eChurch Blog

It took me a long time to figure out that the spiritual life is not about arriving at a place of freedom from trials and temptations, but about suffering trials and temptations well.

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Over the last couple of days, I have found myself in the position of being drawn in to make responses in regard to Michael Patton’s recent controversial blog posts relating to the Catholic Church.

As I am in the process of converting to Catholicism, this is causing me considerable difficulty right now.

In view of this, I have taken the decision to step back from blogging at Theology in the News for the time being.

Some Christians are mad as March hares:

Three pastors, including the self-styled and controversial Reverend Bishop Daniel Obinim, were on August 9, 2011, granted bail by an Accra Circuit court after they allegedly assaulted three journalists and a panelist on an Accra-based radio station, Hot FM on the night of August 8.

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Obinim, the 33-year old founder of the International God’s Way Church, and two of his pastors, Kofi Akweitey and Kingsley Baah, are facing three counts of conspiracy to commit a crime, causing harm, and causing damage to private property.

The pastors had angrily stormed the studios of Hot FM to protest their exclusion from the programme, which discussed an alleged sex scandal involving Obinim and another pastor’s wife. The station played a tape recording purported to have implicated the founder in the scandal.

“They attacked the host and other staff members with a pinch bar and other weapons inflicting injuries on their bodies,” the prosecutor said.

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And because of their actions, the original allegation of indiscretion goes global, as well as their subsequent appalling behavior.

In the Gospel readings today, we read from Luke 1.39-56, Mary’s visitation with Elizabeth. I think Luke here is drawing on Ark typology, particularly the story in 2 Samuel 6 where David recovers the Ark. Like David, Mary rises and goes into the hill country of Judea. David asks, “How can the Ark of the Lord come to me?” (2 Sam. 6.9), while Elizabeth asks, “And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” David leaps and dances in front of the Ark (2 Sam 6.16), and John the Baptist likewise “leaps” at Mary’s arrival (Lk 1.41). While the Ark stays in the house of Obed-Edom for 3 months and blesses it (2 Sam. 6.11), Mary stays in the house of Elizabeth and Zechariah for 3 months (Lk 1.56).  There is also the fact that like the Ark in Exodus 40 that is “overshadowed” by the Holy Spirit (Ex 40.35), so too Mary will be ‘overshadowed’ by the Holy Spirit (Lk. 1.35).

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Anthony has a nice piece on the Assumption of Mary here.

This has been such an extraordinary day, I’m not even sure how to blog about it.

I know some readers will find what follows nothing more than an exhibition of delusion and perhaps a form of madness and yet for others, it will be statements of the bloomin’ obvious.

The following is not a theological discourse, it’s a straight forward telling of events today, as they happened. It’s probably worth noting that I am at this time mentally very stable.

Many of you know that I’m joining the Catholic Church and have blogged some of my reasons for this decision in recent times.

Well, I’ll let you into my dark little secret. No matter how much I tried, I simply could not agree with – and believe – Catholic Mariology. I’ve prayed about it and worried over it. As I view the Catholic Church as the ‘original true’ church, I felt inwardly despicable at my inability to conform to the Catholic view of Mary.

I kept thinking, who on earth am I to pontificate and disagree with church dogma, that reaches as far back in history as the original church Fathers.

It got so bad that when Mary was mentioned in Church, I’d lose focus and my inner battle would begin anew.

This of course reached a horrid pinnacle yesterday, with the Feast of the Assumption of Mary.

I had made a secret pact with myself to remain silent on these doubts and endeavour to join the Catholic Church regardless, but this did make me feel somewhat deceitful.

Well, today, wifey began reading to me from this link on Mary as the New Eve.

As the dawn of realisation hit me that Mary was indeed the new Eve, I started to resist, as I knew the implications of this would be astronomical.

But it was too late, the domino’s were falling and there was nothing I could do to stem the flow.

The FULL revelations and reaslisations over the person of Mary, literally sent shock waves through me. As I fully comprehended her role as the mother of Jesus, I experienced a nano-second where I saw Mary holding Jesus.

In a moment, I realised that nobody loves Jesus as Mary does, as she loves him with a mothers love. I was then hit anew with the fact that Jesus is my brother and resides inside me and therefore Mary is also my mother.

Everything fell into place. I saw her as the mother of the church. It was from her womb that the new living fruit came forth. The new Eve offering to the world the new fruit.

As these revelations and realisations hit me wave upon wave – so many more than I’m prepared to type out now – I was overcome with a feeling of being adopted into this wonderful family, the sense of love was palable, I felt born again, like my old hard and rebellious heart had been ripped out and replaced with a new one of love.

This was no mere metaphysical experience, this was more than just a spiritual experience, this was all of that and more, incorporating even my physical body.

The sense of being set free and cherished was overwhelming.

I’ve always had a sense that God probably didn’t like me all that much, but put up with me because of his own goodness. But now I realised for the first time just how truly and deeply God loves me as his beloved child.

I’m now fully part of the family, my life will never be the same again. And in that family, Mary is the mother of all of us and the Church itself.

Only God himself could have created within me this remarkable turnaround.

I am free indeed.

This is an interesting one and it will be fascinating to see how this pans out:

The Charity Commission has received a complaint about a charity that is campaigning against the “Islamisation of the UK”.

The commission said concerns had been raised about the Barnabas Fund, which is selling a booklet it has produced called Slippery Slope: the Islamisation of the UK.

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Another day, another bomb:

A bomb exploded last night near the St Ephraim Syrian Orthodox Church in Kirkuk, which is just a few hundreds of metres from the Chaldean cathedral, in central part of the city. The device blew up at 1.30 am and there were no victims. The damages to the church were however huge.

Today’s incident is the latest in a string of attacks against Christians and their places of worship. On 2 August, a car bomb exploded in front of the Holy Family Syrian Catholic Church, wounding 15 people. The bomb had been placed inside a car, parked near the building.

On the same day, another bomb also placed in a car parked near a Presbyterian church was defused before it went off.

Islamic fundamentalists, who remain very active, as well as groups involved in local feuds, have targeted Iraqi Christians.

….continue

Want to be a New Atheist blogger?  It’s easy!  Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Launch an unhinged, fallacious attack on your opponent, focusing your attention on arguments he has never given.

Step 2: Studiously ignore the arguments he actually has given.

Step 3: Declare victory and exchange high fives with your fellow New Atheists, as they congratulate you for your brilliance and erudition.

Step 4: When your opponent calls attention to this farcical procedure, accuse him of making unhinged, fallacious attacks on you.  Throw in the Myers Shuffle for good measure.

Step 5: Exchange further high fives with your fellow New Atheists.

Step 6: Repeat 1 – 5 until your disconnect from reality is complete.

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The following is a guest post from my very good friend Edmund Standing:

The recent wave of rioting and looting in Britain’s urban communities were by no means solely a ‘black thing’. A look at the people being charged with offences related to the riots reveals a wide cross-section of ethnicities and backgrounds. That said, it is undeniable that black youth made up a significant number of the rioters, and that the rioting began on the pretext of being a protest against racist policing. Indeed, the rioting highlighted the existence of a criminal subculture formed within certain elements of black communities, but now spreading out to incorporate young people of many ethnicities.

In the riots, we saw not, as the Left would have us believe, an uprising of the ‘oppressed’, but rather a public show of the kind of ‘gangsta’ criminality that, on a lower level, is an everyday occurrence in many urban communities, in particular those with a large number of young black residents. This criminal subculture is largely modelled on the ‘ghetto’ gang culture found in urban America, and is a subculture which is literally killing young black people. Within this subculture, violence and criminality are practised and glorified, and sexual irresponsibility is the norm, hence the large number of black single mothers.

The question of who is to blame for the existence of this subculture and what is to be done about it is something the Left cannot answer, because to answer honestly they would have to admit, ‘we made this happen’. So, instead we have the usual predictable attacks on public sector cuts, as though in the short period since the Coalition took over after years of Labour rule what is in fact a serious and deeply entrenched problem suddenly sprang out of nowhere.

The fact of the matter is that black people have contributed much to this country, and many are hard-working and upstanding citizens. However, there is also undeniably a deep-seated problem of criminality and social breakdown within majority black neighbourhoods, and this problem mirrors similar problems in majority black neighbourhoods in the United States. And the sad fact is that both in the US and in this country it wasn’t always that way.

LTC Allen West, writing of this problem in black America notes that within his lifetime he has seen a change from when black communities ‘fostered a desire to excel beyond the standard and have a commitment to excellence regardless of skin color’ to a situation in which a ‘victimization mentality has taken root in the black community resulting in astronomical unemployment rates, high incarceration rates, appalling murder rates, breakdown of the black family, and embarrassing teen pregnancy rates’.

This is a problem that is not in any sense a creation of conservatives, no matter what the Left may say about it, when they even acknowledge it exists. When they do acknowledge the existence of the problem, they should stop blaming conservatives and heed the words of Kevin Jackson, author of The BIG Black Lie:

When you create problems like you have in the black community, pull your car over and take a look at the damage you’ve done. Don’t keep driving and looking in the rear-view mirror and asking, “What happened?”

The damage that has been done most certainly has the grubby fingerprints of the Left all over it.

It is the Left that has launched a sustained attack on the traditional family and denigrated the importance of the role of the father. As Guido recently noted, no less a mainstream left-wing figure than Harriet Harman was in her younger years pumping out statements such as: ‘It cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life, or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony and cohesion’.

It is the Left that has for years supported and promoted a culture of sexual irresponsibility and promiscuity in the name of ‘sexual liberation’. It is the Left that has promoted the widespread and easy availability of abortion on demand, a tragedy particularly in black communities where we see a disproportionately high rate of abortions, and as Jonah Goldberg has pointed out in his excellent book Liberal Fascism, the pushing of abortion as a solution in black communities has very murky origins in the eugenics movement, which was again a movement primarily of the Left, not of conservatism.

It is the Left that, via welfare statism, has provided the means by which fathers can desert their responsibilities, safe in the knowledge that the State will fund and sustain their discarded girlfriends and unwanted children. And via this same system, it is the Left that has encouraged a culture of entitlement, in which the ‘right’ to hand-outs trumps any notion of personal responsibility.

It is the Left that falls back on the lazy excuse of ‘racism’ as an answer to why people in urban black communities are unproductive and dislocated from mainstream society, while at the same time promoting crippling racial collectivist ideas, rather than colour-blind individualism.

It is the Left that holds up race baiters like Lee Jasper as leaders of the ‘black community’, and which panders to, and fosters, a victim mentality amongst black youth, rather than presenting men such as Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones as role models to be emulated.

It is the Left that, in the name of ‘respecting cultures’, works on the assumption that ‘ghetto culture’ is somehow a representation of an authentically ‘black’ way of life. It is the Left that opposes any attempts to undo this ‘lifestyle’ in which ‘belligerence is considered being manly and crudity is considered cool, while being civilized is regarded as “acting white.”‘ To criticise this subculture is, in the leftist imagination, ‘racist’.

It is the Left that worries about BBC programming being ‘too white’, as though intelligent programming is somehow beyond black people’s comprehension. It is the Left that listens intently when racial collectivists such as Operation Black Vote claim that Radio 4 is ‘too white and has a tweeness to it’. And while we’re at it, it is hardly conservatives who encourage the broadcasting by the BBC of rap music which glorifies black-on-black killings.

It is the Left that, because of its underlying ‘anti-capitalist’ ideology, fails to promote individualism and entrepreneurship amongst black youth, teaching them instead to embrace self-pity and to blame others for their lack of success. Indeed, the further to the left people are, the less likely they are to promote black achievement; after all, successful black people don’t have any need for socialism. It is actually, perversely, in the interest of the Left to keep black people down, as that way leftists can guarantee that black people will remain dependent on them. The practical effects of this are far more racist than anything any conservative has ever come up with.

The fact is that the ‘ghetto’ subculture is a creation of the Left and the riots are in fact another manifestation of what years of left-wing policies and ideology have done to the social fabric of Britain. If leftists actually care about Britain’s urban communities, and most importantly, if they genuinely care about black people, it’s time they took a step back and reflected long and hard on what they have done.

As I am given to having a morbid mind at times, I’ve found myself pondering on what my final prayer would be on my death bed.

I’m no further forward than when I started thinking on this one.

Obviously Catholics have this one sown up in the Hail Mary

Holy Mary,
Mother of God,
pray for us sinners now,
and at the hour of death.

What about you? What would you pray if you knew you were about to breath your last and shuffle off this mortal coil?