Piers Morgan: prime contender for dowfart of the year

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He wants to change the Bible to make it support “gay rights”:

“My point to you about gay rights, for example, it’s time for an amendment to the Bible.”

84,000 people in his new homeland have signed a petition to have him deported because of his less than well-reasoned arguments for greater gun control:

The petition to deport U.S.-based Britishtelevision host Piers Morgan because of his stance on gun control has now collected over 80,000 signatures on the White House website – a number that far exceeds the 25,000 threshold that is supposed to trigger a government response.

He has managed to inspire the citizens of his country of birth to start a counter petition to prevent him from returning:

Now a counter-petition has been started, asking for America to keep him – not because he’s popular there but (allegedly) because no one here wants him back.

And – he is a thoroughly irritating, whiny little pipsqueak.

Rowan Williams to be Baron Williams of Oystermouth

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Oystermouth is a village in Mumbles near Swansea, quite close to where I attended university. In those days a train ran along the sea front from Swansea to Mumbles; I still have fond memories of riding on it to Mumbles pier as a child.

It was a quaint, pretty area – I haven’t been there for many years – and doesn’t deserve the ignominy of having the person who did nothing to prevent the disintegration of its established church become a baron bearing its name.

Rowan Williams will be created a Baron for Life by the style and title of Baron Williams of Oystermouth in the City and County of Swansea.

The Queen should be the next archbishop of Canterbury

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Why? Because she seems to have a firmer grip on the significance of the Incarnation to ordinary people than either the current or soon to be Cantuar.

In her Christmas message, after a brief recap of the year, she spoke of Christ’s example in serving others:

“This is the time of year when we remember that God sent his only son ‘to serve, not to be served’. He restored love and service to the centre of our lives in the person of Jesus Christ.

“It is my prayer this Christmas Day that his example and teaching will continue to bring people together to give the best of themselves in the service of others.

In contrast to the Queen, Justin Welby simply couldn’t resist blathering on about cherished leftist articles of faith: wealth and the implied need for its redistribution, foreign aid, justice and the poor, inequality and higher taxes for the wealthy – encased in a thin veneer of Christianity.

Merry Christmas!

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A very Merry and blessed Christmas to all my readers and their families.

Here is J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio BWV 248. It’s over two hours long but the whole thing is well worth listening to. I am firmly convinced that Bach’s music is one of the pinnacles of Western civilisation – the very best that Christendom has to offer.

Who better, then, to celebrate the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, God among us: the most significant event in human history.

Archdeacon Paul Feheley to edit Anglican Journal

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Paul Feheley is principal secretary to the primate, Fred Hiltz. This casts doubt on the editorial independence of the Journal.

All the comments on the announcement here express the same concern: with Feheley at the helm the Journal will not have editorial independence from the Anglican Church of Canada. What they fail to mention, though, is that the Journal gets a $596,627 subsidy from Canadian Heritage – from our taxes – but only provided it maintains its editorial independence.

For those concerned that I have suffered a lapse into gullibility – perhaps induced by an excess of Christmas cheer – never fear: I am well aware that the Journal’s editorial independence has always been a fiction. But with the primate’s principal secretary in charge, it may be a fiction that is impossible to maintain – at the cost of $596,627 per year.

The paper could not survive without the subsidy. I, for one, would be unhappy to see the demise of the Anglican Journal and satellite diocesan papers: it would be the end of rich vein of material begging to be mocked.

An atheist delusion

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When a person dies, there is little that is more fatuously stupid than saying that the person will live on in the memory of those who loved him. A few months ago when I attended a funeral at a Diocese of Niagara church, that is more or less what the priest told the mourners: no mention of the Christian hope of resurrection at all. If it were not for the inconvenience of having to recite the liturgy, I suspect he would not even have mentioned God.

The priest in question, while appearing to enjoy the pomp and pageantry his office affords, gave a passable impression of a functional atheist who hasn’t yet come out; after all, he wants to continue to collect his salary. For an evangelical atheist who has to try and make sense of mortality, it’s even worse: the memory that lives on is nothing more than the mechanistically meaningless firing of a collection of synapses. Nevertheless, that is how atheists – the champions of reason – choose to comfort themselves and their children when faced with death.

From here:

For Julie Drizin, being an atheist parent means being deliberate. She rewrote the words to “Silent Night” when her daughters were babies to remove words like “holy,” found a secular Sunday school where the children light candles “of understanding,” and selects gifts carefully to promote science, art and wonder at nature.

So when she pulled her 9- and 13-year-olds together this week in their Takoma Park home to tell them about the slaughter of 20 elementary school students in Newtown, Conn., her words were plain: Something horrible happened, and we feel sad about it, and you are safe.

And that was it.

“I’ve explained to them [in the past] that some people believe God is waiting for them, but I don’t believe that. I believe when you die, it’s over and you live on in the memory of people you love and who love you,” she said this week. “I can’t offer them the comfort of a better place. Despite all the evils and problems in the world, this is the heaven — we’re living in the heaven and it’s the one we work to make. It’s not a paradise.”

This is what facing death and suffering looks like in an atheist home.

 

Genderless Swedes

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The rutabaga, in my opinion, tastes disgusting. My grandmother used to try and persuade me to eat it – to no avail. The flowering part of the root vegetable contains both pistils and stamens, rendering the brassica napobrassica sexually ambidextrous.

Sweden has taken its cue from the vegetable in that it has decided that its children are to be raised asexually: Swedes must pretend to be swedes.

From here:

Swedes can be remarkably thorough in their pursuit of gender parity. A few years ago, a feminist political party proposed a law requiring men to sit while urinating—less messy and more equal. In 2004, the leader of the Sweden’s Left Party Feminist Council, Gudrun Schyman,proposed a “man tax”—a special tariff to be levied on men to pay for all the violence and mayhem wrought by their sex. In April 2012, following the celebration of International Women’s Day, the Swedes formally introduced the genderless pronoun “hen” to be used in place of he and she (han and hon).

Egalia, a new state-sponsored pre-school in Stockholm, is dedicated to the total obliteration of the male and female distinction. There are no boys and girls at Egalia—just “friends” and “buddies.” Classic fairy tales like Cinderella and Snow White have been replaced by tales of two male giraffes who parent abandoned crocodile eggs. The Swedish Green Party would like Egalia to be the norm: It has suggested placing gender watchdogs in all of the nation’s preschools. “Egalia gives [children] a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be,” says one excited teacher. (It is probably necessary to add that this is not an Orwellian satire or a right-wing fantasy: This school actually exists.)