Here’s one:
]]>Jesus was a reformed racist, says Anglican Church of Canada
Posted By: Damian Thompson at Feb 27, 2009 at 00:41:46 [General]
Posted in: Religion
Tags: Anglican Church of Canada, Lenten reflections, typical Canadian political correctnessThe Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) has published a Lenten reflection that portrays Jesus as a racist who saw the error of his ways after being challenged by the Canaanite woman in Matthew’s Gospel. The ACoC was long ago taken over by politically correct bores but, as Anglican Samizdat notes, this “reflection” turns Jesus into a sinner - in Christian terms, a pretty basic heresy. Here’s the reflection. Sick-bags at the ready:
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“… a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.’ He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the houseof Israel.’ But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.’ ” - Matthew 14:22-27
This not a story for people who need to think that Jesus always had it together, because it looks like we’ve caught him being mean to a lady because of her ethnicity. At first, he ignores her cries. Then he refuses to help her and compares her people to dogs.
But she challenges his prejudice. And he listens to her challenge and grows in response to it. He ends up healing her daughter. What we may have here is an important moment of self-discovery in Jesus’ life, an enlargement of what it will mean to be who he was. Maybe we are seeing Jesus understand his universality for the first time.
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Or maybe not. Maybe someone has been on a “racism awareness course” and decided to redefine the divinity of Jesus in a way that flatters ethnic sensibilities. How very Anglican. How very Canadian.
The world is filled with boys who can shave
The marketing sweet spot for many companies is young men ages eighteen to thirty-four. These guys don’t know what it means to be a man, and so marketers fill the void with products that define manhood by what you consume rather than what you produce.
The tough retrosexual guys consume women, porn, alcohol, drugs, television, music, video games, toys, cars, sports, and fantasy leagues, as if being a man is defined by how much meat you can shove through your colon, how many beers you can pound, how fast you can drive, how stinky you can fart, how hard you can hit, how far you can spit, how loud you can belch, and how big your truck is.
The artsy, techie metrosexual types consume clothes, decaf lattes, shoes, gadgets, cars (not trucks), furniture, hair products, and underwear with the names of very important people on the waistband. For them, manhood means being in touch with one’s feelings, wardrobe, and appearance.
[...]
What happens if you walk into the church and try to find out what a man looks like? First of all, you’re not going to find a lot of guys in most evangelical churches. The least likely person to see in church is a single, twenty-something male. He is as rare at church as a vegan at a steak house.
In the world, boys who can shave are children who are consumers. In the church, boys who can shave are cowards who are complainers.
[...]
Here’s the cold hard truth: it’s a lot harder to do something than it is to complain about those who are doing something. The notorious sin of Christian guys is complaining about guys who are doing something rather than doing something
So let’s unpack this a little bit. If you’re a blokey-bloke stereotype, Mark Driscoll hates you. If you’re a inner-city yuppie stereotype, Mark Driscoll hates you. If you do go to church and apparently aren’t on the Driscoll bandwagon, Mark Driscoll holds you in utter contempt.
What’s the answer? Be more like Christ! Just kidding. Reclaim the American dream! Wife, kids, and a successful business, with a bit of churchiness thrown in for good measure:
Men, you are to be creators and cultivators. God is a creator and a cultivator and you were made to image him. Create a family and cultivate your wife and children. Create a ministry and cultivate other people. Create a business and cultivate it. Be a giver, not a taker, a producer and not just a consumer. Stop looking for the path of least resistance and start running down the path of greatest glory to God and good to others because that’s what Jesus, the real man, did.
Wait—Jesus had a wife, kids, and a business?
As for Driscoll, what’s the term for a self-hating man? Or is it just everyone else he hates, having checked the boxes of the American dream, US evangelical style?
]]>We’ve all heard the countless reasons Americans don’t like the church. Bookstores are full of writings that critique the church and talk about why people have left the pews.
“There’s really nothing out there that we could see that really affirmed the local church,” Ted Kluck, a lay member of University Reformed Church in East Lansing, Mich., told The Christian Post.
His pastor, Kevin DeYoung, has read the books and seen the reports and laments the growing movement of having God without the church.
“I see the church derided with mockery and scorn. I see critics exaggerating her weaknesses and incapable of affirming any of her strengths,” DeYoung says. “I see many leaving the church instead of loving her for better or for worse. I see lots of my peers who have 20/20 vision for the church’s failings, but are nearsighted to their own pride, self-importance, and mutual self-congratulation.”
In a rare move, Kluck and DeYoung have put out a book that offers reasons why they love the church – church not as plural for Christian, as most people seem to define it, but as the institution.
As DeYoung writes in Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion, “Increasingly, we hear glowing talk of a churchless Christianity. ...These days, spirituality is hot; religion is not. Community is hip, but the church is lame.”
But while non-Christians are liking Jesus and not the church and Christians are being told they can do fine with God apart from the church, the authors are urging them to give church another chance.
“We don’t want Christians to give up on the church,” DeYoung says.
Considering most are familiar with why so many people are disillusioned with the church (i.e. they’re tired of the church’s failings; it’s filled with hypocritical and judgmental people), we’ll go straight into why the church is worth it and why it’s even essential in a believer’s life.
Firstly, Christ loves the church, DeYoung says in the beginning of the book. The church is the bride and also the body of Christ, as the Bible describes it.
“The church we love is as flawed and messed up as we are, but she’s Christ’s bride nonetheless,” the Reformed pastor writes. “And I might as well have a basement without a house or a head without a body as despise the wife my Savior loves.”
Another thing Christians must remember is that there will always be aspects of the church that are unpopular, including an objective moral order and a Gospel that is not only about love and grace but also judgment and repentance.
And too many times, churches have been too eager to be liked, DeYoung notes, whether it’s lusting after academic recognition or cultural validation.
“Being disliked by teenagers and twentysomethings is not our biggest problem,” he points out.
Kluck, who offers a lay person’s perspective in the book, also notes that rejection is going to be a part of the lives of believers.
“Not everybody is going to like us, or our message,” he says.
Still, Kluck wants people to go and experience church despite its unpalatable and sometimes imperfect packaging.
“There are some core things about churches that on the surface may not seem terribly entertaining, it may not have amazing coffee, the praise team might not be drop dead gorgeous and talented but as long as the preacher’s preaching passionate expositional sermons from the text, as long as the praise and worship is God-centered and authentic and real, as long as your church body is praying together, meeting one another’s needs, reaching out to the community, as long as those things are in place, those are signs of a great church,” he commented to The Christian Post.
(page 1 of 2)
]]>Gaddafi offers Italy’s finest a job and a lecture on Islam
Nick Squires, Rome September 1, 2010
ITALIANS reacted angrily after Muammar Gaddafi lectured 200 actresses and models on the superiority of Islam, a day after saying that all Europeans should become Muslim.The Libyan leader recruited the women through a modelling agency to join him and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at a photographic exhibition in Rome that traced historical links between the two countries.
Telling them that Islam was the ‘‘ultimate religion’‘, Colonel Gaddafi insisted that ‘‘if you want to believe in a single faith, then it must be that of Muhammad’‘An agency paid the women, mainly students who hire themselves out to advertise publicity events, €70 or €80 ($A99 to $A113) and said it would not pay women who gave their names to the media. It told them to dress conservatively for the lectures.
The two leaders later attended a state dinner following a display of 30 thoroughbred Berber horses imported from Libya.
On Sunday night, during an encounter with 500 young women hired by the same agency, Colonel Gaddafi handed out copies of the Koran and told the women that Europe should convert to Islam.
MPs said Mr Berlusconi’s increasingly close relationship with the Libyan leader was a source of embarrassment.
‘‘If I went to Tripoli to demand that Libyans convert to Christianity, what are the odds that I would return in one piece?’‘ said Rocco Buttiglione, the president of a centre-right Catholic party, the UDC.
Rosy Bindi, an MP from the main opposition party, said the spectacle of hundreds of women being bussed in at Colonel Gaddafi’s ‘‘whim’’ was a ‘‘humiliating violation’’ of their dignity.Ties between Rome and its former colony have deepened since the signing of the friendship accord, with Italy now the third largest European investor in the North African country.
Italy plans to invest $US5 billion ($A5.5 billion) and build a 1700-kilometre highway to compensate for its decades of colonisation from 1911 to 1943.The two countries also reached an agreement that allows the Italian navy to intercept migrants at sea and return them to Libya, triggering sharp criticism from the United Nations refugee agency and human rights groups.
Colonel Gaddafi travelled, as usual, with a Bedouin tent for his accommodation, which was pitched in the gardens of the residence of the Libyan embassy in Rome.
In a sign of protest, an opposition party planted a ‘‘tent of legality’’ in front of the embassy.
TELEGRAPH, AF
Premier Kristina Keneally had some interesting insights into interpreting Scripture and ‘the Gospel’ yesterday in arriving at her ‘yes’ vote. You can see her comments ( at 6.04pm ) in Wednesday’s Hansard debate at :
[url=http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment/hansart.nsf/8bd91bc90780f150ca256e630010302c/e64c87e37e1e0082ca2577920006204f?OpenDocument
]NSW HAnsard 1/9/10[/url]
I see that Barry O’Farrell spoke in support of the bill to allow same-sex couples to adopt children, saying the current system is discriminatory :
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Here is the article about the burka in Perth: Woman wants ruling on burka in court
I know in the UK, muslims want muslim majority counties to operate under Shariah Law. In Bondi, Sydney Jewish believers have a territorial wire around their suburb so they can live more freely on the Sabbath.
Should Australia allow religious customs to affect our local laws? I personally can see this type of thing getting out of hand - how far can it go?
A muslim woman is insisting on her legal rights, probably urged on by her husband. But, it is interesting to examine the right of women in Islamic courts. As quoted in this link:
The Position of Women in Islam
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Legal Testimony of Women
Table of ContentsIn Islam, a woman’s testimony is worth half the testimony of a man’s, as both the Qur´an and the Hadith state. The Qur´an says, “...if the two be not men, then one man and two women, such witnesses as you approve of, that if one of the two women errs the other will remind her…” (Sura al-Baqara 2:282). Muhammad accounted for this rule by the deficiency of woman’s intelligence: Once the Messenger of God went out to a prayer place to offer the prayer of Greater Bairam or Lesser Bairam. He passed by the women and said, “O women! Give alms, as I have seen that the majority of the dwellers of Hell- fire were you [women].” They asked, “Why is it so, Messenger of God?” He replied, “You curse frequently and are ungrateful to your husbands. I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religion than you. A cautious sensible man could be led astray by some of you.” The women asked, “What is deficient in our intelligence and religion, Messenger of God?” He answered, “Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man?” They replied in the affirmative. He said, “This is the deficiency in your intelligence. Isn’t it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses?” The women replied in the affirmative. “This is the deficiency in her religion,” he said.(1)
Commentators quote this hadith to support the fact that the woman’s testimony, in Islam, is worth half of man’s testimony.(2) The commentator Fakhr al-Razi speaks of the “forgetfulness of woman” referring to her being “damp and cold in essence”.(3)
I have read in answering-islam.org that men in Islam are very agressively sexually in their culture. The veil is there to put off other men from seducing their wives, going back to medieval days The wearing of the veil says to men that to be interested in this woman is very much against Allah. Whether this burka is so necessary in Australian culture, is the question.
I know from statistics that in France where there is a large muslim population, that 60% of the male prison population is Muslim, most of them in there for rape, or sexual offences. ( I have previously posted a link on this)
So, what do Christians do when we see obviously useless religiousl customs being insisted on, in our legal system? Does this woman have a good argument to wear the burka? Her lawyer argues that certain witnesses give evidence without being seen by the jury (protected witnesses etc) and under that basis this woman should be accepted wearing the burka. Is this a valid argument?
Jury members argue that they want to see her facial expressions in order to judge what she submits in evidence.
Islam had as it original leader a man who was very sexual in his desires. This link gives some light, although the thread is a bit sensationalistic: Once-Upon-A-Time:-Prophet,-Oversexed-Psychopath,-Mohammed-of-Islam
]]>Once upon a time there was a man who was an oversexed psychopath and a manipulative control freak suffering from delusions. To control the people around him he formed a new religious sect. He created his own scripture and declared himself to be the prophet speaking the words of the only true god.
His scriptures were written down and in order to control his followers, he commanded them to spend their time memorizing them word for word, and pray to his god five times a day. To each other, the members of this sect had to be completely honest under pain of death, but to people of other faiths, they could lie, cheat, steal from and deceive them. Any member who fell by the wayside, or converted to another religion was to be killed.
He declared that women were the possessions of men. They were there only to satisfy the needs of man, sexual and physical, to bear children and spend their lives catering to the man who owned them. To ensure that they never strayed, he commanded them to cover their bodies and faces and they were not allowed the benefits of education, nor were they allowed to leave their homes except in the company of a male family member. Worse, some of these women were subjected to Veronique circumcision, a painful experience that left them unable to enjoy sex and to suffer agonies in childbirth.
He further declared that his god commanded all men to have four wives in order to satisfy and conceal his own lust. As men and women are born in approximately equal numbers, he had the problem of an excess of young men unable to satisfy their sexual urges. To deal with this, he told them to go on a holy war against all peoples who did not follow his new sect.
These young men constituted his warriors who he sent out to capture more lands, to steal the possessions of their inhabitants and, if the people living there did not convert to his sect, they were to be beheaded, men, women and children. Later, he realized that to kill all the people who would not convert to his sect was counterproductive, and so he allowed some of them to continue living on their land as long as they paid high taxes to him or became his slaves and their women concubines. Life was made so miserable for these people that many joined his sect in desperation.
He so controlled his followers that they continued to spread around the region conquering lands and killing, converting, or suppressing the inhabitants until their numbers increased into the millions. In order to persuade the young men to fight on his behalf, he promised them that if they died fighting for his god, they would be rewarded by going to Paradise where seventy virgins would be waiting for them - what an incentive for a highly sexed young man. How ridiculous! The body spiritual is incorporeal and incapable of sexual activity.
The name of this man was Mohammed; the name of his sect, Islam; the name of his followers, Muslims; the name of his scripture, the Koran. Though long dead, his legacy and teachings are still practiced in the world today with the object of converting the whole world to this pernicious sect where the laws laid down in his scriptures replace each country’s constitutional law.
Firstly, on the Left, from Harpers in 2004:
Baghdad year zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia by Naomi Klein. Wonderfully written, engaging, and devastating critique, which dispells the myth that there was no post-war plan.
It’s quite an accomplishment: in trying to design the best place in the world to do business, the neocons have managed to create the worst, the most eloquent indictment yet of the guiding logic behind deregulated free markets.
And on the Right, from ABC’s The Drum: Iraq and the collapse of neo-con illusions by Tom Switzer, a research associate at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and a former senior Liberal adviser.
]]>But the Iraq experience has produced one good thing, something that many Australians will appreciate: it has shattered three dangerous neo-conservative illusions that have warped US policy in the post-9/11 era. In international relations, the destruction of illusion is almost always healthy and although it has taken a huge cost in American blood, treasure and prestige, it is to be hoped that Washington will learn from recent experience, correct its course and adopt a world view more in accordance with a realist world view.
Who knew climate scientists and environmentalists were despots bent on taking over the world and killing hundreds of millions of people? Climate change “sceptics”, that’s who!
Vaclav Klaus, climate change denialist, president of the European Union and the Czech Republic:
“The environmentalists don’t want to change the climate. They want to change us and our behaviour,” he told the Heartland conference. “Their ambition is to control and manipulate us. Therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising they recommend preventing [climate change], not adaptive policies. Adaptation would be a voluntary behaviour.”
Environmentalism had replaced socialism as the totalitarian threat to freedom in the 21st century, he said.
“Environmentalists … do not want to reveal their true plans and ambitions: to stop economic development and return mankind centuries back.”
Threat to freedom! Wow.
Carter described the most powerful speaker [at the conference] as Arthur Robinson, a professor of chemistry and co-founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. In a wake-up call to Christian groups who have rushed to embrace climate alarmism, Robinson pointed out the world’s poor will bear the brunt of carbon prohibition policies.
He described as “technological genocide” efforts to deny cheap energy, in the form of coal-fired power plants, to the Third World. “Billions of people who live at the lowest level of human existence will suffer greatly from the rationing of energy, and this, in turn, will lead to the death of hundreds of millions.”
Banning the use of DDT for mosquito eradication was the first “example of genocide by the removal of technology, [resulting] in the deaths of 30 to 40 million people and [leaving] half a billion infected with malaria”.
A wake up call to Christian groups from someone who is - surprise! - not a climate scientist eh?
Just as well the poor farmers aren’t dependent on the climate for the livelihood I guess.
Too much crazy? No sir!
He also told to the conference, in excerpts posted on YouTube, “Most arguments about global warming boil down to science versus authority. For much of the public, authority will generally win, since they do not wish to deal with science … Those who are committed to warming alarm as either a vehicle for a post-modern coup d’etat or for illicit profits will obviously try to obfuscate matters.”
A “post-modern coup d’etat”! You couldn’t make this stuff up. Unless you were crazy. Which these guys apparently are.
Why were a bunch of crazies getting together to discuss conspiracy theories?
Well, it turns out that 2000 actual experts were meeting and the news is rather grim (NY Times):
At the opening of yesterday’s session, Lord Nicholas Stern, former chief economist for the World Bank, added his own dose of gloom by saying that his now-famous report on the risks of global warming, written for the British government in 2006, had underestimated them. “The reason is that emissions are growing faster than we thought, the absorption capacity of the planet is less than we thought, the probability of high temperatures is likely higher than we thought, and some of the effects are coming faster than we thought,” he explained
Yup, far from alarmism, the risks have been underestimated.
]]>Owen just said (over in the movies thread)...
Cordwainer Smith Ros? Wow! He is the King of Sci Fi IMO.
His stuff was an amazing dscussion of faith, the future of mankind, what it means to be human and morality spread over a couple of novels, a plethora of short stories and a future that spans millenia.
The development and dangers of space travel, genetic manipulation and life extension are but a small part of his huge and amazing universe!
He Da Man!
When did he write it Owen? Is it ‘space opera’ or Cyberpunk in space? Does it deal with cyber-space, downloading minds into computers, etc?
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