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Meta
Category Archives: Politics and sociology
Sample simony
There’s a really annoying historian on the occasional archaeology TV series Digging for Britain, who, whenever there’s an item on an ecclesiastical site, manages to interview some librarian to show cynically how it was nothing but a cash-cow for money-grabbing churchmen. It happens every time he appears, it seems.
Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology
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O Absalom, my son, my son!
The result of a year long consultation by the Baptist Union came out this week, in the form of a statement by its council. It arose after a few Baptist churches lobbied for a change in the Ministerial Recognition Rules to allow ministers to be in same-sex marriages. What is noteworthy is that the Council, after deep consultation and consideration, concluded that the rules should not be changed – making British Baptists the first major denomination of which I am aware to have bucked the LGBTQ+ bandwagon.
Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology
7 Comments
Towards critical thinking on Charismatic theology (3)
My conclusion from the thought experiment in the last post is that what we actually see in the Church nowadays is more consistent with Pentecostal/Charismatic theology being profoundly mistaken than with its being correct. I base this on the fact that after, 120 years, the churches are not settled comfortably into Charismatic doctrine and practice, but are still chasing the rainbow and wondering why they never reach its end. The extreme example of this is, of course, the Word of Faith variants promising to bring heaven down to earth in ever more dramatic ways, but instead producing a pattern of financial acquisitiveness and irregularity, spiritual and sexual abuse, blatantly false … Continue reading
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology
3 Comments
Towards critical thinking on Charismatic theology (2)
If you’re a member of one of the hyper-charismatic megachurches, the very idea of applying critical thinking to the theology around spiritual gifts and related matters is anathema, as it implies a lack of the faith that enables believers to heal any and every disease as Jesus did – except that they never can. Even the super-apostles have to fake leg lengthening on an industrial scale to inflate the numbers.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology
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Towards critical thinking on Charismatic theology (1)
Not long ago, an elderly friend of mine prayed that his church would, in the future, begin to “move in the spiritual gifts” of 1 Corinthians. And I began to think that, since he became a Christian as a teenager, maybe 65 years ago, at the very start of the “Charismatic Renewal” in Britain, and has always been in churches that were open to this movement, it was an odd kind of prayer to have to make.
Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology
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Divided we stand
I’ve not written much about the Israel-Gaza conflict, my excuse being that it’s a complicated matter. But that is really an excuse – the real reason is that unlike most of the other components of the Omnicrisis, this issue has divided people along rather different fault-lines, and it has been confusing to see people whose opinions one generally trusts taking diametrically opposite tacks from each other. I find this uniqueness significant.
Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology
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The Pauli Principle
In this case I’m referring to the British Principle Trial of Ivermectin, which was pauli planned, pauli executed and pauli applied. Excuse my spell checker.
Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science
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Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…
… mais ceci n’est pas une pipe. The Daily Mail accused Tucker Carlson of not issuing a statement on the death of Alexei Navalny, thus proving conclusively (although he was obliviously on a plane home at the time) that Carlson is a Putin stooge. This is the exact reason Boris Johnson gave for turning down an interview with Carlson, and not that Carlson declined to pay him £1m for the interview that Putin gave for free.
Posted in Politics and sociology
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Spot the clots
Dr John Campbell has been doing a series of videos on the mysterious post-mortem white clots that embalmers have been finding in bodies since around 2021 (search YouTube for “John Campbell white clots). It’s not often that undertakers get to do front-line research, and even less often that they are cancelled for it. But that’s the world we’re in nowadays.
Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science
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Take me to your leader, if you know who he is
When George III went mad, his son was appointed as Prince Regent. The thing was complicated by party politics, and by the fact that George became sane again, for a while, before the relevant formalities were done. Two centuries earlier, when Edward VI was too young to rule, he too had an appointed substitute, so that whether they like or hate policies during Edward’s early reign, historians know they must look to the Duke of Somerset’s position rather than Edward’s own.
Posted in Politics and sociology
2 Comments