Category Archives: Christianity

And now, disarmament advice to politicians from pointy hats

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Various church groups offer disarmament advice to Stephen Harper:

This letter comes to you, to the leaders of other NATO members and to the NATO Secretary General from the councils that represent churches across the member states of NATO, namely, the Conference of European Churches, the National Council of Churches of Christ USA, the Canadian Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches.

Our letter is a joint initiative to encourage joint action. We ask your Government to ensure that the forthcoming NATO summit commits the Alliance to a thorough reform of NATO’s Strategic Concept. The 60th anniversary meeting is a welcome opportunity to begin the process of up-dating the Alliance’s security doctrine. In particular, we encourage new initiatives that will end NATO’s reliance on nuclear weapons and will engage with nuclear weapon states and other states outside of NATO in the serious pursuit of reciprocal disarmament.

We encourage NATO to consign to history the notion that nuclear weapons “preserve peace” (as claimed in paragraph 46 of the current Strategic Concept), and instead to recognize the reality that “with every passing year [nuclear weapons] make our security more precarious” (President Gorbachev’s assessment; echoed by other leaders).

A world without nuclear weapons is an attractive ideal;  so is a world without mosquitoes, minivans and hairy spiders. Something the church leaders fail to address is what they would use to deter nuclear aggressors: a bow and arrow perhaps? Or, for more thorough devastation, the threat of simultaneously broadcasting sermons by Rowan Williams, Katherine Jefferts-Schori and Fred Hiltz to the enemy nation: the resultant brain damage would be incalculable.

Even though a nuclear holocaust is not a particularly inviting prospect, the problem with a bunch of beatnik bishops urging those who would never aggressively use nuclear weapons to get rid of them, while being powerless to influence those who would, is that it would not “preserve peace”: it would destroy it.

Tony Blair straightens out the Pope on homosexuality

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I suppose one can hardly blame a politician for giving free advice to Christian leaders, since Christian leaders cannot resist giving advice to politicians. In this spirit of cross-discipline enlightenment, Tony Blair is advising the Pope on how to deal with the homosexuality issue:Add an Image

The Pope and the Vatican have an “entrenched attitude” towards homosexuality which is less tolerant than the views of ordinary Catholics, Tony Blair says in comments published today.

The former prime minister, who converted to Catholicism shortly after leaving office two years ago, said he disagreed with the Pope’s stance on gay rights and controversially suggested that the Church should reform itself along similar lines to how he re-organised the Labour Party.

“Organised religions face the same dilemma as political parties when faced with changed circumstances,” he said.

His generally liberal stance on abortion also contrasts with the Vatican, which supported the excommunication of a mother and four doctors in Brazil last month who performed a termination on a nine-year-old girl who had been raped by her stepfather.

“You can either A: Hold on to your core vote, basically, you know, say ‘Look let’s not break out because if we break out we might lose what we’ve got, and at least we’ve got what we’ve got so let’s keep it’. Or B: You say ‘let’s accept that the world is changing, and let us work out how we can lead that change and actually reach out’.”

One wonders if Tony Blair actually looked into what Catholics believe he before decided to become one or whether it just seemed like a good idea at the time, and he is now belatedly discovering all the little obstacles entailed in his leap of faith.

The idea that the church must change to accommodate to the world is not a new one: it bedevils all mainline denominations. To succumb to it, of course, renders one’s faith changeable, meaningless, powerless and is a sure road to denominational extinction – just ask Western Anglicans.

Dawkins, Dimness, Aids and the Pope

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Richard Dawkins offers his opinion on an evolutionary dead-end: the condom.

Professor Dawkins, the prominent biologist and atheist, said that Benedict XVI would have blood on his hands if his beliefs were followed by Catholics around the continent.

Speaking at a university in Spain, he said: “I wonder on what basis anyone can say condoms make Aids worse. The Pope is either stupid, ignorant or dim.

That must make Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies dim, too. It couldn’t be Dawkins that is dim, could it?

“The pope is correct,” Green told National Review Online Wednesday, “or put it a better way, the best evidence we have supports the pope’s comments. He stresses that “condoms have been proven to not be effective at the ‘level of population.'”

“There is,” Green adds, “a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded ‘Demographic Health Surveys,’ between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction ‘technology’ such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by ‘compensating’ or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology.”

If Richard Dawkins had the courage of his convictions, he would be advocating as much reproduction as possible between HIV infected people in order for natural selection to develop an Aids resistant strain of humanity. This, after all, is his religion’s view of progress.

Gay couple sue Christian hotel owners

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From here:

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Gay couple sue Christians for barring them from hotel bed

The Christian owners of a seaside hotel may be prosecuted after refusing to allow a gay couple to stay in a double room.

Peter and Hazelmary Bull are facing an unprecedented court case under controversial new equality laws.

Martyn Hall, who lives with his civil partner Steven Preddy, has lodged a county court claim for up to £5,000 in damages alleging ‘direct discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation’.

Last August, the Bulls received a letter from Stonewall, the gay rights organisation, saying it had received a complaint and warning the hotel it was breaking the law.

The following month Mr Preddy, from Bristol, rang to book a double room for two nights.

Mrs Bull, who took the call, said last night that she had wrongly assumed that he would be staying with his wife before she accepted the booking.

When Mr Preddy and Mr Hall arrived, they were told by the manager, Bernie Quinn, that the hotel could not honour the booking.

The couple told him he was acting illegally before leaving and reporting the incident to police

The Chymorvah Hotel lists its rules:

Here at Chymorvah we have few rules, but please note that as Christians we have a deep regard for marriage (being the union of one man to one woman for life to the exclusion of all others).

Therefore, although we extend to all a warm welcome to our home, our double bedded accommodation is not available to unmarried couples – Thank you.

It’s obvious Messrs Hall and Preddy knew about the hotel rules before making the booking. In which case, they were not really looking for a seaside holiday at all, but were out to make a point by deliberately searching for accommodation where they knew they could challenge Christian principle with vacuous 21st Century secular equality. It is significant that no unmarried heterosexual couple has felt the need to sue the hotel –  probably because there are plenty of other hotels in the area. Not to mention the fact that heterosexual unmarried couples do not feel the need to engage in a crusade to establish the normality of their behaviour.

The Pope must be doing something right

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Because he has managed to upset the UN, Planned Parenthood, the Times, the Telegraph – actually every major newspaper – with his remarks about the ineffectiveness of using condoms to combat Aids.

Is his contention that fidelity and abstinence are the only effective ways to combat Aids true?

Using a condom correctly reduces the risk of contracting Aids by 80%.

So, if we take 100 HIV infected, sexually active people, consistently using condoms correctly, who have sex once a month with a new person, who in turn do the same, at the end of one year we would end up with 100 x 1.2^11 = 743 people infected with HIV. In 10 years, we would have 264,000,000,000. I admit, all the people involved would have to be somewhat energetic and enterprising, and I am using a 100% infection rate for the 20% condom failure possibility, not to mention the fact that we run out of candidates worldwide at 6,706,993,152; but using the Pope’s method, after 10 years we would still have only about 100 people infected with HIV.

To bring it down to a more personal level, with an 80% reduction in the chance of being infected, would you have sex, using a condom, with an HIV infected person?

An atheist wants to be de-baptised

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Is this a convincing argument against infant baptism?

An atheist is trying to get himself “de-baptised” from the Church of England because he believes he was accepted into the religion without his consent.
John Hunt, a nurse, is one of a growing number of people around the world who want their former involvement with faith groups to be struck from official records.

Now 56, he was baptised at the parish church of St Jude with St Aidan in Thornton Heath, south London, when he was just a baby.

But as a schoolboy he decided he did not believe in God and stopped going to Sunday school aged 11.

More recently he asked Southwark diocese to remove his name from the baptismal roll, because he believes he was too young to agree to the ceremony taking place.

It is one thing to be removed from a church’s baptismal records, but how does one become de-baptised in the spiritual sense? Join the Anglican Church of Canada, perhaps.

If this catches on in Judaism, it will open up a new industry in re-attachment surgery.

The Pope, Aids and Planned Parenthood

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This is what Pope Benedict said about the Aids epidemic:

“Aids cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems”

Echoing words spoken frequently by Pope John Paul II, Benedict declared that the “traditional teaching of the Church” on chastity outside marriage and fidelity within it had proved to be “the only sure way of preventing the spread of HIV and Aids”.

And here is a response from Planned Parenthood:

Kevin Osborne, HIV adviser at the International Planned Parenthood Federation, said: “All the evidence is that preaching sexual abstinence and fidelity will not solve the problems. We need to work with the reality of where people are, especially in countries he is visiting such as Angola, which is hard-hit by the epidemic.

“The Pope’s message will alienate everybody. It is scary. It spreads stigma and creates a fertile breeding ground for the spread of HIV.”

I’m not a Roman Catholic and I’m not against birth control, but it is easy to spot the diversionary tactic employed in this response by Planned Parenthood. Obviously it’s not the preaching alone that would prevent the spread of Aids, but the preaching and practising of fidelity and abstinence. And there is evidence to suggest that it does work:

Uganda Winning the Battle Against AIDS – Using Abstinence

Uganda may be on its way to wiping out AIDS by using the Biblical values of chastity and fidelity, a new Harvard University study finds. According to the study, abstinence education has shown significant effectiveness in reducing AIDS in Uganda, with the HIV infection rate dropping 50 percent between the years 1992 and 2000.

A consistent atheist

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Peter Singer is a bioethicist at Princeton University; he favours infanticide, euthanasia and animal rights:

Singer is a mild-mannered fellow who speaks calmly and lucidly. Yet you wouldn’t have to read his work too long to find his extreme positions. He cheerfully advocates infanticide and euthanasia and, in almost the same breath, favors animal rights. Even most liberals would have qualms about third-trimester abortions; Singer does not hesitate to advocate what may be termed fourth-trimester abortions, i.e., the killing of infants after they are born.

Singer writes, “My colleague Helga Kuhse and I suggest that a period of 28 days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to life as others.” Singer argues that even pigs, chickens, and fish have more signs of consciousness and rationality-and, consequently, a greater claim to rights-than do fetuses, newborn infants, and people with mental disabilities. “Rats are indisputably more aware of their surroundings, and more able to respond in purposeful and complex ways to things they like or dislike, than a fetus at 10- or even 32-weeks gestation. … The calf, the pig, and the much-derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus at any stage of pregnancy.”

To his credit, Singer does exhibit more consistency than other popular atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens, both of whom wish to largely retain the ethical framework of Christianity while denying its truth.

Of course, Singer is still holding back somewhat since he isn’t yet advocating the use of discarded humanity for food; I expect that is coming.

Cuddly atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens are determined to demonstrate that there is no God; it is ironic, then, that one of their number has gone a long way to proving that there is a devil.

To improve decorum, hospice chaplain is not allowed to use the word "God"

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A chaplain at Hospice by the Sea in Boca Raton has resigned because she is not allowed to use the word ‘God’. Not a nurse or a doctor, a chaplain:

A chaplain at Hospice by the Sea in Boca Raton has resigned, she says, over a ban on use of the words “God” or “Lord” in public settings.

Chaplains still speak freely of the Almighty in private sessions with patients or families but, the Rev. Mirta Signorelli said: “I can’t do chaplain’s work if I can’t say ‘God’ – if I’m scripted.”

Hospice CEO Paula Alderson said the ban on religious references applies only to the inspirational messages that chaplains deliver in staff meetings. The hospice remains fully comfortable with ministers, priests and rabbis offering religious counsel to the dying and grieving.

“I was sensitive to the fact that we don’t impose religion on our staff, and that it is not appropriate in the context of a staff meeting to use certain phrases or ‘God’ or ‘Holy Father,’ because some of our staff don’t believe at all,” Alderson said.

Signorelli said that she and other chaplains were told Feb. 23 to “cease and desist from using God in prayers.”

Signorelli said her supervisor recently singled her out for delivering a spiritual reflection in the chapel that included the word “Lord” and had “a Christian connotation.”

“But that was the 23rd Psalm,” Signorelli said – not, strictly speaking, Christian, as it appears in the Old Testament.

“And I am well aware that there were people from the Jewish tradition in attendance. I didn’t say Jesus or Allah or Jehovah. I used ‘Lord’ and ‘God,’ which I think are politically correct. I think that’s as generic as you can get.”

Signorelli resigned Feb. 25.

None of the six other chaplains objected to the ban on God’s name, she said.

Alderson said she was surprised by Signorelli’s reaction to what she characterized as a minor administrative directive aimed solely at improving the decorum of monthly staff meetings, where the desired tone from a chaplain should be motivational, not religious.

Alderson said it started after she asked a chaplain – not Signorelli – to say something “inspirational” and “thought-provoking” at a staff meeting. The remarks did not strike the secular tone she wanted, Alderson said. So, “I issued some guidelines.”

The obvious question that comes to mind is, why does the hospice employ chaplains if they don’t want them to talk about God? Asking a chaplain to motivate people, but refusing to allow her to refer to that which motivates her, is like asking Richard Dawkins to explain evolution without mentioning Darwin.