Hi, Beloved Readers.
My internet is down. Happily managed to get onto a hub loaned to me.
Problem still remains for Tuesday but hopefully may be repaired by Wednesday.
Blessings,
Blogger.
Monday, May 31, 2021
RC Lowering Standards?
Boris Johnson wedding: How did Prime Minister marry Carrie Symonds in a Catholic church?
In order to marry in a Catholic church, Mr Johnson could have had his two previous marriages recognised as annulled
Boris Johnson's wedding to Carrie Symonds was kept so secret that even some of the most senior Downing Street aides were reportedly unaware they were going to get married so soon.
The couple announced their engagement - together with the news that they were expecting their first child - in February last year.
They have now exchanged vows in Westminster Cathedral in front of a small group of close friends and family. Downing Street falls within the cathedral's parish.
Ms Symonds has previously talked about her Catholic faith on social media.
But how did Mr Johnson, who has now married three times, manage to have a wedding in a Catholic church?
Mr Johnson renounced his mother’s Catholicism when he was confirmed in the Anglican faith whilst at Eton, according to a biography of the Prime Minister.
In order to marry in a Catholic church, Mr Johnson could have had his two previous marriages recognised as annulled.
Alternatively, sources speculated that because he was baptised a Catholic, by not participating in Catholic ceremonies in his previous marriages, for which he would have required special dispensation from the Catholic church, those marriages would have "had a lack of canonical form" and could therefore be considered invalid.
Mr Johnson becomes the first Prime Minister to marry in office since Lord Liverpool wed for a second time in 1822. DT.
Out In Four Years? Justice?
Burglar jailed after stabbing pensioner multiple times before being caught by police covered in his blood.
Andrew Bowering, 26, broke into the terrace house in Croft Street, Willenhall, in the early hours of 27 December last year.
A burglar has been jailed after stabbing a pensioner multiple times before being caught by police in the man’s home covered in his blood.
Andrew Bowering, 26, broke into the terrace house in Croft Street, Willenhall, in the early hours of 27 December last year.
He carried a TV into the garden and returned to the home where he began to rummage through the drawer.
The 82-year-old was woken up and confronted Bowering, who stabbed him three times in the legs and once in the head.
Neighbours alerted police who heard shouts and Bowering saying: “Where are your car keys. Do you want me to stab you?”
Officers arrived within minutes and found the 26-year-old stripped from the waist down and wearing a bloodied T-shirt.
Bowering undressed and tried to claim he was the victim’s grandson, the police said.
Police said Bowering - who was on a prison release licence having been jailed for a shop raid − later admitted wounding and aggravated burglary.
He was jailed for nine years at Wolverhampton Crown Court on 27 May. AOL.
SACK THE JUDGE! Evil must be challenged!
Sunday, May 30, 2021
Criminalise CT and The Pulpit Is Next!
Once conversion therapy is criminalised, the pulpit will be next.
(Photo: Unsplash)The government clearly thinks banning 'gay conversion therapy' is a vote winner and at present they may be right.
Asked by a pollster in the street if they think 'conversion therapy' should be banned, most British people would agree because they would associate it with coercive abuse. The image of a 1950s gay man strapped to a chair and being given electric shocks by a man in a white coat would tend to spring to mind.
But public perceptions may change if opponents of the ban make a persuasive case that, in a democratic country, adult individuals who choose responsible professional counselling to help them reorient their unwanted same-sex attraction should be free to do so.
In that case, the government may not find this the vote-winner they think it is. Besides, if raging inflation hits the UK in the economic fall-out from the lockdown, voters' minds will be a long way from the culture war.
This issue, however, is much more significant for British Christianity than for secular society. In British churches, the issue presents the clear dividing line between Christians who want to uphold the traditional, biblical ethic that the expression of sexual love should be confined to heterosexual marriage, and prominent church leaders who want to ditch it.
Baptist minister Rev Steve Chalke, a leading campaigner against the traditional Christian sexual ethic, wants the government to take a hard line in the proposed legislation.
In response to the government's announcement, he tweeted: "For the record, I'm a church leader. I believe in 'religious freedom'. It is a basic human right. But it does not include the right to attempt to suppress or change another person's sexuality or gender orientation. The govt's proposed #BanConversionTherapy must clarify that."
Does this mean that Rev Chalke would therefore like to see a Christian parent criminalised for advising their son or daughter not to engage in pre-marital sex or for advising him or her not to go down the path of a sex change?
Leading LGBT campaigner, Jayne Ozanne, a member of the Church of England's governing body, its General Synod, is on the same page as Rev Chalke.
Ms Ozanne, who resigned as a government LGBT adviser in March, tweeted on Tuesday after the ban was announced in the Queen's Speech to Parliament: "I am relieved to hear that measures will be brought forward to ban 'conversion therapy'.
"However, the government risks creating a loophole if it chooses to focus on purely 'coercive practices'.
"Most LGBT people in religious settings feel it is their duty to submit to those in authority & will therefore willingly follow their leaders' 'advice' even if it causes them great harm."
So, it would seem, she wants to criminalise a church minister who in pastoral counselling gently and lovingly communicates the biblical reasons for upholding the Christian sexual ethic and agrees to pray with a person that he or she would be given grace to walk in the Lord's commandments in the face of the temptation they are experiencing.
Ms Ozanne has described her own experience of conversion therapy in an interview on Tuesday with The Daily Mail. 'Scarred by the gay conversion zealots: Electrocuted, exorcised, and beaten. As a new law is unveiled to outlaw barbaric 'therapy' to make gay people straight, four victims bravely tell of their experiences,' the headline declared.
Assaulting people is already illegal in the UK. The prayer leader at the Christian conference in 2000 who told Ms Ozanne, then aged 32, to 'vomit the evil out of her' and provided a bucket for the purpose may not have been breaking the law as it stood then but he was grossly unfit to be giving pastoral advice.
Is it proportionate to criminalise incompetent pastoral advice given by one adult to another?
What about other sorts of counselling that can harm people, such as advising them to divorce their spouse or to have an abortion or to have a sex change? Criminalising that kind of counselling does not seem to be on the government's agenda. Why not? Because abortion, divorce, and 'gender transition' are protected practices according to politically correct doctrine.
If the LGBT lobby wins the battle to get conversion therapy criminalised, it is clear what their next target will be – public Christian preaching. Campaigners like Jayne Ozanne and Steve Chalke regard the public proclamation of the traditional sexual ethic as abusive to LGBT people. They would therefore be emboldened to campaign for such preaching to be banned if they win this battle.
So, British Christians seeking faithfully, lovingly and humbly to uphold the traditional Christian sexual ethic, both in public proclamation and in daily discipleship, would be wise to prepare for that next spiritual battle ahead.
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Morecambe, Lancashire.
I Feel Sick To The Stomach.
Pelosi praises Vatican letter on communion for pro-abortion politicians
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a Roman Catholic, has rejected calls from Catholic bishops to refrain from communion due to her support for abortion, asserting that she can use her “own judgment” when assessing her worthiness for the Eucharist.
Learn Gender-Neutral Pronouns. (It really is more fun than you might think!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=IzNGkwGYE4E
Saturday, May 29, 2021
Soviet-Style Brainwashing In Full Swing.
The murderous doctrine of moral equivalence.
It’s not enough for politicians to promise support to a Jewish community under siege
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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his counterpart, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, visited Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week to offer help in building on the ceasefire with Hamas.
Both Blinken and Raab declared themselves committed to Israel’s security. Both governments have also condemned the antisemitism running rampant in their countries.
These are vapid bromides. For neither the British government nor the Biden administration acknowledges that the war against Israel and the war against the Jewish diaspora form an indivisible line of bigotry, which they themselves unwittingly help maintain.
The tsunami of antisemitism continues to inundate the west. In America, antisemitic acts reportedly rose by 80 percent this month, and in Britain by at least 500 percent. More than 17,000 variations of “Hitler was right” have recently appeared on Twitter.
In Britain, after the actors’ union Equity called on its members to join last Saturday’s anti-Israel march in London at which demonstrators burned Israeli flags and displayed antisemitic slogans, Jewish actors have said they are beginning to hide their Stars of David at auditions.
There are many non-Jews who are as horrified as they are bewildered by this evil that has overtaken their society. It is indeed astounding in its scope and scale.
For it is effectively a takeover of millions of western minds by Soviet-style brainwashing, in which the Palestinian perpetrators of murderous, exterminatory antisemitism are regarded as oppressed and dispossessed while their Israeli victims are labeled Nazi oppressors — and diaspora Jews are accused of backing “pogroms” in “Palestine”.
This madness urgently needs to be fought by those who help make the cultural weather. It’s not enough for politicians to promise support to a Jewish community that’s under siege. They need to call out the broadcasters and newspapers peddling Palestinian propaganda and incitement in the guise of journalism.
They need to tell people that Israel stands for law, justice and human rights while the Palestinians stand for their negation.
They need to tell people about the Palestinians’ Nazi-style antisemitism, about how they teach their children to hate Jews and steal their land, and about how the two-state solution forms part of their “strategy of stages” to destroy Israel altogether.
Most people have no idea about any of this. Because they never hear these truths being told, they believe that the Palestinians are helpless and Israel behaves badly. So the Israel-haters get a free pass for their lies.
That’s why the British and American governments need to say that this obscene agenda is what’s driving the upsurge in antisemitism.
Alas, they persist instead with a doctrine of moral equivalence, which itself perpetuates the falsehoods and helps empower and incentivise Palestinian aggression.
Thus, Dominic Raab urged an end to the “cycle of violence” via a two-state solution. But there is no “cycle of violence” in which both sides are culpable. There is instead a permanent Palestinian war of annihilation against Israel, which seeks to defend itself against such attack.
President Joe Biden was correct when he said “you’re not going to get peace until Israel is recognised as an independent Jewish state.” But although he may be well disposed towards Israel, his administration most certainly is not.
Thus, Blinken said the ceasefire must be used to address “underlying issues and challenges” beginning with the “grave” humanitarian situation in Gaza. Surely, he should begin instead with the gravest of all underlying issues — the Palestinians’ Jew-hatred and their strategy for destroying Israel?
America would rebuild relations with the Palestinians, he said, by re-opening a consulate in Jerusalem and giving millions in aid to help reconstruct Gaza.
But why is America rebuilding relations with a Palestinian Authority led by a man who venerates Hitler’s genocidal ally in the Middle East, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and which teaches Palestinian children to hate and murder Jews and steal their land?
And given that in supposedly destitute Gaza Hamas had constructed some 300 miles of underground military tunnels and fired more than 4,000 rockets at Israel, it is beyond absurd for Blinken to claim that the United States can somehow prevent future aid from being used for the same infernal ends.
At the core of Blinken’s whole approach is a rotten moral equivalence, illustrated by his lumping together Palestinian and Israeli casualties sustained in this month’s Gaza hostilities.
The Palestinian casualties — of which Israel says the vast majority were combatants —were caused entirely by Hamas aggression; the Israeli casualties were all the victims of that aggression. To draw an equivalence between the two is to diminish victimhood and sanitise aggression.
The seamless link between antisemitism and this morally bankrupt attitude towards the war against Israel has yet still wider implications.
For moral equivalence is also claimed between antisemitism and Islamophobia —illustrated by the Democratic Party only feeling able to condemn antisemitism by also condemning Islamophobia — and which results in those calling out Muslim antisemitism being denounced as “Islamophobes”.
The pernicious results of this moral confusion were recently demonstrated by an incident at a high school in the British city of Leeds.
The police were called to protect its head teacher, Mike Roper, after he said that the Palestinian flag was perceived by some as “a call to arms”. This resulted in protests at the school gates against Roper’s “racism” and “blatant Islamophobia”.
But Roper hadn’t criticised the Palestinians’ flag or their cause. He merely observed that some people viewed that flag and cause as a message of support for antisemitism and a call to arms against Jews, which he said it was never intended to be.
Roper was forced to grovel over something he didn’t even say. But the irony was that what he was falsely accused of saying was more true than what he did say.
For Palestinianism is indeed profoundly anti-Jewish. It’s not just predicated on the destruction of the State of Israel, but also on erasing the Jewish claim to the land.
It seeks to hijack and appropriate Jewish history to construct an artificial Palestinian identity. And it does this through ludicrous claims that the Palestinians, not the Jews, are the indigenous people of the land; through vandalising and stealing artefacts dating from the ancient kingdom of Israel unearthed on archaeological sites; and through denouncing Zionism — or Jewish self-determination — as racism.
Yet in the wake of the Leeds school debacle, the Muslim Council of Britain is now demanding a “safe space” in schools for this Palestinian narrative, which negates Jewish history and drives antisemitism.
Even more tellingly Irfan Chishti, an imam who works for the British government’s task force on tackling extremism, was filmed at a demonstration in Rochdale telling cheering crowds that non-Muslims at Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque were “vile human beings” who were “desecrating” it.
Under Muslim rule, he said, Palestine had been peaceful, but Israel was a “terrorist state forcing terror upon our brothers and sisters”. He then asked “where is the modern-day Saladin,” as he called for those in the crowd who wanted to become mujahideen (“holy warriors”), and praised shahids (“martyrs”) who had “given their life for Palestine”.
The government has said his comments were “completely unacceptable” and that it will “take appropriate action”. Well, the only appropriate action is surely prosecution under Britain’s laws against incitement and support for terrorism. Are ministers really going to thus expose the hole at the heart of their strategy against Islamic extremism— the one signposted “Muslim antisemitism and support for Palestine”? This seems exceedingly unlikely.
Given all this, the chances of the British or American governments saying what needs to be said to counter the narrative of incitement and lies against the Jewish people, now running so strongly through their Muslim communities and their “progressive” echo chamber, are precisely nil.
Arms Embargo On Burma?
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Hi, Dave |
So - What About Someone Like Me?
Blaze: An Oregon eighth-grade teacher was recorded on a Zoom video session warning fellow teachers they will be "fired" if they don't "come to the light" and become "anti-racist."What are the details?Katherine Watkins — a humanities teacher at Cedar Park Middle School in the Beaverton School District — was decked out in what appeared ... Read more
Blogger: as a Christian, I am 'colour blind'. I have valued friends of different colours; I have friends of colour who are former pupils; I oppose racism whenever I meet it. I believe in equality.
So. By any sane definition, I am anti-racist.
However, I will not kowtow to the excesses of leftist anti-racists whose agenda is either woke, marxist or both.
I will not 'take any sort of knee' to make politicised gestures.
On our heavily overcrowded islands, I believe in minimum numbers of migrants but say this about all colours.
I believe neither in quotas, special treatment nor so-called equality of outcome which is no sort of equality at all.
Conclusion - I would have to be classed as 'a racist' who must be sacked!
Wot: Only Car Insurance?
Car insurance companies banned from 'loyalty penalty': Old customers can't be charged more.
DRIVERS may be able to renew their car and home insurance for cheaper than before, the UK financial watchdog has said. This is due to new rules banning a "loyalty penalty" on insurance.
Friday, May 28, 2021
Labour - The Really Nasty Party.
Labour:
LABOUR'S DOMESTIC POLICY‘Abuse victims should shut their mouths for the good of diversity.’ Anyone remember when Muslim Labour MP, Naz Shah retweeted and ‘liked’ a tweet about girls being raped and groomed by Pakistani grooming gangs?
Voters do.
Voters do.
Anyone remember when Keir Starmer, Lord Adonis and hundreds of Labour MP’s spent three years using every trick possible trying to overturn Brexit? (A vote which in some part was about mass immigration.)
Voters do.
Voters do.
Anyone remember when Keir Starmer and deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner ‘took a knee’ for Black Lives Matter – one of whom had just set fire to the Union Jack on the Cenotaph?
Voters do.
Voters do.
Anyone remember when Lady Nugee, otherwise known as Emily Thornberry, one of Labour’s most prominent front bench members, sneered at ‘White Van man with his St George’s flag hanging outside his modest, modern terrace house?
Voters do.
Voters do.
Pages have been written over the last couple of days analysing why Labour lost not only Hartlepool but over two hundred local election seats to the Conservatives.
Voters are not stupid. They might not read a lot about politics, they might not watch that much news and they might not always vote but they have eyes and ears and they instinctively feel things – and what they instinctively feel is that the Labour party not only does not care about them, but that many actively hate them.
The comments in the Guardian give you a good idea of left wing, Labour thinking. After the result in Hartlepool, the comments were as expected: working class morons who voted Conservative are ‘Gammons’, ‘Stupid’, ‘Ignorant’, ‘Fools’, ‘Racist’, ‘Brexiteers’, or just plain wrong. Comment after comment went on in this abusive vein.
How could the poor, ignorant uneducated white oafs of Hartlepool,(and all the other ‘Red Wall towns’) think that the corrupt, sleezely Tories would help poor areas? Other commentators just said point blank that they did not understand.
Voters understand only too well: Labour represents everyone from anywhere in the world but them. It is not a matter of whether it is Jeremy Corbyn from the socialist / Marxist side of the party or Keir Starmer or Lord Adonis from the Blairite wing – the message is the same – poor, white, working class people do not matter.
It is much more than just being ‘woke’ and it is much more than only appearing to represent rich, urban Marxists and immigrants . Labour is now the morally superior, sneering party and no one wants to be sneered at.
Tories Must Not Let This Horror Succeed.
The Bill has been tabled by Baroness Burt, vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group (APPHG), with support from Humanists UK. It will not affect faith schools. Mail.
Derisory Sentencing for Such Evil! - He May Well Serve Less Than Half.
Thomas Mangar, 36, took the sickening photo on his mobile phone while the woman - who is in her 20s - lay naked and unconscious in Hitherbroom Park in Hayes, west London. Mail.
Blogger: surely a life sentence with a minimum of 25 years should have been applied! Judge Hannah Duncan should be considered for dismissal.
Bible-Verifying Brick.
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Thursday, May 27, 2021
More Persecution In China.
Christianity crackdown: China seizes priests in sick ‘brainwashing’ operation
CHINESE authorities have arrested seven priests and ten students after raiding a makeshift Christian seminary.
Obituary.
Image: Portrait by Ouria Tadmor / Edits by CT
Eilat Mazar, a nonreligious archaeologist who embraced the unfashionable idea of digging with a shovel in one hand and a Bible in the other, died Tuesday at 64.
In her five decades excavating the Holy Land, Mazar discovered the remains of a palace believed to belong to King David, a gate identified with King Solomon, a wall thought to have been built by Nehemiah, two clay seals that name the captors of the prophet Jeremiah, seals that name King Hezekiah, and a seal that may have belonged to the prophet Isaiah.
Once called the “queen of Jerusalem archaeology,” Mazar took the Bible seriously as a historical text and quarreled with scholars who thought it was unscientific to pay too much attention to Scripture.
“Look,” she told Christianity Today in 2011, “when I’m excavating Jerusalem, and when I’m excavating at the city of David, and when I’m excavating near the Kidron Valley and near the Gihon Spring and at the Ophel—these are all biblical terms. So it’s not like I’m here because it’s some anonymous place. This is Jerusalem, which we know best from the Bible.”
Mazar said she was not religious but would pore over the Bible, reading it repeatedly, “for it contains within it descriptions of genuine historical reality.”
Mazar sometimes literally took directions from the sacred text. In 1997, she wrote about how 2 Samuel 5:17 describes David going down from his palace to a fortification. Assuming that was an accurate description and looking at the topography of Jerusalem, she identified the place where David’s palace should be. In 2005, she was able to start excavation at the site, and almost immediately discovered evidence she was right—and so was the Book of Samuel.
“I [can’t] believe these archaeologists who ignore the Bible,” Mazar told CT. “To ignore the written sources, especially the Bible—I don’t believe any serious scholar anywhere would do this. It doesn't make any sense.”
Mazar was born in Israel in September 1956. She started going on digs at age 11, under the tutelage of her famous archaeologist grandfather, Benjamin Mazar.
The elder Mazar was a Jew born in Russia who studied archaeology in Germany before emigrating to what in 1929 was British-controlled Palestine. He became one of the founding fathers of modern Israel, and his excavation helped advance the idea that Israel was the Jewish homeland.
He involved his sons and as many of their children as he could recruit in his projects. In 1967, he started training the 11-year-old Eilat on the Temple Mount excavation, shortly after the site in Jerusalem’s old city was captured by Israel in the Six-Day War.
“It’s nice to touch your history,” she said.
Mazar earned a bachelor’s degree from Hebrew University in 1981 and went to work as a professional archaeologist. She had a brief marriage immediately after finishing her mandatory military service. It ended in divorce. She got remarried to archaeologist Yair Shoham. He died suddenly in 1997, at the age of 44. That same year, Mazar finished her doctorate at Hebrew University, writing a groundbreaking thesis on the biblical Phoenicians based on her excavation of a Phoenician site in northern Israel.
Critics said that Mazar sometimes made too much of her discoveries and was too quick to connect the things she unearthed to biblical stories. One scholar toldThe New York Times that Mazar was like someone who has a button and wants to call it a whole suit. Others said she was unduly influenced by a political agenda, and pointed out that her funding came from conservative, pro-Israeli sources.
Her fiercest critic was archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, who taught that David’s biblical kingdom was greatly exaggerated, probably no more than a hill-country village occupied by a tribal chief.
“You cannot study biblical archeology with only a simple reading of the text,” he said in 2006. “The Bible cannot be understood without a knowledge of the millennia of biblical criticism that has gone along with it. … The Bible is an important source, but we can’t take it seriously.”
Other authorities came to her defense, however. Hershel Shanks, the founding editor of Biblical Archaeology Review who frequently clashed with scholars, said Mazar’s approach was perfectly scientific. She started with a hypothesis from the Bible, and then tested it by digging.
What she found, by any measure, was remarkable. CT.
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