The extraordinary claim is: “God exists”.
The extraordinary evidence is the self-evident existence of the self-awareness that is able to doubt the truth of the proposition: “God exists”.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
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Monthly Archives: September 2012
Cracking Open White Identity towards Transformation: Canadian Ecumenical Anti-Racism Network Examines White Identity, Power and Privilege
That’s the catchy little title of a new book published by the Canadian Council of Churches, whose president is – white. When the CCC’s Executive Committee is not busy Cracking Open the White Identity of its leader, it devotes its energies to social justice, climate change, wealth poverty and ecology, and ushering in a new world. Not a brave new world – really.
The contributors to the book have discovered that the church’s real problem is its “failure to address white power and privilege”. The Anglican Church of Canada is a member of the CCC and, funnily enough, all the ACoC’s bishops are – white! Perhaps the CCC is on to something: I’m eagerly awaiting the mass resignation of all ACoC bishops and their replacement by African bishops..
From here:
In his afterword, the United Church of Canada’s Michael Blair, who is of black Jamaican descent, argues that failure to address white power and privilege threatens the very core of the Christian church. “…I would say the very essence of what it means to be church is at stake…The traditional marks of the church—one holy, catholic and apostolic—are challenged,” Blair writes.
The example of Christ must always remain at the heart of the church’s work. “Certainly the model of the ministry of Jesus was the dismantling of systems of power and privilege—particularly within the context of institutionalized religion,” Blair writes.
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The Toronto School Board and district sex shop
The Toronto School Board seems to be so intent upon thrusting sex upon its students that it makes me wonder whether the entire GTA school system has been infiltrated by paedophiles. The latest furore is over a link the board has to a website given to describing, in graphic detail, what used to be considered aberrant sexual practices.
The actual page is here, the site it links to is positive.org, and the suggestions for teen recreational activities include having sex with vegetables. Not forgetting the tasteful employment of nipple clamps, buttplugs, pornography, cock rings, and vibrators, to mention but a few items of commonly owned paraphernalia of the average teen.
To be fair, positive.org gives a word of caution in all this: “If you’re putting something into a butthole, make sure it has a flared base and looks something like the picture. That way it can’t go all the way in and get stuck.” I bet you wish someone had told you that when you were 13; it could have saved an embarrassing trip to the Hospital Emergency Department.
In case buttplugs don’t pique your interest, there is always the prospect of a proposed “gay-centric” school – for those who remain unconvinced that existing Toronto schools are not already rabidly “gay-centric”.
And then there is the Oasis Alternative School Triangle Program that offers “[a] program that features curriculum about our LGBTQ – lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-identified, inter-sexed, two-spirited and questioning/sexual minority – literature, history, and lives. How better to prepare children for life in the real world?
For those who want to do all the above with multiple people simultaneously, there is the Toronto School Board’s definitive guide to polyamory.
As positive.org says “Sex is everywhere” – but the highest concentration can be found in the Toronto School Board.
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The NDP is afraid to discuss abortion
Canada has no law limiting abortion – none at all. It is legal to murder a full-term baby while it is still in the womb and illegal to murder it five minutes later when it is outside of the womb. Jason Kenney, conservative immigration minister, is supporting a motion that would require parliament to study scientific evidence that could help us decide when human life begins.
The NDP, the party that would have us believe it defends the weakest in society, instead, champions a woman’s right to choose – to kill the weakest of the weak: her baby. Moreover, the NDP wants to suppress any discussion on the issue.
Evidently the NDP is not so sure of its position that it is willing to subject it to scrutiny. The reason is that, in their heart of hearts, everyone – even NDP politicians – knows that abortion is murder and the only reason for it being legal is that we are a society so given over to self-absorption, so immersed in narcissism, so solipsistic, we are willing to sacrifice our own children on the altar of hedonistic self-interest: much as ancient pagans burned their offspring as a propitiation to Moloch.
In fairness to the NDP – not that they would reciprocate – Harper and the entire liberal party are just as bad.
From here:
OTTAWA — The NDP hammered Immigration Minister Jason Kenney Tuesday after the cabinet minister said he will support a motion calling for a discussion about “when life begins.”
NDP status of women critic MP Niki Ashton says Kenney’s motives for supporting Tory MP Stephen Woodworth’s motion are dubious.
“The question here is why he is choosing to stand up in opposition to his government’s wishes on a motion that is so fundamental to women’s rights,” Ashton said
[….]
However, Ashton and her caucus colleague Francoise Boivin say the motion should have been smacked down before it reached the Commons because it challenges a woman’s right to choose.
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Toronto school board denies promoting polygamy while continuing to promote it
The Toronto District School Board has denied that the poster below, which is to be placed in their schools, promotes polygamy even though it plainly does.
Employing Newspeak as the preferred refuge of last resort of beleaguered bureaucrats, a spokesman from the board said: “…the board does not support polygamy. The images in question were meant to support an individual’s right to choose whom they love, regardless of gender. For example, the reason for depicting two women and one man was meant to show that a person can be attracted to more than one gender.”
Of course the board is promoting polygamy: if people have the right to choose whom they love, i.e. have sex with, and there are three people at it, you have – yes, you’ve guessed it – polygamy if they are “married”, polyamory if they are not.
Perhaps the board would be more comfortable if they were known as the school of polyamory rather than polygamy.
From here:
TORONTO — The Toronto District School Board is denying claims it’s promoting polygamy — just illustrating it exists as a family dynamic — with a poster campaign for gender-based violence prevention.
The school board’s website depicts a series of five posters — one of them has the message “Love has no gender” in big white capital letters. Surrounding the slogan are various hearts containing different stick-figure people. In one of them there is an image of a man with two women; in another, two women with one man.
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Anglican Church of Canada’s 7 eastern dioceses may be condensed to 3
In order to save costs, the dioceses of Montreal, Quebec, Fredericton, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, Western Newfoundland, Central Newfoundland, and Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador may be reduced to just three dioceses, the synod of the ecclesiastical province of Canada has announced.
Such is the desperation of the ecclesiastical province of Canada, that its metropolitan, Archbishop Claude Miller, sees no point in denying the inevitable comparison to deckchairs aboard the Titanic. Rather, he is portraying the Titanic’s maiden voyage as one of promise and opportunity because a remnant was saved. I expect the Titanic’s passengers would have derived considerable consolation from that thought had it been shared with them as they boarded. Small wonder things are falling apart in the Anglican Church of Canada, considering the tenuous grip on reality of those at the helm.
From here:
Archbishop Miller admitted that some critics compare the church’s discussions about change to “just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” However, in his presidential address to synod members, the metropolitan noted that the doomed ship’s story isn’t entirely about unredeemed loss.
The Titanic’s maiden voyage was “a journey with a promise and opportunity for a new life for most of the passengers on board,” the archbishop said. “Not all died in that tragedy. Sometimes we forget that a remnant was saved and realized that hope. Amid the tragedies and tests of this life there is much hope and reason to give thanks.”
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Anglican Church of Canada $900,000 in the red mid 2012
From here:
MONTREAL-Despite efforts to balance its budget the national synod of the Anglican Church of Canada was running about $900,000 in the red at the end of the second quarter of 2012, the primate of the church, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, says.
He told representatives of eastern Canada dioceses Friday that the shortfall was due mainly to revenues lower than anticipated from dioceses. This was despite impressive efforts by some diocese to grapple with their own financial challenges and the decision of some diocese able to do so to voluntarily increase their contributions to the national church.
“The General Synod is struggling financially and if the truth be known we have been on this trajectory for a long time,” he told the synod of the Ecclesiastical Province of Canada, made up of seven dioceses in Atlantic Canada and Quebec. After slipping into “a dangerous tendency of deficit budgeting” it had been seeking to balance its budget through austerities including a 25 per cent reduction in national staff in the last three years, while at the same time seeking to re-focus its activities on mission.
Archbishop Claude Miller of Fredericton seems to have cottoned on to the idea that the financial plight of the Anglican Church of Canada is a result of following false gods. I think he has missed the mark on which false gods and who is following them, though. In his view, they are governments, money, possessions, knowledge, industry, commerce, even entertainment and sports. But they are the false gods of the unsaved; there is no real surprise in that. While it’s hard to keep up with the ever broadening plethora of false gods that the church has taken into its bosom, it seems clear that an, admittedly, non-exhaustive list would include: utopianism, socialism, homosexuality, gender ambiguity, inclusion, temporality rather than transcendence, diversity, eco-religion, aboriginal superstition and general new-age mumbo-jumbo.
“We have put our faith in other gods for our security and salvation: governments, money, possessions, knowledge, industry, commerce, even entertainment and sports. Witness the Sabbath day and the parking lots of churches versus the parking lots of the shopping malls. Where our treasure is, we find our hearts.”
Fortunately, Primate Fred Hiltz has the situation under control and has issued a memo to calm nervous staff: apparently, the remedy for the church’s financial embarrassment is enshrined in “pruning” and “Vision 2019”.
I want to assure you that in my remarks I said nothing about cuts to programs or staff. I simply made reference to our obligation for careful attention to “pruning” that may need to be considered. In reality we find ourselves in a deficit position and the worry that comes with it at this time each year.
In my remarks I also said that by 2016 the structures of the General Synod will look “very different”. That friends is not breaking news! The need to do this work is enshrined in Vision 2019 (practice #1-Creating Structures that work now for God’s mission) General Synod Resolution A111, the resolution of the November 2011 meeting of CoGS and the focus of conversations at the Spring 2012 meeting of CoGS and those we will have at the upcoming meeting in November.
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Welcome to Pakistan Railways
Where the trains are run by “professional management and competent staff ” whose leader, Ghulam Ahmad Balor, is using the money he earns by making the trains run “strictly in accordance to time table“, to offer a $100,000 reward for the murder of an American citizen.
It’s not the first time that someone has been mentally derailed by the strain of keeping the trains running on time.
From here:
ISLAMABAD – A Pakistani Cabinet minister Saturday offered a $100,000 reward for the death of the person behind the anti-Islam video made in the United States that has roiled Muslims around the world, even suggesting that Taliban and al-Qaida militants could carry out the killing.
Railways Minister Ghulam Ahmad Balor said at a news conference in Peshawar that he would personally finance a bounty aimed at the maker of the crude, low-budget video that denigrates the Prophet Muhammad.
Balor acknowledged that incitement to murder was illegal but said he was “ready to be hanged in the name of the Prophet Muhammad.” And he invited the Taliban and al-Qaida to be “partners in this noble deed,” according to news reports.
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The blasphemy game
The National Endowment for the Arts, an agency of the US Federal Government, helped to pay for Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, one of his creations that will be on display at the Body and Spirit exhibition at the Edward Tyler Nahem Gallery on September 27th. I’ve included the link for those who would like to arrive early and beat the rush.
Andres Serrano is obsessed with putting photographs of his bodily fluids on display, along with the occasional corpse garnished with human excrement. In saner times, Serrano, would be recognised for what he is: someone who is mentally ill. In the twenty first century, however, he is an artist.
The same government that paid for Serrano to pee into a jam jar containing a crucifix, has piously intoned: “The U.S. deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.” I suppose the key to understanding this is in the word “others”: denigrating the religious beliefs one’s own citizens is a federally funded obligation.
From here:
Religious groups are blasting President Obama for not condemning am anti-Christian art display set to appear in New York City and one Republican lawmaker said he is “fed up with the administration’s double standard and religious hypocrisy.
“Piss Christ,” once branded as a “deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity,” will be displayed at the Edward Tyler Nahem Gallery in Manhattan on Thursday. The artwork features a “photograph of the crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine.”
The artwork debuted in 1989 and was funded through prize money provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. The art gallery hosting the retrospective salute to Andres Serrano is privately owned.
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Muslim prayer room opens in Catholic high school
The Principal wants to ensure that all our students feel welcome. Fair enough, but will the inclusive, tolerant Principal go for maximum diversity and hold her gay-straight alliance club meetings in the same room? They could share the prayer mats.
From here:
LONDON, ONT. – Mother Teresa Catholic secondary school is turning a second-floor office into an Islamic prayer room — the first high school in the city, private or public, to do so.
Carpet will soon cover the tile flooring, speakers will be installed and prayer mats purchased to provide the school’s Muslim students, estimated at around two dozen, with a quiet and private place to pray.
The idea has been in the works since the end of the last school year after a group of Muslim students lobbied administration to create the space.
“They’re members of our school community. We want to ensure that all our students feel welcome, that they feel that they belong,” said Principal Ana Paula Fernandes.