Category: Christianity

Dr Jensen & the future of identity

In rejecting their own ethnic traditions liberals are left with a major problem. What is to hold society together, if not a common ancestry, culture, religion and history?

Australian intellectuals are especially fond of “imagining” new forms of national identity which will unify society. The latest effort is called “Australia: Ideas for our Future”. The authors of this work believe that there is an Australian tradition of mateship, tolerance and a fair go for all around which a unifying Australian identity can be based.

The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen, has criticised this approach to an Australian identity in an article in today’s Age newspaper (not yet online).

He is, firstly and understandably, disappointed that the proposed national identity is entirely secular. He sees this as further proof of the declining position of Christianity in Australia. In his own words, “Frankly, Jesus is slipping out of memory and imagination.”

He then points out the limitations of the proposed identity, in words which demonstrate a mixture of clarity and confusion:

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, November 12, 2005 at 04:00 AM in Christianity
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Racial attitudes and Christianity

It follows almost without saying that Leftists would believe Christians to be “bigots”—i.e. to have negative attitudes towards minorities. “Racist” is the favourite Leftist term of abuse and Christians are the group that Leftists hate most so racism and Christianity must go together.

Many readers here would however probably be inclined to say: “If only it were true”.  They would be aware that Christian idealism tends to cause Christians to see all men as “equal in the sight of God” and hence to reject any notion that large-scale uncontrolled immigration could have any problems associated with it.

So how does it pan out in fact?  Do Christians overall tend to have negative or positive attitudes towards minorities?  I present some research findings on the subject here.

Posted by jonjayray on Monday, October 31, 2005 at 12:06 PM in Christianity
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Social Justice ten times better than God

Every month I get a magazine from my old school, Xavier College, which is the leading Catholic private school here in Melbourne.

Up to now, I’ve been uncertain whether I want to send my own son to Xavier. But the latest school magazine has made the decision easy. He won’t be going.

The latest magazine shows all too clearly how far the school has drifted away from Catholicism into a modernist, secularised liberalism. In fact, going by the magazine the school has dropped religion altogether in favour of a new kind of cult called “social justice”.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, October 1, 2005 at 09:17 PM in Christianity
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Christianity: The Signs of Decay

Local Methodist Church

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Posted by leslie on Sunday, August 28, 2005 at 09:50 PM in Christianity
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Overturning Constantine

At least for 1000 years my kin have been Christian, lately I’ve struggled with keeping the faith. After reading this story I doubt that I’ll send my children to Sunday school. If the Church doesn’t defend us from race replacement, I won’t defend her.

I’ll take my children to the cathedrals to explain architecture, I’ll teach them Latin, and teach them to understand Christian art, but I won’t give two cents to the pederasts and cowards speaking in the pulpits of our churches. Choke on your communion wafer!

Posted by leslie on Friday, July 15, 2005 at 07:11 PM in Christianity
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How could he do it?

I heard about the shooting on the radio on Friday morning. A man had been gunned down in his Melbourne home during the night.

In today’s paper we get the full story. The victim was a man by the name of Jafar Heshmaty. He had left his native Iran, worked illegally in Greece, bought a Greek passport and then flown to Melbourne in 1989.

In Melbourne he was put in detention while his claim for refugee status was fought in the courts. He received support from the Baptist Church which organised protests and a Christian community sponsorship for him.

But after three years the High Court ruled against him because of doubts about his real identity. So he sought and received asylum in America instead.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, April 23, 2005 at 02:39 AM in Christianity
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BEST WISHES TO POPE BENEDICT XVI

His views are well-known and he will be a great defender of his church against the white-anting from within that is its major threat. His early election is a tribute to the already great authority he held within the church.  From a news report:

A delirious crowd of around 100,000 cheered and waved wildly as Ratzinger, the 265th pontiff in the Church’s 2000-year history, smiled and acknowledged the applause from the curtain-draped balcony of Saint Peter’s basilica. His first words were met by a huge ovation. “Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope John Paul II the cardinals have elected me a simple and humble labourer in the vineyard of the Lord,” he said, paying tribute to his immediate predecessor.  The announcement that the 115 cardinals sequestered inside the Sistine had chosen a new pontiff on only the second day of their conclave came when white smoke billowed out of a chimney atop the Vatican…. The election by a two-thirds majority came in a fourth round of voting that had begun when the 115 cardinals sequestered themselves into the chapel for their conclave.  The Pope now has the onerous burden of guiding the Church into a new era fraught with moral dilemmas and dissension over a host of issues ranging from emptying pews to contraception and celibacy. A close confidant of John Paul II, he shared his conservative views.

Posted by jonjayray on Tuesday, April 19, 2005 at 07:25 PM in Christianity
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Random thoughts on P.D. James

Browsing through an autobiography of authoress P.D. James, I was surprised to discover she is something of an Anglican traditionalist. She writes,

“The Church of England in my childhood was the national church in a very special sense, the visible symbol of the country’s moral and religious aspirations, a country which, despite great differences of class, wealth and privilege, was unified by generally accepted values and by a common tradition, history and culture, just as the Church was unified by Cranmer’s magnificent liturgy.”

As you might expect, she does not approve of recent developments within the C of E. She declares,

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Friday, April 15, 2005 at 01:22 AM in Christianity
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NYC prefers Satanism to Christianity

(Post excerpted from an article by the estimable Tom Barrett)

Churches meet in schools all across our nation. In fact, another minister and I have teamed up to start a church in a public school here in Loxahatchee, Florida. So I was understandably interested when I discovered that New York City is trying to throw churches out of their public schools.

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Posted by jonjayray on Friday, April 8, 2005 at 07:53 PM in Christianity
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The Vatican announces the death of Pope John-Paul

Great men are rare beings, and the Catholic world has lost one this evening.  Few Pope’s have been more loved than the Polish Pope or meant more to non-Catholics, too.  May he rest in peace.

Posted by Guessedworker on Saturday, April 2, 2005 at 04:33 PM in Christianity
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Long lost Christianity

I doubt that many readers of this blog also read my scripture blog so I have put together below some posts from it that should be of some interest to readers of this blog.  To get the full background of what I say below, however, you need to read earlier entries on the blog

THE CROSS

Did Christ die on a cross?  It seems unlikely.  The two words used in the Greek NT to refer to the cross are “stauros” and “xylon”.  “Xylon” simply means “wood” and “stauros” simply means “stake”.  Because of Christian convictions about the cross, however, all Lexicons do give “cross” as one of the meanings of “stauros”.  But in classical (pre-Christian) Greek, “stauros” seems always to have meant simply “stake”.  So Christ probably died with his hands pinned ABOVE his head.  Why would the Romans go to the trouble of adding a crossbar just for the purpose of executing a criminal when a stake with no crossbar would do the job equally well?

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Posted by jonjayray on Monday, February 28, 2005 at 12:31 AM in Christianity
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Sweden steps back from the brink

News report:

A Swedish pastor convicted of hate crimes for a sermon denouncing homosexuals as a ``cancer’’ was acquitted Friday by an appeals court that said he was protected by the country’s free speech laws.  The Goeta Appeals Court said that while Aake Green’s views of gays can be ``strongly questioned,’’ it was not illegal to offer a personal interpretation of the Bible and urge others to follow it.  ``The purpose of making agitation against gays punishable is not to prevent arguments or discussions about homosexuality, not in churches or in other parts of society,’’ the court said.

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Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, February 16, 2005 at 07:20 PM in Christianity
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A British melting pot?

A reverend gentleman got this published in The Guardian of 8th:-

” The unique character and history of the British people has arisen precisely because these islands have been subject to many waves of immigration, most of which were not under our democratic control. Why should we seek to freeze the evolving composition of our population at this point in history?”

Robin Clarke replies:-

The fashionable but mindless assertion that “The unique character and history of the British people has arisen precisely because these islands have been subject to many waves of immigration” (Letters, February 8) is the very reverse of the truth.

On the contrary, the unique character of the British society has arisen precisely because, rather obviously due to its being a remote island on the edge of the known (old) world, there has been a peculiarly low level of mass invasion/colonisation over the past 2000 years. There has been only one grand empire controlling our land (and that very long ago) in contrast to for instance Iran and Iraq which have had the Assyrian, Babylonian, Achaemenian, Hellenic, Parthian, First Islamic Caliphate, Abbasid Caliphate, Seljuk, Khwarezmid, Mongoloid (Ghengis Khan), and Safavid, with a load of migratory war-bands in between.

I can only guess that your next letter-writing wizard will ‘reveal’ to us that the birthplace of modern democracy, human stoning rights and the scientific revolution was Iran anyway.

Posted by jonjayray on Tuesday, February 8, 2005 at 10:53 PM in Christianity
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Fr. Bush’s Vatican – a Demise of American Christianity

Tragically many Christians see President Bush as a righteous defender of the Faith; perhaps in much the same way our medieval ancestors honored the Pope, or Christian monarchs. But Christianity in America is an experience radically different than of the European heartland, with the partial exception of Great Britain.

American Christianity is a balanced formulation of protestant morality and democratic plurality. According to historian Paul Johnson this formula was present at the founding of the nation, and persists. [1]

In the post-war period American Christianity has seen a recession of the Christian element and a procession of the democratic. As the Christian element diminishes the democratic element - as if to mask its newfound muscularity - cloaks itself in sacred Christian rhetoric; a clever shell game.

This is a disturbing development for America and Christians. For instead of promoting the universality of Christ’s message – with a minimum of Christian dogma - America is creating a perverted orthodoxy with Christianity hopelessly entangled in democratic imperialism, engaged by military force.

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Posted by leslie on Saturday, January 22, 2005 at 10:46 PM in Christianity,  War on Terror
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Sunday school now teaches environmentalism rather than Christianity

In spite of the “school wars,” parents have felt safe taking their children to Sunday School to help build a solid moral foundation. But, have you looked at your church’s Sunday School curriculum lately? You may be shocked to find tree-hugging, earth-worshipping paganism intermixed in the Christian lessons.  Many churches are now using a Sunday School curriculum created by an organization in Colorado called “Group.” There is nothing in Group’s publications that tells who they are, what they believe in, or anything about the backgrounds of the creators of the materials. But Group curriculum is now sold in most Christian bookstores. The Group material offers “Hands-on Bible curriculum” and advocates a “new approach to learning.”

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Posted by jonjayray on Tuesday, January 18, 2005 at 11:30 PM in Christianity
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Anti-Muslim websites to be censored

Some academics from the peacenik end of the Australian church community were recently commissioned by the Australian Federal government to do a report on “Multi-faith” (translation: Islam-promoting) activities in Australia.  Summary here. The full report (PDF) is mostly a combination of mush and political correctness but one of its recommendations is downright hilarious:  It recommends that public use of the cross be discontinued and a “composite symbol” be developed to replace it.  My mind is quietly boggling at what a composite of the Christian cross and the Muslim crescent might look like!  Pretty confusing, I guess.

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Posted by jonjayray on Saturday, January 8, 2005 at 08:21 AM in Christianity
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The Judeo-Christian Eucharist

”...if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood—that depends on the idea and its dimensions…”

Raskolnikov

Crime and Punishment

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Posted by leslie on Friday, January 7, 2005 at 10:10 AM in Christianity
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Another argument for school choice

Charles Darwin, squeeze over. The school board in this small town in central Pennsylvania has voted to make the theory of evolution share a seat with another theory: God probably designed us.  If it survives a legal test, this school district of about 2,800 students could become the first in the nation to require that high school science teachers at least mention the “intelligent design” theory. This theory holds that human biology and evolution are so complex as to require the creative hand of an intelligent force.  “The school board has taken the measured step of making students aware that there are other viewpoints on the evolution of species,” said Richard Thompson, of the Thomas More Law Center, which represents the board and describes its overall mission as defending “the religious freedom of Christians.”

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Posted by jonjayray on Friday, December 31, 2004 at 07:25 PM in Christianity
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Judaism: Last Stop for American Protestants

Reggie White, a famous American football player, died at the age of 43 last Sunday. Most reports mention his Christian faith; Mr. White was an ordained minister. Reading further I discovered his interest in Hebrew. Reportedly he said before his death, “I moved away from Christianity and started studying Hebrew...”

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Posted by leslie on Tuesday, December 28, 2004 at 07:09 PM in Christianity
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So this is Christmas

… which, all things considered, is a fairly appropriate moment to return to the subject of faith in our liberal times.  Earlier this month a Cassandra-like figure, Jayne Ozanne, lit up a debate in the Church of England with a private paper she submitted to the Archbishop’s Council.  It was leaked and in it she wrote this:-

I see a time of great persecution coming, which will drive Christianity all but underground in the West. I believe that this will primarily take the form of a social and economic persecution, where Christians will be ridiculed for their faith and pressurised into making it a purely private matter.

Meanwhile, the established Church will continue to implode and self-destruct, fragmenting into various divisions over a range of internal issues. There will be an increasing number who fear man more than God, and who shy away from admitting that there is any absolute truth. Instead, they will seek to promote a gospel that is socially acceptable to all. As a result, many will continue to leave – disaffected and dismayed by the lack of faith and courage needed to stand the ground.

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Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, December 24, 2004 at 09:21 AM in Christianity
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Merry Christmas T.S. Eliot

Selections from

The Idea of Christian Society

, 1939, and

Notes Towards the Definition of Culture

, 1945.

“...to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp their mechanised caravans.”

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Posted by leslie on Thursday, December 23, 2004 at 06:36 PM in Christianity
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Merry Christmas, to you, St. Mugg

Before the internet, and before the explosion of satellite and cable TV, you might’ve seen this man’s face.

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Posted by leslie on Wednesday, December 22, 2004 at 11:49 PM in Christianity
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1m Christians sign EU religion plea

1m Christians sign EU religion plea.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son
Luke 15

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Posted by leslie on Thursday, November 25, 2004 at 12:25 PM in Christianity
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Do liberals discriminate?

Are liberals willing to practise religious discrimination? In the case of Chris Cranmer, it seems not. Mr Cranmer has won recognition of his satanism on board his Royal Navy ship, meaning that he is free to publicly practise satanic rituals and to have a funeral carried out by the Church of Satan.

But then we get to the case of Signor Buttiglione who has been deemed unacceptable for a position of responsibility with the EU because of his orthodox Catholicism - this despite a promise that he would keep his Catholic beliefs private.

Matthew Parris, in a column in the Sunday Times, wrote of Mr Buttiglione that,

“Signor Buttiglione claims that he has been the victim of anti-Christian discrimination ... I think Signor Buttiglione has indeed been the victim of anti-Christian discrimination, and that such discrimination is now in order ... Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion are unacceptable and insulting, not only to me but also the majority of Europeans, and the overwhelming majority of educated Europeans. I do not shrink from according special status to the educated, for they lead thought.” (via Conservative Commentary)

So, we’ve arrived at a situation where it’s thought reasonable to allow Satanism to be practised in the Royal Navy, but that Catholicism is too “insulting” to be accepted even as a private belief by a political candidate.

Liberals, in other words, will discriminate on the grounds of religion, but just aren’t concerned to discriminate against satanists. In fact, on one very liberal Australian website, satanism was declared to be admirable for its “frank and rational hedonism”. So I don’t like the chances of a return to a more traditional ordering of things, in which discrimination was practised against satanists rather than Christians, at leat not in modern liberal societies.

Posted by Guest Blogger on Wednesday, October 27, 2004 at 04:50 AM in Christianity
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End of the Canterbury tales

When I was an Episcopalian — that’s what we call Anglicans in America — it seemed to me the name summed up the core belief that held the church together: they believed in bishops. It was pleasant being a bishop, it should be pleasant being a bishop, and if you didn’t go along with that you didn’t belong and you should go someplace else. Of course, there was more to it than that. Episcopalians also believed in relationships. People should be nice to each other, and accept and affirm each other in their mutually affirming whateverness, so long of course as the various whatevernesses stayed mutually affirming.

The effect was that you could think and do whatever you wanted as long as you approved of everyone else thinking and doing whatever he wanted, and you otherwise didn’t make waves. The Episcopal Church was thus a religion formed on the model of the politically correct managerial consumer society. Everybody pleased himself by following his own pursuits, within a structure that ruled quite effectively without seeming to do so because nothing could ever become an issue. How could anything be an issue, after all, when everything was either private taste, amusement, happy talk about celebrating otherness, or arranged by higher-ups over whom there was very little control? The only real issue was how to redefine apparent issues as non-issues as smoothly as possible. To make anything else an issue was to show you weren’t really an Episcopalian, because you had violated “Anglican comprehensiveness.” And besides, it wasn’t nice.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, October 21, 2004 at 05:32 PM in Christianity
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