Churches in Zhejiang province in China are still being
demolished, or are having their crosses removed; around 360 churches have now
been partially or completely demolished. There are rumours of a competition
amongst local government officials to demolish the most churches, to improve
their political standing. At a church in Wenzhou city, up to 1000 Christians
have been forming a human barricade around the church every night for the past
month; at 3am on Monday morning, around 400 police officers attacked the
protesters with iron batons, and four Christians were hospitalised with severe
injuries. The church is still intact.
President Obama recently gave a speech in which he mocked
climate change deniers and spoke favourably of his science ‘czar’, John
Holdren. Unfortunately for Obama, Holdren (who is director of the Office of
Science and Technology Policy) co-authored a Malthusian book in 1977 which
proposed that a world government should control all resources and “determine
the optimum population for each region.” To support such population management,
the book argued that “laws requiring compulsory abortion could be sustained
under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became severe.” In
another 1970s book, the same authors proposed pressuring the US government to
halt the growth of the American population, and also to ‘de-develop’ the USA.
Holdren has made no recent comment about population control, but when asked if
he still supported ‘de-development’ in a 2010 interview, Holdren said he did.
He claimed that it referred to “stopping activities that destroy the
environment and promoting activities that improved environmental quality”. He
said that he hoped that market forces would accomplish this, but in fact
regulation is being used; the Environmental Protection Agency has just
introduced strict limits on CO2 emissions from electrical plants. In short,
while some of Holdren’s environmental goals may be worthy, the reasoning that
lies behind them seems even more eccentric and much more disturbing than
climate change denial.
In Mosul, Iraq, Islamic forces have started marking
Christian homes and businesses with the Arabic letter ‘N’ for ‘Nazarene’ (see
picture), in the same way that the Nazis marked Jews during World War II. A
number of Christians have changed their Facebook photo to the same letter, to
show solidarity with Christians in Iraq.
A Conservative member of the House of Lords, who is also a
member of the British Humanist Association, has described belief in God as a
“virus.” He added that Anglicanism was a “mild and attenuated form of the virus
and may even act as a vaccine against more virulent infections.” He was
commenting on the “Trojan Horse” Islamic attempted takeover of Birmingham
schools; his proposed solution was to take religious practice out of schools
altogether, to protect children against exposure to religion.
A government-funded Canadian report entitled “Exposing
Crisis Pregnancy Centers in British Columbia,” which has been used by
international abortion conferences, universities and lobbying groups, has been
roundly criticised by CPC workers and has been rebutted with a 50-page document
entitled “A Respectful Rebuttal to a Disrespectful Report.” The rebuttal, which
has been verified for medical content by several doctors and counsellors,
accuses the original report of falsely making eight “serious allegations” and
twelve “silly allegations.” The former include crisis pregnancy centres “lying
about being religiously affiliated” and “enticing women in by pretending they
will help them with an abortion”; the latter include CPC staff being trained to
terrify vulnerable women or deliberately falsifying pregnancy test results. When
the original report was first released, two crisis pregnancy clinics in
Vancouver sued the author for defamation; the suit failed, not because the
report was judged to be accurate, but because the court decided that the report
only referred to the clinics indirectly.
In sport news, the Commonwealth Games begin tonight in
Glasgow. There have been some reports of an unidentified flying object in the Glasgow
sky shortly before the games’ opening ceremony, which will be attended by the Queen,
but it turned out to be the sun.
And finally, summertime occasionally produces stories of pets
or even children who are rescued by passing adults after being left locked in
hot cars. However, last week in Knoxville, Tennessee, the roles were reversed.
A 68 year old man who had had two strokes in the past six months was waiting
for his wife to return from a church event when the car doors automatically
locked. He was too weak to open the car door but managed to attract the attention
of a passing 3 year old. The boy couldn’t
open the door so he ran to the event, found the pastor, and kept saying “locked,
locked, locked” and “hot, hot” and pulling the pastor’s hand until the pastor
came to see what was the matter. The pensioner recovered after being taken into
an air conditioned room and being given water; the toddler’s summary of events
was, “I saved life.”
No comments:
Post a Comment