Magic Statistics

Jeff Foxworthy (or someone impersonating him) filled in for Brother Slawson today at Tominthebox News Network and offered some questions to help readers figure out if they're Calvinists.  Apparently, I'm a good candidate.

[I]f sitting in a tub full of scissors sounds more appealing to you than listening to a Sunday School class share their personal gut feelings about a Bible verse, you are a good candidate.

Here are some others I scored high on.

If you have adjusted the default passage setting at www.biblegateway.org from “NIV” to “ESV”

… you might be a Calvinist.

If your preacher says to turn to Obadiah and you do not use the index, or

If you think a 50-minute sermon is too short, or

If you’ve ever heard a wave of groans sweep through Sunday School when you refer to Romans 9,

…you just might be a Calvinist.

And then there’s this one:

If you have ever purposefully sung a different word in a hymn to conform to scripture,

… you might be a Calvinist.

Calvinist Anglicans do that every week.

Read the whole thing.

Algeria’s recent oppression and persecution of the country’s Christians has been attributed to anxiety over the increasing number of Muslims converting to Christianity.

The government has ordered over half of the country’s Protestant churches to close, in accordance with a 2006 law, only now being enforced, that restricts worship by non-Muslims.

In addition to church closures, Protestants have been arrested in western Algeria as they travel between cities or exit religious meetings, and Catholics have been prevented from regular ministry activities outside their church walls.

Such restriction of religious freedoms has coincided with a barrage of antagonistic articles in Arabic newspapers, heightening tensions between Christians and Muslims in the Islamic Mediterranean nation.
. . .
“This is the most pressure Christians have faced in Algeria,” said Farid Bouchama, an Algerian televangelist living in France. “Before it was discrimination from families or jobs, but this is the first organized pressure from the state.”

In Tiaret, western Algeria, Habiba Kouider, a 35-year-old Muslim convert to Christianity, has been charged with practicing her faith without a licence after she was found carrying several Bibles in her hand bag.  The prosecutor told her he would drop the charge if she returned to Islam.  She refused and now faces a possible three-year jail term.  Her lawyer maintains the charge has no basis in Algerian law.

The state prosecutor in Tiaret is also demanding that six other Muslim converts be given two-year sentences and heavy fines.  The six were arrested at a prayer meeting and originally charged with “distributing documents to shake the faith of Muslims”.  A further charge of illegally practicing non-Muslim worship was added at a court hearing earlier this week.

One of the defendants asks a reasonable question:

“How can six people shake the faith of 40 million unless the court is convinced that the faith of the 40 million is not based on strong foundations?” said Djillali Saibi, one of the Christians on trial, referring to Algeria’s majority-Muslim population. Christians, mostly converts, make up less than 1 percent of the country’s people.

Reason, unfortunately, seems to be in short supply among Algerian authorities these days.  The irrational reaction to Muslim conversions to Christianity indicates the condition previously identified as apostaphobia.

Previous related posts:

• Algerian Muslims turning to Christ in record numbers
• Islamic extremists consumed by “apostaphobia”

The collect for today, Feast Day of The Venerable Bede (673-735), Monk at Jarrow, Scholar, Historian, Doctor of the Church (source):

Almighty God, maker of all things,
whose Son Jesus Christ gave to thy servant Bede
grace to drink in with joy
the word which leadeth us to know thee and to love thee:
in thy goodness
grant that we also may come at length to thee,
the source of all wisdom,
and stand before thy face;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

For The Epistle: Wisdom 7:15-22
The Gospel: St Matthew 13:47-52

More about The Venerable Bede can be found here. 

The collect for today, the Feast Day of St Augustine (d. c. 605), first Archbishop of Canterbury (source):

O Lord our God, who by thy Son Jesus Christ didst call thine apostles and send them forth to preach the Gospel to the nations: We bless thy holy name for thy servant Augustine, first Archbishop of Canterbury, whose labors in propagating thy Church among the English people we commemorate today; and we pray that all whom thou dost call and send may do thy will, and bide thy time, and see thy glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 5:17-20a
The Gospel: St Luke 5:1-11

Celtic Christianity had taken root in Britain and Ireland by the end of the third century. In the fifth century, however, Britain was overrun by non-Christian invaders from northern Europe: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

In 596, Pope Gregory the Great chose Augustine, prior of a monastery at Rome, to head a mission to convert the pagan English.  After Gregory consecrated Augustine bishop, the missionary party landed in Kent in 597.  The dominant ruler of Anglo-Saxon England was the heathen King Ethelbert of Kent, whose wife Bertha was a Christian princess of the Franks.  The king, although initially uninterested in Christianity, allowed Augustine and his companions to live in his territory and freely preach the gospel.  Within four years, the king and several thousand of his people had been converted and baptised.

After his consecration as archbishop, Augustine built the first cathedral at Canterbury.  Pope Gregory had initially planned to organise the church in England with metropolitan sees at the old Roman centres of London and York.  London, however, was in the hands of a hostile king, and Canterbury was therefore chosen as Augustine’s seat.  The people of London were later brought to the faith through the preaching of Augustine’s companion Mellitus.

Augustine established a monastery just outside Canterbury’s city walls, originally dedicated to St Peter and St Paul and later known as St Augustine’s.

Augustine tried but failed to secure the co-operation of Celtic bishops in evangelisation of the Anglo-Saxons.  Beyond south-east England, missionary efforts unrelated to Augustine’s were successful in converting the English.  The most important of these was the Celtic mission from Iona.

Augustine also helped Ethelbert to write the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon laws.

Click here for St Augustine’s page at the website of The Archbishop of Canterbury.

The collect for today, the 1st Sunday after Trinity, from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer:

O God, the strength of all them that put their trust in thee, mercifully accept our prayers; and because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping of thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St John 4:7-21
The Gospel: St Luke 16:19-31

Artwork: Friedrich Pacher, The Bosom of Abraham (detail), c. 1490. Novacella Abbey Cloister, Bressanone, Italy.

The collect for today, Trinity-Sunday, from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace by the confession of a true faith to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity; We beseech thee, that thou wouldest keep us stedfast in this faith, and evermore defend us from all adversities, who livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.

For the Epistle: Revelation 4:1-11
The Gospel: St John 3:1-15

Artwork: Andrei Rublev, The Old Testament Trinity, c. 1410, Tempera on wood, Tretjakov Gallery, Moscow.

It’s been almost 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but KGB officers in Belarus aren’t over it yet.

Belarus discourages the commemoration of Orthodox Christians killed for their faith by the Soviet Union, Forum 18 News Service has found. Today's KGB secret police have sought to have icons of the New Martyrs, as they are known by the Orthodox Church, removed from Grodno Cathedral. Russian Orthodox Deacon Andrei Kurayev told Forum 18 that "Some comrades from the local KGB asked local clergy why they were inciting the people in such a way." While there was no official order to remove the icons – "it was on the level of a chat" – Kurayev reported that Bishop Artemi (Kishchenko) of Grodno and Volkovysk refused to take them down. "He told the KGB that he couldn't rewrite history."

Of 90,000 Orthodox believed to have been killed for their faith by the Soviet regime, the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) formally canonised 1000 as New Martyrs in August 2000.

And, no, in Belarus, the KGB never been changed its name.  In fact, the agency is proud of its Soviet roots. 

Previous related posts:

• Belarusian pastor fined for organising church holiday
• Belarus: Europe’s most oppressively anti-religious nation

A Canadian biochemistry professor has made a startling discovery: University research work increases global warming.

Hervé Philippe, a Université de Montréal professor of biochemistry, is a committed environmentalist who found that his own research produces 44 tonnes of CO2 per year. The average American citizen produces 20 tonnes.
. . .
Philippe has a well-established international reputation for his work on phylogeny and according to his calculations his computers produce 19 tonnes of CO2 per year, the air conditioning in the laboratory produces 10 tonnes of CO2 per year, and transport from one meeting to another produces 15 tonnes of CO2 per year.

The “committed environmentalist” suggests a few cosmetic changes.

For universities, he recommends having less frequent international conferences, increasing the use of video-conferences, avoiding research on well explored topics, reducing publications and evaluating the amount of CO2 produced by research projects.

Fie on such trivial and timid counsel.  This calls for radical action: Shut down every environmental studies department in the world.

Previous related posts:

• I blame global warming
• Is there anything that doesn’t make global warming worse?
• Cleaner air may be exacerbating global warming

What is happening to politics in this country?  The Liberal Party of Canada has apparently tossed aside the rights and freedoms that gave the party its name, and now the Liberal premier of Newfoundland and Labrador tells poor constituents to be patient: Oil wealth will improve their lot—eventually.

A cascade of oil-based revenues will, sooner or later, fall in all corners of Newfoundland and Labrador, the premier promises.
. . .
Even so, Williams recognizes that many people in the province feel like the oil-fuelled boom is passing them by.

In recent days, news reports have detailed how various people — seniors needing home care, others requiring medical services, such as portable oxygen tanks — have been turned down for public aid, and found no help in the blockbuster budget.

"I know there's instances of hardship, and I'm very, very sensitive to them," Williams said.

"We'll always find an example of some poor person who's hard done by, and it's not getting down to them. But we're trying to spread it out as much as we can at this stage, and hopefully the trickle-down effect will benefit everybody."

Translation: After Danny’s friends and supporters get their share, those ubiquitous poor people might get some leftovers.

"We’ll always find an example of some poor person"?  How callous can you get.  Nineteenth-century robber barons couldn’t have said it better.

Danny should be careful with this trickle-down rhetoric or he may find fewer votes trickling up come the next provincial election.

Previous related post: Danny Williams: Not a have-not, but plays one on the national stage

Ezra Levant yesterday linked to a Seattle Times editorial that looked with sadness at its foolish neighbours to the north.

We do not envy the Canadians. They have entrusted to their government a power Americans never would, and they follow it into foolishness.
. . .
British Columbia now bans all words and images "likely to expose a person … to hatred or contempt" because of race, religion, age, disability, sex, marital status or sexual orientation." This sounds like a libel law for groups, except that libel is a misstatement of fact that damages an individual reputation. In the United States, for a public figure to be libeled, the false statement has to be made maliciously or recklessly.

The Canadian idea of hate speech is less specific and more dangerous. Hate is like obscenity, about which Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said, "I know it when I see it." The difference is that a ban on obscenity does not touch political discourse, and a ban on hate does.
. . .
Racial harmony in Canada would have been safer had the question never become official.

To understand the full import of this editorial, some background needs to be kept in mind, I think.

The Seattle Times is the newspaper of record in one of the most notoriously left-wing Democrat cities in the United States.  Having lived there for four years in the late 1970s, I can attest that Wikipedia has it right:

Seattle's politics lean famously to the left compared to the U.S. as a whole. In this regard, it sits with a small set of similar U.S. cities (such as Madison, Wisconsin, Berkeley, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts) where the dominant politics tend to range from center-left to social democratic. Seattle politics are generally dominated by the liberal wing (in the U.S. sense of the word "liberal") of the Democratic Party; in some local elections, Greens (and even, on at least one occasion, a member of the Freedom Socialist Party) have fared better than Republicans.

The journalistic voice of a hotbed of leftist American politics believes that Canada’s human rights codes have given unelected authorities arbitrary power to censor public discourse.  That says a lot.

h/t: Ezra Levant

Previous related posts:

• Unelected “experts” destroying credibility of human rights
• Ezra Levant faces down the “human rights” cops

Not only are Americans far more generous than Canadians, a study released yesterday indicates that, when it comes to philanthropy toward foreigners, they are more generous than anyone else on the planet.  This chart of donations by private individuals and businesses shows that Americans gave an estimated $34.8 billion in 2006, over 21 times more than second-place Britain.

The data come from the Index of Global Philanthropy, published by the Hudson Institute.  The executive summary can be downloaded here and the full report here.  (Both documents pdf.)

h/t: Free Exchange at The Economist

Previous related posts:

• Faith in government suppresses charitable giving
• Why are Americans far more generous than Canadians?
• Americans far more generous than Canadians

Unfortunately, the court was in Sweden, not Canada.

Dahn Pettersson, a politician from a suburb of Malmö, was charged with “agitation against an ethnic group” for submitting a motion to town council that linked heroin smuggling with Kosovar Albanians resident in Sweden.  A district court found him guilty and levied a fine equivalent to 100 days’ pay, but the verdict was overturned by the Court of Appeals.

Get this: Mr Pettersson was acquitted even though his motion erroneously claimed that 95 percent of all heroin in Sweden arrives via Kosovo.

Ultimately, the court choose to release Pettersson, arguing that freedom of expression and the right to criticize current policy is important, especially when it comes to political debate.

Pay attention, Canadian "human rights" commissions: Freedom of expression is especially important in political debates.  What a radical idea!

h/t: Tongue Tied 3