The benefits of Christianity

So often the liberal west demonizes oversees mission. Certainly abuses did occur. But the irony is that Christians in the developing world are deeply thankful for those who risked life and limb to bring the life-changing culture-transforming message of Jesus to them.

As a breath of fresh air, Matthew Parris (an atheist) has written an article reflecting on the good Christianity has brought to Africa. It is worth a read, and reflects the fact that the Christian gospel renews people into a more truly human humanity that can only be the cause of good.

Let's pray that as this "light shines before men" that they would "see these good deeds, and praise our Father in heaven" (Matt 5v16).

To read the article click here.

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Behind Islamic fanaticism

Been meaning to post a link to this article for a while. From the horses mouth, explanation that Islamic theology not our foreign policy is what ultimately lies behind Islamic terrorism. When will western plurliasm wake up to the fact that it must prioritise truth on these matters above a dishonest pretence that all religions are equally peaceful?

See: I was a fanatic...I know their thinking (Daily Mail)

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The Dawkins Delusion

Do stop behaving as if you are God, Professor Dawkins

By ALISTER McGRATH
Daily Mail on-line
9th February 2007

He is a 'psychotic delinquent', invented by mad, deluded people. And that's one of Dawkins's milder criticisms.

Dawkins, Oxford University's Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, is on a crusade.

His salvo of outrage and ridicule is meant to rid the world of its greatest evil: religion. "If this book works as I intend," he says, "religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down." But he admits such a result is unlikely. "Dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads" (that's people who believe in God) are "immune to argument", he says.

I have known Dawkins for more than 20 years; we are both Oxford professors. I believe if anyone is "immune to argument" it is him. He comes across as a dogmatic, aggressive propagandist.

Of course, back in the Sixties, everyone who mattered was telling us that religion was dead. I was an atheist then. Growing up as a Protestant in Northern Ireland, I had come to believe religion was the cause of the Province's problems. While I loved studying the sciences at school, they were important for another reason: science disproved God. Believing in God was only for sad, mad and bad people who had yet to be enlightened by science.

I went up to Oxford to study the sciences in 1971, expecting my atheism to be consolidated. In the event, my world was turned upside down. I gave up one belief, atheism, and embraced another, Christianity. Why? There were many factors. For a start, I was alarmed by some atheist writings, which seemed more preoccupied with rubbishing religion than seeking the truth.

Above all, I encountered something at Oxford that I had failed to meet in Northern Ireland - articulate Christians who were able to challenge my atheism. I soon discovered two life-changing things.

First, Christianity made a lot of sense. It gave me a new way of seeing and understanding the world, above all, the natural sciences. Second, I discovered Christianity actually worked: it brought purpose and dignity to life.

I kept studying the sciences, picking up a PhD for research in molecular biophysics. But my heart and mind had been seduced by theology. It still excites me today.

Dawkins and I both love the sciences; we both believe in evidence-based reasoning. So how do we make sense of our different ways of looking at the world? That is one of the issues about which I have often wished we might have a proper discussion. Our paths do cross on the television networks and we even managed to spar briefly across a BBC sofa a few months back. We were also filmed having a debate for Dawkins's recent Channel 4 programme, The Root Of All Evil? Dawkins outlined his main criticisms of God, and I offered answers to what were clearly exaggerations and misunderstandings. It was hardly rocket science.

For instance, Dawkins often compares belief in God to an infantile belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, saying it is something we should all outgrow. But the analogy is flawed. How many people do you know who started to believe in Santa Claus in adulthood?

Many people discover God decades after they have ceased believing in the Tooth Fairy. Dawkins, of course, would just respond that people such as this are senile or mad, but that is not logical argument. Dawkins can no more 'prove' the non-existence of God than anyone else can prove He does exist.

Most of us are aware that we hold many beliefs we cannot prove to be true. It reminds us that we need to treat those who disagree with us with intellectual respect, rather than dismissing them - as Dawkins does - as liars, knaves and charlatans.

But when I debated these points with him, Dawkins seemed uncomfortable. I was not surprised to be told that my contribution was to be cut.

The Root Of All Evil? was subsequently panned for its blatant unfairness. Where, the critics asked, was a responsible, informed Christian response to Dawkins? The answer: on the cutting-room floor.

The God Delusion is similarly full of misunderstanding. Dawkins simply presents us with another dogmatic fundamentalism. Maybe that's why some of the fiercest attacks on The God Delusion are coming from other atheists, rather than religious believers. Michael Ruse, who describes himself as a 'hardline Darwinian' philosopher, confessed that The God Delusion made him 'embarrassed to be an atheist'.

The dogmatism of the work has attracted wide criticism from the secularist community. Many who might be expected to support Dawkins are trying to distance themselves from what they see as an embarrassment.

Aware of the moral obligation of a critic of religion to deal with this phenomenon at its best and most persuasive, many atheists have been disturbed by Dawkins's crude stereotypes and seemingly pathological hostility towards religion. In fact, The God Delusion might turn out to be a monumental own goal - persuading people that atheism is just as intolerant as the worst that religion can offer.

Alister McGrath is professor of theology at Oxford University. His new book The Dawkins Delusion?, co-authored by Joanna Collicutt McGrath, is published by SPCK at £7.99.

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The rise of Christophopbia

What about the basic rights of Christians?

Ann WIDDECOMBE
12 July 2006
The Daily Express
(c) 2006 Express Newspapers

IT IS supposed to be a crime to stir up religious hatred but the Gay Police Association either doesn't know this or doesn't care. It has recently run an advertising campaign for which it is difficult to find any description other than Christophobia.

There is a picture of the Bible and the headline is: In The Name Of The Father. It then goes on to claim that in the past 12 months, the Gay Police Association has recorded a 74 per cent increase in homophobic incidents, where the sole or primary motivating factor was the religious belief of the perpetrator.

It would be interesting to know the nature of the homophobic incidents. Christianity specifically forbids hatred, not just acts of hatred or expressions of hatred but the feeling itself. No Christian can abuse or assault a homosexual "in the name of the Father". Yet, by choosing that very famous line of Christian worship the advertisement suggests that Christianity almost uniquely is responsible for hate crime.

Can anyone imagine the Koran rather than the Bible being featured? Yet the teaching of both faiths (and, indeed, others) is against homosexual acts. Why pick on Christianity?

Perhaps this increase in "homophobic incidents" includes the response of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain, to an interviewer's question about the Muslim view of the issue.

Or the opinions of Lynette Burrows, the respected children's author, who said she did not believe the adoption of children by gay couples to be normally advisable. Or the action of a Christian couple from Lancashire who asked their local council if they could display Christian literature in register offices carrying out civil partnership ceremonies.

The reason I cite these three cases is that we know the police became involved in all of them but none of them would fulfil a reasonable person's view of the definition of abuse or assault.

What we are now faced with is not equality but a hierarchy of equalities.

When any human right comes up against homosexual rights the latter must always win.

The human right to express a religious or conscientious view or to hear religious teaching must give way to a homosexual's right never to feel offended. There is a set of proposed regulations, coming before Parliament in the autumn, which takes this to extremes. It will almost certainly be railroaded through.

Under its provisions someone who supplies bed and breakfast in his own home will be able to refuse a double room to an unmarried heterosexual couple but not to a homosexual couple.

A church will not be able to refuse to hire out its own hall for civil partnership celebrations. You can bet your last penny that it will be Christians rather than other faiths who will be picked on for test cases.

What, other than Christophobia, determines that Christmas must be renamed? That Christmas lights must be called festival lights? That nativity displays must be forbidden?

That hot cross buns are banned from some schools? That it is acceptable to mock Christ in shows such as Jerry Springer – The Opera in a way that would cause riots if done to the Prophet Mohammed? That inspired this Government, which made such a parade of Christian socialism before 1997, to try to eliminate prayers from the millennium celebrations?

It is an offshoot of exactly the same political correctness which allows an artist to be seen eating a foetus on television but imprisons an octogenarian for circulating pictures of aborted foetuses.

And the same PC madness which forbids teachers to dispense aspirins or Elastoplast but encourages them to refer underage girls for abortions unbeknown to their parents.

Hitherto, Christians have fought with argument and protest and the powers that be, including government, the BBC and police, have brushed us off.

The time has come to use the very weapons which have been so successfully used against us.

We should complain formally of hate crimes and the stirring up of religious hatred and demand our human rights to religious freedom and to freedom of conscience.

The Gay Police Association advert might be a very good place to start.

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Christianity becoming a hate crime

How Britain is turning Christianity into a crime

by Melanie Phillips
THE DAILY MAIL
9/11/2006

How long will it be before Christianity becomes illegal in Britain? This is no longer the utterly absurd and offensive question that on first blush it would appear to be.

An evangelical Christian campaigner, Stephen Green was arrested and charged last weekend with using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour.

So what was this behaviour? Merely trying peacefully to hand out leaflets at a gay rally in Cardiff.

So what was printed on those leaflets that was so threatening, abusive or insulting that it attracted the full force of the law?

Why, none other than the majestic words of the 1611 King James Bible.

The problem was that they were those bits of the Bible which forbid homosexuality. The leaflets also urged homosexuals to "turn from your sins and you will be saved".

But to the secular priests of the human rights culture, the only sin is to say that homosexuality is a sin.

Admittedly, Mr Green is not everyone's cup of tea; other Christians regard him as extreme. But our society is now so upside-down that, by doing nothing more than upholding a fundamental tenet of Christianity, he was treated like a criminal.

And yet at the same time, the police are still studiously refusing to act against Islamic zealots abusing British freedom to preach hatred and incitement against the West.

Prejudice

The Bible is the moral code that underpins our civilisation. Yet the logic of the police action against Mr Green surely leads ultimately to the inescapable conclusion that the Bible itself is "hate speech" and must be banned.

This bizarre state of affairs has arisen thanks to our human rights culture which automatically champions minorities against the majority.

As a result, no one can say anything disobliging about a minority without being accused of prejudice or discrimination.

The problem for Christianity is that it holds that homosexuality is wrong. This, however, it is no longer allowed to say because it treats a minority practice as sinful.

So it can no longer uphold a central tenet of its own faith without being accused of prejudice.

This dilemma is currently tearing apart the Church of England itself. But it is also turning our whole notion of justice on its head.

Author Lynette Burrows received a warning from the Metropolitan Police merely for suggesting that gay people did not make ideal adoptive parents.

The former leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, also had his collar felt by police after he said that homosexuality was harmful.

Notably, in his case the matter was swiftly dropped. If there's one thing that terrifies our PC police even more than being called homophobic, it's being called Islamophobic - even though Islamic fundamentalism poses a real threat to the human rights of gay people.

If this wasn't all so frightening, it would be hilarious. Christians, by contrast, get very different treatment.

An elderly evangelical preacher, Harry Hammond, was convicted of a public order offence after he held up a poster calling for an end to homosexuality, lesbianism and immorality.

Although he had been the victim of a physical attack when a crowd poured soil and water over him, he alone was prosecuted.

And Lancashire pensioners Joe and Helen Roberts were interrogated by police for 80 minutes about their 'homophobic' views after they had merely asked their local council to display Christian literature alongside gay rights leaflets in civic buildings.

Bullying Christianity is fast becoming the creed that dare not speak its name. It is being written out of the national script by ideologues seeking to hasten its disappearance.

Yesterday, the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said in a radio interview that Britain was "no longer a Christian country" because people no longer went to church.

Local authorities and government bodies are systematically bullying Christianity out of existence by refusing to fund Christian voluntary groups on the grounds that to be Christian means that they are not committed to 'diversity'.

Thus local and central government refused to replicate the vocational training provided by the Highfields Happy Hens Centre in Derbyshire for young offenders and pupils excluded from school despite its impressive record of success, simply because it was run with a clear Christian ethos.

Norfolk council objected to the inclusion of the word 'Christian' in the constitution of Barnabas House in King's Lynn, Norfolk, which houses homeless young men.

And the Housing Corporation, the major funder of Romford YMCA in Essex which looks after hundreds of needy young people, objected to the fact that only Christians were board members - which meant, it said, that the YMCA was not capable of 'diversity', even though it was open to all faiths and none.

The 'diversity' agenda, in other words, is a fig-leaf for an attack on Christianity.

And to cap it all, we can no longer rely on our future monarch to hold the line, since Prince Charles has said that when he becomes King he will no longer be Defender of the Faith but "defender of faith".

But Christianity is still the official religion of this country. All its institutions, its history and its culture are suffused with it; Britain would lose its identity, its values and its cohesion without it.

But minority rights are now being wielded against it like a wrecking ball.

What started as a commendable desire to ban hatred of the gay minority has morphed into a hatred of the Christian majority.

Behaviour which was previously considered to transgress the moral norms of the Bible has now instead become the norm - and it is biblical values that are treated as beyond the pale of acceptable behaviour. This is no accident.

The sacred doctrine of human rights - which explicitly sets itself up as the religion for a godless age - is the means by which secularism is steadily attacking the Christian roots of our civilisation, on the basis that religion is inherently unenlightened, prejudiced and divisive.

Christianity has been dethroned as this country's governing creed on the basis that equality demands equal status for minority faiths and secularism. As a result, it is being marginalised as no more than a quaint cultural curiosity.

Offensive

It is a process before which the Church of England has long been on its knees, going with the flow of moral and cultural collapse in accordance with the doctrine of multiculturalism - and then wondering why its churches are so empty, while those of uncompromising evangelicals such as Stephen Green are packed to the rafters.

As a result, Christianity is being steadily removed from the public sphere.

Various councils have banned Christmas on the grounds that it is "too Christian" and therefore "offensive" to people of other faiths, and are replacing it with meaningless "winter festivals".

This attack on Christianity is not merely something that seems straight out of Alice In Wonderland.

It is not merely a threat to freedom of speech and religious expression. It is a fundamental onslaught on the national identity and bedrock values of this country - and as such will destroy those freedoms which Christianity itself first created.

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