More evidence of global warming – sorry, climate change – in Oakville.
After the ice storm
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J. S. Bach’s Musical Offering on a Möbius Strip
A crab canon—also known by the Latin form of the name, canon cancrizans—is an arrangement of two musical lines that are complementary and backward, similar to a palindrome. Originally it is a musical term for a kind of canon in which one line is reversed in time from the other (e.g. FABACEAE <=> EAECABAF). A famous example is found in J. S. Bach’s The Musical Offering, which also contains a canon (“Quaerendo invenietis”) combining retrogression with inversion, i.e., the music is turned upside down by one player – also known as a table canon.
What is remarkable about this is that Bach makes something so intricately complex sound so sublime.
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Canterbury and Vatican to play cricket
From here:
The head of the Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has accepted a challenge from the Vatican to play their first ever cricket match.
I am anticipating the Archbishop of Canterbury suggesting that, rather than play an actual match where someone has to lose, both sides should participate in a continuing Indaba, find a middle ground – known in cricketing parlance as a silly mid-wicket – thereby indefinitely postponing pointless confrontation while projecting the illusion of useful activity – without any of the risk. Besides, to take part in a real match, you need real balls.
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Canada Supreme Court strikes down prostitution laws
From here:
The Supreme Court of Canada has unanimously struck down the nation’s anti-prostitution laws.
The high court deemed laws prohibiting brothels, communicating in public with clients and living on the profits of prostitution to be too sweeping.
The ruling follows a court challenge filed by former and current sex workers.
The justices’ decision gives the Canadian government one year to craft new legislation.
All nine of the court’s judges ruled in favour of striking the laws down, finding they were “grossly disproportionate”.
“It is not a crime in Canada to sell sex for money,” Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote in Friday’s decision.
Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin has a point: since prostitution is not illegal in Canada then, legally, brothels should be little worse than restaurants, “communicating in public with clients” is merely advertising and pimps are a form of publicity agent. Becoming a prostitute is clearly a legitimate career choice whose adoption by, say, one of McLachlin’s daughters – assuming he has any – would prompt little more than the raising of a parental eyebrow.
Perhaps prostitution should be illegal – at least that would be consistent.
Lawyers for the Ottawa government reportedly claimed “if the conditions imposed by the law prejudice [sex workers’] security, it is their choice to engage in the activity, not the law, that is the cause”.
But the Supreme Court ruled it was not a choice for many.
“Whether because of financial desperation, drug addictions, mental illness, or compulsion from pimps, they often have little choice but to sell their bodies for money,” Justice McLachlin wrote.
The Supreme Court didn’t pay prostitutes much of a compliment by ruling that prostitution is not “a choice for many.” To claim a person is bereft of one of the distinguishing characteristics of humanity, free will – the potential a person has to make a choice that is not entirely conditioned by circumstance – is to regard her as less than human.
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Florida rejects monument to Satan
Instead, it has opted to mock Christianity with a Festivus pole and a Flying Spaghetti Monster display. I’m sure Christians will not only manage to withstand the onslaught but draw sustenance from observing how adrift in banality a civilisation can become when it abandons the truth upon which it was founded.
From here:
A Satanic group’s bid to put up a display at the Florida Capitol is being rejected by state authorities.
During this year’s holiday season several groups have allowed to put up displays in the rotunda because the area is considered a “public forum.”
A Nativity scene has been installed as well as a six-foot Festivus pole with beer cans around it. State officials this week also approved a display from a group called the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
But a request from a group calling itself The Satanic Temple has been denied.
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Christmas Greetings from Bishop Charlie Masters
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Christmas according to Fred Hiltz
It’s all about the UN Millennium goals, and speaking up for – not, you will note, directly helping, a task too difficult for today’s enervated mainline denominations – the poor.
Instead of celebrating the most important event in the universe’s history, the arrival of the Incarnate God, born of a Virgin, sinless, sacrificed for us and our only means of reconciliation with the Father, we have prosaic, idolatrous utopianism. A religion emptied of transcendence.
From here:
With Christmas approaching, Archbishop Fred Hiltz today urged Anglicans, via a CBC radio interview, to think about the poor and disadvantaged, saying the church “must be in the world and for the world” as Jesus Christ was.
In the gospels, “we see quite clearly that he [Jesus] cared as much for people’s physical well-being as their spiritual well-being,” Hiltz said when asked by CBC Toronto Metro Morning’s Matt Galloway about why he’s asking Anglicans to become stronger advocates for social justice. “The church has a moral obligation, rooted in the gospel and in the teaching of the prophets long before Jesus. We have a moral obligation…to speak up for those who are disadvantaged, for the poor and for the downtrodden.”
[….]
Hiltz noted that eliminating extreme hunger and poverty was one of the UN Millennium goals (to which Anglicans worldwide have been asking their governments to demonstrate commitment).
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Global warming hits Ontario
Anglican Church of Canada plans to attract more people by lowering the entry requirements
From here:
What should church hospitality look like? Is “hospitality” enough?
The church has wrestled with these questions for some time, and recently in response to “open table”—the practice of welcoming unbaptised people to participate in the Eucharist.
At the spring 2012 meeting of the House of Bishops, the bishops opted for a broader conversation, moving from discussing open table exclusively to a conversation on hospitality and how it connects to discipleship.
The bishops asked the Primate, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, to set up a task force to examine the issue. The Primate defined the task with two questions: Are there any limits to the church’s hospitality to the unbaptised? How can the church’s hospitality to the unbaptised be part of making disciples?
The fallacy in this is that it presupposes eager hordes whose longing to participate in the Eucharist is thwarted only by the fact that they have not managed to get around to being baptised. All we have to do is tell them they needn’t bother with baptism and churches will be filled to overflowing. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that if a person doesn’t want to be baptised, he is unlikely to want to be part of the Eucharist.
The church has been trying for some time to attract people by telling them it doesn’t matter what they believe or how they behave – a strategy which has reinforced the conviction that the church can’t have much to offer if it is so easy to be a part of.
Offering the Eucharist to the unbaptised in the hope that they will accept the invitation is the lunacy of repeating the same thing while expecting a different result.
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A compendium of antidotes to Mandela blandiloquence
Peter Hitchens thinks there is a Mandela cult:
A great tidal wave of syrup swept across the surface of the Earth as soon as the death of Nelson Mandela was announced.
[….]
This is the real point of the whole exaggerated Mandela cult. Anyone looking at the world in the second half of the 20th Century could see that the harshest and cruellest regimes on the planet were Left-wing ones, in Moscow, Peking and Havana. But the fashionable Western Left will never admit that. They are interested only in ‘Right-wing’ repression and secretly think that Left-wing oppression might actually be justified.
That is why there was nothing like this fuss on the death of another giant of human liberation, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was at least as great as Mandela – and, in my view, greater.
George Jonas thinks Mandela was an incomplete terrorist:
As an anti-apartheid militant in white supremacist South Africa, Mandela seemed the embodiment of the fallacy that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. He was a proponent of the armed struggle, taking his cue from such role models as Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro. Although he denied being a communist, and may not have been a card-carrying party member, he was certainly “soft” on a system as bad as South Africa’s. Mandela, who was to become the secular saint of the century, during the 1960s wandered about in what America’s leading satirist wordsmith, Tom (“The Right Stuff”) Wolfe, called “a quasi-Marxist fog.”
[……]
If Mandela was a borderline terrorist in 1960, as I believe he was, acknowledging it is important. Reconciliation without truth cannot endure.
Humberto Fontova wonders why those imprisoned by more repressive regimes than South Africa’s are largely ignored:
Well, many Cubans (many of them black) suffered longer and more horrible incarceration in Castro’s KGB-designed dungeons than Nelson Mandela spent in South Africa’s (relatively) comfortable prisons, which were open to inspection by the Red Cross. Castro has never allowed a Red Cross delegation anywhere near his real prisons. Now let’s see if you recognize some of the Cuban ex-prisoners and torture-victims:
Mario Chanes (30 years), Ignacio Cuesta Valle, (29 years) Antonio López Muñoz, (28 years) in Dasio Hernández Peña (28 years) Dr. Alberto Fibla (28 years) Pastor Macurán (28 years) Roberto Martin Perez (28 years) Roberto Perdomo (28 years) Teodoro González (28 years.) Jose L.Pujals (27 years) Miguel A. Alvarez Cardentey (27 years.) Eusebio Penalver (28 years.)
No? None of these names ring a bell? And yet their suffering took place only 90 miles from U.S. shores in a locale absolutely lousy with international press bureaus and their intrepid “investigative reporters.” From CNN to NBC, from Reuters to the AP, from ABC to NPR to CBS, Castro welcomes all of these to “embed” and “report” from his fiefdom.
[….]
Here are some choice Mandela-isms:
“Che Guevara is an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom.”
“The cause of Communism is the greatest cause in the history of mankind!”
“There’s one place where (Fidel Castro’s) Cuba stands out head and shoulders above the rest – that is in its love for human rights and liberty!”
Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin thinks Mandela’s introduction of unrestricted abortion to South Africa was “shameful”:
On Sunday, Tobin publicly disagreed with Francis again. While the pope said that former president Nelson Mandela of South Africa, who died last week, will “inspire generations,” Tobin issued a statement declaring that appreciation of Mandela’s admirable qualities should be tempered by his “shameful” promotion of abortion in his country.
While we are on the subject of abortion, Linda Gibbons has spent close to 10 years in Canadian prisons not for blowing up abortion clinics but for peacefully protesting outside them. Are starry eyed Anglican bishops gushing incontinently about her? Of course not. Yet, when history surveys the catalogue of wrongs visited on the innocent during the 20th and 21st centuries, I am reasonably certain that killing unborn babies will be at least as high on the list of state sponsored evil as apartheid.