Magic Statistics

A leader of the fundamentalist Mormon sect in Bountiful, BC, used to lay low in hopes the authorities would not make a big issue of the fact that he has more than 20 wives.  Now, however, Winston Blackmore has gone public, complaining that Canada’s immigration office is seeking to deport three of his wives back to the US because their visitors’ visas have expired.  Edmonton Sun columnist Mindelle Jacobs is unsympathetic.

Blackmore suspects immigration authorities rejected his wives' appeals to stay in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds just because they're polygamists.

Well, I would hope so. Now, will officials please hurry up and turf these women out of the country? As for the 16 Canadian children they've reportedly had, there's no perfect solution, but I'd place them in foster homes.

Leaving them in Bountiful means sentencing them to bleak and twisted lives.

Canadian prosecutors have been reluctant to charge Mr Blackmore, apparently worried that Canada’s Criminal Code statute banning polygamy could be ruled unconstitutional.  Since he has openly discussed his polygamous relationships, however, he has publicly flouted the law.  Will the authorities stand by and permit Canadian law to be disrespected and ridiculed?

And what about the children?

A report last year by the Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre noted that in Bountiful, children in polygamous families "are raised in an environment where women are told what to believe and are controlled entirely by men."

It is time to resolve the legal uncertainty over Canada’s anti-polygamy laws.

Previous related posts:

• BC polygamists send kids to public schools
• Polygamy in real life

Harare Central, Zimbabwe’s main public hospital, is deteriorating rapidly, along with the country’s health care system, which until ten years ago was the best in sub-Saharan Africa.  The building has broken windows and leaking pipes, heaps of rubbish and dirty laundry are seen in the corridors, and the dispensary is chronically low on drugs.

The dire state of the country's pharmacies inspired Marko Phiri, a columnist in the independent weekly Standard newspaper, to comment, "Zimbabwe appears over the past decade or so to have decided to stick to the African way where hospitals are known not to have a single pill in the dispensary, where hospitals have become places one goes to die, not to look for life. Welcome to Zimbabwe's hospital Hell."

Harare Central is where the city’s poor, who cannot afford private health insurance, are forced to come. Within its morale-sapping walls, there does indeed seem to be more dying than healing. Patients undergoing surgery have died under anaesthetic during the capital city's frequent power cuts because the hospital has not been allocated scarce foreign exchange to import an emergency generator.

Life expectancy of Zimbabweans is the lowest in the world: 34 for women and 37 for men.  As a result, the hospital morgue is full to capacity.

The morgue at Harare Central receives the daily toll of the dead. It is overflowing with hundreds of bodies and the stench is inescapable. The hospital refuses to release the dead until relatives pay hospital fees they can no longer afford. Treatment was once free, but as the country's economy went into steep decline the government introduced charges. In May 2006 the government announced a 300,000 per cent increase in state hospital charges in an effort to shore up crumbling services, with the cost of medicines doubling or tripling every few months.

Not only are drugs and other goods in short supply, health professionals are leaving the country “in droves”.  Harare Central closed its intensive care unit three years ago due to equipment breakdowns and lack of staff.  Doctors and nurses who remain work in intensely demoralising conditions as they see patients die every day due to lack of drugs, blood, soap, antiseptics, and other necessities.  No wonder they are emigrating to South Africa, Britain, Australia, the United States, and elsewhere.

The government says it is aware of the health care crisis and is “looking into the situation” at the hospital.

Previous related posts:

• Zimbabwe rounds up destitute street people
• Zimbabwe impoverished by hyper-inflation
• Zimbabwe observes a sombre anniversary

One of the most historically illiterate claims of The Da Vinci Code is that Roman emperor Constantine convened a council in order to foist on the church a new teaching: the divinity of Jesus.  Referring to the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, Dan Brown writes, "until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet … a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless."

Two articles published online in the Christian Post document Brown’s blunder by examining writings of pre-Nicene church fathers and accounts of Christian martyrdoms.

Rev Mark Creech cites the account by early Christian writer Tertullian of a group of Christians, including two women Perpetua and Felicitas, who were thrown to the lions.

Then she [Perpetua] got up. And seeing that Felicitas had been crushed to the ground, she went over to her, gave her hand, and lifted her up …. Then she called for her brother and spoke to him together with the catechumens [persons who had professed Christ, but had yet to be baptized] and said: 'You must all stand fast in the faith and love one another, and do not be weakened by what we have gone through'. All of them were thrown in their usual spot to have their throat cut. But the mob asked that their bodies be brought out into the open that their eyes might be the guilty witnesses of the sword that pierced their flesh. And so the martyrs got up and went to the spot of their own accord as the people wanted them to, and kissing one another they sealed their martyrdom with the ritual kiss of peace. The others took the sword in silence and without moving …. Perpetua, however, had yet to taste more pain. She screamed as she was struck on the bone; then she took the trembling hand of the young gladiator, and guided it to her throat. It was though so great a woman, feared as she was by the unclean spirit, could not be dispatched unless she herself were willing."

Rev Creech points out that Christians were put to death for insisting that Christ is the only Lord.  They would have been spared if they believed what Brown claims, that Jesus was “a mortal prophet … a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless”.  The Roman authorities would have found that quite acceptable—but Christians obviously did not.

[T]he voice of the martyrs, sealed with the testimony of their own blood, cry out well before the Council of Nicea — "Jesus is the Lord God Almighty."

The companion article by Richard Ostling quotes statements from a multitude of pre-Nicene church fathers that contradict Brown’s claim.  Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Clement’s second epistle (believed to be a sermon by an unknown Christian of the mid-second century), Justin Martyr, Melito of Sardis, Athenagoras of Athens, and Irenaeus of Lyons all testify to the church’s belief, well before the Council of Nicaea, that Jesus is by nature both God and man.

Mr Ostling also points out that the earliest known heresies concerning the nature of Jesus Christ held that he was divine but not human—the opposite of what Brown says.  Not until the late third century did Arius teach that Jesus was not divine by nature, but only an exalted man.  Arianism was the heresy that prompted the convening of the Council of Nicaea and which the council specifically condemned.

Previous related posts:

• Da Vinci Code’s popularity signals spiritual cowardice
• Tom Wright on the Da Vinci Code

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has begun to use the phrase "responsible development" instead of "sustainable development" and at least one Canadian environmentalist thinks it's the end of the world.

PMO and Environment Canada spokespersons say they know nothing about it, but change in terminology is under way at Natural Resources Canada.

Natural Resources Canada is now using the phrase "responsible development" in place of "sustainable development," The Hill Times has learned, drawing intense criticism from at least one environmental advocate who says the federal department appears to be trying to "stamp out" an environmental word.

Emma Welford, communications director for Natural Resources minister Gary Lunn (Saanich-Gulf Islands, BC), acknowledged the decision to use "responsible development" in place of "sustainable development" at Natural Resources Canada, and said it reflects the new Conservative government in power, but she added that it is independent of the government's work on a yet-to-be released "made in Canada" climate change plan.

Rick Smith, director of Environmental Defence, hits the roof.  Stamp out one of his words?  The impertinence!

"It's not an exaggeration to say that sustainability is the most mainstream and widely accepted concept in the modern environmental debate," Mr. Smith said. "So to be trying to stamp out the word sustainability from NRCan is a horrendous message to be sending."

Mr. Smith called the decision to use "responsible development" a "bizarre" and "bone-headed" move, pointing out that the proper title of the Commons Environment Committee is the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development.

"If they persist in this, it will make them into the laughing stock of the industrialized world, and you can quote me on that. This is the most bone-headed thing I've heard all year," Mr. Smith said in an interview last week with The Hill Times.

A lot of Canadian environmentalists and their political allies have spent the past week in a perpetual tizzy.  In questioning the impeccable rectitude of the Kyoto Protocol, the government perpetrated “a serious diplomatic incident”, according to a representative of Greenpeace.  Environmentalists bayed for Environment Minister Rona Ambrose’s resignation as chair of UN negotiations on climate change.

Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe found Ms Ambrose impossible to take seriously; NDP leader Jack Layton accused the government of sabotaging the negotiations; NDP environment critic Nathan Cullen charged the government with lying and (horrors!) having a defeatist attitude.

And now this hyper-reaction to a semantic change.  Those folks obviously feel very threatened by the new regime in Ottawa.

Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the University of London, congratulates Canada for challenging the environmentalist lobby’s putative control of the language to be used in framing discussion.

Well done Canada, say I. The way to undermine any '-ism' is to replace its Words of Power. This is far more effective than any scientific, economic, or political wrangling. It changes the very paradigm, and such word replacement often indicates that a paradigm is beginning to enter a crisis phase.

I do hope he’s right about climate-change politics entering a new phase.