Christians trying to do some good

Sorry Yanks. Our Baptists and Methodists are much better than yours. (Well, there had to be at least one thing we could crow about.)

While American baptists include people like Pat Robertson. some of OUR baptists seem to be more sane – wise and admirable, even.

The baptists, methodist and united reformed churches in the UK haven’t just got together to speak out against the condem government’s massive cuts in public spending and welfare, they’ve even had the grace to challenge the made-up statistics that the condem government is using to support the cuts:

The Methodist and United Reformed Churches, and the Baptist Union, said the £5bn figure Mr Osborne quoted in his spending review speech wrongly depicted the poorest and most vulnerable in society as thieves.
President of the Methodist Conference, Alison Tomlin, said it was a question of fairness.
“Exaggerating benefit fraud points the finger of blame at the poor” she said. “Let us be clear this recession was not caused by the poor, those on benefits, or even benefit cheats.” (from the BBC)

The Moderator of the United Reformed Church has described her organisation as “concerned” about the cuts. Although. they actually put it a bit more strongly than “concern”.

Mrs Val Morrison, moderator of the General Assembly of the United Reformed Church, warns about the long term effects of yesterday’s comprehensive spending review (CSR) on the UK’s infrastructure. She says: “I worry about the futures of communities across the UK – these cuts could undo years of constructive effort to build community cohesion and tolerance in the UK. And, on an individual level, the stark reality is that most households will be badly affected by the CSR and the ideological shift – from Big State to Big Society – that it represents.”…

…. Addressing the disproportionate impact that the cuts to welfare spending will have on the poor and vulnerable in the UK, Mr Simon Loveitt, public issues spokesperson for the URC, commented: ….. “As Christians we reject the rhetoric which seeks to revive a disciplinary approach to welfare, only concerned with controlling, rather than supporting, individuals; and sees poverty as an issue about personal behaviour and dependency, rather than economic inequality and justice.”

(What a great name that spokesperson has. Don’t you just, etc?)

In your faces, raptard baptists.

This blog is bigger than god

In what must be one of the longest waits from confession to absolution on record, the Vatican has forgiven John Lennon for saying the Beatles were bigger than god (or more popular than Jesus, or something) according to the BBC.

This was a mildly jokey casual remark made in the early 1960s, by a man who’s been now dead for decades. Has the Catholic Church been fretting about it ever since?

The BBC has a 1960s clip that shows some of the aftermath of the Beatles’ bizarrely notorious jokes about their huge success in the USA.

In this clip, a reporter with an impeccable old-style “BBC” accent talks about US fundamentalist baptists with the barely disguised distaste of someone who’s spotted another guest eating a fly at a dinner party.

The implication is that the UK saw the extreme US responses to the Beatles’ remarks as symptomatic of a strange and backward American culture. Beatle atheism was more or less taken for granted in the UK. The tolerant attitude of UK religious believers is also taken for granted. The BBC reporter could clearly assume that even UK churchgoers would see US bonfires of Beatles merchandise as exotically bizarre.

This was 40 years ago.

You certainly can’t imagine science teachers thinking that Intelligent Design should have an equal billing with Evolution in the biology curriculum, forty years ago.

The world can’t be a sci-fi novel. If it were, the hero would surely have detected by now that time is running backwards.

Equal Rights – educating fundies

(hat tip: DarkfireTaimatsu on FSTDT)

Other than being a bit to soft on fundies at the end, this seems pretty reasonable to me.