Saturday, August 18, 2012

The Hypocrisy of the abortion industry


New Testament professor fired for Orthodox beliefs


New Testament professor fired for Orthodox beliefs

This shows how intolerant those who want to promote "tolerance" really are.

Who is really a Jew?

There has been some debate of what constitutes a jew today. If you have heard the news, there's a far right Hungarian politician who found out that he has Jewish blood. So he stopped attacking Jews.

In my Latin American world, there are some who think they are Jews, because there heritage hints that they had a mother or father of Jewish ancestry.

There are also issues among Jews as to ascertain who is truly Jewish. So this is an ongoing issue.

I leave you this article from The Economist for you to ponder this issue.

If you live in the USA, and even if you don't

This is a good interactive map, that shows you four categories of each state of the USA:
Cheap (green) vs Expensive
Cost of Living
Healthy (green) vs OverweightObesity Ranking
Boring (or not).
State pride!

So go to this site and have a look.


Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Quote of the decade!!

"Wright is even willing (and able!?) to almost single-handedly take on both the Reformers and their would-be heirs."

This is so amazing, because it is so true.

Via Vocab Malone  

Sunday, August 12, 2012

NBC doesn't know what the flags of the world are


And Americans complain why the rest of the world consider them provincial. Even those who live in provinces know better!!!

Friday, August 10, 2012

The USA has the worst health care service of all industrialized countries

I remember years ago, when opposing the Health Care Act (dubbed by its opponents, Obamacare) was criticised because it meant that the legislation implied that the USA health system was broken. Then Congress leader, John Boehner said that the USA had the best health care system in the world.

Well, we know now, what we knew then, the USA health care system, is the worst among industrialized countries. The issue is that for Americans, admitting that, is a sign of weaknesses. And in the meantime, people died, and don't get the health care needed.

Here it's a report by Reuters on the issue.

The one thing that really gives me courage is that we in Australia, have a better health system than in the USA, and still, we here complain for the "lack of care". We should be more grateful for what we have.

Monday, August 6, 2012

Christianity must change or die, but not like Gene Robinson suggested

I've been told that the church must change in order to continue as a living organism. But the people who tell me that, usually belong to churches that are dying, exactly for implementing the changes they suggest to me.

Ross Douthat, has written a good piece dealing with this issue in the New York Times, where he deals with this issue. Liberals have been telling us for years that the church must change in order to stay alive, but the churches lead by liberals are the ones dying because of their misguided change.


Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?IN 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States. 
As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.

Spong was wrong then, and is wrong now. He wants to kill of Orthodox Christianity, so it doesn't stand in the way of his sinful life, but at the end, he seems to had inflicted a wound to his own type of christianity. The issue was then, and is now, that those who should have known better, did nothing, instead went on to dismantle the Episcopal Church in order to be in the good graces of today's society and culture.  So there's no interest in defending the truth of the Bible against a society that needs it so much, rather, picks up their political fights, which contradict the Gospel at its core.


Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.

Well, there's nothing they can offer but the same thrush that the young people are facing outside the church. We don't see a great increase in the audience they intended to target. In Australia, the Uniting Church, is experiencing something similar. Yet, the churches it was meant to replace, seem to either thrive (the Methodist), or at least survive (the Presbyterians).


This decline is the latest chapter in a story dating to the 1960s. The trends unleashed in that era — not only the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism — threw all of American Christianity into crisis, and ushered in decades of debate over how to keep the nation’s churches relevant and vital. 
Traditional believers, both Protestant and Catholic, have not necessarily thrived in this environment. The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.
My sentiment as well. But I wouldn't call prosperity Gospel people "traditional believers". They are as far from the Gospel as the Mormons or Jehova Witnesses. They have a total different religion. These churches thrive, not because they are Gospel driven, rather, because they are money driven. People want money and wealth, so they go to these churches to get a hand of how to obtain it, or make it.

But if conservative Christianity has often been compromised, liberal Christianity has simply collapsed. Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.
Not all Methodist, Lutheran or Presbyterians are going the way of the dinosaurs, but those denominations that have adopted the Episcopal way, are going the way of the Episcopal church.

Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis. Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2006 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.) 
Liberal commentators, meanwhile, consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a model for the future without reckoning with their decline. Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor. 
 Liberals don't want to accept their peril. As we see in the case of Katherine Jefferts Schori, she wants to window dress their declining numbers by passing it as a way of "stewardship of the earth". This type of denial would not be allowed in other quarters. And in the case of "progressive" Catholicism, it just won't get people inside their orders. If some progressives nuns wants to affirm somebody's homosexuality, why would, they in turn, would quit being a lesbian in order to turn into a life of celibacy?


But if liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.

May the Lord deliver us from the right to take the face of Christianity!!!!

What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.” 
Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that per haps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.

I wonder then, how these "liberals" couldn't pass on their faith to the next generation. There's still much we have to learn. 

Sunday, August 5, 2012

II Samuel 12 No greater sin that God cannot forgive


Israelis attack Palestinians as well, yet, we don't hear about it.

We hear all the time about how much the Israelis need to defend themselves from the "terrorists" Palestinians. I don't deny that there are many Palestinians who employ terrorism, but so do Israelis in order to grab Palestinian land.

This link came via Zwinglius Redidivus. So I got a bit more than what is available from the Haaretz website.

Here it's what the news item says:

There were more than 50 reports of Israelis assaulting Palestinians in the West Bank last month. In the start of a regular series, Haaretz details one particularly violent attack.
There is still a bruise under Ibrahim Bani Jaber's left eye. The blows his brother Jawdat received to his right ear didn't leave any marks, but they still make his head feel heavy. During our meeting at their home in the West Bank village of Akraba last week, they did not spend much time describing the fear and pain they felt when they were attacked. Instead, they spoke about the family's sheep, that they had rushed to try and save that day, July 7, when they heard that settlers were attacking them. 
The violent confrontation - between settlers from Itamar and Giva 777, and Palestinian residents of Akraba - was the worst such incident last month. But it was, nevertheless, merely part of the daily routine of assaults, attacks and incursions. It is only on rare occasions that these incidents become news. In most cases, if there is an investigation there is no indictment.
So there you go, human beings, being them Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, etc., they are all violent. They all need Jesus.

Why the Christian view of marriage matters, and the real impulse of some gay activist regarding marriage

This discussion took place here, in my own country, Australia, where even our Prime Minister is not married, and does not look like she is going to in the long term, happily living with her "partner" The direct link is here for the audio.

What I will post, however, comes from the Stand to Reason (STR) Blog.

July 31, 2012
Same-Sex Marriage Won't Be Enough
Last month, at a Sydney Writers Festival panel discussion on the question, “Why get married when you could be happy?” Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen had this to say about same-sex marriage:
It’s a no-brainer that we should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist [cheers from the audience].
That causes my brain some trouble. And part of why it causes me trouble is because fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there—because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist. And I don’t like taking part in creating fictions about my life. That’s sort of not what I had in mind when I came out thirty years ago. I have three kids who have five parents, more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally….
[After my divorce,] I met my new partner, and she had just had a baby, and that baby’s biological father is my brother, and my daughter’s biological father is a man who lives in Russia, and my adopted son also considers him his father. So the five parents break down into two groups of three…. And really, I would like to live in a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality. And I don’t think that’s compatible with the institution of marriage.
This just illustrates the fact that the institution of marriage is inextricably connected with children and reflects an unchangeable reality: One man + one woman = children. The reproductive system is divided in half—the man has one half, the woman has the other—and when they come together, the result is a whole, functioning system that creates children. Therefore, the state protects the union between a man and a woman. By doing this, the children are legally protected.
Gessen wants to fight for marriage to legally include different types of relationships because she wants the government to declare there is no difference between a heterosexual union and a homosexual one. But there is a difference. A very important difference based on the unchangeable realities of biology. A difference that’s relevant because it’s at the very heart of the institution of marriage. A difference that justifies the government treating the different unions differently.
So Gessen is conflicted. She wants the unions to be treated the same, but she recognizes that, by nature, they create fundamentally different situations. And since the institution of marriage can’t accommodate a union that has only one woman and one woman (because another person—a man—is needed somewhere in the picture in order for a family to be created), she understands that an entirely new legal system must be created in order for the government to be able to address her situation.
So here’s the thinking (a summary in my words, not hers): “I want all unions to be treated the same, but since we’re not the same, due to biological realities beyond our control, and since marriage can never work for the union and children I have, we need to drop marriage and come up with a new idea so we can all be the same under that new system.” Or even more succinctly stated, “You shouldn’t have marriage because we can’t have marriage.”
Marriage can’t be separated from biological realities. And that’s why this upheaval won’t end when same-sex marriage is accepted—why Gessen’s ultimate goal is the end of marriage.
I’m glad to hear her honesty about this.
[HT: John Sandeman (click to see more quotes from the panel)]
So, for all of those who so fiercely defend same sex marriage, would you like to move into this new type of understanding?? What if you get divorced, and then you find that your ex's new hubby or wife has full custody, just like you??

Better think again, since you don't seem to know what you are wishing for.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Harassing an innocent worker in the name of freedom




Good on the bosses of this hate filled person to dismiss him. This must be a lesson well learned that this type of intolerance will not be tolerated from either side.