Religion

For the UK, the Ulster bit is the Presbyterian heartland of the Plantation. Liverpool is the Irish and Catholic immigration. The islands are the Wee Frees (??). France is the Vendee – the Catholic and Royalist anti-revolution so harshly put down by the Jacobins. Andalusia was Muslim until 1492, some hangover there. The N Spain bit is, umm, the Carlists of Navarre? V. Catholic. Romania is Transylvania, presumably the Hungarian speakers holding to religion as well as language. Rome is Vatican, well, D’Oh. S Germany is what, Catholic Bavaria? N Albania is the old Venetian Stato Del Mare (spelling?).

Greece is Salonika and no, I don’t know why there.

However, from those other examples at a guess I’d say there’s some different cultural/effnik grouping which clings to religion as one of the differentiators of that grouping. Because that’s much of what’s happening elsewhere. Dunno why the Tatras are more religious than most of Poland but the Czech bit is Moravia and they’ve long had that Catholic/Protestant thing going on.

Anyone got any better ideas?

The areas that are more religious are those which are effnikly different anyway, religion being a marker of that difference? Not as a proof, a 100%, but as a tendency?

A Catholic priest has caused uproar in Ireland after declaring that the deputy prime minister, Leo Varadkar, and other gay politicians will go to hell.

Fr Seán Sheehy, 65, condemned homosexuality, trans rights and abortion rights from the pulpit and in media interviews this week, drawing widespread censure, including from his own bishop.

Some called the comments a throwback to a vanished Ireland, others linked them to Sheehy’s exposure to US culture wars during 42 years serving in US dioceses.

Could actually be just that he’s a Catholic priest who has actually read the stuff about what Catholic priests are expected to believe.

You know, we are indeed all God’s little children and here’re the family rules he’s laid down about how we should live our lives. Obey them and be with him in the next life – don’t and don’t. Hell being the absence of being in God’s presence in that eternity.

Now, we out here don’t have to believe all of that as the majority of humanity doesn’t believe the Catholic Church’s take on these things. Largest centrally organised religion in the world it may be but it’s not dominant nor a majority. But complaining that a Catholic priest actually believes Catholic teaching is a bit much, no?

A New York City preacher was robbed of more than $1m worth of jewellery while delivering a livestreamed sermon on Sunday when armed bandits crashed his Brooklyn church.

It’s who it works for that is at issue…..

Bishop Robert McManus told the Nativity School in Worcester, Massachusetts, that the flags sent a “confusing and scandalous message” and sought to “disrupt the family structure”.

“It is my contention that the Gay Pride flag represents support of gay marriage and actively living a LGBTQ+ lifestyle,” he said. “This is also true of Black Lives Matter.”

School resists removal
After raising the flags in 2021, the school resisted demands by the Diocese of Worcester for them to be removed, despite warnings it would be banned from identifying as a Catholic school if it failed to do so.

Whether the Catholic Church should be against aspects of the LGBT set – the existence ain’t it, it’s the practice – is another matter but it’s fairly well known they are, no?

Religious groups that follow Jesus must push to end the exploitation of others for power and profit
Brad Chilcott

Well, alright, maybe:

Recently, my psychologist asked me to consider her assertion that “there is no true altruism” – in other words, no one is truly selfless.

Hmm, maybe we might not gain our ethical guidance from someone in the grip of psychiatric care then, eh?

A Catholic priest in Arizona has resigned after he was found to have performed baptisms incorrectly throughout his career, rendering the rite invalid for thousands of people.

The Catholic Diocese of Phoenix announced on its website that it determined after careful study that the Rev. Andres Arango had used the wrong wording in baptisms performed up until June 17, 2021. He had been off by a single word.

During baptisms in both English and Spanish, Arango used the phrase “we baptize you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” He should have said “I baptize,” the diocese explained.

In the strictest sense anyone can baptise using pretty much any damn formulation they like. For God, being omniscient, knows the intent etc. Does actually happen too. Newborn, baptised with mother’s finger dipped in any convenient drop of water. You know, if there’s a fear they won’t survive.

Happened to me after all.

Or is it me?

and Mary Rose, canon emeritus of Leicester Cathedral,

Tempus Fugit obvs. But wimmins vicars seem only yesterday. Yet it’s been going on long enough to have a canon emeritus?

From Matthew T:

In Kirklees borough, where Batley Grammar School is located, the syllabus says children should be “give[n] reasons why visual representation of God and the prophets is forbidden (haram) in Islam,” by the end of Key Stage 2.

Pupils should also understand “key religious values including democracy, human rights, rule of law, secularism, freedom of expression and tolerance” – this is taught in Key Stage 3.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30813742

well researched and well argued response to the evidence-free scaremongering and barely laundered antisemitism of cisgender authors who claim to know more about trans people than trans people do. It details the links between UK anti-trans feminism and the US Christian Right,

Quite why antisemitism is in there is unknown. But connecting it with the famously philosemitic US Christian Right is absurd.

I’d never heard the story beyond the mockery of the makeup and hair:

Her highly coiffed, heavily made-up persona was mocked and parodied on comedy shows such as Saturday Night Live. She died in 2007 at the age of 65, having remarried.

Pieters never met her in person but is a close friend of her son, Jay Bakker. “He was 10 at the time that I did the interview with her and he said that it changed his whole outlook on his mother and on on all of it. She began taking him and his sister to LGBT-affirming churches. pride parades, Aids hospices and hospitals and had them learn about people with Aids by interacting with them in the hospital.

“She saw that she had a ministry to the LGBTQ community and took great joy in it. She was the grand marshal of a pride parade at one point and she had all the drag queens and the gay people all singing, ‘Jesus loves me this I know / For the Bible tells me so’. She had them all singing along and I would have loved to have seen that.”

Good to find out that televangelist hucksterism does contain at least some Christians. It is, after all, love the sinner, hate the sin.

So, the Bishop leaves his job for the erotic novelist. But that’s not the fun part:

His fundamentalist stances included defending gay conversion therapy and he once questioned whether “confusion about sexual orientation” could be linked to the absence of a father figure in the family. He also described abortion and euthanasia as “genocide”.

ultraconservative views

How the world has changed, eh? For such views to be described as ultraconservative, fundamentalist, among Catholic bishops?

The Last Abbot of Reading

OK, so it’s a play and all that.

But was Hugh Faringdon actually the last abbot of Reading?

It’s not uncommon for distinguished and elderly monks – I think particularly of Benedictines, which the Reading house was – in these days to be awarded an honorary abbacy (abbotcy?). Of one of the houses that was destroyed in the Reformation. I’m really pretty certain there was one at Downside in my time there. Abbot’s ring and all that, but not actually the Abbott at all. Instead, abbot of “somewhere destroyed around 1540” an an honorary title.

A quick look around doesn’t provide me with any listing of houses whose titles are used this way. So, does anyone know?

Is “Abbot of Reading” a title still floating around in the manner that King of Jerusalem still does (although how many claimants to that there are I’ve no idea, at least three royal houses did so in modern times).

The film-maker’s murder was discovered in the early hours of Sunday morning. Police were called to the Tehran suburb of Ekbatan after someone spotted human body parts in a bin, local media reported, quoting the judge, Mohammad Shahriari, the head of the Tehran criminal court.

Police found human remains, including two hands, and used fingerprints to identify the victim. They then went to the house of Khorramdin’s parents.

Iran Khorramdin, 74, and Akbar Khorramdin, 81, told police they had used sleeping tablets to knock their son out before suffocating and stabbing him, and cutting up his body, the Hamshahri newspaper reported.

And:

The parents claimed they killed the son-in-law because he was abusive, murdered their daughter because she became addicted to drugs, and targeted their son because he was single and having relationships with students, according to Hussein Rahimi, a Tehran police chief, quoted in newspapers.

Umm, why?

During the court hearing, Akbar told Hamshahri reporters he had no regrets. “I don’t regret what I did with the cooperation of my wife. They were corrupted and I thank God.”

Oh, OK.

Court officials said the parents seemed largely of sound mind but they needed to investigate further.

Well, yeeeees………

I thought I was over my Catholic guilt about being gay. Maybe I was wrong?
Antoun Issa

It’s the defining result of being Catholic – feeling guilty. Doesn’t matter what it’s about, it’s always possible to find something……

The horrific new anti-women legislation in Poland, a near-total ban on abortion, is already harming women. The country already had some of the strongest anti-abortion legislation in Europe, and it has now removed the exception for foetal abnormalities. According to the New York Times, 1,074 of the 1,100 abortions performed in Poland last year were for that reason.

Poland’s right-wing government is not the only evil here. Its bigotry and intolerance has been assisted legally and financially by the US Christian Right.

An overwhelmingly Catholic country elects a political party espousing Catholic values and then enacts policy based upon Catholic moral teaching.

Of course, everyone involved here might be entirely deluded, what ever, but to blame the Americans seems a little odd.

Bishop of Lewes orders churches to shut despite Government lockdown rules saying they can stay open

What bishops are for, taking care of their flock.

The objection is when government says the churches must close. Here, we might even think the bishop is wrong in his decision but this is his job……

Among Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and people of no religion, the majority felt uncomfortable with the idea of a close relative marrying a Muslim. Among Christians, there was a significant minority.

A majority of Muslims were uncomfortable with the idea of a close relative marrying a Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish or Sikh person, or someone of no religion. Almost four in 10 Muslims were uncomfortable with a close relative marrying a Christian.

Not all that odd really. The colour of your skin is one of those genetic lottery things. What you believe about gender relations, civil liberty and all that is something more changeable. So, believe those things that clash as a result of the Sky Fairy and sure, people should be more interested.

And she is still ruffling feathers from beyond the grave. Henry VIII’s second wife is the subject of a new Channel 5 series; she is to be played by the black British actor Jodie Turner-Smith. Predictably, racists are losing their heads over it. (I’d wager many of the same people who think a black woman shouldn’t play a white historical figure have zero issues with Jesus being routinely portrayed as a white guy.)

Do we generally regard Jews as white guys? There has certainly been discrimination against them but that’s not quite the same thing. Louis Farrakhan ain’t gonna accept that they’re black now, is he?

Sure, historical reality would have a Middle East resident of the time as tinted. But then any working or peasant class bloke near anywhere of the time would be tinted too.

Sixteen years ago, St Stephen’s church in Bradford was on the verge of closure. Its congregation had dwindled to half a dozen, and the building – a “big old barn of a place”, in a predominantly Muslim area – was in poor repair. “People thought it had had its day,” said the Rev Jimmy Hinton.

Now, St Stephen’s is a vital hub, providing support and activities in an area of acute deprivation. The nave has been cleared of its pews, and heating has been installed. On a typical day, you might find an exercise class, a support group for asylum seekers and refugees, community meals being cooked and served, singing and stories for infants, mosaic-making, and people hunting for jobs or claiming benefits online.

Yes, sure, community stuff is good. And yet the point here is that the CoE can only fill the barns by not being religious any more. Which is odd really, as the places that do pack them in to the rafters for religious reasons are the places that do the fire and brimstone version.

In a message of support to the conference, Elton John said: “The failure of many churches to welcome, accept and include LGBTQ+ people creates stigma, loneliness, fear and denial, causing lasting damage to their wellbeing and mental health.” Churches must be safe and affirming, he said.

Jayne Ozanne, a prominent figure in the Church of England and a speaker at the conference, said spiritual abuse of LGBT people was “the next big scandal” for the church following decades of disgrace over child sexual abuse.

“It’s a ticking timebomb. When I first spoke out, I felt I was the only voice. Now I’m one of thousands, and people are feeling more and more emboldened to tell their stories,” she said.

Campaigners say charismatic and evangelical churches that tell LGBT people they are an abomination or possessed by demonic forces are driving some towards self-harm and suicide.

Sigh.

There’s the obvious point that certain mosques are going to be less than welcoming of all of this. But more than that is the grasping ambition of the entire idea. You’ve got to change the Word of God – as believed, whether it’s true or not – because Woken SS.

I seem to recall that certain totalitarian movements of the last century made the same sort of demands….