Magic Statistics

Last weekend our beloved Prime Minister was out buying a wreath for his family farm. When a reporter asked him whether it was a Christmas wreath or a holiday wreath, Martin was tongue-tied. After a few moments of embarrassed silence, he blurted out, "It's a $240 wreath"

How sad. Our prime minister, a grown man of 67, a Christian (Catholic) and a successful businessman before he entered politics, can't bring himself to utter the word "Christmas" in the context of buying his own family a Christmas wreath. To be sure, it's a fitting punishment for him, because no political party in Canada, with the possible exception of the NDP, worships more at the shrine of political correctness than the Liberals.

Less than a month ago, PM PM was only too happy to recognise Christian beliefs in public–when it served his interest. He was hoping the opposition would delay a federal election in order to "allow Christians and Canadians of other religious faiths to celebrate their religious holidays without interruption from politicians knocking on their doors."

via Nealenews.

Theodore Huxtable, whose son Jason was shot dead in Toronto last August, had this to say about PM PM's proposed ban on possession of handguns:

"For this so-called prime minister of ours to come into the low-income areas of this city and make a statement banning guns … I look at him as a jackass … and I'll never vote Liberal again as long as I live," said Theodore Huxtable, whose eldest son Jason, 18, was killed on Aug. 30.

via Nealenews.

Yes and no, says Charles Moore of the Daily Telegraph. It's true that the Koran and the Bible are the holy books of their respective religions. When it comes to the question of where the books came from, however, Islam regards the Koran in a much more "fundamentalist" way than Christianity regards the Bible.

Mohammed was probably illiterate, and . . . the Koran was therefore dictated by him from memory after he had received it in visions. It is not his teaching: it is the unmediated word of God: "The Holy Koran differs from any other religious text in that it was not written or edited by any human author; no word has been added to it or subtracted from it."

What this means is that all Muslims are what we call "fundamentalist" in a way that no Christian, not even the most literalist, can quite be. One man, the Prophet, was given the perfect truth in one form, and so the truth, and the form, are absolute. To question the status of the Koran as described above is to insult God.

This accounts for the well-known fact among religious scholars that Islam has no accepted counterpart to the biblical criticism employed by academics studying Judaism and Christianity. Scholars engaging in criticism of the Koran must live and work in Western academic environments.

This also provides the theological basis for laws against desecrating the Koran and insulting the Prophet that have been enacted by Islamic regimes. Such laws necessarily impose second-class status on adherents of other religions and provide a legal pretext for persecution of Christians, as has happened recently in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, etc.

Finally, Moore suggests that Muslims view Western attempts to improve relations with Islam as a sign of weakness: "The grim fact is that the development of Christian/Muslim official dialogue has coincided with much greater Muslim persecution of other faiths than 30 years ago."

That would be N.T. (Tom) Wright, Bishop of Durham, Church of England. At least, that's the view of John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture.

Some argue that God lacks a sense of humor, but for those with eyes to see, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Consider: The most influential biblical scholar in American evangelical circles today is a bishop in the Church of England who regularly inveighs against U.S. "imperialism". For a comparable improbability, imagine a renaissance of the Democratic Party led by a devout Mormon from Texas.

This scholar contends that the leaders of the Protestant Reformation–Martin Luther especially–misread St. Paul on the subject of justification by faith. A self-described Reformed theologian, he proposes nothing less than a reformation of the Reformation, 500 years on–and he does so by appealing to the Reformers' own motto, sola scriptura, "going back to scripture over against all human tradition."

Here's another Protestant theologian who thinks that not everything Luther said was right–and, moreover, that Luther has sometimes been misinterpreted.

The collect for today, the 3rd Sunday in Advent, from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer:

O Lord Jesu Christ, who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to prepare thy way before thee; Grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at thy second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in thy sight, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.