Monday, March 4, 2013

Scrolling around...March 4, 2013

Unmasking the Grim Reaper's foot soldiers: Cuomo, Obama, and the rest of the Push-button Baal worshipers
...And now that we've descended further down the rabbit hole of atheism and barbarity, the mask is coming off. New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo (Remember Andrew Cuomo-the youngest HUD secretary in history ) just recently bloviated about keeping people safe from imaginary "assault weapons," but then in a later speech advocated abortion almost without restriction. He repeated passionately, "It's her body, her choice!" — three times. Interestingly, this political tactic for manipulating the masses was recommended by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf: he said that the average person had a very short memory, so you must use pithy, catchy slogans and repeat them frequently. Hey, now we know why talk-show host Bob Grant dubbed Cuomo's father, a former NY governor, "Il Duce."

But Cuomo the Younger has plenty of company. When Barack Obama infected the Illinois Senate, he voted against the Born Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA) and inveighed against it on the Senate floor — on more than one occasion. And understand this law's purpose. It would sometimes happen that a baby was born alive during a botched abortion, and, well, a good contract killer always finishes the job. So these poor children would be left to die of exposure, perhaps in lonely, soiled storerooms. And BAIPA would have prohibited this. But Push-button Obama?...

Advanced breast cancer rising among women under 40, study finds ...Cases of advanced breast cancer among women younger than 40 have tripled in the U.S. over the last three decades, a trend that researchers said has “been increasing at a steady or even accelerating rate.”...
Only a few decades ago, breast cancer was known to be a grandmother’s disease. Because of abortion, it has become a young woman’s disease, and breast cancer rates have skyrocketed over 40% since the surgical procedure was legalized in the U.S. in 1973.

Albert Mohler: Adultery: When Law and Morality (used to) Agree
...Throughout most of human history, morality and law were united and in agreement when it came to the reality of adultery and the larger context of sexual immorality. Laws criminalizing adultery were adopted because the society believed that marriage was central to its own existence and flourishing, and that adultery represented a dagger struck at the heart of the society, as well as the heart of marriage.

Marriage was not considered merely a private arrangement. Every society regulates marriage, and most have adopted clear and punitive sanctions against adultery. But the moral and cultural revolutions of the past several decades have shifted the meaning of marriage from a public institution to a private contract...

Leaders of Courageous Character: Why They're Needed but Lacking-- With Four Ways to Be One
...True leadership demands character. In ministry, that character has to be courageous character. My experience is that it is not celebrated enough and, to be honest, is sometimes lacking in ministry...

Reporters reveal how the Obama administration threatens and controls the media  As coverage of last week’s flare-up between Bob Woodward and the White House devolved into the granular parsing of words and implications and extrapolations and possible intent, the larger point was roundly missed: the increasing pressure that White House correspondents feel when dealing with the Obama administration — to follow their narrative, to be properly deferential (!), to react to push-back by politely sitting down and shutting up...   Drip by drip, the Obama administration has demonstrated its intolerance for dissent and its contempt for any who stray from the White House script
Barack Obama: The Man Behind the Mask

Obama DHS Purchases 2,700 Light-Armored Tanks to Go With Their 1.6 Billion Bullet Stockpile Why?

Obama: Children Do Not Need-and Have No Right to-Mothers
...The Justice Department presented its conclusions about parenthood in rebutting an argument made by proponents of Proposition 8 that the traditional two-parent family, led by both a mother and a father, was the ideal place, determined even by nature itself, to raise a child.

The Obama administration argues this is not true. It argues that children need neither a father nor a mother and that having two fathers or two mothers is just as good as having one of each...

The Legal Attack on Religious Liberty in America – Part 1  Part 2

The God of Silver Linings
...A telling scene: On Halloween, Tiffany and Pat meet at a diner, ostensibly to eat but in reality to connect, to try to figure each other out. But they arrive tense and feisty. Then the waitress shows up: she’s dressed in costume. As a devil. Her pen is a pitchfork.

It is a brilliant scene for how much it simultaneously conveys. It is ironic, cruel and funny. For the waitress, the devil is garb to mark a holiday. But her insouciance only highlights how serious a matter the devil is: In the glare of Pat and Tiffany, we know the demonic is no costume. Evil lurks, both without and within. It may come as a disguise, but the disguise is a disguise. The movie’s irony makes it clear: Unless you’re vigilant, the devil will be right there, ready to take your order.

Much of the rest of the movie is a prolonged exorcism. It is about expelling demons.

Papal vote preparations start in earnest at Vatican
Preparations for electing Roman Catholicism's new leader begin in earnest on Monday as the College of Cardinals opens daily talks to sketch an identikit for the next pope and ponder who among them might fit it.

The idea is to have the new pope elected during next week and officially installed several days later so he can preside over the Holy Week ceremonies starting with Palm Sunday on March 24 and culminating in Easter the following Sunday...

With Passover Approaching, a Plague of Locusts Descends Upon Egypt   As if we hadn't already seen enough Biblical events this year, a plague of over 30 million locusts swarmed over Egypt's cities and farms just three weeks before Passover begins. But put your apocalyptic fears to rest. This happens every year as part of the locusts' natural migration pattern, though this year's swarm is especially large. That doesn't mean Egyptians aren't freaked the heck out by millions of nasty bugs buzzing through the air at all hours of day and night, possibly descending upon the agriculture fields where they're known to destroy entire crops, just like in the actual Passover story.

The crops are so far safe, Egyptian officials assured the public. As the plague made its way from the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia at the end of last week and this weekend, though, Egyptian Agricultural Minister Salah Abdel Moamen explained the situation to the country in a calmly worded statement. "The current inspection teams at areas targeted by locusts did not witness swarms damaging a single inch of crop," said Moamen. He added that the locusts are "sexually immature and do not depend on plants for energy since they mainly rely on fat stores."...

Most Reverend Nicholas Okoh: Our stand against same sex marriage stands

by Sylvester Okoruwa
Monday, 04 March 2013

THE Anglican Metropolitan Archbishop and Primate of Nigeria, Most Reverend Nicholas Okoh, has declared that there is no going back by the Anglican Church of Nigeria on its opposition to same sex marriages.

He spoke at the consecration of three new Anglican bishops last Sunday, at the Cathedral of St. Jude, Ebute- Metta, Lagos State.

He said that no amount of pressure from any quarter could sway the church on the controversial issue, which he emphasised, was against the scripture.

Okoh warned people to be wary of ongoing campaigns by promoters of the practice which was now in vogue among Anglican priests and others in Europe, stressing that the practice specifically contravened the law of marriage as instituted by God.

He also said such sustained campaign in the United States, Europe and some political forces in Nigeria to force “us to accept and approve same sex marriage” was misplaced. the rest
“We are proud to say we stand by our belief in the true word of God, as we will never be part of such unholy practice presently destroying the Church of God in Europe,” Ukoh said.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Scrolling around...March 3, 2013

The Floodgates Open: More Accounts of White House Thuggery Emerge  In the wake of last week's brouhaha between journalistic legend Bob Woodward and the Obama White House, other reporters have come forward to talk about their own experiences with the controlling and sometimes abusive administration...


Will 3D Printing Change the World?

'The Bible' Actor Diogo Morgado: How Can You Play the Son of God? You Can't
...Morgado, who grew up in Portugal, described his homeland as a religious country. He said he was not only challenged by the role, but was humbled at being selected for the part. "How can you play the Son of God? You can't," he told the crowd. "What I had the privilege of playing was simply the words of Christ and taking the journey of the scriptures."...
The 10-hour, 5-part TV miniseries "The Bible" will premiere tonight on the History Channel at 8/7c.

File:Studion.jpg
Turkey: Famous fifth-century monastery to be turned into a mosque  More indication of the rapid Islamization of Turkey. It is noteworthy also that none of the world's "human rights" organizations seem concerned about this, or the worsening plight of the remaining tiny Christian minority in Turkey, at all...
 Byzantine miniature depicting the Stoudios Monastery (c.1000)

Albert Mohler: The Christian Leader in the Digital Age
The Digital Age is upon us. In the span of less than three decades, we have redefined the way humans communicate, entertain, inform, research, create, and connect – and what we know now is only a hint of what is to come. But the greatest concern of the church is not a technological imperative, but a Gospel imperative.

The digital world did not exist a generation ago, and now it is a fundamental fact of life. The world spawned by the personal computer, the Internet, social media, and the smart phone now constitutes the greatest arena of public discussion and debate the world has ever known.

Leaders who talk about the real world as opposed to the digital world are making a mistake, a category error. While we are right to prioritize real face-to-face conversations and to find comfort and grounding in stable authorities like the printed book, the digital world is itself a real world, just real in a different way...

Australia: Ethicists Argue in Favor of ‘After-Birth Abortions’ as Newborns ‘Are Not Persons’
Alberto Giubilini with Monash University in Melbourne and Francesca Minerva at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne write that in “circumstances occur[ing] after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.”

The two are quick to note that they prefer the term “after-birth abortion” as opposed to “infanticide.” Why? Because it “[emphasizes] that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child.”...

Sowell: Shepherds and Sheep
...Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us.

Yes, we all make mistakes. But do governments not make bigger and more catastrophic mistakes?

Think about the First World War, from which nations on both sides ended up worse off than before, after an unprecedented carnage that killed substantial fractions of whole younger generations and left millions starving amid the rubble of war.

Think about the Holocaust, and about other government slaughters of even more millions of innocent men, women and children under Communist governments in the Soviet Union and China.

Even in the United States, government policies in the 1930s led to crops being plowed under, thousands of little pigs being slaughtered and buried, and milk being poured down sewers, at a time when many Americans were suffering from hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition...

Bloomberg booed at annual St. Patrick’s Parade in storm-ravaged Rockaways
Mayor Bloomberg was booed yesterday as he walked in the annual St. Patrick’s Parade in the hurricane-ravaged Rockaways.

The jeers grew so loud toward the end of the Queens parade that mayoral candidate and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn appeared to break away from the mayor to march separately....

Botched Late-Term Abortion Lands 14th Woman in Hospital Since 2008
“Today’s incident further emphasizes the dangers of late-term abortions that are being done in inadequately equipped outpatient clinics without proper monitoring by abortionists who have a long history of injuring women,” said Cheryl Sullenger, Senior Policy Advisor for Operation Rescue. “Late-term abortions are too dangerous to tolerate and it is past time to pass legislation that will ban this barbaric procedure for good.”

About Paul Ehrlich and ‘The Most Spectacularly Wrong Book Ever Written’
...Certainly, Ehrlich’s book was “spectacularly wrong,” and he was a ubiquitous media presence in the late 1960s and ’70s, appearing repeatedly as a guest on The Tonight Show, among other high-profile venues. However, Jonathan Last is incorrect to say that “one guy, Paul Ehrlich” was responsible for all this disinformation about demographics.

No, ultimately, that “one guy” is John D. (David) Rockfeller III, who became obsessed with neo-Malthusian worries about overpopulation in the 1930s. Ehrlich was merely one of the chief propagandists who helped popularize bad ideas Rockefeller promoted for decades...

Friday, March 1, 2013

For a spiritual life...

For a spiritual life is simply a life in which all that we do comes from the centre, where we are anchored in God: a life soaked through and through by a sense of His reality and claim, and self-given to the great movement of His will.
  ...Evelyn Underhill  image

'The Bible' – This Time, Hollywood Got It Right


By Geoff Tunnicliffe
February 28, 2013

Excerpt:
Burnett and his wife have produced a mini-series that is not only "not disappointing," but actually rises to the top of the "Wow" scale. Attempting to take on the whole Bible in 10 hours is pretty much an impossible task for just about anyone, but apparently not for the Burnetts. They really have produced something of epic proportions.

Over the last 3 1/2 years, Mark and Roma have been driven by the singular vision of producing a project that would honor the sacred text, yet bring it to life for a new generation. The end result is something that has the feel of a $150 million big budget film.

A half year of filming in Morocco, hundreds of extras, an Oscar-winning editing studio and a score that brought back together for the first time after "Gladiator" the incredible Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerard – all this helped to bring the Bible to screen like no other film in history. The cast made up of gifted actors coming from across the world reflects the global influence of the Bible – a Samson from the African diaspora, an Irish David, and a Portuguese Jesus, just to name a few. the rest

 Following its March 3 premiere, remaining episodes of "The Bible" will air each Sunday with the finale arriving on Easter Sunday, March 31.

Scrolling around...March 1, 2013

“Ratzinger slept well and will spend today praying”
All is quiet in Castel Gandolfo today as the Pope spends the day resting and praying. The date of the Conclave is yet to be announced...

Comet Siding Spring. (Image from nasa.org / Spitzer Space Telescope)
Rush to Mars: Comet impact could make Red Planet inhabitable
...However the comet’s trajectory is still uncertain, which leaves a small chance it could impact the planet, said Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin, who worked on calculating the course of the celestial body. The comet will be travelling at a speed of 56 kilometers per second relative to Mars when it passes; if they do collide, the resulting explosion would be equal to a 20,000-gigaton bomb blast – powerful enough to leave a 50-kilometer crater on the planetary surface...

Florida College Says Christian Group Can’t Have Christian Leaders
Rollins College has determined that a Christian student organization is in violation of the school’s nondiscrimination policy because the group requires its leaders to be followers of Christ...

Bishop enforces Catholic doctrine; press goes, ‘Wha …?’
...Clearly what the bishop is doing is supporting Vatican efforts to teach the doctrine that the church already has. Also note that, under Catholic law, these schools are under the direct authority of the bishop. That’s important in a hierarchical church that, to be blunt, is not a democracy. Journalists struggle to grasp that fact.

So this bishop wants his teachers to agree to defend or, I would imagine, to stop attacking the teachings of the Catholic Church...

Egypt: Muslims firebomb church demanding Christian convert

You Are Not a Religion
In Habits of the Heart, written almost thirty years ago, sociologist Robert Bellah and his co-authors came up with a term to describe a new American religion: “Sheilaism.” The phrase comes from an interview Bellah conducted with a woman called Sheila, who described her religion as follows:
I believe in God. I am not a fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice. . . . My own Sheilaism . . . is just to try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other.
Religious Change in the Middle East
...At the same time that traditional Christian populations are being driven out, Muslims are converting to Christianity at what missionaries and other Church leaders describe as an unprecedented rate. Joel Rosenberg claims that “more Muslims are coming to faith in Jesus Christ today than at any other time in history.”

An Iranian dissident told Rosenberg that there may be as many as 4.5 million converts in Iran. New Testaments and other Christian literature have flooded Iran, and Iraqi pastors cannot keep up with the demand for Christian books and pamphlets. Out of the carnage of Sudan, as many as a million have become Christians since 2000. By 2005, there were reportedly 100,000 Christian converts in Saudi Arabia. Because of vicious persecution, it is impossible to tell how many Christians there are in Afghanistan, but some have estimated as many as 20-30,000, and there is a similar number in Uzbekistan, a country that twenty-five years ago had only a handful of believers. Accurate numbers are difficult to find and more difficult to confirm, but even if these are inflated, there’s little doubt that something remarkable is happening...


Doors close at Castel Gandolfo, Sede Vacante period begins

Elizabeth Scalia; Benedict’s Lessons for Americans
There was a striking sense of puzzlement amid American coverage of Benedict XVI's last day as pope. Even as they tried to capture every move and softly spoken word, media pronouncements contained a note of inexplicability, like punctuation marks strewn within the margins of a book. Behind their questions lay a sense of real confusion. Was this for real? Did anyone believe a man would remove himself from a throne to simply disappear from sight? He's going to still publish and speak … right?
Pope Benedict has pretty consistently confounded the press. When the shy, professorial man with the awkward body language did not align in any way with the "rottweiler" caricatures they assigned. Most media folk adapted to that reality with the more mature among them even admitted that Ratzinger's nature was more pastoral than expected....

Obama urges court to overturn gay marriage ban
...The Obama administration’s friend-of-the-court brief marked the first time a U.S. president has urged the high court to expand the right of gays and lesbians to wed. The filing unequivocally calls on the justices to strike down California’s Proposition 8 ballot measure, although it stops short of the soaring rhetoric on marriage equality Obama expressed in his inaugural address in January...

End of the Mainline
...More likely, the NCC’s move from New York to Capitol Hill will divorce it even further from most of its church constituents and presage its eventual, quiet death. The arc of the NCC’s story showcases the rise and fall of liberal Protestantism in America. It’s a sad tale but also instructive for the more robust churches of today.

Marc Andrus: The Episcopal Church’s gay rights pilgrimage

02/28/2013
By Marc Handley Andrus

Excerpt:
First, The Episcopal Church has always seen itself as existing in our culture, not outside or above or in opposition to our culture. For over a century, Episcopalians look to the model of Christ transforming culture, rather than, say, Christ against culture. Even the idea of Christ transforming culture has evolved, so today many Episcopalians look for the divine at work far beyond the reaches of our church buildings, and beyond those who identify as Episcopalians or even as Christians.

On marriage equality, our church has traveled on pilgrimage with our culture. Sometimes we have led in advocacy for marriage equality, and sometimes we have learned from the culture and from leaders outside the church. We have developed rites for blessing and marriage for all, and we have extended the support of the church to LGBT people in the form of premarital counseling and the integration of same-sex couples into loving communities of faith. The historic social prominence of The Episcopal Church lays some extra responsibility on us to use our influence for good. Thus we have advocated with courts and lawmakers at every level of government to promote marriage equality.

What about the charge that we have thrown away tradition? Over and over I’ve heard people jokingly (mostly) call our church, “Catholic light,” and claim (this, almost always derogatorily) that The Episcopal Church has no clear moral standards. It is easy for such a church, the argument goes, to irresponsibly accept culturally-led innovations like marriage equality.

The second thing about Episcopalians and marriage equality, then, that is important to say at this moment is that we are a church that believes Christ continues to be with the world, moving with us, helping us find meaning in moments of joy and also loss and pain. The Christ whom we recognize is the one who speaks in John’s Gospel, saying, “There are many things I would teach you but you cannot bear them now … the Sprit will lead you into all truth.” For Episcopalians, tradition is a moving force that is not only dynamic but that changes quality over time, and we might liken the change to be one of more light being cast into the world.

We overturned nearly two millennia of set tradition when we began ordaining women 34 years ago. We repudiated the traditional tolerance of slavery and racial prejudice in the mid-20th century. We traded our cultural privilege and hegemony as a largely Anglo denomination for the wealthy and have deliberately become more and more consciously a church for all. In all these things we have prayed and thought and been in earnest conversation in and out of the church, and believed that in the end we have discerned better the mind of Christ than we had in the past. the rest

Charges of TEC-Related Fraud and Bribery Filed Re: Election of Tanzanian Primate
The general synod of the Anglican Province of Tanzania held an election on Saturday to select a primate, and now a complaint has been filed with the provincial House of Bishops to suspend the results of the election pending an investigation into charges of fraud and bribery.

Elected by just three votes on the third ballot was Bishop Jacob Chimeledya, a graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary—but the total number of votes cast in the election was four more than the number of clergy and laity present and voting.

The runner-up was the existing primate of Tanzania, Archbishop Valentino Mokiwa, who had been serving since 2007, and who was eligible for one more five-year term.

The complaint asks the House to annul the election, and to remove from their offices the synod’s General Secretary, Dr. Dickson Chilongani, and its Registrar, Prof. Palamagamba Kabudi. It alleges that the election had been rigged by means of “walking around” money to the tune of $50,000, spread among those who voted for +Chimeledya, and that the money came from a source within the Episcopal Church (USA)...

A.S. Haley: Hostilities in South Carolina Postponed for the Nonce
The initial skirmishes in the litigation between Bishop Mark Lawrence's Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina and the Episcopal Church (USA) have been postponed to yet another day. ECUSA had been due to respond to the Diocese's complaint for declaratory relief on March 4. But the Diocese recently amended its complaint to add three new plaintiff parishes and one new defendant, the ersatz "Episcopal Church in South Carolina.

An amendment of a complaint automatically gives the defendants another period in which to respond. So ECUSA's (and its remnant group's) responses will now (by agreement, in exchange for ECUSA's stipulating to the amendment) be due on April 4.

Meanwhile, buried in an ENS story about the meeting of the Executive Council recently in Linthicum Heights, Maryland was this tidbit:
In other plenary business Feb. 26, council:
* authorized a $250,000 line of credit for the Episcopal Church in South Carolina.
Now, this is an interesting number. If the "Episcopal Church in South Carolina" is prepared to concede the legal issues in the Diocese's complaint (chiefly, the rights to the Diocese's name and identity, and the rights of the individual parishes to their own properties), then two hundred and fifty thousand dollars is not necessary for such a purpose. Five thousand dollars (even at the "discounted" rates charged to the Church by the Chancellor's own law firm) would be more than ample with which to concede the merits of the Diocese's lawsuit...