Conservative Bible Project?

Surely this is a spoof?

Hypocrites

Why is it that the extreme right - the Stand Camp and the Anglican Mudstream - of the current Anglican debate, claim to espouse high moral values but appear - all too often to be strangers to the truth?

Berlusconi and the Roma (again)

There was an article by Seumas Milne in last week's Guardian on the new fascism of Berlusconi:

At the heart of Europe, police have begun fingerprinting children on the basis of their race - with barely a murmur of protest from European governments. Last week, Silvio Berlusconi's new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country's estimated 150,000 Gypsies - Roma and Sinti people - whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to "prevent begging" and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.
It has been left to others to speak out against this eruption of naked, officially sanctioned racism. Catholic human rights organisations have damned the fingerprinting of Gypsies as "evoking painful memories". The chief rabbi of Rome insisted it "must be stopped now". Roma groups have demonstrated, wearing the black triangles Gypsies were forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps, and anti-racist campaigners in Rome this week began to bombard the interior ministry with their own fingerprints in protest against the treatment of the Gypsies. But, given that the European establishment has long turned a blind eye to anti-Roma discrimination and violence in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, along with the celebration of SS units that took part in the Holocaust in the Baltic states, perhaps it's no surprise that they ignore the outrages now taking place in Italy.

The rest of us cannot. ...

But the same phenomena can be seen to varying degrees all over Europe, where racist and Islamophobic parties are on the march: take the far right Swiss People's party, which on Tuesday succeeded in collecting enough signatures to force a referendum on banning minarets throughout the country. In Britain, as Peter Oborne's Channel 4 film on Islamophobia this week underlined, a mendacious media and political campaign has fed anti-Muslim hostility and violence since the 2005 London bombings - just as hostility to asylum seekers was whipped up in the 1990s. The social and democratic degeneration now reached by Italy can happen anywhere in the current climate.

food for thought and - hopefully mettle that it will not be allowed to progress further - in Italy or the UK.

Can we have another phone poll?

Apparently, last week, the newspapers were ringing around general synod members trying to find ones who wanted Rowan to resign - they managed to find two (and I guess they'd both come to this view long before last week's events)[1]. On Wednesday the Bishop of Carlisle said some 'interesting' things at a meeting to launch a book that mixes the mildly sane with the absolutely barking. I'm sure the telephone pollsters could find more than 2 people calling for this bishops removal!
I have a book somewhere by Chris Sugden (one of the authors of this collection) written back in the early 1980's when he may have been a little more balanced - I'm currently trying to find it - any suggestions as to what I should do with it? - I'm so against book burning.
[1] and more on the BBC's undistinguished role in those events detailed is here

BBC1 news taken over by loonies

At least that's impression after two days of coverage of Rowan Williams on Sharia law. For some sanity try Bishop Alan who writes:

At the time of Roman Catholic emancipation back in 1829 we experienced big social hysteria about how people who theoretically owe allegiance to other systems of law could be completely part of English society.

or this comment off Dave Walker's cartoon blog

Rowan Williams, being a very intelligent man, knows that sharia law is far more complex than this. The vast bulk of Islamic laws that are invoked within Muslim communities (yes, present tense because it is a current reality here in Britain), concern family relationships (divorce and separation), and inheritance matters. The trouble is, the media and our beloved political establishment are either not intelligent enough to know this or, and God forbid this be the case, prefer to play to the simplistic public perception (sharia = stonings etc) for short term electoral expediency.

and as for the comments at the Times, they seem less intelligent than the yokels when deciding to send a torch party up to castle Dracula.
And as for the BBC's assertion that General Synod is the chief body of the Anglican communion - I'll try not to mention it (oops!)