Monthly Archives: May 2010

Seniors told they can't pray before meals

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From here:

Preston Blackwelder proudly showed off a painting of his grandmother that had hung next to the front door of his Port Wentworth home.

She was the woman who led him to God, Blackwelder said Friday.

And with that firm religious footing, Blackwelder said it would be preposterous to stop praying before meals at Port Wentworth’s Ed Young Senior Citizens Center near Savannah because of a federal guideline.

“She would say pray anyway,” Blackwelder said of his grandmother. “She’d say don’t listen.”

But Senior Citizens Inc. officials said Friday the meals they are contracted by the city to provide to Ed Young visitors are mostly covered with federal money, which ushers in the burden of separating church and state.

On Thursday, the usual open prayer before meals at the center was traded in for a moment of silence.

I trust the instinct of the seniors will be that of Daniel on hearing that King Darius – the ancient equivalent of Western governments, it appears – had forbidden prayer to all but himself:

When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously. Dan 6:10

Update: it appears that the ridiculous anti-prayer policy has been changed.

Rating Hitler’s coolness factor

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From the BBC:Add an Image

Some West Midlands Ambulance Service staff contacted their union after being asked if they thought Adolf Hitler was a “cool” leader in an NHS survey.

Unison said it had received complaints from a few members who found the question inappropriate.

The service defended the survey, which asked staff to rate leaders like Gordon Brown and Richard Branson.

I can’t see the problem: is there a more egregious insult than being viewed as cool?

University of Calgary students officially warned over anti-abortion display

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From the Star:

CALGARY—Letters of warning have been issued to several members of an anti-abortion group for a display they put on at the University of Calgary last month.

Eight students who are members of Campus Pro-Life have been found guilty of non-academic misconduct following closed-door meetings with a university official.

The university says the students, who had been facing expulsion, failed to comply with security requests and could face harsher penalties in the future if they don’t comply with regulations.

The U of C has said the issue does not surround the students’ opinions, but their failure to comply with requests to ensure the safety of students.

It’s a shame that the University of Calgary doesn’t have the same degree of concern for the security and safety of the unborn. The signs in question are revolting – as intended, presumably – but the only threat they present is to the equanimity of pro-abortionists.

Anglican Earth Day Daftness

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It must be a comfort to Roman Catholic priests to know that if their theology becomes so outré that they are ejected from the Catholic Church, there will still be a home for them in Anglicanism. Mathew Fox, an ex Roman Catholic, is an Anglican priest in TEC where he feels quite at home; he pioneered the Techno Cosmic Mass:

An Episcopal priest and theologian who popularized the rave-like “Techno Cosmic Mass” and advocated goddess worship recently led a seminar on mysticism and Earth spirituality to coincide with Earth Day.

Warning that environmental degradation caused by raging against “Gaia” had to cease, the Rev. Matthew Fox made frequent references to “the Goddess” and the divine feminine during his environmentally-themed lecture and workshop, “Earth Spirituality and the Mystical Tradition.” The event was held in April at the Unitarian Universalist Church in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Maryland, and sponsored by the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation.

Fox’s seminar was a melding of Celtic spirituality, goddess worship, panentheism (which posits that God interpenetrates every part of nature, but also transcends nature), environmental activism, and a political rejection of American “empire,” peppered sporadically with digs against the Vatican. Making references to Christian mystics like Hildegard of Bingen alongside pagan deities and the animal world, Fox comfortably oscillated between threats to polar bears and the oppression patriarchy when expressing his views on the natural world.

Mad Pride

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Having had my fill of anti-theism, the emergence of anti-psychiatry comes as a welcome diversion. Any attempt to debunk psychiatry is commendable, partly because psychiatrists are usually in greater danger of permanent mental instability than their patients and partly because psychiatrists have not come to any consensus on what it is they are treating: some think the mind is entirely treatable by manipulating the brain through chemicals or electroshock, others favour therapy through the kind of exchange people used to have with a bartender – or a priest in prior ages. Almost none admit to the existence of the human spirit, so almost all are at sea.

Batty though most psychiatrists are, those who gathered recently in Toronto for a conference called PsychOUT, are battier still and, ironically,  remind me somewhat of the grand-loon of psychiatry, R. D. Laing, whose theories included: psychotic behaviour is a valid expression of distress; psychiatry is not a science (well, true); schizophrenia should be valued as a cathartic and transformative experience; and psychiatrists themselves are responsible for the madness of many of their patients – hard to argue against that last point.

From the National Post:

David Carmichael, a mentally-ill youth fitness advocate and aspiring federal politician who drugged and suffocated his 11-year-old son in a hotel room, is not your typical academic conference presenter.

Then again, PsychOUT, a controversial strategy session this weekend at the University of Toronto for “organizing resistance against psychiatry,” is not a typical conference.

A rare global event for the anti-psychiatry movement, with speakers from as far as Ghana, it is billed as a celebration of Mad Pride with an eye to the future overthrow of psychiatry, which has replaced religion as the primary oppressor of the human mind.

As organizer Bonnie Burstow puts it, modern psychiatry is beyond saving, and destroying it “is unachievable in the short run. But the long run is a very different thing.”

As a first step, the conference will promote new Ontario legislation aimed at defunding electroshock therapy, seen by anti-psychiatrists as a particularly brutal assault on people unfairly labelled as crazy.

Obsessive compulsive global warming fears

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In this article, Australian and New Zealand psychiatrists don’t connect the last couple of dots by actually saying that global warming fear is an obsessive compulsive disorder in its own right; so I am doing it for them. How many of those suffering from this disorder are employed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, I wonder?

A recent study has found that global warming has impacted the nature of symptoms experienced by obsessive compulsive disorder patients.

Climate change related obsessions and/or compulsions were identified in 28% of patients presenting with obsessive compulsive disorder. Their obsessions included leaving taps on and wasting water, leaving lights on and wasting electricity, pets dying of thirst, leaving the stove on and wasting gas as well as obsessions that global warming had contributed to house floors cracking, pipes leaking, roof problems and white ants eating the house.

Having children is equivalent to stealing says the Anglican Church

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The Anglican Church in Australia has decided that having children is bad for the environment, breaks the eighth commandment and is the equivalent of stealing.

Thus the Anglican Church soldiers on in its never-flagging efforts to devolve into an obscure, laughable and deranged eco-cult.

The Anglican Church wants Australians to have fewer children and has urged the federal government to scrap the baby bonus and cut immigration levels.

The General Synod of the Anglican Church has issued a warning that current rates of population growth are unsustainable and potentially out of step with church doctrine – including the eighth commandment ”thou shall not steal”.

In a significant intervention, the Anglican Public Affairs Commission has also warned concerned Christians that remaining silent ”is little different from supporting further overpopulation and ecological degradation”.

”Out of care for the whole Creation, particularly the poorest of humanity and the life forms who cannot speak for themselves … it is not responsible to stand by and remain silent,” a discussion paper by the commission warns.

”Unless we take account of the needs of future life on Earth, there is a case that we break the eighth commandment – ‘Thou shall not steal’.”

The discussion paper, prepared in March, claims that federal government financial incentives encouraging childbirth should be scrapped and replaced with improved support for parents, such as leave.

Toronto gay pride denied federal funds

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Apparently, taxpayers are not going have to pay to celebrate sodomy this year; shame, since it provides such a wonderful opportunity for a wholesome family outing:

Organizers of Toronto’s gay pride festival were surprised and angry Friday at the Conservative government’s decision to drop the Add an Imagelucrative and popular event from its tourism stimulus package.

Pride Toronto was not on the list of over 50 festivals awarded grants on Friday as part of the federal government’s two-year, $100-million Marquee Tourism program.

In a statement Friday, Industry Minister Tony Clement said there are 20 new beneficiaries this year, and the fund’s second-year goal was to “ensure regional fairness by making sure every corner of Canada benefits from this temporary stimulus program.

Pride Toronto executive director Tracey Sandilands called the decision a “clear indication that the federal government doesn’t believe that queer arts and culture is worth investment in.”

“We are very disappointed …. We believe that that is a very strong message for the queer community, especially here in Toronto,”

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Sandilands told the CBC’s Rosemary Barton.

Not to worry, the parade will still have plenty of support from the usual mob.



Are we alone in the universe?

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Stephen Hawking is convinced that aliens exist; if the universe is free-running and has produced intelligent life in one place seemingly by accident, why could it not produce it somewhere else, too? As a Christian I don’t find this particularly convincing; on the other hand, I have little difficulty in believing that God made man in his image, that life is not accidental and that God, being extravagant, created a very large universe just for us.

Here – from Premier Christian Radio – is an illuminating conversation between astrophysicist Paul Davies and Christian mathematician and philosopher, John Lennox which sheds light on life, the universe and everything. And the likelihood – or unlikelihood – of ET.

300 Anglican clergy in the UK doubt God’s existence

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And that was in 2005.

A report produced 5 years ago by the University of Bangor found that 300 clergymen in the Church of England doubt that God exists. That makes about as much sense as a carpenter disbelieving in the existence of trees; you might think that 300 out of 9000 isn’t bad – unless you happen to be in one of atheist-priest’s parishes, of course. The CofE fares much worse when it comes to Christian beliefs, with 1800 clergy disbelieving in the bodily resurrection of Christ and 3600 disbelieving in the Virgin Birth. That means, in 2005, at least 3600 CofE clergymen routinely and publically lied every Sunday when reciting the creed.

For those who think the current trials afflicting the Anglican church are about nothing but sex, these figures should serve as a salutary reminder that a disturbingly large number of Anglican priests in the UK do not believe in what they are peddling.

Things are far worse in Canada, of course: the Anglican Church of Canada makes the Church of England look like a hotbed of fundamentalism.

The report, published on the eve of the General Synod, refers to “very fragile faultlines along which the Church of England could be torn apart”. Congregations are much more conservative than most of the comparatively liberal clergy preaching to them.

The report says that if committed Anglicans are clear about one thing it is the existence of God: 97 per cent have no hesitation in affirming His existence. Yet, it continues, one in 33 clerics doubts the existence of God. If reflected throughout the Church’s 9,000 clergy the finding would mean that nearly 300 Church of England clergy are uncertain that God exists.

Equal numbers of clergy and laity, eight out of ten, believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ but more laity than clergy believe in the Virgin Birth — 62 per cent compared with 60 per cent — and in the miracle where Jesus turned water into wine — 65 per cent compared with 61 per cent. The biggest division comes over the issue of homosexuality. One third of clergy are in favour of the ordination of practising homosexuals as priests, compared with one quarter of laity. Nearly one third of clergy also support the ordination of gay bishops, but among the laity this falls to fewer than one fifth