Category Archives: Politics and sociology

Luxury beliefs

A change of subject from the last few posts. I rarely watch the BBC’s stuff, but occasionally Mrs G. and I sit down to see something on archaeology or history, and most recently it was Fake or Fortune, a series in which art dealer Philip Mould and BBC general factotum Fiona Bruce investigate disputed works of art. Given the conventions of documentary-making, my guess is that unsung researchers do the actual investigating, whilst “the talent” reads the script convincingly. After all, with Fiona on the news every night and on Question Time every week, and trekking round the country with Antiques Roadshow, there must be little real opportunity for lengthy … Continue reading

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Who will lead an apostolic counter-reformation?

Leaving the Message is an excellent, and exceptionally prolific, YouTube Channel run by a survivor of William Branham’s Message cult, John Collins. You may or may not have heard of Branham, but you ought to have done, because his teaching underpins much of what is wrong in Evangelical Christianity today. To attempt a pithy summary of the channel’s aims, it is to prove the direct personal and ideological connections between the heretical Latter Rain Movement of the years after World War II, and the so-called New Apostolic Reformation of Bethel Redding, IHOPKC and so on that fascinates so many Evangelicals in Britain and elsewhere, and has virtually cornered the lucrative … Continue reading

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There’s a perfectly logical explanation

A video from a couple of years ago has been doing the rounds. The maker spotted a whole flotilla of inflated RIBs at Dover, each one with an official label showing that it had come ashore stocked with illegal immigrants.

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Righteousness exalts a nation…

…but sin is a reproach to any people. Opponents of the Deep State both in the USA and here are wondering why President Trump has “turned on a dime” from demanding full transparency on the Jeffery Epstein affair to showing every sign of covering it up, from doctored prison videos to denying there is even anything to investigate. Lawyer and commentator Robert Barnes provides what, to me, is the most plausible explanation for the change here.

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The pen is mightier… but words will never hurt me.

“The pen is mightier than the sword.”“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”These can’t both be right, surely?

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On singing Bethel songs in church.

“O.K. Listen up, Guys. I’ve got a song for the worship band to do. It’s from Ike Watts’s new album.” “That’s good, His ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ is glorious. But isn’t he – well – a little… old? That song must have been written back in the 1990s.”

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Lessons from Civil War history

I first became aware of William Allen, eventually a Colonel in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, when I was researching my 2019 (privately printed) book commemorating the tenth anniversary of our Baptist chapel’s burning down shortly before I moved to Devon. As Captain Allen, together with his lifelong friend Captain John Vernon, and a couple of other Baptist “other ranks,” he was an early leader, and almost certainly founder, of the Baptist Church, Kilmington, now active and growing with weekly congregations upwards of 150 people.

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Tying a few (or a lot of) COVID loose ends

I’m reading Debbie Lerman’s The Deep State Goes Viral. It is deeply satisfying as it explains almost without remainder, with as much documentation as one is likely to get, all the nonsense of COVID, on which I wrote tens of thousands of frustrated words.

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Southport protests – silenced truth and spouted lies

The new report from the police, or specifically His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, has created a stir on the Internet, though not so far in the mainstream media, by concluding that there is not (and never was) any evidence of the involvement of Far-Right groups in the protests after the Southport massacre, and that most of the disorder involved angry locals, and not mindless thugs traveling in on buses and trains.

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Is “moderate Charismatic” an oxymoron?

The reason for posing this question is that whilst the excesses of the “Hypercharismatic” megachurches are plain to see, and have been so for many years, they still seem remarkably attractive to the undoubtedly sane and generally sound Charismatics in most British Evangelical churches.

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