Cirque du Guantanamo

Posted on by
1

Five of the 9/11 conspirators are appearing before a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay.

So far, they have refused to answer the judge’s questions, extended the proceedings by repeatedly kneeling on the floor and praying – a perverse accommodation of the court since conspicuous Christian prayers would not be allowed in a secular courtroom – removed their translator headphones and feigned indifference to the proceedings by ostentatiously reading magazines.

And now the defense attorney for this execrable bunch is not only wearing a hijab herself, but has passed on the prisoners’ request that other women in the courtroom show respect for the defendants’ religion by doing likewise so that her merry band of sexually-repressed, psychotic, mass-murdering Islamofascists don’t have to go to the trouble of averting their gaze.

I wouldn’t suggest this under any other circumstance, I really wouldn’t, but in this case, it’s justified: to show the religion of these gibbering demoniacs the respect it deserves, all the women in the courtroom should show up topless.

The whole fiasco is a powerful argument for the judicial efficacy of summary lynching.

From here:

A female defense attorney, who is not Muslim, wore the traditional Islamic hijab to the military court staging the trial of five Guantanamo Bay prisoners accused of the September 11 attacks yesterday.

Cheryl Bormann, 52, who represents Walid bin Attash, said that her client had demanded she wear the clothing and insisted that other women at the hearing also wear ‘appropriate’ clothes out of respect for his religion.

Today she explained her decision at Guantanamo Bay, saying she always wears the hijab around her client.

She asked that other women follow her example so that the defendants do not have to avert their eyes ‘for fear of committing a sin under their faith’

An unusual anti-global warming advertisement

Posted on by
2

From here:

“Charles Manson Still Believes in Global Warming. Do You?”
That’s the essence of a thoughtful and nuanced new billboard campaign put together by the Heartland Institute, the nation’s top climate change-doubting think tank. The billboards feature portraits of figures like Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, Charles Manson, and Fidel Castro, alongside giant lettering that reads “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?”

If I had designed the ad, it would have been much more subtle. Something like this:

Same-sex marriage showdown at All Saints, Sanderstead

Posted on by
1

Read it all here:

Peter Gowlland, 78, was accused of sowing discord among worshippers at the liberal-leaning All Saints Church in Sanderstead, Surrey, by inviting them to sign a petition against the Government plans to introduce same-sex weddings.

Despite being told by his Archdeacon to “withdraw” from ministry for two months as a result, Church authorities continued to insist last night that he had “not been suspended”.

The retired science teacher says he was told “we don’t do that here” by a fellow lay reader when he set out a pile of leaflets promoting the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey’s Coalition For Marriage before a Sunday service last month.

Matters came to a head shortly during the service when he urged parishioners in his sermon to be “bold like the apostles” and register their opposition to the redefinition of marriage.

It prompted what might pass in the Church of England for a public showdown: a brief and polite disagreement with two other lay readers in front of the congregation, a retired bishop and the visiting Worldwide President of the Mothers’ Union.

It goes to show that there are ways to have fun in a liberal Church of England parish.

All Saints proudly proclaims:

Whoever you are, and wherever you find yourself on your journey of faith, there is a place for you at All Saints’.

But if, on your journey of faith, you find yourself at a spot where you disagree with same-sex marriage, keep it to yourself.

 

“Life is wasted without Jesus” causes offence

Posted on by
5

From the CBC:

A Christian student suspended from a high school in Nova Scotia for sporting a T-shirt with the slogan “Life is wasted without Jesus” vows to wear it when he returns to class next week.

William Swinimer, who’s in Grade 12, was suspended from Forest Heights Community School in Chester Basin in Lunenburg County for five days. He’s due to return to class on Monday.

The devout Christian says the T-shirt is an expression of his beliefs, and he won’t stop wearing it.

[….]

Nancy Pynch-Worthylake, board superintendent, said some students and teachers found the T-shirt offensive.

“When one is able or others are able to interpret it as, ‘If you don’t share my belief then your life is wasted,’ that can be interpreted by some as being inappropriate,” she said.

I wonder how the delicate students, whose fragile sensibilities were offended by a slogan they were free to ignore, will cope when they enter the big bad world of business with all its slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Perhaps they will all become teachers and retain the luxury of being easily offended.

I also wonder what the reaction would have been to this t-shirt:

The end of the world – again

Posted on by
2

From here:

Doris Rosado watches her teenage daughters, Ninette and Kiara Mongrut, get the numbers “666” tattooed on their wrists, beaming with pride. The number typically conjures up biblical symbolism tied to the Antichrist, but this St. Catharines, Ont., family belongs to a obscure Christian sect for which “666” is a positive symbol of their group’s messianic leader.

“They wanted to do it,” Ms. Rosado, 45, said at the St. Catharines tattoo parlour where her daughters were inked. “But now it’s more important because we’re counting down… I’m so proud.”

For this family, and other members of Growing in Grace International, these tattoos are a way of demonstrating their faith as true believers of Jose de Luis de Jesus — who they fervently believe is the second coming of Jesus Christ — before a day of reckoning they believe will wipe out most of humanity.

[…..]

To spread the word, Growing in Grace put up billboards in Toronto this week featuring Mr. de Jesus.

“That day, the body of Jose de Luis de Jesus, who is a human like you and me, his flesh is going to be immortal…. He’s going to be living forever. And that will happen to him, but also his followers.”

But, said Mr. Poessy: “All those that are not believers are going to be destroyed.”

Growing in Grace International is not the first to prognosticate that the so-called end of the world will come this year. The Mayan calendar famously picks Dec. 21, 2012.

But Mr. de Jesus also predicts that the “transformation” will endow him, and his loyal followers, with superpowers, such as the ability to fly and walk through walls, said Axel Cooley, the bishop’s daughter.

This is, to use a tired cliché, a win-win situation: if Mr. de Jesus is wrong – and I can’t see how a man careless enough to glue two of his fingers to his forehead could be right about the end of the world – we’ll all still be around on July 1st and his followers will be lined up to have their tattoos removed. If he is right, destruction is a more appetising prospect than seeing Mr. de Jesus flying and walking through walls.

The added benefit to his being wrong is that, on July 1st, we can all enjoy watching him try out his newly acquired superpowers.

The Diocese of New Westminster does Godspell

Posted on by
2

And, surprise, surprise, when the production opens in Christ Church Cathedral in May, the diocese will “dare the audience to consider Christ anew” by having a female Jesus and portraying the crucifixion as a regrettable episode of school bullying taken a step too far. This article goes on to speculate that the “production of Godspell will instigate fresh thinking in those who come to see it.” Not really, it’s entirely predictable.

Was the crucifixion of Christ a supreme act of bullying? Godspell Director, Rev. Andrew Halladay and Director of Music, Rev. David Taylor believe that Jesus was bullied. Bullying is a hot topic — not just in Canada — but also around the world. In March, both the Liberals and the Conservatives introduced bills meant to influence the way that Canadian educators deal with bullies in our schools.

What does it mean to have the role of Jesus played by a woman? By casting theological student Clare Morgan as Jesus, Halladay and Taylor break from the typical Godspell formula. The role of the typical Godspell Jesus is difficult to fill. The role requires a male soprano. When Halladay and Taylor began casting their Godspell, they already considered inviting a woman to play Jesus — to honor the talent that confronted them and to dare the audience to consider Christ anew.

Atheists Anonymous

Posted on by
Reply

“Hello, I’m Jerry and I’m an atheist.” Nothing unusual about that, you might think – other than the fact that when Jerry drifted from Christianity to disbelieving in hell to universalism to God is our inner dialogue, to atheism, he was a Pentecostal minister.

Since he wasn’t an Anglican minister, this presented Jerry with a bit of a dilemma which, on hearing of his new-found lack of faith, his congregation helped him resolve by firing him.

From there, he fell into the welcoming arms of The Clergy Project, a “confidential online community for active and former clergy who do not hold supernatural beliefs”: TCP, the spiritual formulation, guaranteed to disinfect the bacteria of Faith, Hope and Charity from contaminated souls.

Having come out, Jerry has been photographed with Richard Dawkins and become executive director of Recovering from Religion; that’s about as transcendent as it gets for an atheist.

A brief perusal of this clip will confirm that, although Jerry has abandoned Pentecostalism, it hasn’t entirely abandoned him: his intonation, gestures and stagecraft are all standard Pentecostal minister fare. I was expecting a “preach it, brother” from the audience; Jerry needs to attend a few more Reason Rallies to purge the remnants of what used to intoxicate him from his system.

From here:

In the span of just a few months, Jerry DeWitt went from a respected pastor with a vibrant congregation to an atheist without a job.

DeWitt, 42, is the first “graduate” of The Clergy Project, a program supported by several atheist organizations that assists pastors who have lost their faith to “come out” as atheists to family, friends, congregations and communities.

DeWitt, who lives in Southern Louisiana, went public last October when he posted a picture of himself with the prominent and polarizing atheist Richard Dawkins, snapped at a meeting of atheists and other “freethinkers” in Houston.

The real problem with the Anglican Communion is that is does not communicate effectively

Posted on by
1

According to this:

The Anglican Communion faces a shortage of qualified communicators, according to an international Working Group on communications. The group — consisting of communications professionals from five continents — concluded that the Communion life was at risk of being detrimentally affected by some Provinces’ inability to source and share their news and stories widely.

Ironically, the article that bemoans the “shortage of qualified communicators” goes on to exhort the church to start “communicating proactively as well as reactively”, a phrase whose clichéd vacuity appealed to illiterate corporate managers for a season, after which, around the turn of the last century, mercy prevailed and it was put out of its misery .

Perhaps the Anglican Communion in the West should be grateful that its inability to communicate means that not many of its parishioners know what is really going on.

Bishop Michael Ingham reviews the Anglican Church of Canada’s position on war

Posted on by
2

He comes to this conclusion:

The Ecumenical Call discusses the justifiable use of armed force, and concludes “there are extreme circumstances where, as the last resort and the lesser evil, the lawful use of armed force may become necessary.” This is a difficult conclusion for many Christians, and yet it would reflect the broad views of Canadian Anglicans as expressed in these official statements through the years.

A clear and consistent pattern of belief is evident in the documents surveyed here. Violence and war are incompatible with Christ’s teaching. Christian responsibility is to build up communities of peace founded upon justice for all people and for the earth itself. Peacemaking and reconciliation are at the heart of the Christian gospel.

I would have thought that the violent death of God’s son offered as a propitiation for the sins of the world is at the “heart of the Christian gospel”, rather than the polysemous vagueness of “peacemaking and reconciliation”. But, then, I’m not an Anglican bishop.

Terry Jones burns another Koran

Posted on by
2

The pentagon urged him not to and the fire department fined him $271 because he did not have the “required authorization to burn books”.

The big questions are: how much does a permit from the Gainesville Fire Rescue to burn books cost, how many do they issue per year, does the permit include permission to burn Korans and once the fell deed was accomplished did the fire department treat the ashes with the respect they deserve or did they fail to flush them down the toilet? And would they have issued a $271 fine to an atheist burning a Bible?

From here:

About 20 people gathered for the ceremony outside the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., during which Jones demanded the release of Youcef Nadarkhani, an Iranian pastor, currently in jail for apostasy after converting from Islam to Christianity.

Moments after the burning, the Gainesville Fire Rescue issued a citation against the church, claiming it did not have the required authorization to burn books.

The church will be fined $271, including court costs, fire chief Gene Prince told the newspaper.