Iona oddities

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I’ve just returned from spending a couple of weeks in Scotland. One of the places I visited was the Isle of Iona, home of Iona Abbey, originally built in 563.

Here are some of the photos I took:

There is still a Christian Community – of sorts – in Iona. These notices were on the notice board:

This descent into lunacy isn’t particularly surprising. If we are to believe the legend of the Abbey’s origins, St. Columba was, himself, a gibbering nutcase.

In 563 St. Columba had a “vision”. In the vision he was told that the Abbey would only thrive if it was built upon the site of a human sacrifice.

So he buried his friend Oran alive before starting on the Abbey. Oran volunteered for the job. We don’t know how long it took Oran to regret his rash decision, but after three days, Columba uncovered his face in order to say a final farewell only to find Oran uttering blasphemies. Who could blame him? To Columba, blasphemy must have been more disturbing than being buried alive, so he hastily reburied Oran’s face.

This may all  be fantasy but, if true, it makes Columba a good advertisement for Christopher Hitchens’ book God is Not Great, Religion Poisons Everything.

Still, the RC Church canonized Columba, so it must be OK.

And Oran has his own chapel:

Anglicans at the Toronto Pride unravelling

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Here are some Anglicans from the Diocese of Toronto at the 2024 Toronto Pride parade.

They include the usual members of clergy, but I don’t see any bishops present this year. Perhaps they were hiding.

More interesting, is the fact that the Diocese of Toronto has 54,000 people on its parish rolls all of whom Bishop Andrew Asbil exhorted to fling themselves exuberantly into the month of bacchanalian cavorting. Most of them sensibly ignored him. Athrough it’s probably not unusual for his missives to be ignored.

To my considerable satisfaction, the parade was halted by the Coalition Against Pinkwashing, a group of queer and trans activists from Palestinian solidarity groups, affectionately known as Chickens for KFC. Organisers then cancelled the rest of the parade.

When you add the squabbles between the transgender mob and straight queers, it seems the whole enterprise is starting to unravel.

Anglican Church signs resolution to support the queer interfaith coalition

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I had no idea that a queer interfaith coalition existed until my state of blissful ignorance was by punctured by the article below. Apparently, it includes Muslims, which is odd, since countries in which Muslims have unfettered control enjoy throwing members of the alphabet community from the top of tall buildings.

So far, eighteen people from the Anglican Church of Canada, a bastion of inclusion in spite of having been deserted by those it purports to include, have signed the resolution. They include the Primate Linda Nicholls, Bishop Lynne McNaughton from the Diocese of Kootenay, and a further assortment of gentlemen and lady reverends, many of whom have come out as queer. Not that they have an axe to grind.

As of today, there are 182 signatories: the entire religious gay population of Canada. Not quite all are clergy. No Muslims have signed it; they probably all suffer from vertigo.

You can find the signatories here, in case you need a list of churches to avoid.

I didn’t dredge up the photo from a sleazy gay website, it accompanies the article.

Read it all here:

In celebration of June as Pride Month, I would like to share a resolution that unanimously passed on May 25 at the annual meeting of the Anglican Church of the Diocese of the Kootenays.

Resolution to Support the Queer Interfaith Coalition

The Queer Interfaith Coalition was formed in late 2023 in response to an increase in homophobic and anti-trans* rhetoric. The Queer Interfaith Coalition is a group of religious leaders and laypeople from Jewish, Muslim, Christian and other backgrounds. The QIC seeks to reclaim the word “religious” to mean a word of faith, of safety, of inclusion and especially of love. As well, they seek to acknowledge that every human being is born in the image of God and that God’s love has always been and will always be inclusive.

On the 14th of March, the Queer Interfaith Coalition launched an open letter to the Canadian government demanding action in response to the rise in homophobic and anti-trans rhetoric. In this open letter they write: “We affirm that the shared understanding of our religious duty is to dedicate ourselves to advocating for the full and comprehensive human rights of all members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community; promoting mental health, realizing the rights of 2SLGBTQIA+ children and youth, and ending gender-based violence.”

Lies, damned lies, statistics, and vaccines

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From the beginning I was suspicious of the MRNA vaccines being peddled by Pfizer and other drug manufacturers. As I mentioned here:

“I have worked on technology most of my life”, I told the nurse. “For new technology, we operated on the principle that ‘if it can go wrong, it will’. Messenger RNA vaccines are new technology”.

That, and the fact that all the available COVID vaccines were developed or tested using cell lines grown from HEK293 or PERC6 cells extracted from aborted babies, convinced me not to take them.

The state of Kansas is now suing Pfizer for lying about the “safe and effective” mantra, the fact that, contrary to their claims, a vaccinated person can still infect someone else, for censoring criticism, for concealing the number of miscarriages their vaccine induced, for known adverse reactions and deaths, for invalidating the “blind testing” and for refusing to release its test data.

Still, Pfizer made around $100 billion dollars for its lies, so that’s something.

If you have the even the vaguest interest in the truth about this, watch this:

And here is the attorney general of Kansas:

This is merely anecdotal but, for what it’s worth, most of my friends did take a full course of one of the vaccines and almost all of them caught COVID. Many of them multiple times. A surprising number of them have also had blood clots, strokes and heart problems since taking the vaccine. Neither my wife or I had the vaccine (she did have one shot), we didn’t take any special precautions and neither of us caught COVID. We also haven’t had a blood clot, stroke or heart problems. As I said, merely anecdotal.

Hubris month is upon us

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That means it’s time for clergy to adorn their necks with rainbow collars:

Love is love bishops will hoist rainbow flags and prattle about diversity and inclusion, while scolding those who exhibit insufficient enthusiasm.

Here is Toronto Bishop Andrew Asbil doing his best to staunch the stampede of parishioners abandoning the ACoC by encouraging participation in the month long – or is it a season now? – bacchanalia and denouncing those who would rather not as homophobic and transphobic.

Dear Friends,

June is Pride month.

Wonderful celebrations are taking place across our Diocese. Last week, Anglicans from the Nottawasaga Deanery gathered for Barrie Pride. Around the same time, the Rev. Dana Dickson was present with community leaders in Bradford to raise the Pride flag at their city hall. A few days later, parishioners at the Church of the Redeemer on Bloor Street were taping their steps with Pride colours, to remind the people of Toronto that they are a proud, welcoming and inclusive parish. In a few weeks, Anglicans from across the Diocese will gather under the banner of Proud Anglicans at the annual Toronto Pride Parade.
[….]
Homophobic and transphobic voices seem to be getting louder in public discourse, on social media and even in parts of our Church.

The liberal delusion

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In the early 20th Century Malcolm Muggeridge declared that “the fundamental error of liberalism is its false gospel of automatic and ineluctable progress”. I usually agree with Muggeridge, but I think he had this wrong. That isn’t the fundamental error of liberalism. The fundamental error is the assumption that man is innately good.

From this springs the idea that we can progress through our own efforts, that we can build our own utopia, that all our ills spring from things like a poor upbringing, a hostile environment or by class oppression. Once those are sorted out, the earth will be suffused with peace and harmony.

As it turns out, the opposite is the case. The notion that we are good, or at least self-perfectible, leads to tyranny, bloodshed, death and misery. Just look at Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Millions of dead and endless suffering all because of one simple delusion.

I’m pretty sure many mainline churches have fallen for the same lie. And it is a satanic lie. If we are innately good, we don’t need a Savior. If we don’t need a Savior, Jesus was not who He claimed to be: he couldn’t have died for our sins because He didn’t need to.

Ten seconds of self-reflection will easily dispel this nonsense and confirm that the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.

Yet the delusion persists, particularly in the Anglican Church of Canada. I remember overhearing a lady vicar murmur in a break during a TV program Michael Coren used to host before he lost his marbles that “after all, we are all basically good people, aren’t we?”

And here we go again in an article published by the Anglican Journal, a mouthpiece of the ACoC, even though it likes to pretend otherwise (my emphasis):

What to do? How do we change paths? It’s a tall order, but not an impossibility if we can finally dispense with that perversely erroneous, discredited tenet of Enlightenment philosophy that defines humanity as irredeemably wicked, and instead remember that we are innately good. Born that way. It’s a truth that’s available to each of us through common sense and reflection. It is acknowledged and celebrated in classical Greek philosophy and all the great monotheistic religions. In my careers as a journalist and academic I’ve watched for decades as that ancient moral insight has gained the reinforcement of social-scientific researchers, reluctant though they may be to involve themselves with metaphysics.

With that truth firmly in mind we might see that nothing less than a new social contract is what’s necessary and appropriate to our post-modern condition: stronger market regulation to reduce the economic and political influence of industrial and commercial monopolies and oligopolies; a new ethic of corporate social responsibility that replaces hypocrisy with genuine commitment; more equitable distribution of wealth to replace the current winner-take-all ethic; and an improved and expanded social safety net perhaps founded on a guaranteed annual income, for starters.

Anglican Church of Canada seeks to halt precipitous decline

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ACoC revenue is expected to decline by around $200,000 per year, diocesan contributions to the national church are falling and the number of active parishioners is in free-fall.

Most businesses in this situation would have fired their executives long ago but, alas, the number of bishops in the ACoC seems inversely proportional to the number of lay people.

The situation is so desperate that radical solutions are being explored. So radical that, in order not to unsettle the staff, meetings will be held behind closed doors. What could be that unsettling?

Reintroducing Christianity to the church would certainly qualify but that is as unlikely as firing all the bishops. More probably, there will be staff cut-backs, diocesan mergers, church buildings sold and a further combining  with the ACoC’s partner in self-inflicted extinction, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada.

Read all about it here:

He recommends that conversations about the future of the church be convened around the theming of the five “transformational commitments” in the church’s latest strategic plan. Doing so, he says, “could be an instrument to aid in the renewal and rejuvenation of the General Synod and perhaps begin a process of devolving some powers and responsibilities to provinces and dioceses.”

The document ends with five “intentionally provocative statements,” which assert that “generally, General Synod’s adherence to strategic planning must be deemed a failure” and that this planning has not always recognized General Synod’s role as the “weaker partner in a strong alliance of dioceses,” which exercise more power in funding and implementing goals. It notes the church’s “precipitous” decline in attendance and General Synod’s history of strategic plans that have attempted to reverse this without demonstrable results. The last of these statements concludes by asking “Is it time to de-acquisition and downsize some structures to enable new possibilities to emerge? Is this the framing that should guide current planning?”

Archdeacon Tanya Phibbs, deputy prolocutor of General Synod, brought a motion that only council members and Archbishop Anne Germond, soon to be acting Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, remain for the session. It was necessary for CoGS to meet behind closed doors, she said, to ensure its members were able to freely share ideas, hopes, fears and dreams for the church’s future which may be provocative. Phibbs also said some of the content of the discussion might be unsettling to the staff as it directly affected them. It might be difficult for members of CoGS to discuss some of the options before them knowing staff were in the room, she said.

Decolonizing liturgy

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The National Worship Conference of the Anglican Church of Canada is meeting in Regina this summer. It “will examine how church liturgy and worship practices can better reflect the diversity of modern congregations”.

The aim of the conference is to extirpate “expressions of empire” from liturgy in order to “decolonize“ it. As things stand, we are “excluding voices from the margins”.

We have to “begin by listening to the land, hearing the ancient voices of creation that hold our narratives.”

I’m not sure what the “voices from the margins” or the “voices of creation” are, although I’ve heard rumours that many clergy are hearing voices when they forget to take their pills.

Here is a radical idea: instead of straining to hear the voices of creation, try reading the Bible to see what God has to say.

You can register for the conference at the website.

All are welcome except orthodox Christians.

More here:

Berringer said she expected the subject matter of this year’s conference to be sensitive and controversial. The event’s website describes its purpose as exploring what it means to decolonize expressions of worship in the Anglican and Lutheran churches. Berringer says it’s about identifying the ways in which Anglicans and Lutherans from outside European-derived culture don’t see themselves reflected in the churches’ worship, and about finding ways to make it their own.

The word “decolonize” has so many disparate meanings to people according to their backgrounds and preconceived ideas, she says, that the conference may not get beyond negotiating a shared understanding of what the churches need to do to make themselves more inclusive. But even if that means having some difficult and uncomfortable conversations, she says it’s worth doing.

“I fully expect people to attend this conference and have pushback on everything from the title, to the description, to who we’ve included as far as workshop leaders,” she says. “We do expect people to be uncomfortable, probably. We’re providing prayer support, we’ve got chaplains ready … It’s human nature to feel defensive when the perception is ‘what you’re doing isn’t working, we’ve got to change it and make it better.’”

Frociaggine and peas

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In South Wales where I grew up, faggots and peas were a staple for dinner. Faggots consist of pig offal wrapped in caul, a fatty membrane encasing the pig’s internal organs. They are very tasty.

In 2004, there was a radio commercial in which a man says, “I’ve got nothing against faggots, I just don’t fancy them”, after being offered them for dinner. This could be construed in at least two ways, one of which breached the Advertising and Sponsorship Code. The advertisement was banned.

When I was enjoying my faggots and peas in my youth, perhaps watching a BBC drama, I knew that there were certain words that you could not say on TV, even after 9:00 p.m. We all know what they are because now the same words have to be said repeatedly on every Netflix production you are the unwitting victim of.

No doubt we were a little prudish in our vocabulary in the 50’s, but we have managed to breed a whole new generation of prudes whose fragile sensibilities are unable to survive an assault by the breaching of contemporary taboos: faggots – without the peas.

Such is the horror of the use of the word faggot to denote a homosexual, that when the Pope recently let slip he thought that “there is already enough faggotry” in Catholic seminaries, the CBC issued a warning on its article about the incident.

Avert you gaze now.

From here:

WARNING: This story contains vulgar language.

Pope Francis, widely quoted as having used a highly derogatory word to describe the 2SLGBTQ+ community, did not intend to use homophobic language and apologizes to anyone offended by it, the Vatican said on Tuesday.

It is extremely rare for a pope to issue a public apology.

“The Pope never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms, and he apologizes to those who felt offended by the use of a term reported by others,” Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni said in an emailed statement.

Italian media had reported on Monday that Francis used the Italian term frociaggine, roughly translating as “faggotness” or “faggotry,” as he told Italian bishops he remained opposed to admitting gay people into the priesthood.