Why do the left hate Christians so much ?
We now have a situation where the Cabinet can face down the prime minister of the day to make sticking to your Christian faith a crime ( SORs ).
Charles More has an article in the Daily Telegraph which pulls together a load of further examples of how Christians and the Christian culture of this country are under attack from the forces of secular leftism. See here ... I've put a small extract below:
Another charity, which wishes to remain anonymous as it tries to rebuild itself after the loss of council funds, helped get disaffected black youths out of gun and drug crime. A council officer accused it of "brainwashing" and "being a cult". When asked why, he said that no other course in the field had been nearly so successful, so there must be something funny about it. He did not like the charity's video projector used in its courses, which showed a logo saying "We empower youth".
But of course, for a Christian, faith and works go together, the latter flowing from the former. Works without faith would be like a body with limbs, but no heart.
The faith is why the works are necessary. As Ian McColl, of the Spitalfields Crypt Trust, puts it: "We wouldn't do it if we didn't believe it."
And if you believe something, you cannot just abandon it at convenient moments. All the mainstream Christian Churches teach that homosexual acts are not the moral equivalent of heterosexual acts within marriage (though a good many individual Christians disagree with this view).
I wonder what the Christian Socialist Movement make of all this - my guess is that they are all for just giving in ( they'll rationalise it differently - but it will most likely mean the same ).... You can't tell one way or the other by looking at their web site - but they do report the Son of the Manse visiting the Pope.Related item - Iain Dale point to this note from Dizzy thinks on how the Labour government and parliament exempt themselves from the equality act.
Update: Its seems the Christian Socialist movement is in crisis - I'm not surprised given the government they have helped to bring about.
Extract from the CSM renewal blog...
In Proverbs we are told: “Without a vision the people perish”. The Christian Socialist Movement is perishing - precisely because it lacks a clear vision and purpose. Membership is in decline, it is running at a loss and has lost almost all of its reserves, and those who remain loyal are questioning its purpose and activities. Without drastic action to raise funds and recruit members in the next year, CSM may simply perish within a year.
Since it seems to Man in a Shed that socialism and Christianity are directly opposed that would be no bad thing, IMHO.
8 comments:
The article is mostly nonsense, Christians, like the rest of society, are quite capable of changing their beliefs as and when required, and of reading into scripture what they want to take out, hence the idea that Christians can fight in wars for example. Homophobic Christians are not homophobic because the Bible tells them to be, they are homophobes who look to the Bible to back up an opinion they know to be morally unsound.
I'm glad its not 100% nonsense ... ;-)
There is no mention of people who have a fear of homosexuality in the post or article.
Homophobia is a word used to create a form of 1984 type thought crime - you can't define it -but wow betide anyone who is guilty of it. Its a word used - like racism - to scare people off from talking about things. Often its used in a bullying form to demean and insult people, but without any actual evidence. (Bigot is popular at the moment also - often with much the same apparent intention.) I don't really like it very much.
The issue with Christianity is where its takes its authority from. Yes Christians do change their collective view on some things over time - but from a starting point of scripture, not secular law or trends. (If otherwise were true then the Church would not have survived and prospered in places like Communist Europe and China. Or indeed in the early Roman Empire - where coming into conflict with the state could mean becoming cat food.)
The issue being raised by Charles Moore is, to my mind, the intolerance and lack of understanding of religious belief and practice by the left and the discrimination made against Christianity but not Islam, Hinduism etc etc..
It seems to me that Christians change their collective mind but slowly, and not in accordance with the latest fashion or whim.
I am a Christian and find myself labelled as homophobic although I've never met a homosexual who frightened me at all. I am definitly homo indifferent. In just the same way as I am probably racist and for the same reasons.
Regrettably, I am not a good Christian. Every day I have to repent for nasty thoughts, and occasionally for actions when I really lose it, in the face of non Christians reinterpreting scripture.
Peace to you Loz, for as long as you deserve it.
To me the word homophobia is as useful as the word heterophobia. I've got gay friends who take the mickey out of 'butch' blokes, and equally I've met lesbians who have a quite 'driven' dislike and distrust of men.
The word homophobia takes most of its power, certainly in 2007, because it is used vindictively by people who have been taught they are 'victims' themselves.
The reason the SORs are doomed to fail in the long term is because as well as overturning 2000 years and more of cultural norms they overturn a moral standard dictated by majority instinct, an instinct designed to preserve families and protect children.
Defending the institution of the nuclear family is NOT homophobia. Only the 'one size fits all' rights totalitarianism of New Labour could make people think it was.
northwing, I'm not sure what you mean by 'a moral standard dictated by majority instinct', I would have thought that assembling in family groups and protecting children was an evolutionary trait to increase survival prospects, and I wonder whether the conservative attempts to deny queer people partnership and adoption rights is driven by the need to try and exclude them from the family group so they get picked off by the sabre-toothed tigers easier?
On a slightly less reverent theme - I'm convinced that when stone age man started a family and confronted by small off spring and his woman being driven spare by them, then the idea of going out for a fortnight sabre tooth tiger hunt began to look good.
Loz - I don't think the Conservatives were against civil partnership - if memory serves correctly - I think the party was against them being restricted to just those people engaged in homosexual sexual activity.
On the adoption issue I don't think its a rights issue for the potential parents as much as for the child to be adopted. No one seems to be very interested in what they might think.
I wonder whether the conservative attempts to deny queer people partnership and adoption rights . .
I don't think this is true, but taking the evolutionary line there is a fundamental 'axiom' we need to elaborate here. A gay couple do not have the 'privilege' in nature to produce offspring, therefore any 'right' is a social artifact based on applied ethics, ie it may be better to place a child in a loving gay home than leave it in an institution. That doesn't mean that the nuclear family still isnt the Gold Standard.
This equality ruling is bananas, because it takes rights away from those christian and other groups who want ONLY this Gold Standard for children, even though Gay couples can use other adoption agencies, and have market choice.
Many christians may have been hitherto ambivalent toward gay families (and I know of many types personally). This legislation now pits one group directly against the other, for what good reason exactly?
Man - I also agree. Every child has a natural right, wherever possible to a Mum and Dad. I simply don't see how that view is homophobic. On my own site I had a discussion about this, and someone said they thought the traditional family was a Victorian ideal that was more romantic than real.
Let's gaze into the crystal ball 50 years. What will we see? Something out of an Aldus Huxley novel, with babies born in huge nurseries with 'community parents'? I think not.
We'll see a world full of billions of Chinese, Indian, Muslim and other people living in traditional biological extended family groupings doing very well indeed. Let's get real!
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