petermullen – Page 31 – All Things Considered

07 Jun

Ill Literacy

The Secretary of State for Educashun, Michael Gove, aims to “end illiteracy within a generation.” And when he’s finished doing that, he will abolish hatred and prejudice, present a cure for the common cold and make all people live in love and charity together. Then we shall all celebrate The Great and Notable Day of the Gove. I must say, I scratched my head when I heard Gove make that promise about ending illiteracy. He’s normally so intelligent and to the point and he has done more for schoolchildren than anyone since Robert Raikes (1736-1811). Gove is not given to making damn fool remarks, so why is he promising something which he can’t possibly provide? (You didn’t think I was going to say “deliver,” did you?)

And where will he choose to begin this soroptimistic project? He had better start with the teachers – and, while he’s at it, a great number of our “leading” commentators who write in the papers and talk on radio and TV. You know, people who say “begs the question” when they don’t mean ignoratio elenchi or petitio principii but only “asking the question.” They say “deteriate” and “mitigate against.” “Refute” when all they mean is “repudiate.” medical reports announce that the patient is “critical but stable” – when the meaning of “critical” is precisely that a thing is unstable. Then there are the worshippers of the spurious adverb, as in “actively seeking,” “communicate effectively” and sheer slang such as “going forward” for “in future.” The word “iconic” is used to describe a punk rocker or a television cook. “Crescendo” to mean “pinnacle of sound” when that word means a gradual increase in volume. They can’t pronounce “drawing” but have to put in an extra “r” – “drawring.” They start all their sentences with “So…” – so forgetting that nihil ex nihilo fit also has its grammatical context. And “centred around.” “pressurised” for “pressured.” “I was stood.” “I was sat.” “Disinterested” when they mean “uninterested.” “Run down council estate” for “council estate.” “Miniscule” for “minuscule.” “Burgalry.” “Decision-making process” for “deciding.” “Impact on” for “affect.” “Infamous” means that a thing is notoriously vile, abominable etc. Now it’s used in such as “the Liverpool striker’s infamous penalty miss.” “Trained marksman” – as if there were untrained ones! “Damage” becomes “negatively impact upon.” “Is comprised of” for “comprises.” “Murals on walls…”

Gove might like to start with the in-house journal of his profession, The Times Educational Supplement in which I saw an advertisement for someone to teach English in a “grammer school.”

04 Jun

Four legs good, two legs bad

In a wonderful act of selective self-censorship, the Church of England has banned the clergy from joining the British National Party and the National Front on the grounds that these parties are guilty of “the sin of racism.”

They really mean it!

Racism is one of the modern seven deadly sins along with sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, elitism, social-exclusion, global-warming denial and belonging to the Nasty Party. It’s reassuring to know that the bishops will not unfrock me if I join the Communist party, despite that party’s historic contributions to general impoverishment and genocides. Indeed, some Anglican clergymen of very high rank have been members of the Communist Party.

There was Hewlett Johnson (1874-1966) who was elevated to become Dean of Canterbury. He ought to have been shot as a traitor for his continued support for the USSR even after the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact had allied Russia with the Germans with whom we were at war. The Soviets regarded him as principal among the “useful idiots” along with G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. They awarded him the oxymoronically-named International Stalin Peace Prize in 1951.

It occurs to me that there are more pertinent allegiances which ought to earn the penalty of unfrocking: not believing the fundamental doctrines of the Church, for instance. Though I guess the bishops conjectured that this would reduce the number of the clergy by quite a lot – not excluding some of the present episcopate.

This latest act of ecclesiastical puerility and political-correctness only serves to make the Church look ridiculous and to show it up once again in its true colours. Actually, the Church of England has only one colour these days: red.

03 Jun

Die Fuhrerin

Of course it’s a damnable libel to suggest that Britain is ruled by the EU. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are still an independent sovereign nation and we govern ourselves. It’s just that we are bound by a Common Agricultural Policy which is against our national interest. We had to agree to have our fishing industry destroyed by EU diktat. We can do nothing to limit catastrophic numbers of economic migrants from other member states. Our financial institutions are ever more shackled by EU rules and burdened by tax rates set by the super-state. We are unable to deport foreign criminals and perceived enemies of the state. Every day there come fresh examples of EU interference in our national life: this morning alone it is reported that the EU is telling us to alter the way we administer the Council Tax and instructing us to raise taxes on high value property purchases.

But if you catalogue and criticise the countless ways in which we are under the EU’s control, you will be accused of a Little Englander mentality and of xenophobia. The truth is that all the decisions of importance about what goes on in our country are taken in Brussels and Strasbourg. It was always intended that way. The founders of the European project envisaged “ever greater political union” from the start. This is not a matter of opinion or a paranoid fantasy, but the reality: the architects of the EU made their intentions plain on numerous occasions and their words are well-documented. Interviewed in the British press and on our TV channels, EU statesmen and leaders never show the slightest reluctance to agree that this ever-closer union is their aim.

David Cameron is making a pretence just now of talking tough. He says that if the arch-federalist Jean-Claude Junckers is appointed President of the European Commission, Britain “might have to leave the EU.” I say he is making a pretence because he has no intention to lead us out of the EU. Dave is talking big because he and his party are severely startled by the success of UKIP in the recent elections. The reality is that we live in a federal Europe already, a Europe that is dominated, ruled and exploited by the Germans. What Bismarck in 1870, the Kaiser in 1914 and Hitler in 1939 were unable to effect by force of arms, Angela Merkel has achieved by economic muscle and uber-bureaucratisation. Germany exercises hegemony from the Baltic to the Atlantic seaboard.

Here is the news: David Cameron will not be able to take us out of the EU – because, put quite plainly, Frau Merkel won’t let him

01 Jun

Pre-emptive self-abasement

We – I mean the West – is going to die of political correctness and self-hatred. We are compassed about by identifiable enemies in the barbaric ideological cult of Islam which masquerades as “a great world religion” and “a religion of peace and love.” They have declared so many times that they want to kill us. The propaganda has it that the great majority of Muslims are peace-loving agreeable souls content to live in love and charity with their non-Muslim neighbours.

This is the great lie of our time.

On three continents Christians are being persecuted , dispossessed, tortured and murdered. Individual tear-jerking examples – of which our mass media is especially enamoured are beside the point. The slaughter of Christians and other non-Muslims by this barbarism is worldwide and increasing by the minute. Our governments are craven. Our Archbishops full of nothing but pre-emptive self-abasement. Welby says that all the Pakis he has met are outraged by the stoning to death of that woman outside the Lahore courtroom, with the lawyers, judges, officials and police looking on. Welby means to suggest by this that Muslims in that country, and by extension, worldwide detest such barbaric acts.

But they don’t. If they did, these acts would cease. Whereas, here is the truth: the Pakistani government admits that 969 women were stoned to death (or otherwise murdered) in “honour killings” last year alone. Informed opinion says that, if that is the number they admit to, the true number must be much higher. No one is ever prosecuted for these savage and murderous deeds. This could not happen in a country, Dr Welby, where the great majority of the people disapprove.

It’s no use getting angry with the Muslims: persecution, ritual slaughter and lying are what they do. But I do get angry with our so-called statesmen who pretend things are otherwise and our jelly-legged bishops and archbishops who make wanton excuses

We have a global enemy rampant, cruel, dissembling and remorseless.

Whatever happened to the Church Militant, Archbishop?

Arch – what?

29 May

The religion of peace and love – again

The Arch of Cant says he is “horrified” by the stoning to death of a Pakistani woman (by her friends and family) who had married a man of whom her relations disapproved. Justin Welby added, “And every Pakistani I have spoken to is also horrified.” What did he mean by that remark? Did he mean to suggest that no Pakistanis approve of stoning? Clearly, he had not spoken to the victim’s family and friends who so enthusiastically perpetrated this murderous atrocity – and especially not to her brother and father who, after the mob had done their worst, went in and (as reported by The Daily Telegraph) “finished her off.” Neither did Welby speak to any of the hundreds of lawyers inside the court near which the murder took place, and who might have intervened. Nor to the hundreds of bystanders who witnessed the stoning and were clearly not horrified enough to help the victim.

But we can guess what Welby intended to convey: that most Pakistanis – i.e. Muslims – were horrified by the stoning. I don’t believe that to be the case, otherwise these and similarly appalling events would not take place as often as they do. The awful truth is that while our Archbishops and Bishops have set up a useless everlasting talking shop with “moderate Muslims,” there is a very considerable faction in that country which, far from being horrified by such atrocities, is willing to condone them by inaction. We must assume tacit approval. Why else are churches burned down every day, individuals slaughtered for converting from Islam to Christianity; terrorised, tortured, mutilated and murdered for “blasphemy”?

Such appalling events would not be tolerated in a country in which the majority of the population disapproved them. Blood-soaked fundamentalist Islam, Sharia in practice, is alive and well – I mean alive and sick – throughout Pakistan. If, by his remark about so many being horrified, the Archbishop meant to play this down, to pretend that things are other than what we know them to be, then he is by implication an appeaser of those who commit such barbarous acts in the name of their religion.

28 May

The beauty of holiness

I can’t dispel the nasty taste produced by my reading the Church Commissioners’ Annual Report and particularly its description of what the church is up to in Liverpool. A project called “Zone 2” which features “cafe-style worship” for the poor on Sunday mornings while the rest of the Christians attend the regular Eucharist. The Commissioners say they aim to extend this Zone 2 stuff into other impoverished areas. Thus the poor will be impoverished yet further.

As I brooded on this travesty, I thought to myself that things don’t have to be like that, and indeed there was a time when they weren’t like that: a time when the poor were not patronised and singled-out for dumbed-down substitutes for religion, but were offered only the best. Throughout the 19th century, priests went into the slums, lived among the industrial poor and adorned and beautified their churches with lights, colours, music, incense and sound theological teaching. We can name names. First there was the Clapton Sect of High Churchmen, followed by the Guild of St Matthew and the Christian Social Union. The priests in the ritual movement conducted worship to the highest aesthetic standards – not out of any culture-vulturism but because they believed that all worship must be to the glory of God and to the edification of the people

There’s not much glory and no edification in Zone 2.

Standards in worship were maintained for the first two thirds of the 20th century too. I was brought up in a Leeds slum without benefit of cafe-style worship. The Parish Eucharist was celebrated according to The Book of Common Prayer and the musical setting was Merbecke, sung by the whole congregation, a hundred and fifty and more of us. Choral Evensong was also as set in the Prayer Book with readings from The King James Bible, with fifty attending. None of our priests presumed to offer us something trashy just because we were poor. I suppose we churchgoing slum-dwellers of the 1950s would be regarded as “elitists” by the present shambolic regime.

The rot started in the 1960s with the first of the modern services and the proliferation of new hymns and songs of stultifying banality. Merbecke was dropped in favour of Lloyd-Webberish musical clowning which recognised no chordal progressions beyond tonic-dominant-subdominant. The disastrous invention of the General Synod in 1970 and parliament’s abdication of its control over forms of worship ensured the triumph of trash. And now in so many churches there prevails a new tradition – one of intellectual and aesthetic bankruptcy

The fact that some people are poor doesn’t mean that they are also stupid and incapable of an appreciation of beauty and the finest things, along with a response to the articulate teaching of the truth. It is beyond demeaning, it is shameful to patronise those who are materially poor and to deprive them of the best things of the mind and heart.

“Or which you, having a son which asketh for bread shall give him a stone?”

27 May

Saving the planet by killing its people

I am grateful to Google for so helpfully telling me which persons I should revere. This morning when I switched on, I was informed that today is the 107th anniversary of the birth of Rachel Louise Carson who wrote the book Silent Spring. This book proved to be a sensational success and its publication, more than any other single factor, created the environmentalist movement. It became trendy – even holy – to be Green. Carson argued that the use of pesticides was profoundly deleterious to animal life. Particularly, if the world continued its widespread use of DDT, the wild creatures would be killed off and we should enter the silent spring of her book’s emotive title.

The consequences of discontinuing the use of DDT have been catastrophic.

For example, in the southern states of the USA malaria killed as many people as scarlet fever prior to its eradication, by DDT, in 1947. After that it killed nobody there. Before 1953, when DDT was first used in India, there were 75 million cases of malaria every year and 800,000 deaths. By 1966 there were fewer than one million cases and proportionally fewer deaths. Similarly, Indonesia saw cases of malaria cut from 25% of the population to 1%. Since the banning of the widespread use of DDT in 1976, the scourge of malaria has returned with a vengeance. Now 2000 children die from it every day, most of them in Africa.

The author of Silent Spring was accused of the selective use of data and of fanaticism. Her most telling critics did not belong to Big Pharma but included internationally renowned biochemists such as Christopher Leaver and Bruce Ames, the immunologist Peter Lachman and the Director of Africa Fighting Malaria, Michael Tren. The true and accurate data concerning DDT’s great usefulness is still available and I have quoted some of it, above. Alas the fanaticism is still with us and it has become even more fanatical, a sort of worldwide, lethal psychosis. Sentimental attachment to what is called “the environment” has intensified and proliferated like the plague of malaria itself. If you say this, you will be pilloried as a man who wants to slaughter elephants for their ivory, shoot the remaining tigers and make impolite remarks about gorillas in the mist. Of course most of those who criticise the insanity of the Green agenda have no desire to do any of these things. We just don’t think that the best way to preserve animal life is by adopting a policy which murders millions of human beings, and impoverishes countless millions more.

So called environmentalism is not really about preserving animal species – or, to quote the vacuous slogan, “saving the planet” – but about political ambition and the means to control. Green is the new Red. The banning of DDT is probably the most extreme example of the awful consequences of following the Green agenda. There are many other examples of its disastrous effects. The useless windmills which are said to be constructed in order to save the environment but which succeed only in scarring the landscape. The vast subsidies paid to wealthy landowners for permitting these eyesores on their property is not only immoral in itself but also leads to methods of electricity generation which are absurdly expensive and so impoverish the poor yet further.

I have a dream: that one day there will be a great universal awakening amounting to the recognition that all this is sentimental. misanthropic folly, followed by a return to sense and with it the true conservation of a healthy environment.

26 May

C. of E. RIP

The Church Commissioners have kindly sent me a copy of their review of 2013. Nice coloured brochure stuffed with bullet-points, task groups, significant difference, something called the “Joint Simplification Group” and a smiling photograph of the Arch of Cant. We learn that the Commissioners manage a portfolio of £6.1billions. Then they tell us what they spend our money on. There are some exotic ventures. For instance a programme called “Jesus-shaped people” in Bradford with “special priority for those on the edge.” The edge of what – the Yorkshire Moors, the verge of insanity? This project “challenges evil and injustice” and operates a “development strategy.” I hope it’s a better strategy than the one employed by the Commissioners some years back when they lost £800millions of parishioners’ money donated through the collecting plate.

If it’s excitement you’re seeking, i suggest you go to Liverpool and pay a call on something called “Zone 2 – an all-age, cafe-style worship service that meets every Sunday at the same time as the traditional Choral Eucharist.” Why not just invite people to the traditional Eucharist? But it isn’t traditional in any sense other than that it’s not quite so barmy as as cafe-style worship. And it’s all modern language liturgy anyhow. They claim to be trying to “…replicate this type of initiative into deprived parishes.” So that these parishes become even more deprived? And St Mary’s Church, Bramall lane, Sheffield has “established a monthly Messy Church.”

The whole damned thing is a mess

25 May

Give ‘em hell

Attleborough Baptist church in Nuneaton has been accused of committing a “hate crime” for its poster featuring the fires of hell and saying “if you think there’s no God, you’d better be right.” I’d like to start by saying so called “hate crimes,” nasty as they are, are nothing like as bad as love crimes. Burning in hell is a prospect devoutly to be wished rather than hearing those dread words pronounced, “if you don’t stop picking your nose in public, I’ll get Vince Cable to come and kiss you.”

But the poster is tasteless, a typical example of Protestant aesthetics: crude, blatant, literalistic. A sensitive twenty-year-old called Robert Gladwin had his feelings hurt by the sight of the poster and so (as should be done more often when examples of bad art are discovered) complained to the police. I wish someone would get the cops to go and set fire to the whole Saatchi collection, the complete repertoire of Damien Hirst, the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and… and…But why stop there? The sensitive Mr Gladwin offered us a lecture in theology: “Christianity is inclusive and loving.” Quite right, Bob. And sentimental, touchy-feely, nice, cosy, celebrating diversity, togetherness and cups of coffee in the church hall after the schmaltzy singalong and aisle-dancing which passes for morning service in so many places.

The plain truth is that Jesus Christ is totally inappropriate and unacceptable in our enlightened, progressive and very nice 21st century. I think Prince Charles should come out from under his prestige biscuits, windmills and his flowerpot and compare Jesus unfavourably with Adolf Hitler. ‘Cos it was Jesus – betraying a conspicuous lack of inclusivity and lovingness – who said:

“And he shall set the sheep on his right hand and the goats on the left. Then shall he say to unto them on the left hand, Depart from me ye cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

Jesus’ saying is… but what word is there to describe such products of a diseased mind?

How about “judgemental”?

22 May

The Ecclesiastical Politburo

One of the main features of fascist regimes is their unwillingness to listen to rational, informed criticism. Well, if a perverse unwillingness to respond to criticism and to enter reasonable discussion and debate is a defining characteristic of fascism, then the Church of England authorities qualify perfectly. When the Liturgical Commission published draft revisions to the Baptism Service at the end of last year, this draft received much criticism of both theological and literary sorts. I am not talking about Yah-boo disapproval, but about intelligent, articulate comment. The authorities did not take a blind bit of notice and so this week the House of Bishops – why does that phrase make me think of a house of cards? – is blundering heedlessly ahead and incorporating their ill-advised alterations to the Baptism rite official. Having scorned debate first time round, this smug coterie of theological illiterates have again stopped their ears to reasonable discussion. Fascism, or what? Nevertheless, those who have ears to hear, let them hear…

The new Baptism Service is a gross insult to Our Lord Jesus Christ and is therefore properly described as blasphemous. There is no mention of sin in the rite, no call to repentance and the devil is not so much as mentioned let alone renounced. The insult to Our Lord consists entirely in this: if there is no devil to defeat, no sin to atone for and no repentance to be made, why did Christ bother to come here at all and die for us? So it is time to ask just what the modern, euphemistic, coy, sentimental and touchy-feely so-called Christians who devised this (dis)Service actually believe and stand for?

They are specimens of that sort of theologically-vacuous liberal so tellingly dismissed by Richard Niebuhr a long time ago: “They believe that a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

True Christianity has nothing to do with this effete, sanitised, fawning, inoffensive fraud. Christianity is not very nice. It is not goo and slush sucking up to debauched and cloying notions of “family.” There is a proper sense in which Christians are a family: but we are a family at war against sin, the world and the devil. Or we used to be. Think back to something Rowan Williams said in his last sermon before he retired: that the church “has quite a bit of catching up to do with secular mores.” But that is what the church has been doing for the last forty years. The policy is one of appeasement so, if the punters don’t like the original message, no probs, as they say: simply change the message. And so the stark challenge of the gospel has been abandoned to accommodate the barren emotionality of our sentimental and infantilised society, and the new code of practice that is political correctness. The result is banality. And it was Aquinas – 800 years before Hannah Arendt – who told us, “Banality is evil.”

For forty years the liberals have ruled the church and they have destroyed it. The bland have led the bland and they have all fallen into the Kitsch. And behold, those who live by the euphemism will die by the euphemism.

In effect, Christian theology has been demoralised. The doctrines of personal sin and Original Sin discarded while, by way of contradiction, the notion of corporate sin – by the bankers, the capitalists, the social heretics in the nasty party – has been retained. So, insofar as any concept of sin remains, it is depersonalised and institutionalised and identified in a range of preferred targets. For the modern church – that oxymoron – sinners now are those who don’t sign up to foreign aid, who question the virtue of mass immigration, who deny global warming, who warn against the moral and social destructiveness of the benefits culture which condemns succeeding generations to dependence and lives of sheer pointlessness. In short, for today’s church, sinners are all those who don’t subscribe to the nostrums of the new Establishment, which is the socialised state.

Stephen Platten, Chairman of the Liturgical Commission, explained that the devil is omitted from the new Baptism Service because the devil is “theologically problematic.” Now that’s a fine example of strangulated bureaucratic jargon. It is not the devil who is theologically problematic, only the Liturgical Commission is. Since the 1960s and the first appearance of alternative services, marketing a different gospel, each succeeding rite has been more accommodating to the spirit of the age than its predecessor.

But the spirit of the age is unchristian, secularised, diverse and multicultural, while Christianity is particular, definite, dogmatic and, as St Paul said, scandalous. St Paul said the cross is a stumbling block. The modern church has removed the stumbling block and replaced it with an ornament. No original sin? No devil and all his works? No need for personal repentance with weeping and gnashing of teeth? Then, dear Jesus, you had no business coming here, preaching your offensive parables of the wedding garment and the sheep and the goats. You might have spared yourself the bother of being flogged to the point of death and then nailed on a cross of wood and left to die a lingering death on the first long Good Friday. Why didn’t you simply stay up there in heaven easy-listening to soppy charismatic choruses and watching the General Synod’s flatulent proceedings on your I-pad?

The catastrophe of the church’s collapse was not something forced upon it by external enemies, but willed upon itself in a decades-long process of serial self-emasculation. The gruel has got ever thinner so that now there is nothing there. Or, to change the analogy, it is a case of wine into water. Every one of the modern Services has been purged of “offensive” reality. No worms or vile bodies at funerals. No fornication or men as brute beats with no understanding or dreadful day of judgement at the marriage. No devil and all his works at the christening. The new hymn line is effectually “No Lord, no faith, no baptism.”

What can be done? Much. But we must not pretend to ourselves that when Our Lord promised St Peter he had set his church on a rock and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it, he had our contemporary, simpering Church of England in mind. The church is thriving – but not in England, not in Europe the civilisation created by Christian values. In the centuries when Europe professed Christianity, in obedience to Christ’s command to go into all the world and preach the gospel, it sent out missionaries to Africa – an heroic achievement now disparaged by our trendy prelates and spiritless theologians as “cultural imperialism.” It is salutary to notice that today African Christians are returning to preach Christ to our godless continent.

For the individual English Christian all that is left is to hang on to the faith and try, however desperately, to find a place where it is still preached. This may involve crossing denominational boundaries. It will certainly mean doing the equivalent of those early Christians who went into the desert to think, pray and worship. There will be a renewal, for the gospel is true and therefore indestructible. Only don’t expect our decadent Ecclesia Anglicana to provide it.

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

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