society – Page 9 – All Things Considered

13 Jul

Equality is bad for you

The so called agreement just announced between Greece and the EU will have a devastating impact on poor people in Greece. This agreement effectually confiscates Greek assets and imposes the most severe austerity on the Greek people. It was concluded in order to preserve the Euro – the instrument for ensuring the survival of the EU’s centrally-planned, one size fits all, European economy.

Socialists try to create a more equal society. They believe in levelling. Unfortunately, owing to the nature of socialism itself, that philosophy always ends up achieving the opposite of its aims. The other day, Alexander Boot put this in a nutshell in his persistently enlightening blog where he says we must not confuse the socialists’ slogans with their practical policies:

“All socialist economies (which is to say all modern economies) have the widest gap between the rich and the poor. And, the less developed the socialist economy, the greater the gap, the harder the poor are hit. For example, in the 19^th century, the era of dog-eat-dog capitalism, the average ratio of income earned by US corporate directors and their employees was 28:1. Yet in 2005, when socialism had made heavy inroads into the post-New-Deal US economy, this ratio stood at 158:1.”

There are comparable figures for Britain

In other words, the less money there is around, the more of it will be grabbed by the rich and the poor will consequently get poorer.

This is the truth expressed by Friedrich Hayek in his classic The Road to Serfdom (1944)

In fact, all socialist roads lead to serfdom. When socialism is practised moderately, the poverty of those in the lower reaches of the social scale is quite moderate. Where socialism is practised more thoroughly, poverty consequentially becomes more severe. Where socialism is practised absolutely – one might say ideally – the poverty of the poorest is absolute too. Moreover, extreme socialism always ends up in dictatorship, the oppression of the people and, in the most notorious cases such as the USSR under Stalin and China under Mao, the socialist experiment culminates in gulags and mass slaughter: by Stalin at least twenty millions and by Mao around sixty millions.

But socialism sounds so promising, so nice, kind and humanitarian. So what goes wrong? It is always the same thing which goes wrong: the replacement of the free market by the planned economy.

The free market has raised more people out of poverty than any other economic system in the history of the world. So why are such notable humanitarians as the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury so down on it?

I described socialism as an experiment. Why do we keep on repeating an experiment which always fails?

As Einstein said, “To keep on doing the same thing while expecting different results is the first sign of madness.”

09 Jul

Methodismophobia

The BBC has done us a great service by revealing that between 2010 and 2014 more than 11,000 honour crimes were recorded by the police. We are even given the definition of an honour crime which is “one committed to protect or defend the reputation or supposed honour of a family or a community.”

Diana Nammi, director of the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation – a charity that provides support to Middle Eastern women living in the UK who are the victims of honour crimes – said the figures suggested incidences of the crime remain “consistently high” in the UK and that the issue is “not going away.”

She said: “Unfortunately the figures do not show the real extent of the problem. So many crimes are unreported because the perpetrators are often the victim’s own family. We need a national strategy for all agencies – including police forces, courts, and schools – to be trained and to work together to end this problem.”

A police spokesman said, “These crimes go largely under the radar of local agencies, including the police. The number of crimes reported is certainly only a very small proportion of total crimes committed.”

These crimes are usually committed against women and include beatings, abduction, imprisonment in the victim’s own home, ostracism and female genital mutilation.

Estimates of how many women and girls have been subjected to FMG in Britain range from 65,000 to 137,000. FMG has been illegal in this country for thirty years.

In all that time, not a single perpetrator has been convicted.

Unfortunately, the BBC report doesn’t tell us which community is overwhelmingly responsible for this disgraceful practice. But I have my suspicions and I can understand why prosecutions are not brought against the barbarians, bigots and sadists who subject women ands girls to this torture in the name of religion and cultural integrity.

I’m pretty sure that the practitioners of FMG are mainly Methodists – give or take a handful of low church Anglicans. These people are very sensitive and they don’t like to be accused. When they are accused, they complain that they are being subjected to “Methodismophobia” or, as it might be, “Low churchophobia.”

And immediately the police back off for fear of giving offence to these Methodist and Anglican communities.

This must stop. The police must be given authority to enter the chapels, tin tabernacles, manses, bring-and-buy sales and coffee mornings and root out the atrocity of FMG once and for all.

08 Jul

The meaning of TEC

I recall the intense pleasure when I was first first taught the rudiments of the differential calculus donkey’s years ago: this seemingly miraculous, and charmingly simple, means of calculating increases and decreases in rates of change. Well, I don’t think the editors of Church Times needed the calculus to measure the catastrophic increase in the pace of the decline – literally dismemberment – of the Church of England. That newspaper is really the house journal of the C. of E. and it is read by more than 90% of the clergy and a good proportion of the laity. The current edition must give them all pause for thought, for it has devoted ten pages to consider the “apocalyptic” decline of the English church which, some claim, will barely exist in twenty years’ time. Most churchgoers are elderly or old. Their numbers are not being replaced. Thus – we might say rather late in the day – appraised of the crisis, we have those ten pages of head-scratching in CT, as sociologists, clergy, theologians and religious pundits cast around for what might be done.

On the basis of the well-known fact that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it, we should ask first what has been going on in the English church in the last half century which has – shall we say – coincided with its collapse. Let me mention a few of what seem to me to be the most significant features.

The last fifty years have seen the rise of theological reductionism. Bluntly, this means that ancient doctrines, always previously proclaimed as true and the foundational beliefs of the church have been, in the jargon, demythologised. So Jesus was not born of a virgin and he didn’t rise from the dead. His miracles were really “acted parables” – that is more jargon for the claim that they didn’t actually happen.

Concurrent with theological reductionism has run a fifty years programme of liturgical “reform” which has seen the discarding of The King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. This means that there is no longer observance of the rule that all the realm shall have one use. In fact, these changes mean that you have no idea what you’re going to find in a church service until the service begins. It’s a sort of churchy babel in which no two churches do the same thing and many priests and ministers seem to do as they like.

In addition to these changes, the bishops, the clergy and the synod have endorsed the secular mores of the age.

I have commented enough on these matters and I will not do so again here, but conclude with a single observation:

In those churches where the ancient doctrines are still taught as true, where traditional scriptures are used and where the moral teaching which stood the church apart from pagan practices is still taught, there is life and growth. Churches in Africa, Central and South America and parts of the Far East are burgeoning.

By contrast, the churches which have most successfully modernised themselves are failing, and – perhaps this is where the calculus comes in – those modernising more rapidly are also failing faster.

The church which has modernised itself to the greatest extent is the Episcopal Church of the USA (ECUSA).

Recently this institution changed its name from ECUSA to The Episcopal Church, known widely as TEC

Some, basing their remark on observation, say that TEC stands for The Empty Church

03 Jul

Achtung Juden!

Lovely weather we’re having! What better way to take advantage of it than to get yourself into Whitehall tomorrow for a spell of Jew-baiting? You will have the opportunity to rip up Israeli flags and burn pages of the Talmud. Do take the children.

The master of ceremonies at this fun day for all the family is a Nazi called Joshua Bonehill-Paine.

Nice Jewish name you’ve got there, Josh!

Pain-Bonehead Esq – I haven’t got that quite right – and his Nazis want to demonstrate “a show of solidarity by English people who recognize that Israel is a corrupt state which is responsible for horrific war crimes.”

What war crimes are these? Do they mean taking defensive measures in southern Israel against the rockets that are fired into local villages every day? Do they further refer to bombing raids by the Israel Air Force on these rocket-launching sites in Gaza – where Hamas position these sites in schools and hospitals, thus cynically causing the injuries and death of their own civilian population?

Bonehill-Paine added that the protest will target Jewish Shomrim volunteers, whom he describes as “undemocratic and illegal.”

No, they are not illegal. And, when it comes to the practice of democracy, it’s not exactly the Nazis’ strong point is it?

Shomrim, the Hebrew term meaning guards, are neighbourhood-watch organizations established by Orthodox Jewish communities to provide some meagre defence against vicious antisemitic attacks which have greatly increased over the last twelve months .

The Nazis aim to protest what they call “the Jewification of London.”

Bonkers!

I lived in central London from 1998-2012 and I didn’t notice that the capital was being Jewified. Something else is going on though for, while according to the 2011 census there are but 171,960 Jews in London, there are 1,012, 823 Muslims – an increase of 40% since the previous census a mere ten years earlier.

Have the Nazis perhaps got things slightly out of proportion? Well, we know such people are not regarded for their powers of cerebration. But aren’t they tearing up the wrong flag and burning the wrong book?

Perhaps the Nazis ought to reflect that Jews make a substantial contribution to the wealth, culture and social life of London, and instead redirect their protest towards that community which has been revealed to practise corrupt politics,ballot-rigging, violence towards women and incitement to terrorism?

Just a suggestion, Josh.

02 Jul

The Bible and other rubbish

The house of bishops in the Episcopalian Church of the USA has voted to alter its canons to remove the stipulation that marriage must be between a man and a woman. By this ECUSA has repudiated biblical teaching and indeed the 2000 years old doctrines of the church. The scriptural definition, which is also an injunction – what in better days we called a commandment – “A man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife” is thus rendered null and void. The Bible says, “Male and female created He them.” Don’t be ridiculous! Don’t be so unprogressed. The Bible was in the wrong for millennia. Thank goodness – do I really mean goodness? – that the liberated lights of ECUSA have now come to put things right.Nowadays we know that male and female are only social constructs. You are what you say you are. You can do whatever you want to do. And to hell with both the biological evidence and the authority of scripture.

Well, that’s all happening in America, so it doesn’t affect us, does it? But it does, because the Church of England and ECUSA are in communion. So I suppose the Archbishop of Canterbury is very upset and angry over ECUSA’s apostasy. Surely the Archbishop will leap to defend the age-old biblical teaching and denounce this un-Christian innovation? I can just hear him saying, “What you have done is an abomination and contrary to the word of God.”

Actually, I have just read Dr Welby’s official response on the Church of England website. He says, “We must respect the prerogative of The Episcopal Church to address issues appropriate to its own context,”

That’s socking it to them Justin! Attaboy – you tell ‘em! There’s leadership for you. There’s the prophetic word of judgement from the Primate of All England.

I bet the prophet Isaiah himself wished he had coined that ringing condemnation: “…address issues appropriate to its own context.” That would really have made the hearts of the heathen quake.

In truth, what we are hearing in this latest Archiepiscopal pronouncement is only confirmation of the fact that, as a moral and spiritual authority – you might say as a church – the C. of E. has resigned. Its long history of speaking truth to power and of being the conscience of the nation is finished. The bishops, the clergy and the General Synod now exist only to endorse the rapidly-changing nostrums of secular society. Not only is this the way things are, it is, according to Welby’s predecessor Rowan Williams, the way things ought to be. In one of his last sermons before he retired, Williams told us, “The church has a lot of catching up to do with secular mores.”

It makes a change, I suppose, from St Paul’s “And be ye not conformed to this world.” (Romans 12:2)

But what did St Paul know? He was all, like, so biblical. He’d never make bishop in the enlightened church of today in which what were once defined as mortal sins are now exciting new lifestyle choices.

We have despised the word of God and effectually re-written the Bible in those places where it tells us things we don’t want to hear.

The worldwide Anglican Church should know that there is a destiny in store for those who do that: “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life.” (Revelation 22: 18-19)

01 Jul

“Is that a suicide belt you’re wearing, Tariq, or are you just pleased to see me?”

If you can’t hear me very well this morning, it’s owing to the neighing coming from the bolting horses and all the stable doors being belatedly slammed shut. For behold, our intelligent, wise and on-the-ball government has just announced that we need new anti-radicalisation laws. This creative dispatch comes fourteen years after the attacks on New York and ten years after the London bombings.

Never mind, let’s look at what the new arrangements will involve.

The new rules will require public bodies to identify and report those “vulnerable” to extremist views. Strange use of the word “vulnerable” and it reminds me of that other odd usage, as in “those vulnerable to committing a crime.”

Deciding your vocation is to be one of Allah’s suicide bombers is not, I suggest, about vulnerability; it is produced by a psychotic and murderous disposition. The prime minister wonders aloud why all these young Muslims are taking themselves off to Syria to learn how to be murderers or sex-slaves.

Because they want to, Dave. Because they want to. The “cause” of radicalisation is a perverse exercise of the faculty of free will.

Councils will have to “consider whether publicly available computers should limit access to extremist material.”

What’s to consider?

“Schools will need to demonstrate they are protecting pupils from being led to terrorism by having robust safeguarding policies in place to identify children at risk, and intervening as appropriate.”

So this is our government’s secret weapon against terrorism: more bureaucracy, clip-boards and box—ticking. “Safeguarding” didn’t deter career paedophiles and it will do nothing to curtail the activities of those just itching to rampage with a Kalashnikov and kill as many Kuffars as possible in a shopping centre or, as it might be, on a beach

You needn’t be afraid of a terrorist attack, for our government will keep you safe. We have stockpiled huge quantities of jargon and we are prepared to deploy this jargon at a moment’s notice to face the threats that confront us..

For example, “Universities will have to carry out a risk assessment to determine where and how students might be radicalised.”

A risk assessment – that’s the device which strikes terror into the heart of every jihadist

“Healthcare workers should be trained to recognise signs of people being drawn into extremism.” Are these the same health care workers who fail to notice when an aged hospital patient is dying of thirst?

“Prison bosses should carry out cell-sharing risk assessments for inmates.”

Of course, before you can kill your terrorist, you have to recognise him for what he is. I mean that tall chap with a beard and going into the kebab house might have no more sinister intent than breaking his Ramadan fast. How to decide if he wants to blow us all up? Education Secretary Nicky Morgan suggests we enquire as to whether he has “an extreme intolerance of homosexuality.”

I can imagine the line of enquiry: “Excuse me, Sir but may I examine your suicide belt? And, incidentally, are you an admirer of Doris Day and Judy Garland?”

Predictably, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, Christine Blower, said the Government’s Prevent programme was “causing significant nervousness and confusion among teachers.”

Well, that’s the first thing I’ve heard in its favour. Anything that scares the chalk out of members of the NUT can’t be all bad.

Of course, do any of these things and the enemy will soon see you off by shouting, “Islamophobia!”

23 Jun

A whiff of grapeshot

The Church Militant Tendency was well-represented on the BBC this morning when Rev’d Dr Giles Fraser came on Thought for the Day to tell us that the victory at Waterloo was a bad thing: “We worship the Prince of Peace, not the Duke of Wellington.” By contrast, he insisted, Napoleon was a good thing. If he had won and taken over in England, he would have abolished the nobility and we would have had no more of all that reactionary stuff about the Establishment of church and state. Fraser told us straight: there is nothing about patriotism in the Christian Faith.

It’s worth taking a few moments to summarise the doings of Fraser’s hero Bonaparte. He was no egalitarian, no people’s man. He set himself up as tyrant of France, killed four thousand by cannon in Paris in a single day, established concentration camps in the Caribbean and destroyed hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers out of naked self-interest.

Ordinary Englishmen did not long for the rule of Napoleon: they celebrated in the streets when they heard the good news from Waterloo.

Why does Fraser admire the tyrant Bonaparte? Because the socialism and collectivism espoused by such as Fraser always ends in the establishment of tyrannies. Where these doctrines are practised moderately, they lead merely to the impoverishment of the people. Where they are practised thoroughly, they lead to genocide and the gulag.

Never mind the history of the 19th century, Dr Fraser: just cast your eyes over the 20th century. Consider Napoleon’s heirs and successors: Stalin, Mao and the national socialist Hitler.

Actually, Giles Fraser is quite a phenomenon in his own right and deserves our close attention.

He is the philosopher-priest who appeared last year on Christmas University Challenge to demonstrate that he doesn’t know his Aristotle from his Spinoza.

Fraser is that former canon of St Paul’s who, when the rabble-rousing oiks from Occupy turned up, invited them into the cathedral and told the police, who were trying their best to protect the place, to go away. By these actions, Fraser not only precipitated his own resignation but also that of a fine dean.

What should have been the fate of the ecclesiastical-political lout Fraser? A posting into some decent obscurity would have been merciful .

Instead, he was immediately championed by the Bishop of London who proclaimed, “Giles’s voice is a voice that must continue to be heard.”

And so heard it is. He was given a new parish, a column on The Guardian – where else? – and regular appearances on Thought for the Day. He also turns up to parade his mastery of the non sequitur on The Moral Maze

Such a man should have been dispatched with a whiff of grapeshot. His hero Napoleon would be the man to do it, of course.

18 Jun

Coniuntio Oppositorum

I count myself fortunate indeed to be living in a world of infinite possibilities and for that we have at long last escaped that oppressive environment in which you had to take what you were given. For example, when I was a boy I supposed I would always be a boy. Only recently I have I heard the voice of the liberating gospel of sexual freedom whisper – what do I mean whisper? I mean of course shout – in my ear that I can become a girl if I like. And that I can get government help with the plumbing in order to do so. I also grew up with the shockingly unimancipated and repressive Christian notion that, if I wanted to get married, it would have to be to a woman.

Thank whatever gods there be – the old pagan gods actually – that Christianity is now inoperative, so that today I am free to marry a man and to become a woman. I suppose that’s as it should be really: a man married to a woman.

But I have a few questions. What if, exercising my pagan rights, I marry a man and then he decides to turn into a woman? Would this be grounds for my divorcing him/her? Would we, after the complicated plumbing involved, even still be married?

You might think such arcane issues are intractable and labyrinthine in their personal, moral and social ramifications. But their settlement is easy-peasy compared with something I’ve just been reading about.

In the USA Rachel Dolezal says “I do take exception because it’s a little more complex than me identifying as black or answering a question of, ‘Are you black or white?’”

I will try to get this as clear as I can and set it out in black and white, so to speak.

Ms Dolezal has resigned from her position as a big noise in The National Association for the Advancement of Black People because, while she had formerly always claimed to be black, she was recently exposed – by her parents! – as white.

I find this most disappointing, for clearly western society is not as enlightened and liberated as I had thought. Surely Ms Dolezal had no cause to resign just for telling that little porky about being black when she’s white? I thought we could all be whatever we want to be. Clearly this is not so and the forces of social oppression are not finally defeated.

Unfortunately, the matter is even more complicated. Ms Dolezal now claims she is black and indeed she worked tirelessly for an association which promotes the advancement of black people and denounces racial prejudice against them. But Ms Dolezal has form. Eleven years ago she sued her university because, she claimed, its authorities had shown racial prejudice towards her as a white woman by favouring some black people in her class.

So it appears we don’t have to be black or white; we can be black and white provided, as in the comparable case of sex – what they now call gender – we do these things sequentially.

At this point high imagination fails and I start to get all my metaphors more mixed up than even Ms Dolezal: kettles calling pans black; having your cake and eating it; one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and go, go go!

O brave new world that hath such people in it…

16 Dec

C.of E. RIP

Ooh, we have got the willies!

I’ve seen some correspondence among my fellow believing Christians in what’s left of the Church of England in which they declare that they are dismayed by the determination of the powers-that-be to “fast track” the soon-to-be consecrated women bishops into the House of Lords.

Sex-discrimination, you might say, at the sacerdotal level

One of the letters I saw asked, “Does this mean the Church of England is busted flush?”

Of course the Church of England is a busted flush and it has been so for decades: from the 1960s when it gave up believing the New Testament, the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth and Our Lord’s miracles; through the 1970s and 1980s when it replaced the matchless liturgy of the English Church with trash and doggerel.

And so into the 21st century and Archbishop Rowan Williams’ last sermon before he retired in which he told us that “The Church has a lot of catching up to do with secular mores.”

Whatever happened to “Be ye not conformed to this world…”?

And now, and according to Mullen’s First Law of Ecclesiastical Polity which states that every succeeding Archbishop of Canterbury is bound to be worse than his predecessor, Justin “Oil” Welby has gone and cancelled the 2018 Lambeth Conference of all the bishops from the Anglican Church worldwide

Why?

Because he can’t face the prospect of all those wonderful, faithful, orthodox, devout and true bishops from Africa coming to London and telling him that he’s got it all wrong about homosexuality and women in the episcopate.

So what will happen?

It’s easy to foretell because we have the model before us in the case of the Episcopal Church of the USA (ECUSA) which over the last three or four decades has become so secularised and accommodating of progressive values that it has ceased to be a Church in any sense of the word.

The C. of E. is now only the politics of the PC soft left, The Guardian and the BBC, with all its fashionable causes from socialism-lite, appeasing the Muslim fanatics and the pagan fantasy of global warming

ECUSA – and now the C. of E. – are frankly apostate – and proud of it

So what is the believing Christian to do? Rome looks increasingly dodgy under the virtual communist Pope Francis. Some of my friends look east to the Orthodox. For myself, I am content to discover a little authentic Christianity wherever it can be found: a faithful Protestant sect, a traditional Anglo-catholic outpost, a chapel where the gospel is preached

Anything but this shameful, politically-correct, utterly secularised, completely compromised hypocritical, time-serving, contemptible shambles the C. of E has now become

15 Dec

Let’s all go to the manse

Well. I’m shocked and disappointed. I had always thought Methodism was a religion of peace and love – Wesley. peace be upon him. But now we learn that a despicable devotee of that faith has taken hostages and gone into a cafe in Sydney. Bystanders report that they heard his blood-curling cry, “Dear Lord and heavenly Father, we would ask thee for our harvest festival…for marrows and pumpkins, for courgettes and new potatoes…”

A local Catholic priest said, “They don’t drink, these Methodists, and that alone should have aroused suspicion from the start.”

Of course, this regrettable incident should be no excuse for Methodophobia. The great majority of moderate Methodists deplore what has taken place as strongly as anyone else.

However, we are bound to notice that, when we take account of these terrorist atrocities, they are all perpetrated by Methodists. Surely, on these grounds, we might tentatively suggest that there is something wrong with Methodism – a religion which states clearly that all those who will not subscribe to the chapel’s gift envelopes scheme should be beheaded.

Following this terrorist outrage, the government has, to its credit, taken a firm line and issued clear warning to the public. Avoid all bring and buy sales, all coffee mornings – which may sound innocent enough but which might on exceptional occasions result in attendees being denounced and their under-age daughters committed to marriages with dirty old Ministers and stewards of the collecting plate.

Above all, we must remember that these atrocities are not the fault of Methodism,which is a noble and life-enhancing religion

These atrocities are all our fault.

And so we come to our final hymn: Love Divine All Love Beheading…

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: society