This sterling effort from the World Council of Chuches will be over in May 2010.
Churches Seeking Reconciliation and Peace (DOV) calls all the worlds people to engage in violence prevention, the pursuit of justice and peacemaking.
And there will be a celebration:
The International Ecumenical Peace Convocation will mark the conclusion of the WCC Decade to Overcome Violence. It will be both the harvest festival of the DOV and a planting season for fresh initiatives.
So how did they do?
After I have celebrated Earth Hour by turning all my lights on, I am going to flush all the toilets in the house in orgiastic abandon. While doing so, I will have the satisfaction of knowing that crackpots in churches in 50 countries will be queuing in front of pretend toilets in order to bring clean water to those in need. I can already feel the water beginning to flow.
“The water crisis is a symptom of our ‘unjust’, our ‘polluted’ relations with one another and with the rest of creation,” she added. “The two are interconnected. And water, the bloodstream of the earth, is one of the elements that makes this connection visible and felt.”
In a act of solidarity with the 2.5 billion people in the world who don’t have access to safe, private and hygienic lavatories, staff members of the various church-related organizations based at the Ecumenical Centre queued in front of a symbolic “toilet door” for ten minutes. By doing so, they became part of the World’s Longest Toilet Queue. This campaign, taking place in more than 50 countries on all continents, is urging governments to tackle the global sanitation crisis.
I don’t know why no-one has thought of this before: people who don’t need to use a toilet lining up in front of a mock loo is the obvious way to tackle a global sanitation crisis.
From here
The issue at stake here for those in the poorest regions of the world is one of health justice. About 90 percent of the world health budget is being spent on 10 percent of the world population. The issue, put starkly, is this: why are so few resources poured into curing the most basic, preventable diseases, when so many resources are dedicated to stem cell research? This applies to all forms of stem cell research, from adult stem cell research through to embryonic stem cell research. This problem is compounded by fears that unregulated stem cell treatment will proliferate in nations that do not have the legal and regulatory infrastructure to cope. The need for ova in embryonic stem cell research has given rise to a new form of exploitation of women.
As expected the issue is not one of protecting the unborn made in the image of God, but of health justice (a nerve jangling phrase), the principle that the equal distribution of the benefits derived from experimenting on the unborn is more important than their destruction.
Dr Fabian Salazar Guerrero from Latin America challenged his listeners: “The problems discussed in this consultation have world dimensions. But those in the poorest regions of the world are excluded from discussions. This exclusion kills in a long agony”.
This was the most perversely misguided paragraph: surely being excluded from the discussions of a coterie of bombastic self-righteous scientists, ethicists and theologians would be cause for rejoicing; to be present would have been a long agony.
It lives on in the World Council of Churches: luckily, the WCC itself is almost dead:
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty years ago, many critics have been quick to sign liberation theology’s death certificate. Most of them did so because they understood it to be an apology of bygone Soviet-style socialism. It seems, though, that this death certificate has been issued prematurely.
It is true that liberation theologians – some more than others – used Marxist categories for socioeconomic analysis and for a critique of capitalism’s evils. However, the core of liberation theology has never been Marxism.
If the core of Liberation Theology is not Marxist, we would expect to find it agitating for the “liberation” of the oppressed in left-wing dictatorships like China and Cuba; instead, it plays the prancing sycophant to them – because it really does have Marxism, not Christianity at its core.
Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia, general secretary of the World Council of Churches shaking hands with the devil:
In a recent meeting with a delegation from the World Council of Churches (WCC) visiting Pyongyang, North Korean president Kim Yong-nam said a significant impetus to solving the nuclear weapons stand-off in the region would be for North Korea and the U.S. to meet “face-to-face with each other”.
Kim, the president of the Presidium of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) Supreme People’s Assembly, said the region needs to be denuclearized. He alluded to a certain unfairness within the Six Party Talks, saying that the members of the talks are “all nuclear powers or enjoy nuclear protection by the United States” with the sole exception of North Korea.
He also said that the armistice agreement which effectively ended the Korean War but did not bring peace to the region “should be replaced with a peace agreement between North Korea and the United States”.
Kim’s comments were made during his 70-minute meeting with the WCC general secretary, the Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia, on Monday afternoon 19 October in Pyongyang.
What is wrong with this picture; well, this for a start:
In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 – North Korea’s largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held.
Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them.
Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.
Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il’s North Korean regime.
And this:
Grandsons are condemned to life-long terms as slave laborers alongside their grandfathers, both equally helpless in the brutal surroundings. Prisoners are arbitrarily murdered by security guards. Women suffer from forced abortions at the hands of unlicensed doctors. Newborn babies are beaten to death. And sons and daughters are publicly executed in front of their mothers.
And this:
WASHINGTON – A woman in her 20s executed by a firing squad after being caught with a Bible. Five Christian church leaders punished by being run over by a steamroller before a crowd of spectators who “cried, screamed out, or fainted when the skulls made a popping sound as they were crushed.”
These and other “horrifying” violations of human rights and religious freedom in North Korea are reported in a new study by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, titled “‘Thank You, Father Kim Il Sung’: Eyewitness Accounts of Severe Violations of Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion in North Korea.”
Having abandoned the Triune God, I suppose the WCC’s thoroughly nauseating, grovelling anthropolatry was rather to be expected:
It is with great joy that I take this opportunity to express my profound satisfaction at the decision of the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award you this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, the general secretary-elect of the World Council of Churches, who will succeed me in January 2010, joins in offering you our heartfelt congratulations on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. As citizens of Norway and Kenya, we take pride in our two nations’ particular connections to this event.
The Nobel committee’s decision honours you as a statesman who demonstrates a deep commitment to the cause of peace with justice, and hope for a transformation in this world. This quality of yours was eloquently recognized by the Nobel committee when it stated that only very rarely has a person captured the world’s attention to the extent that you have done already, and given the world’s people hope for a better future. You have shown the world your readiness to set aside serious ideological, political and cultural differences in the pursuit of peace and reconciliation. I am confident that this approach will ensure positive new developments in international relations and diplomacy. Your endorsement of the United Nations resolution on nuclear non-proliferation, your decision to discard U.S. plans to build a missile shield for Eastern Europe, your call to curb greenhouse gas emissions to prevent global warming and your eagerness for easing conflicts with Islamic nations demonstrate your deep commitment to promote peace and reconciliation in today’s troubled world. In all these matters, your administration affirms long-held positions of the World Council of Churches.
Your initiatives for promoting a new ethos and values in international relations based on a diplomacy of mutual recognition and shared responsibilities are vital in our contemporary situation. I am confident that the decision of the Nobel committee to confer this year’s peace prize upon you will go a long way toward accelerating your relentless efforts to contribute to peace. The award is a call and encouragement to build upon the important work you have already initiated.
The WCC seems to be among the Obamania beguiled that have failed to notice that he hasn’t actually accomplished anything to further peace – other than not being George Bush.
