Author Archives: David

The Christian bus driver and the Pride bus

Posted on by
10

From here:

A Calgary man says he will quit his job if he’s assigned to drive a bus wrapped in a rainbow flag.

The annual Calgary Pride Festival kicks off Friday and, as a show of support, a Calgary Transit bus has been wrapped in the symbol of inclusiveness.

The rainbow flag bus will operate through Sept. 7, the day of the parade.

Jesse Rau, who has worked for Calgary Transit as a driver for about a year, says he’s a Christian and can’t support homosexuality.

Rau hopes Calgary Transit and the Amalgamated Transit Union will support drivers who don’t want to drive the rainbow bus.

Doug Morgan, director of Calgary Transit, says drivers can only refuse to work based on safety issues.

Here is the bus:

bus1

Although I sympathise with the bus driver’s disinclination to drive the bus, I have an uneasy feeling that he has picked the wrong battle. As Christians in the world, we are constantly surrounded with ideas that are out of step with our beliefs and sometimes they are plastered on the side of a bus. The driver has not been asked to drive a bus in the Pride Parade.

Would Jesse Rau also refuse to drive a bus with these ads?

 

I wonder what would happen to a Muslim bus driver who refused to drive a bus with this on it:

New eligibility criteria for politicians and voters

Posted on by
4

From Peter Hitchens:

Nobody under the age of 55 should be able to stand for election, and nobody under the age of 30 should be able to vote in those elections. Nobody under 55 knows anything much about life. Nobody under 30 knows anything.

I would add one: anyone unable to formulate a sentence without using the word “like” is incapable of coherent thought and should be ineligible to vote – that rules out everyone under 40 and many under 60.

Another quotidian baby part vendor lunch

Posted on by
2

In this video, StemExpress, baby part merchant, suggests cutting off the hands and feet of the aborted babies so that lab technicians can’t easily identify what they are looking at and have a meltdown.

Even baby part trafficking ghouls know that the “tissue” is really a baby.

Anglican Church of Canada marriage canon report almost complete

Posted on by
11

Read the entire article here:

The largest section of the roughly 50-page report will be devoted to biblical and theological reflection on the feasibility of Anglican same-sex marriage. The report will also address other components spelled out in General Synod 2013’s original mandating resolution on the marriage of same-sex couples. These include the wording of any amendment to Canon 21 permitting same-sex marriage, the terms of reference of the Solemn Declaration of 1893, which created the Anglican Church of Canada, and legal aspects of a conscience clause protecting bishops, dioceses, clergy and congregations from being constrained to authorize or participate in such marriages against the dictates of conscience.

[……]

It also set additional criteria contained in amendments introduced by diocese of Algoma Bishop Stephen Andrews and Dean Peter Elliott, diocese of New Westminster. The amendments, approved by a vote, stated that the 2016 motion should include supporting documentation that:

  • “demonstrates broad consultation in its preparation;

  • explains how this motion does not contravene the Solemn Declaration;

  • confirms immunity under civil law and the Human Rights Code for those bishops, dioceses and priests who refuse to participate in or authorize the marriage of same-sex couples on the basis of conscience; and

  • provides a biblical and theological rationale for this change in teaching on the nature of Christian marriage.”

I can’t help noticing that the wording of this article is always on the positive side of changing the marriage canon. For example, considering same-sex marriage has not existed in the church for two millennia, I might expect to see a theological reflection on the infeasibility of Anglican same-sex marriage. Instead, we read that the reflection will be upon the feasibility of Anglican same-sex marriage. Similarly, rather than explain how this motion does contravene the Solemn Declaration, we find the opposite. The bias is obvious, surely.

I wonder how this could possibly work:

confirms immunity under civil law and the Human Rights Code for those bishops, dioceses and priests who refuse to participate in or authorize the marriage of same-sex couples on the basis of conscience

How can a group of clerics expect any pronouncement they make about what may or may not occur under civil law to be taken seriously? Have they all taken a break from their studies of global warming to become civil rights lawyers?

How to be a cool bishop

Posted on by
3

Western bishops, having cast off the shackles of musty dogma that have been accumulating around the church for the last couple of millennia, are searching earnestly for something that will make people pay attention to them. Something to make them relevant. Something to show the world that they are cool.

National Lutheran Bishop Susan Johnson has the answer. It doesn’t get much cooler than her jitterbug at the Anglican sacred phlogiston shindig:

dancing bishop

Lighting a sacred fire under the Anglican Church of Canada

Posted on by
4

I’m all for the metaphorical application of such an idea, but it seems that the ACoC has been invaded by a tribe of literalists, so the fire in question is the result of rubbing a few pieces of wood together. Why not use a match, you may wonder: that would be cheating and cheating would hardly be sacred would it?

From here:

Gathered outside in the early morning hours, a circle of onlookers watched as volunteers rubbed spindles into fireboards, trying to produce enough friction to create an ember.

For young men in the Diné tradition, building a fire from scratch remains a rite of passage. The hard work of sparking a blaze without the aid of matches, lighters, etc. teaches virtues such as patience, forbearance, and perseverance.

The fire will be kept running all week, even during the obligatory fulmination against global warming by Bishop Mark MacDonald. The CO2 emitted must be sacred CO2.

Ironically, a persistent fear is that the Arctic might be getting warmer; isn’t there anyone in the Arctic who would like it to get warmer? As this study points out, cold weather is 20 times as deadly as hot weather.

For the evening presentation, Bishop MacDonald discussed the issue of climate change from a biblical and Indigenous perspective.

Early on, he noted his preference for the term “climate injustice” as the people who stand to suffer the most from the effects of climate change—the poor, the dispossessed, people of the land—are those who had the least to do with creating the problem, as is the case with residents in the Arctic.

Primate Fred Hiltz lamented that the church has turned away

from its evangelical call to follow “other gods” such as imperialism, the institutionalizing of racism and policies of assimilation. And lighting sacred fires.

Inexplicably, he omitted that last sentence.

Why we believe what we do

Posted on by
6

In his book Rage Against God, Peter Hitchens makes the point that both atheists and theists believe as they do simply because they choose to do so. In the case of atheism, it is generally a choice made from self-interest: if we admit that God exists we must also admit he might very well require something of us, something we may not wish to give.

Mainline churches have incorporated and refined this whole process, especially when dealing with the gay issue. The Anglican Church has produced endless papers, theological reflections and conversations on why, for 2000 years, the church had it wrong. All a learned smokescreen designed to conceal the real reason: compared to the general population, there is a disproportionately high number of gay clergy who wish not only to continue living with their same-sex partners, but to have their employer’s approval of the arrangement.

The same principle applies vicariously: people like Tony Campolo and Michael Coren who used to oppose gay marriage are now all for it. Not because the arguments have changed, but because condoning the lifestyle of their gay friends affords them feelings of fuzzy comfort – our contemporary substitute for love – whereas disagreement, however truly loving, can be so….. well, unpleasant, intolerant and hurtful.

None of this is new, of course: Peter Hitchens wrote about Aldous Huxley’s view of it here:

The  interesting bit , for this part of the argument, begins at the bottom of page 269, where Huxley is discussing the reality of the ‘meaning’ which we like to give to the world and our actions within it.

‘This is a question’, says Huxley, ‘which, a few years ago, I should not even have posed. For, like so many of my contemporaries, I took it for granted that there was no meaning’…

‘…I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…

‘Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know *because we don’t want to know*(my emphasis). It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless…’

[…..]

‘No philosophy is completely disinterested. The pure love of truth is always mingled to some extent with the need, consciously or unconsciously felt by even the noblest and the most intelligent philosophers, to justify a given form of personal or social behaviour, to rationalize the traditional prejudices of a given class or community.’

Anglican bishop likens global warming to atomic bombing of Hiroshima

Posted on by
11

Canadian bishop Mark MacDonald reckons the same forces that were responsible for bombing Hiroshima are now at work wreaking climatic havoc.

To the best of my knowledge, MacDonald is not an expert on the Second World War, a nuclear scientist or a climatologist. Nevertheless, he is a bishop so we can expect – even forgive, perhaps – an unending stream of advice on matters of which he is entirely ignorant; since he is an Anglican bishop that would usually include theology.

From here:

The nuclear attack on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945 revealed the brutality and dangerous logic of war, money and power, according to an Indigenous Anglican bishop from Canada.

“That such a thing can make sense in any universe gives insight into what is happening in the world today,” says Bishop Mark MacDonald of the Anglican Church in Canada. “The forces that led to the bombing of Hiroshima are at work now in the destruction of the climate.”

[…..]

“The role of the church today is to confront the destructive gods of greed and power. We Christians need to return to our roots, proclaim the truth of God and challenge these powers,” the bishop states.

I was under the impression that the role of the church is to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

I disbelieve; help thou mine belief.

Posted on by
10

The disbelief in which United Church minister, Rev. Gretta Vosper, revels puts to shame the sincerely cherished uncertainties harboured by most the devoutly doubting Anglican cleric. Sad to say, her pious dubieties have become too much for even the United Church of Canada: they may defrock her. Never fear Rev. Gretta; frocked or not, you could almost certainly find employment plying your insights of incertitude on one of the many Anglican facilitated conversation circuits.

grettaFrom here:

TORONTO — An ordained United Church of Canada minister who believes in neither God nor the Bible said Wednesday she is prepared to fight an unprecedented attempt to boot her from the pulpit for her beliefs.

In an interview at her church in the Toronto suburb of West Hill, Rev. Gretta Vosper said congregants support her view that how you live is more important than what you believe in.

“I don’t believe in … the god called God,” she said. “Using the word gets in the way of sharing what I want to share.”

Vosper, 57, who was ordained in 1993 and joined her east-end church in 1997, said the idea of an interventionist, supernatural being on which so much church doctrine is based belongs to an outdated world view.

What’s important, she says, is that her views hearken to Christianity’s beginnings, before the focus shifted from how one lived to doctrinal belief in God, Jesus and the Bible.

“Is the Bible really the word of God? Was Jesus a person?” she said.

“It’s mythology. We build a faith tradition upon it which shifted to find belief more important than how we lived.”