Raising the Climate Religion Stakes
Posted 4 December 2008
You know you have won an argument when you find yourself on the receiving end of a stiff fine or custodial sentence; when your accusers have no debate left in them and resort to the law.
The law truly is an ass, developed for the benefit of the law makers and their underlings and vassals. When the wigs wheel you in and set about bamboozling a jury or judge, you are usually screwed unless you can afford more expensive lawyers.
Knowing the argument is lost, the European governments that give a shit, have desperately sunk again into the legal mire.
William Briggs (statistician) has an interesting take on the development that has legs. Let's hope he is right or many of us 'deniers' will be slurping on porridge for the rest of our days.
Climate bullies out-classed
Posted 4 June 2008
I have been very busy recently finding very little time for everything, especially this blog. Mostly, though, I have come close to giving up battering my head against the CO2 wall. The green lobby has friends in all the lowest places and, in its deluded narcisistic state, will not stop until humanity has been brought to its knees.
Luckily others are bravely soldiering on, not least those stalwart fellows over at Climate Resistance. Their well written exposure of green ideology put me in mind of Prof Brignal's marvelous essay on the religion of science Number Watch.
Keep up the good work chaps. The truth will out! Eventually!
Pimping the pulpit
Posted 2 January 2008
Call me a right-wing reactionary Holocaust Denier if you like but man-made-global-warming is a myth and it is increasingly likely that global-warming as a whole is nothing more than boogey-man hokum.
So, I find it particularly irritating that Christianinity has so comprehensively given up on soul saving that it has to resort to saving the planet instead. Why? God is going to give it a right royal seeing to at the 'end of days' anyhoo; isn't S/He?
At every opportunity they imply in their preachings that we will burn in hell if we don't stop destroying the planet. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury is at it. Read how Jeremy Clarkson sees him off in the Times.
Happy New Year, by the way!
A Religious Tale of Two Cities
Posted 20 July 2007
Your hopeless host is torn, as you may have guessed from reading most of this site, especially spiritually (see - what I believe at the moment).
In recent years I have re-visited my youthful searching years and come to different conclusions about the meaning of life (see link above). So why am I bothering to tell the world? I am currently concerned about the state of ‘church’ in the protestant Christian western sense, amongst many other spiritual concerns.
Why ‘church’? I have close links with two very different ways of ‘doing church’ (as one of them likes to put it). One is a big-city, modern, self styled ‘we are all disciples’ evangelical, non-aligned, young church. The other is Methodist, utterly rooted in its very old tradition and in its much smaller rural city community, but with a young(ish) ministerial team. I will not name and shame here because I think my point is a general one about the mess protestantism is in and why it is failing.
What concerns me? Competition, marketing, limited resources, jobs for the boys, exclusivity, extremism, double standards, trendyism etc. etc., that’s what!
What do I mean by that?
The young trendy big-city church was ‘planted’, a decade or so ago, into an area with a lot of young disaffected Christians with new families or plans for new families. They are a wealthy church with an effective tithing system, which pays good salaries to the staff and maintains a good level of missionary work locally and overseas. The members can afford it! They have no permanent home but are now considering searching for one and raising the funds to afford it. I think, if they go ahead, they will succeed. They are driven by the passion of the charismatic founding pastor, who has on occasion moved me out of my box.
But.
They are obsessed with the trendy and fashionable in terms of communication, worship and lifestyles. Not surprising, given their demographic, but how does this spread the word amongst the less affluent, the elderly and the less trendy? I have been visiting this church every few months for nearly three years and a related one for a few years before that. The demographic does not change! There are no more than a handful of people with whitening or grey hair and surprisingly few non-white people given the area. They appear to be practising a form of Christianity in a particular style that limits their potential growth. They scare all but a narrow constituency away. They are preaching to the converted and feeling very self-satisfied about it.
So, what about the competition. For nearly twelve years I have been visiting one of the oldest Methodist churches in the country in a small rural city, at least three times a year. Despite pretensions to the contrary in the trendy modern church, above, I feel far more welcomed by the Methodists. I certainly detect far more tolerance and a natural warmth that comes from a much more mixed community. The membership numbers are very similar but the annual income is a third of ‘modern’ church.
There is true sense of family in the older church where generations worship together and do so where so many have done it before. The speakers here, ordained or lay, have also manged to move me out of my box (some more than others). The experience shows, the wisdom of the ages and old style of worship clearly puts off a proportion of younger members of the community but this is Methodism. They are, however, working on it unlike the church above, which appears quite content in its narrow mind-set and cult like worship of Jesus with no mention of God.
The old church have their own building and it makes such a difference. Extraordinary work is done here too in the local community and far beyond and there is much hidden generosity that does not show up in the official accounts. The young church is cult-like in its openness about giving and percentage tithing and strict conformity and suspicion of outside influences.
We have the old struggling to attract the new and the new failing to attract the old and not enough of both. The catholic church is still stuck in the middle ages. None of it draws me into a culture of regular church attendance or membership, even if they would have me with my beliefs. I see more long term hope in the Methodist church. There is a desire to change and an obvious wilingness to embrace or flirt with the new and I think its roots will see it through its culture clashes. The ‘modern’ church has more long term problems as its membership ages, and its attempt to emulate what it believes happened in the 1st century, actually expose it as the real old-fashioned church. Here the Methodists are in the accendancy, clearly listening to God now and not Jesus then.
Vegetarianism 101
Posted 1 June 2007
originally published elsewhere at another time
Vegetarians don’t eat dead animal flesh (meat)! Animal is a word with more than one meaning in modern usage but the first meaning given in the Oxford English Dictionary is the one that matters from a Vegetarian point of view. Fish, birds and everything else that walks, crawls, flies, swims or wriggles are animals. Somebody who eats any of them is not a Vegetarian! Vegetarians are not Vegans. Vegetarians eat dairy products such as milk, cheese and eggs (unfertilised), Vegans do not (and have many other restrictions). Vegetarians believe that it is not necessary to kill any animal in order to eat, and may make other animal product related life-style choices. Fruitarians only eat plant products that can be harvested without killing the plant. Some people are predominantly Vegetarian but ‘lapse’ to satisfy particular occassional desires or perhaps when away from home because of a lack of nutritional Vegetarian options. While they are lapsed they are not Vegetarian.
All cells in the Human body are regularly replaced but some more frequently than others. It is possible that after being vegetarian for many years some of the longest living cells in your body will remain ‘manufactured’ from some of the components of animal products consumed previously. You may never become a non-animal mammal.
Some Vegetarians also eat meat substitutes made from fungi and soya derived products amongst others, but many do not (especially because most soya is genetically modified). Many Vegetarians would prefer that their food does not resemble meat in any way. The difference is usually related to how an individual became Vegetarian in the first place. If the choice was idealogical (’eating animals is bad or unnecessary’ or for religious reasons) then they may also choose not to eat the substitutes. This will be particularly true for people who have been Vegetarian from childhood. Others choose Vegetarianism because they don’t like what is fed to animals or injected into them or object to their treatment, so believe that the resulting meat is harmful or unethically produced. Such Vegetarians may still like the taste of meat so may eat the substitutes.
Vitamin B12 can only be derived from animal products because it derives from a bacteria that lives in the guts of animals. It is essential for life but symptoms of a deficit may be slow to manifest because the liver stores a supply that can last for years. A lack of B12 will eventually kill and research suggests that plant derived substitutes are not properly absorbed by the body. It is found in eggs and cheese so Vegetarians eating these should be OK. Vegans and Fruitarians will become ill and eventually die if they don’t take B12 supplements.
The food Vegetarians eat (often labelled as such, or in separate compartments in shops) is also suitable for Omnivores. People who eat meat often turn up their noses at Vegetarian food, which would often have been the healthiest and tastiest food they had consumed for years, if only they had tried it.
Equally, it is very easy to follow a strict Vegetarian diet and eat extremely unhealthily. A Vegetarian can quite easily avoid anything green, avoid any protein, eat a great deal of fat and sugar and generally consume food of poor nutritional value. A Vegetarian can smoke, drink vats of alcohol and do absolutely no excercise content in the knowledge that no animal died contributing to his or her early expiration.
