The Christian church has a deeply flawed understanding of sex that has led to morally groundless objections to masturbation, birth control, abortion and homosexuality, says a leading Canadian Anglican bishop.
In particular, the church has been wrong for centuries on the notion that sex exists only for the purpose of procreation, Right Rev. Michael Ingham, bishop of the Greater Vancouver Diocese of New Westminster, told a conference in Ottawa last night.
“Christianity as a religion stands in need of a better theology of sexuality,” he said, “a better understanding of the complex role sexuality plays in our human nature and of the purposes of God in creating us as sexual beings.” globe and mail
One of the pleasures of being a notional Anglican is the intelligence and compassion which some, but not all, of our bishops bring to fundamental questions. Unfortunately, Bishop Michael’s positions may well lead to schism withing the worldwide Anglican communion; but that is not such a terrible thing if the alternative is an ongoing set of theological errors regarding sexuality.
Written by jay on March 9th, 2007 with 4 comments.
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Over at Olaf’s there is a thoughtful post about the Robert McClelland affair.
I commented:
The McClelland affair underscores just how pernicious the organization of the Canadian blogosphere into partisan lists has become.
Robert himself is a grade “A” asshat and his remarks are often offensive. So what? The entire point of blogging is to allow even the looniest a place where their opinions - however demented - are published and examined.
However, once the taste police and the guardians of civil discourse get involved - as is inevitable when one blogs as part of a partisan group - certain topics are no longer acceptable. The good of the group (or, indeed, party) trumps the value of an individual’s right to express his opinion.
In this case the dissident opinion was deemed to be anti-semitic and therefore beyond the pale. However, what if Robert had committed the heresy of questioning climate change or, in Tory circles, Stephen Harper’s leadership capacity? What if a blogger were to suggest that current immigration policy was a bad idea or that women, on the whole, like raising children more than working full time? Remember a couple of months ago poor Elizabeth May was read out of the feminist left for daring to suggest that having an abortion was not the best thing in the world for the woman concerned?
The blogosphere and the party system are at odds with each other. In a mass media driven, gotcha, political age, political parties have to exercise strict message control else they be accused of a “gaffe”. The essence of blogging is that there is no message management, no party line, no whip or talking points.
Vile as McClelland often is, his accusers and eventual executioners do indeed endanger my liberty. Worse, they threaten to homogenize political discourse to the point of such blandness that no one will bother to read the blogs.
As Alan at GenX at 40 gleefully points out regularly, blogging has not lived up to its early promise to provide a genuinely alternative agora where all opinions are written and weighed. That naive promise died once political parties began to take bloggers seriously enough to want to organize them and once blogging partisans decided to help out with this predictable effort. Gradually there emerged certain topics which were off limits and, worse, various people took it upon themselves to police their little patches of the Canadian blog world.
Party politics in Canada is all about the creation of coalitions and to do that a party politician needs to avoid giving offence. The politics of polite means that you are not allowed to notice a broad range of topics. Which, of course, makes sense politically. The problem is that this polite political world tends to reject ideas which run contrary to received wisdom (or last week’s polling results).
At this point Canada is blessed with four political parties who have all become fervent believers in man made climate change and the need to “do something” about it. Each is proposing ever more expensive measures to combat this scourge of our time. Each is committed to raising public awareness and none are prepared to countenance debate as to the science or the policy implications of their new found orthodoxy. The case is closed and people who raise questions are unwelcome.
Orthodoxy, by its nature, confines and directs debate. It has no room for outliers, none for dissidents. It creates and enforces political no go areas in which no debate is allowed, no deviation tolerated. For the party pols the stakes are too high to allow discussion.
One of the great gifts of blogging is that the stakes are incredibly low. A person can write what he likes with next to no consequence, pro or con. Which, until the parties began to see blogging’s potential, was what allowed the rapid, often vitriolic, occasionally incisive, exchange of ideas which is how blogging started. The echo chambers and mass traffic of the current world was unknown when virtually the entire Canadian blogosphere read each others’ work without regard to party affiliation.
In many ways, Robert’s expulsion from the Progressive bloggers is typical of the relentless logic of “bland”. What he wrote and what the excretable arthurdecco wrote to prompt is revolt me; but the point of blogging is not to be reassured in one’s positions but rather to have them challenged again and again. This scares the Hell out of the appartchiks like Cherniak who want to pretend that politics is confined to the well rehearsed banalities of party politicians.
Party politics and blogging have had their starter marriage - some people will try to keep it going, some will quit altogether, but a few, and Robert, for better or worse will be among them, will accept the inherent contradiction and get on with their lives. Blogging is an outsider’s medium and, to stay interesting, it needs to stay that way.
Update: Kate observes:
While I may find much of what he writes to be repulsive and the remainder of it uniformed, I agree with Peter Rempel and Kathy Shaidle. When members of the blogosphere - particularly those of us who write under our real identities - find themselves the target of campaigns orchestrated by self-rightous speech herders, it’s the responsibility of bloggers to set aside personal differences and partisanship to defend our individual freedom to offend.
Written by jay on March 8th, 2007 with 5 comments.
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I posted this yesterday at Just One Minute:
Damn.
The appeal will be interesting legally but a nullity politically.
Unfortunately, getting a jury - any jury - to understand the burden on the prosecution in a criminal matter is very difficult. It appears, as one commentor notes above, that this particular jury, faced with a rather unconvincing prosecution, rolled up its collective sleeves and got to work doing the prosecution’s job for it.
It is also unhelpful to have a judge intent on preventing a full defense and declining, time after time, to grant the defense the customary latitude to bring in evidence going to context. Some of those rulings likely contain errors of law; but the overall effect of Judge Walton’s cheese paring was to deny Libby the right to present critical facts to the jury. Ms. Mitchell being one of them, Ms. Plame’s still murky status being another. By denying Libby the opportunity to bring in such evidence Walton ignored the spirit of the law which entitles an accused to mount a full defense.
I’m not terrifically impressed with Well’s decision to go for simple and streamlined because nothing about this case was simple. Pushing the judge a lot harder and calling more witnesses who would speak to the sheer incompetence of the overall investigation would have made sense. So would calling the multiple other sources of the Plame pushback within the administration. This might not have done the administration much good but Wells was acting for Libby not George Bush.
Finally, for our Fitzmas friends: when you were expecting a bike under the tree and you get socks you still have to smile. Because that’s all you’re getting
.
Written by jay on March 7th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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Soot from the factories of Asia is changing weather across the Pacific Ocean and causing storms like the December howler that clobbered Vancouver’s Stanley Park, a new study says.
For a change, scientists aren’t blaming global warming for the increase in number and intensity of storms. The new study blames sooty, sulphurous coal smoke from Asian industry — largely in China and India — for altering the eastbound “storm track” in the Pacific. vancouver sun via sda
I keep saying that the solution is to buy nothing from China….as if.
I’m hoping to find a market to trade soot offsets. So far, no luck. Apparently algore has not heard about soot. And, by the way, there is some evidence that changing ice conditions in the Arctic, if these changes are happening at all, may well be attributable to soot as well. Makes the ice darker and thus more heat absorbent.
However, I remain content to blame George Bush.
Written by jay on March 7th, 2007 with no comments.
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A report released last week by Beijing authorities indicated that as its economy continues to expand at a red-hot pace, China is highly likely to overtake the United States this year or in 2008 as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
This information, along with data from the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based alliance of oil importing nations, also revealed that China’s greenhouse gas emissions have recently been growing by a total amount much greater than that of all industrialized nations put together. sfgate.com
Which, of course, renders the entire Kyoto exercise a farce. Even if Canada decided to contract its economy by the required 35%, our sacrifice would be lost in the billows of CO2 rolling out from the world’s workshop.
I am, of course, waiting for GreenPeace, the Kyotology community and M. Dion to call for an immediate boycott of all products from China (that is to say, pretty much everything).
Written by jay on March 6th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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