponder is, how long will it be before Rowan Williams uses this as a fine example of how Muslims settle family disputes.

Rowan Williams would make a terrible gambler

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He doesn’t know it’s best to quit when you’re ahead. Most people had forgotten Rowan’s ramblings about how good Sharia law would be for Britain. Considering the fuss it caused last time he brought this up, one would think he’d leave it alone; but does he? Of course not:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has defended his controversial comments Add an Imageabout the introduction of Islamic law to Britain and claimed that public opinion is now behind him.

On the anniversary of the interview in which Dr Rowan Williams said it “seems inevitable” that some parts of sharia would be enshrined in this country’s legal code, he claimed “a number of fairly senior people” now take the same view.

He added that there is a “drift of understanding” towards what he was saying, and that the public sees the difference between letting Muslim courts decide divorces and wills, and allowing them to rule on criminal cases and impose harsh punishments.

However critics insist that family disputes must be dealt with by civil law rather than according to religious principles, and claim the Archbishop’s comments have only helped the case of extremists while making Muslim women worse off, because they do not have equal rights under Islamic law.

Rowan Williams makes it easy for us to overlook the fact that he is the leader of the Church of England, the established church in Britain: he is supposed to be defending Christianity, not acting like the Grand Mufti of Middlesbrough.

Update: Melanie Phillips has written about this here:

The attitude among Britain’s establishment towards Britain’s creeping Islamisation becomes ever more surreal. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who betrayed British Muslim women, Christian values and British national identity when he said that Britain had nothing to fear from embracing sharia law in personal status issues and other disputes, has used the anniversary of those infamous remarks to opine that more people now agree with him.

Well if he’s right, there’s going to be an enormous drift of misunderstanding between the establishment and the rest. There may be an increasing number of ‘fairly senior people’ who are taking up residence with the Archbishop on Planet Cringe, but among ordinary folk there is a steady buildup of positively volcanic fury at the way the UK is being offered up in salami slices to the Islamists.

St. Hilda's ANiC: our one year anniversary

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It was one year ago that St. Hilda’s voted to come under the Episcopal oversight of Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Province of the Southern Cone. We had a cake this morning to celebrate.Add an Image

Our realigning unleashed a series of actions by the Diocese of Niagara that included firing the rector, demanding the building keys, freezing our bank account and taking St. Hilda’s to court.

Bishop Michael Bird threw things in frustration, John Page, the diocesan lawyer, hurled abuse during discovery meetings, and court appearances were disagreeably frequent.

During this time, St. Hilda’s web site peaked at 6000 hits per day and overall had 340,000 hits in 2008. The rector of St. Hilda’s, Rev. Paul Charbonneau appeared in a large colour photo on the front page of the National Post; we received hundreds of emails of support from all over the world – and even from parishioners in local Anglican churches.

None of this has been particularly easy: the pastor was fired and former colleagues shun him. Each week we have to pay to rent the gym in a local school; the chairs and sound equipment have to be set up and torn down. A series of ‘priests in charge’ have been installed in the building by the diocese and have brought with them a dribble of people from other Oakville parishes to create the illusion of a real diocesan congregation. They complain a lot.

To this day, the diocese has refused to share in building expenses or to negotiate – as was ordered by the court.

Standing up for something you believe in can end up being quite inconvenient.

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Diocese of Niagara: Potemkin St. Hilda's

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At the primates’ meeting in Egypt, the newly formed ACNA was warned not to recruit members from – presumably – the TEC or ACoC.

Any scheme developed would rely on an undertaking from the present partners to ACNA that they would not seek to recruit and expand their membership by means of proselytisation.

If only the ACoC would obey the spirit of this and not recruit members from one parish to populate another.

There are numerous ACoC churches in Oakville that are close to St. Hilda’s ANiC. The church of the Epiphany is one. St. Hilda’s ANiC has friends everywhere. One of them informed us today that an announcement was made at Epiphany that the diocesan services being held in St. Hilda’s building have something missing: people. Members of Epiphany are being encouraged to show up at St. Hilda’s to maintain the illusion that the diocese has a congregation there. This is in addition to the 3 people that Cheryl Fricker drags with her from St. Aidan’s.

After all, another court appearance is imminent.

Valentine's Day: testing the saliva

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There are a number of different ways to look at Valentine’s Day. This one, for example:

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Look out and see the pretty birds
How each doth chuse his mate,
To kiss and coo, and Jove pursue,
Their kind to propagate

And for the Dawkins dogmatists, this one:

She said men like “sloppier kisses” because they are testing the saliva to see how fertile a woman is.

“The hypothesis is they’re trying to get small traces of oestrogen to see where the woman is in her menstrual cycle to indicate the state of her fertility,” she said.

She said women used smell as they are kissing to deduce some things about the man’s immune system.

This gives us a perfect illustration of the contrast between meaning and mechanism.

The latter is undoubtedly an accurate description of how Dawkins and his wife met – a combination of sniffing and saliva analysis – but for normal people, believing that love is little more than an attraction to a superior immune system would be the recipe for a one way trip to the funny farm.

Personally, I avoid Valentine’s day altogether.