Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People
An eternity of atheism stars Ricky Gervais, Robin Ince and Richard Dawkins at Bloomsbury Theatre.
“I’ve started to drift towards a belief in God, creationism and intelligent design,” said Lee, who looks rather like a chubby choirboy. “When I look at something as complete and intricate and detailed as Professor Dawkins I think, ‘Surely that can’t just have happened by chance.’”
The best joke of the evening was also true.
Even Christmas cards are not immune from the F-word
The Christmas cards are sold in Scribbler, a prominent chain of stationers which specialises in “edgy” cards by young British graphic designers, as well as the fashion store Urban Outfitters and Selfridges on London’s Oxford Street.
One of the cards on sale shows three men holding placards bearing the slogans “Merry Christmas ——“, “Merry ——- Christmas” and “Merry Christmas ——“. Another shows a pensioner standing next to a Christmas tree with the message: “Have a ——- miserable Christmas.”
One range of cards, from a design company which boasts the name Offensive plus Delightful, uses trendy designs married to crude slogans such as “Happy —-ing New Year” and “Resolutions . . . —- ’em!”
One of the cards, produced by graphic designer Dean Morris, shows a woman carrying an armful of Christmas presents and declaring: “—– off, these are mine”
Antonia Major, 18, a student, said: “I don’t like them at all. They aren’t in the spirit of Christmas at all. Nobody I know would send them and I wouldn’t like to get one.”
But Lisa Yates, 22, a sales account manager, said: “It’s really down to the individual whether they are suitable or not. Some of my friends would appreciate them, but I’d never send one to my Nan.”
Even the managing director of Scribbler, John Procter, admits that Christmas should ideally be “off-limits” to such vulgarity. But he said many customers would complain if his stores did not stock such cards.
Mr Procter, who runs 14 branches across London, Oxford and Bournemouth, said: “We don’t set ourselves up as arbiters of taste. We sell these cards because there is a demand for them. It is the way language and humour are going.”
In school when we studied Hamlet, I remember our teacher telling us that we would not have any examination questions on this passage:
HAMLET
Lady, shall I lie in your lap? Lying down at OPHELIA’s feetOPHELIA
No, my lord.HAMLET
I mean, my head upon your lap?OPHELIA
Ay, my lord.HAMLET
Do you think I meant country matters?OPHELIA
I think nothing, my lord.HAMLET
That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
He didn’t say why, but I studied diligently to find out.
So the problem with these Christmas cards isn’t the language so much as the attempt to create humour without imagination. Simply being vulgar – and I can’t think of anything more vulgar than the gratuitous association of God incarnate and a word that is constantly on the lips of every illiterate lout in Christendom – is not funny, clever or Shakespeare.
Grow up, Scribbler.
True when Malcolm Muggeridge first said it and still true now.
Also of note: “1200 American psychiatrists said Goldwater was potty, therefore he was my man”.
I met Muggeridge in the late 70s and asked him what he had against organised religion – churches (this was before he became a Roman Catholic); he became quite annoyed when I pressed him on it. Still signed a copy of his autobiography, though.
When I was growing up, it was customary to refer to a man’s sexual apparatus euphemistically as “willie”, “jimmy” or some other unfortunate’s Christian name. It took me a long time to catch on to the true meaning of “Charlie’s dead” – an omission in my vernacular that led to embarrassing consequences since it means, your fly is undone. It all seems rather silly now, but it must have made everyone feel comfortable at the time.
Nowadays, of course, the politically correct thing to do is to bring up one’s children to use the correct names – whose utterance once caused such embarrassment – for all anatomical paraphernalia. So at the dinner table, when little Johnny casually refers to the fact that his penis is itching, the proud parents look at him with the smug satisfaction that accompanies those who have broken free of the petit bourgeois mores of their forebears.
However, even for the penis and vagina generation, there are some words that are still taboo:
Church sanctioned for campaign against “sodomy”
The Advertising Standards Authority says Church advert on homosexuality broke decency standardsA church has been sanctioned by the UK advertising regulator for a campaign against “sodomy” in which a Bible verse was used to describe homosexuality as an “abomination”.
The Advertising Standards Authority has has upheld a complaint against the regional press advertisement, headlined “The Word of God Against Sodomy” in capital letters.
The authority ruled that the advertisement, placed in the Belfast News Letter by the Sandown Free Presbyterian Church in Belfast, caused “serious offence” and broke its standards on decency.
In its adjudication the authority, which received seven complaints, rejected the suggestion that the advertisement could provoke violence against gay and lesbian people but said it was offensive and should not be repeated.
Boy George, the shallow yet not pathologically stupid, musically interesting, 80’s 
precursor to much that has gone wrong subsequently androgyne had the dubious distinction of being named the best dressed man and the best dressed woman in the same year. When, in his youth, he was asked what he would look like in his 40’s, he said ‘ugly probably’. He was right.
From here:
Boy George chained up a male escort and beat him in a revenge attack, a court heard.
Audun Carlsen, 29, told how the former Culture Club singer pinned him to the floor of his bedroom, beat him up, swore at him, then handcuffed him to a hook next to his bed.
George produced a box of sex toys, chains and leather straps but the escort, originally from Norway, managed to pull his hand free and ran for the door.
No longer, it seems: it has withered under the glare of leftist lunacy. The corrosive influence of the Welfare State, from Here:
Overall, I think in general the bigger evil effects of welfare have been enormously underestimated, even by commentators who regard themselves as more pro-capitalist in their sympathies. Welfare is the basic cause of the deleterious cultural changes we have witnessed in the West over the past 60 years.
The Welfare State, pioneered in Britain of course, has corrupted this country to its core. It has transformed the country caricatured by Noel Coward and others – essentially pretty decent, self-reliant, and plucky – into a country which is thuggish, selfish, mindless, dispirited and lost. Gone is the British stiff upper lip. Modern Britons are moaning, self-pitying inadequates. The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne’er-do-wells. It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world’s biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine.
I’m sorry to sound cross about this, but I don’t think people fully realise what’s happened. Britain has, I think, the highest crime rate of any industrialised country in the world. It is twice as high as the US. The violent crime rate is higher in London than New York. Britain has the highest rate of drug abuse, the highest teenage pregnancy rate and the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease in the modern industrial world. What the hell happened?
Christopher Hitchens on the old megalomaniac’s latest lunacy. From Slate
Why on earth did Castro build a Russian Orthodox cathedral in Havana?
Fidel Castro has devoted the last 50 years to two causes: first, his own enshrinement as an immortal icon, and second, the unbending allegiance of Cuba to the Moscow line. Now, black-cowled Orthodox “metropolitans” line up to shake his hand, and the Putin-Medvedev regime brandishes its missile threats against the young Obama as Nikita Khrushchev once did against the young Kennedy. The ideology of Moscow doesn’t much matter as long as it is anti-American, and the Russian Orthodox Church has been Putin’s most devoted and reliable ally in his re-creation of an old-style Russian imperialism. If you want to see how far things have gone, take a look at the photograph of President Dmitry Medvedev’s inauguration, as he kisses the holy icon held by the clerical chief. Putin and Medvedev have made it clear that they want to reinstate Cuba’s role in the hemisphere, if only as a bore and nuisance for as long as its military dictatorship can be made to last. Castro’s apparent deathbed conversion to a religion with no Cuban adherents is the seal on this gruesome pact. How very appropriate.
It just goes to show that all the sycophantic antics of the Anglican church towards this vicious, thuggish crambazzle did not pay off: he didn’t build an Anglican cathedral.
I first met Dr. Packer about 28 years ago. I was a fairly new Christian with all the naivety, enthusiasm and questions common to this affliction. I was fortunate enough not only to be next to the great man in the lunch line, but to sit opposite him during lunch. Having seen the fate suffered by someone who disagreed with him, I decided for the most part to keep my opinions to myself and simply ask questions. A lot of questions. One was this: the Anglican church appears to be bent on a course of self destruction; why stay in it? Dr. Packer is a gracious man, even to impudent whippersnappers, so he patiently explained to me the richness of the Anglican heritage and worship. So I stayed.
One of the things he said then stuck in my mind: I asked what had gone wrong. He said that, as a result of the Enlightenment, people had ceased to believe in God’s propositional revelation. I reminded him of this last Friday; he said “hmm, I would probably put it differently now”. Which leads me to last Friday.
I was sitting in the first ever ANiC synod listening to financial statements, when I was asked if I would like to interview Dr. Packer or continue listening to the financial statements. With the enthusiasm of a man who has been reprieved from a tooth extraction without anaesthetic, I chose the interview. There were 3 journalists interviewing Dr. Packer – and me.
A lot was said; so much that there was a concern that it might be too much for Dr. Packer. He said, no, a professor likes talking to his students. Although physically a lot more frail than the last time I saw him, he has lost none of his mental acuity, nor his sense of humour, nor his graciousness. I referred to one of his arguments as “compelling”, something which, apparently, was kind of me.
Time passed and dinner arrived; we ate together. Dr. Packer was pretty insistent on procuring chairs for everyone, but he was persuaded to sit down and let others do it. Eventually, the other journalists left and I had him all to myself.
Nevertheless, so many questions, so little time.
I reminded Dr. Packer of his ‘propositional revelation’ remark of 28 years ago. Here is the argument today: Jesus is God in the flesh; did he use words to communicate? Yes, therefore, God uses words to communicate; can that be extended to Scripture? Yes, because Jesus did. How do liberals wriggle out of this? They refuse to engage the argument at all. They are implicitly Unitarian.
How can liberals keep referring to the Holy Spirit and yet get everything so wrong? Because they do not view the Holy Spirit as a person: to a liberal, the Holy Spirit is another way of saying “God in action”. Therefore, once consensus is reached, the liberal declares it to be a work of the Holy Spirit.
Theologians today tend to suffer from parochialism: they know more and more about less and less. Their minds have been narrowed.
I have a habit of referring to the ACoC as an organisation that is no longer Christian. What does Dr. Packer think? He puts it like this: many dioceses and the ACoC itself have leaders that are sub-Christian. As a result, many of those they lead are also sub-Christian.
What about Tom Wright? It seems to me, I said, that he has placed church hierarchy above the gospel. You are not the first to say that, said Dr. Packer; nevertheless, he is a brilliant man. His large books are better than his short ones, apparently. He said more that I would rather not go into, but it included the words: ‘ego’ ‘blog’ and ‘Tom Wright’. And had Rowan not been given the ABC job, Tom Wright would probably have been next in line. Power corrupts – that’s my comment, not Dr. Packer’s.
Every week, Malcolm Muggeridge used to declare that Western Civilisation was about to collapse; what does Dr. Packer think? He agrees. We are living in a post-Christian era whose roots have been destroyed. We used to believe in the validity of Christianising an institution because we believed in the truth of Christianity; no more.
Does Dr. Packer really think that Rowan Williams should resign? He was not happy with David Virtue’s headline “J. I. Packer calls on Rowan Williams to resign”, later to be picked up by every other miscreant in blogger land. What he actually said was “he is not qualified to lead the Anglican Communion and enforce the rules laid down at the Lambeth Conference in 1998”. The reason for this is that he is attempting to publicly uphold the 1998 Lambeth ruling while privately disagreeing with it. At the very least, said Dr. Packer, on this issue he should defer to someone who is not subject to that dichotomy.
Another journalist asked Dr. Packer if he believes in demons. Yes, in the same way that C. S. Lewis did. And does he believe in spiritual warfare? There was an interesting answer: he does not believe that demonic forces engineer cultural trends, but that they take advantage of them. Dr. Packer thinks that a lot of damage has been done by those that believe otherwise. We didn’t have time to probe this further.
A lot more was said; I was the only person there without a tape recorder – an omission that led to a lot of self kicking.
J. I. Packer is now Theologian Emeritus to ANiC. We are in good hands.
From Theodore Dalrymple
I was awakened at one in the morning in my small and elegant hotel on the Herengracht, the resort of literary types, by that most terrible of sounds — raised English voices.
A group of standard English drunken thugs in their thirties had entered the hotel with their prostitutes in tow and were refusing to leave. They were conducting two arguments at once: one with the police, who had arrived to eject them, and one with the prostitutes over how much they should be paid (the prostitutes were demanding E300, and they were offering E100). Somehow the police involved themselves in this latter argument too; a policewoman appealed to them to find ‘middle ground’, i.e. (I suppose) E200.
I hesitate to sound like one of those Protestant divines who saw in outbreaks of the plague God’s justified vengeance on a sinful people, but as I looked into the crude red faces of those men in their bully-boy Saturday-night uniform of short-sleeved shirts not tucked into their trousers, exuding lager fumes and arrogant in their inalienable right to make a nuisance of themselves, I could not help but think that no other nation has ever more deserved a prolonged period of economic hardship and utter misery. The slump is indeed God’s wholly accurate and justified judgment upon the English.
God also visits judgement by allowing people to have what they think they want: Romans 1. A modern example is Barack Obama.
From Here
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Muslim-born journalist baptised by Pope Benedict XVI at Easter asked the pope to tell his top aide for relations with Muslims that Islam is not an intrinsically good religion and that Islamic terrorism is not the result of a minority gone astray.
As the Vatican was preparing to host the first meeting of the Catholic-Muslim Forum Nov. 4-6, Magdi Allam, a longtime critic of the Muslim faith of his parents, issued an open letter to Pope Benedict that included criticism of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.
In the letter, posted on his Web site Oct. 20, Allam said he wanted to tell the pope of his concern for “the serious religious and ethical straying that has infiltrated and spread within the heart of the church.”
He told the pope that it “is vital for the common good of the Catholic Church, the general interest of Christianity and of Western civilization itself” that the pope make a pronouncement in “a clear and binding way” on the question of whether Islam is a valid religion.
It takes an ex-Muslim to state the obvious.
