Anglican bishops want a guaranteed basic income

Canadian bishops from the Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada have written an open letter insisting that the government pay everyone a ‘basic income’ whether they work or not.

Where is the money going to come from? They don’t say: presumably from people who are working. Why work if you are paid not to work? They don’t say, although they are probably suffering from the woolly liberal delusion that people are innately good and will naturally want to work to support those who find laziness too tempting to resist – like me.

What is really behind this? I expect they are all afraid of losing their jobs and have an uneasy feeling that they would be unemployable in any other profession.

A Public Letter on Guaranteed Basic Income

By General Synod Communications on May 3, 2020

Dear Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister Morneau:

Subject: COVID-19 Pandemic – Guaranteed Basic Income

We write from across our country – from the tundra of the high Arctic, the out-ports of the Atlantic coast, from French and English speaking Canada, from urban to rural, the Prairies, the Rockies and coastal mountains and from the Pacific coast; we write as Indigenous people and as non-Indigenous. We write from across denominational traditions. As bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada we write, compelled by our shared faith convictions and moral obligation to care for the human condition of all.

Although we represent great diversity, we write to you because we are united, and morally bound in a singular message: Canada needs Guaranteed Basic Income for all. We need it today.

Sit softly for you sit on my satire

Many years ago Malcolm Muggeridge published a collection of essays called “Tread Softly for You Tread on My Jokes”. I still have a yellowing copy on my bookshelf. The title is inspired by a poem by W. B. Yeats and, as I recall, expressed Muggeridge’s frustration when he was editor of Punch at trying to out-parody a civilisation that had already become a parody of itself.

He could not have known that worse was to come.

Here is one of today’s headlines from the CBC who, it seems, are blissfully oblivious to its idiocy:

The pandemic is making it harder to deliver medically assisted death, doctors say
Some doctors say the pandemic is making it harder to provide medically assisted deaths to patients who request them, due to shortages of protective masks and gowns and last-minute scrambles to find places to perform the procedure.

The pandemic also is being cited as the cause of a reported surge in public interest in assisted death.

Diocese of Niagara: a decade of lies and hypocrisy

Like most other dioceses, the Diocese of Niagara is fervently declaring that “the church isn’t the building, it’s the people”. Mainly because everyone is shut out of church buildings and the clergy are terrified that their congregations will never return. More importantly, neither will their money.

Hence, we have Rev Martha Tartanic writing articles like this, to convince us that the diocese cares nothing for buildings; all it cares about is people. Really.

The church is most definitely not closed! The church isn’t our building, and it’s not dependent on our ability to gather in our building. Our church is us. Wherever we are, and no matter what measures are put in place, our identity as church continues. We may just need to find other ways of showing up for each other and connecting as a community to God’s love.

Those of us who were part of the Diocese of Niagara in 2008 when ANiC was formed know that this is hypocritical nonsense. When the diocese liberated St. Hilda’s church building from the people who paid for it, all they cared about was the building; the people were an embarrassing inconvenience who had to be ejected so the place could be bulldozed and the land sold for $2million.

Before that could happen, the diocese had to convince the courts that they had a use for the building. In order to do that, it parachuted in a bogus congregation from neighbouring churches led by, among others, Rev Martha Tartanic.

So we have lies, hypocrisy and, now in 2020, more lies. It’s the buildings that are important to the ACoC, not the people.

The same edition of the diocesan paper has this:

Where my church was. It still stands empty:

Anglican Church of Canada’s income spirals downwards

The Anglican Church of Canada receives 90% of its income from voluntary donations from dioceses. For the 10 years between 2007 and 2017, this income was quite stable. Since then it has been sinking rapidly:

This graph does not take into account the additional and inevitable loss of income due to the closure of all Canadian church buildings.

The solution, we are told, is not repentance and a change of direction, but more conversations:

In response to the financial presentation, Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, told CoGS, “The reality is that we need a conversation…with the Council of General Synod, with the House of Bishops, with dioceses.” Citing, among other things, the trends of decreasing giving and attendance in Anglican churches, Nicholls added the conversation would require “transparency and frankness.”

It’s tempting to speculate on whether the ACoC will survive the year of the virus. I suspect some dioceses won’t.

And now for something completely different: an Anglican bishop who believes in the Resurrection

When I first read this story, naturally I suspected that it was a creation of Titania McGrath; it all seemed so implausible.

Bishop Joey Royal is a Canadian Anglican bishop who believes in the physical resurrection of Jesus – and he is still employed! The catch is, he was sent to live in the Arctic.

Read the whole thing here, bearing in mind it still could be an elaborate prank:

For all the talk of mystery and meaning, what a non-bodily resurrection offers is ultimately despair. It is a “gospel” emptied of good news, an exhortation to try hard so you too can have powerful, transformative experiences. Stripped bare of its extravagant rhetoric, it arrives at the same place as the so-called Prosperity Gospel. The latter says “have enough faith and God will make you rich”; the former says “have enough faith and God will make you feel good.” The difference is that one promises material comfort and the other psychological comfort. Both are religious philosophies developed by, and for, wealthy people who are searching for some way to transcend the ennui of their secular lives. Unfortunately, it’s all smoke and mirrors, destined to be discarded when disappointment inevitably arrives.

To all that I say, “No thanks.” If the dead aren’t raised, then our faith is in vain, and we may as well find another cause to which we can commit our lives. But if the dead are raised, and Jesus is the forerunner in resurrection life, then our hope is sturdy, because Jesus has defeated Satan and disarmed the powers of death and sin. That means that our bodily existence—with all the accompanying wreckage and failure and vulnerability and unrealized hopes—are caught up in, and find ultimate meaning in, the reality of the empty tomb. Put simply, we don’t have to have powerful religious experiences, because we have new life, available now and to be completed on the Last Day.

Don’t buy the counterfeits. Christ is risen! And because of that we can rise too.

Make Canada cold again

Yesterday was earth day, the day batty Anglicans try to convince us that nature is on our side, if only we would leave it alone.

April in Oakville has been colder than usual this year; it snowed a few days ago. It’s not cold enough for Anglicans, though:

Just to reinforce the virtues of freezing to death, these two Anglican ladies want us to stop using the only resource we have that prevents Canadians turning into winter pillars of ice: fossil fuels:

No wonder so many secularists regard Christians as irrational crackpots: many of us are.

From here:

The global climate emergency has reached a new level of public awareness in recent years, spurred by phenomena such as the Fridays for Future movement—youth climate strikes—led by Greta Thunberg. Recently, scientists cited climate change as a factor in the unprecedented intensity of bushfires in Australia in 2019-20.

In the face of this crisis, Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, has called on the church to take action on climate change, calling stewardship of the earth and the care of creation “a core responsibility of our faith.” The primate compares concern of young people for the future of their planet with the fear of nuclear annihilation she experienced growing up during the Cold War.

“The question,” she asks, “is how do we proclaim that vision of creation as a gift of God that we are called to steward and that we should be at the very forefront of those that are fighting for it?”

Archbishop Melissa Skelton to retire

The Diocese of New Westminster’s Bishop Melissa Skelton will be retiring in 2021.

Her tenure was not as divisive or tumultuous as her predecessor, Michael Ingham but that isn’t saying much, since his contribution to the fracture of the Anglican communion, while not singlehanded, was energetic and indispensable.

Skelton supported all the usual causes, most of which bore little relation to the religion that is responsible for paying her salary. Here she is, for example, wearing a pussyhat. Purple, not pink, as befitting the dignity of her calling as a bishop.

From here:

Greetings, People of the Diocese of New Westminster

When I first became the Bishop of the Diocese, I reminded all of you that, on account of Provincial Canons specifying that bishops must retire by age 70, I would have seven years to serve as your bishop. I turn 70 years of age in mid-March of 2021, and with a mixture of sadness about leaving as well as excitement for the future of this Diocese, I inform you that I am calling for the election of a Bishop Coadjutor for the Diocese of New Westminster on October 3, 2020.

Justin Welby worries about post pestilence inequality

He’s right to, of course. Once Corona virus infections have subsided, some people will be dead and others alive. It doesn’t get much more inequitable than that.

Even worse, some who are dead will find themselves in paradise and some in a place where global warming has reached a diabolical crescendo.

Neither of these are important enough to concern Justin Welby, though. He is concentrating on what matters most: money, who has it and who doesn’t. And no wonder! The archbishop of Canterbury lives at Lambeth Palace: the clue to what that looks like can be found in the second word. Here it is, a modest little place for the main Anglican representative of the religion started by the fellow reputed to have said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

Which goes to show that in a post-pestilence Welbyian utopia, some archbishops would be more equal than others.

From here:

The archbishop of Canterbury has said inequalities must be addressed or even eliminated once the current “pestilence” is over.

Speaking on Easter Sunday on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, Justin Welby said there was a “huge, huge danger” of the coronavirus pandemic exacerbating inequality, but “that is our choice as a nation and as a world”.

He added: “The next wave coming is the economic one … We have a choice there as a nation and as a society and as a world. Do we take hold of our destiny and make sure the differences are mitigated, abolished where possible – or do we just let things happen, do we let the market rule, in which case there will be enormous suffering.”

Resurrecting the Anglican way: myth, confusion, uncertainty and doubt

The point about the Resurrection of Jesus is that by any normal standards it is so preposterous that it cannot possibly have happened. Unless God himself intervened and made it happen. There is no half-measure that will soften the absurdity of the claim: it doesn’t help to say Jesus was partly resurrected, “spiritually” resurrected, resurrected as a myth or resurrected as some quasi-mystical Jungian inner resurrection.

It is entirely binary, either/or. One moment there was a corpse, the next a living Jesus in a real body. Either believe it or don’t but, for God’s sake – and I mean that literally – don’t turn it into a watery imitation of what it claims to be. Like this:

Confusion about the resurrection continues to this day. I think that many of the original chronicles were essentially myths created by the first believers to help them make sense of events beyond human explanation. Their uncertainty is probably best summed up in a comment by one of the men at dinner in Emmaus—“We had hoped,” he said, “that he might have been the one who would redeem Israel.” But at this point, obviously, that hope was fragile.

Jesus makes an attempt to explain how his passion and death had long been intimated in the Hebrew scriptures; but even then, he is met by hesitant disbelief.

It took time and spiritual discernment for the early Christian community to come to experience the meaning, if not the actuality, of Jesus’ reappearance.

Eventually, however, “The Lord is risen; he is risen indeed!” became an experiential truth, a claim that many would make personally. Still later came the conviction that everyone could experience a personal resurrection just like Jesus. What started as a claim from a few confused people matured into a global confession of faith.

Recognizing how the reality of “resurrection” burst upon a perplexed group should remind us that there will always be stages of doubt as well as conviction. I continue to evolve in my own discernment of what it all means.