Category Archives: Barmy Bishops

Archbishop says Keep Away from the Bible

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Or more precisely, he said “Christ Says Keep Away from the Bible”.

How exactly he knows this, we are not told, but he seems pretty certain.

Archbishop Jonathan Blake is the presiding Archbishop of the Open Episcopal Church, a “radical fluid open connecting space for everyone in search of meaning, justice, love, truth and life”, whatever that means.

He is no stranger to controversy: in 2017 he was found guilty of sending abusive messages.

He was a Church of England vicar up until 1994, when he left.

After writing a book called “For God’s Sake Don’t Go To Church”, he formed the Open Episcopal Church, presumably having decided not to follow his own advice.

In his latest foray into the far reaches of the clerical lunatic fringe he has posted this video. We can only speculate as to whether this is an attempt to be reassimilated back into the Church of England.

The road to Damascus

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I just came across this:

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church has denounced the Apostle Paul as mean-spirited and bigoted for having released a slave girl from demonic bondage as reported in Acts 16:16-34 .

Just prior to this unfortunate encounter I was travelling on the road to Damascus musing on Paul’s more providential encounter.

Call me a blind optimist if you must but, as an experiment, I would like to set the Presiding Bishop and numerous other Anglican bishops – who shall remain nameless – on this road of destiny, point them in the right direction and tell them to start walking. It could work, couldn’t it?

There is a lot more traffic these days, of course.

What is Occupying Bishop Dennis Drainville?

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Whenever I see Dennis Drainville mentioned I am overcome by an overwhelming desire to make an unkind play on words using his name and the direction his diocese (Quebec) is heading; so far my will of iron has helped me resist the urge.

It seems that the bishop has been a “lifelong social activist”, a phrase almost completely devoid of any meaning other than as a label for people who like wandering around carrying placards containing phrases equally devoid of meaning. Like this:

Speaking of phrases devoid of meaning, Bishop Dennis Drainville has decided that the Occupy movement has provided the cosmic illumination that: ‘They are the 1 per cent and we are the 99 per cent.’ It doesn’t get much deeper than that. The bishop himself, by virtue of being in the upper echelons of an elitist church hierarchy and earning a typical bishop’s salary of over $100,000 per year, is probably in the 0.001 per cent.

As the bishop notes, “the gulf between the rich and poor is widening”; it’s almost as wide as the chasm between Anglican bishops and normal people.

From here:

The Occupy movement has created a focused public debate on economic and political institutions and provided “a new and powerful critique” of them, says Bishop Dennis Drainville of the diocese of Quebec.

Invited to speak at various events Sept. 28-30 sponsored by Occupy Nova Scotia and churches in Halifax, Drainville noted that the anti-capitalist movement that spread around the world in 2011 has brought new awareness to the notion that ‘They are the 1 per cent and we are the 99 per cent,’ ” Drainville told those attending his lecture at the Atlantic School of Theology. “This formula underlines the structural inequalities of our political and economic system and highlights the collusion between the corporate and political elites,” he said.

 

The bishop who doesn’t believe in God

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Richard F. Holloway stopped believing in God in the mid ‘60s but this didn’t prevent his becoming bishop of Edinburgh in 1986 or Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church in 1992. Who knows, perhaps it was a requirement.

He decided to become a “funny existentialist” and behave as though God does exist. Evidently he didn’t try too hard to pretend God exists, since  he wrote a book called Godless Morality, where he argued: “It is better to leave God out of the moral debate and find good human reasons for supporting the system or approach we advocate, without having recourse to divinely clinching arguments.”

He is patron of LGBT Youth Scotland and supports abortion and legalised euthanasia.

All in all, a pretty typical Anglican bishop.

From here:

THE bishop who stopped believing in God, Richard Holloway doesn’t pray any more but his moving memoir makes it clear that he’s lost none of his faith in humanity

[….]

He lost his faith five years after he left Kelham. There had been struggles even when he was there – sexual urges didn’t go away, and even though these were heterosexual, his first real crush was for a fellow novice. (Although that relationship remained entirely chaste, when the two men met up decades later and reminisced, his colleague admitted that they must have been in love).

None of those early struggles, though, had been about belief itself. Yet in the mid-Sixties, when he was working in a parish in the Gorbals, his faith in God ebbed away. “I ended up with this funny existentialism – that there may be no God in the universe, but let’s live as though there is

Parents should lose custody of obese kids, expert suggests

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From here:

Parents should lose custody of children who suffer from life-threatening obesity, obesity specialists argue in a leading medical journal.

The opinion piece, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Wednesday by Lindsey Murtagh of the Harvard School of Public Health and Dr. David Ludwig of the Children’s Hospital in Boston, said putting children with severe obesity in foster care would act in the best interest of the child.

“In severe instances of childhood obesity, removal from the home may be justifiable from a legal standpoint because of imminent health risks and the parents’ chronic failure to address medical problems,” the article said.

[….]

According to Statistics Canada, 17 per cent of children in Canada are overweight and nine per cent are obese.

Too late for some, I fear.

 

Archbishop of Wales doesn’t understand the tenth commandment

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First to give Barry Morgan some credit, he appears to understand that Jer. 17:9 applies to everyone, rich and poor alike, which is in itself something of a breakthrough for an archbishop.

ARCHBISHOP of Wales Barry Morgan yesterday warned that the British elite must put their own house in order as the country reels from the riots that shattered neighbourhoods across England last week.

Speaking shortly after Prime David Cameron condemned the UK’s “slow-motion moral collapse”, the Welsh Anglican leader warned that “desperate” young people had been set a poor example and Britain’s boardrooms needed a “clean sweep”.

Dr Morgan lambasted the “greed and selfishness” which existed at the top of society.

Unfortunately, Barry Morgan’s remedy for the fact that all men are sinners is for the successful sinners to work harder at being less successfully sinful , thereby presenting less of a temptation to covet to those of us not occupying boardrooms.

The irony here is that the real solution is right under the nose of the poor befuddled archbishop: yes, that’s right! His own church has the answer: Jesus took the sins of the poor and the rich upon himself. Too simple for the archbishop, I suppose. Still, maybe it will eventually come to him as he lounges in his bishop’s palace sipping sherry.

 

 

Bishop Mary Glasspool extols Obama’s virtues

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From here:

Los Angeles—Praising the Obama administration for upholding the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) persons in domestic and international contexts, Diocese of Los Angeles Bishop Suffragan Mary D. Glasspool attended a June 29 White House reception and policy briefing in honor of LGBT Pride Month.

For those who might be confused, LGBT means Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender.

The Anglican Church believes that the sexual urges of those in the first three categories are placed there by God. And obviously God doesn’t make mistakes.

It also believes that the last category contains people whom God plopped into a body of the wrong sex. So in their case, he does make mistakes. The theological term for this apparent contradiction used to be known as an antinomy, but that was too hard for Anglican theologians to understand – or pronounce – so now it’s called a muddle.

 

Bishop Mary Glasspool promotes 9/11 harmony

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From here:

On Saturday, Sept. 10, Los Angeles city hall will host One Light, a vigil for peace on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the devastating events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Under the leadership of Episcopal Bishop Jon Bruno, the three Abrahamic faiths have partnered with LA city council to hold the vigil at 7: 15 p.m. “People of all faiths are invited and people of no faith are invited,” says Suffragan Bishop Mary Glasspool. Saturday evening coincides with the end of the Sabbath for Muslims and Jews and the beginning of the Sabbath for Christians.

“We proactively wanted to say ‘one light, one peace, one world’ to have a visible sign of unity for peace to preempt any kind of terror or fear,” says Glasspool.

The religious leaders, who include Rabbi Mark Diamond and Imam Shaquile Sahid, intentionally picked a secular venue so that no one religious group would appear to be favoured. Some 5,000 people are expected, and 500 symbolic glass light globes will be given out.

“The idea is for a representative from each house of worship—whether it’s a church, a synagogue, a mosque, an ashram or a temple—to take a globe back to their home house of worship,” says Glasspool. “It will be a huge celebration.”

Everyone will then proactively sing “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”, while holding a glass light globe.

I’m anticipating this will not only be the end of terrorism but will usher in a new age of peace, love, universal accord and free love – mostly gay.

Bishop Mary Glasspool is the first Episcopal lesbian bishop: a person whom potential Islamist terrorists will respect.

Archbishop of Wales lectures business on ethics

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From here:

The Archbishop of Wales will support calls for an ethical business code when he talks to firms in Wales later.

Dr Barry Morgan will suggest that practices could be improved if executives signed an oath similar to that adhered to by doctors.

Speaking to Professions Group Wales, Dr Morgan will say a change is needed after crises like the banking crisis and MPs’ expenses scandal.

Who is an Anglican archbishop to be lecturing others about ethics, one wonders. This particular specimen is vigorously anti-Israel, anti-nuclear weapons, advocates more homosexual bishops, uses words like “glass ceiling” and is a thoroughgoing pointy-hatted apparatchik.

It is true that business is often unethical but, if Barry Morgan had his way, there would be no businesses, ethical or otherwise. Who would he nag then?

Archbishop Douglas Hambidge is astounded

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It doesn’t take much to astound him, though, according to this letter to the Anglican Journal:

As a former member of the Anglican Consultative Council and of its standing committee, I am astounded to learn the standing committee actually voted on whether or not to dismiss The Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion. I wonder where it imagines it has the authority to do this.

The Anglican Consultative Council, and obviously its standing committee, does not have legislative authority. It is, by definition, consultative, as is the Lambeth Conference and the meeting of Primates. That is the nature of the church.

We do not have a central supreme authority; we do not have a Curia. We have disagreements, but what binds us together is greater than things that could drive us apart. We do not always get our own way in debate; not everyone agrees with everyone else. We are not that kind of church.

What we do have is a community held together not by laws and government, but by those “bonds of affection” that have always been the basis of Anglicanism.

Archbishop Douglas Hambidge
Delta, B.C.

When Archbishop Hambidge intones, “[w]e do not have a central supreme authority”, he is not far from the mark. The Anglican Church of Canada recognises no central authority, including God’s as revealed in his Word. Instead it wafts along blown hither and thither by every gust of pagan superstition and cultural vice it encounters.

The “bonds of affection” between Anglicans has long gone, with the vast majority of worldwide Anglicans having declared themselves in impaired communion with both the ACoC and TEC. This probably doesn’t impinge much on Archbishop Hambidge’s equanimity, ensconced as he is in the insular, increasingly insignificant, neo-colonial, North American oddity that thinks it represents Anglican Christians in the West.