MetaCatholic

It would seem to me, in my naïveté that this site offering online ordinations is simply a scam, dressed up in some nonsense. I fear however, that there are people who take it seriously. But I can’t quite get my head round why people who don’t believe in any God would want to go round getting “ordained”.

It seems clear that as well as being barking mad, they must be exceptionally stupid as well. The form that invites you to sign up for ordination says there are “no hidden fees or costs”, but everything in the FAQ says that to do anything with your “ordination” you need to pay for various extras at their online shop – so ordination’s for free, but calling yourself “Reverend” will cost you $89.95.

I did particularly like this bit, however.

Is this ordination legal in Canada?
No, we are not recognised in Canada. Our application to Revenue Canada as a religious non-profit was rejected because we do not include worship of a deity in our services. Canada is not as liberal as the US in recognizing alternative religions and apparently requires a deity, except in cases of ancient religions like Buddhism which are grandfathered in for no apparent reason.

Is this one of the unintended consequences of the separation of church and state?

This is all a bit bizarre. A couple of weeks ago I posted the sad news of the death of former Worcester bookshop manager Steve Jeynes by his own hand. This followed a long saga of exceptionally bizarre management of the former SPCK bookshop chain by the Texan brothers Mark and Phil Brewer

A comment was left on that post by someone who gave his name as Mark Brewer that said this:

I am the the former chairman of SSG, the limited company for which Mr. Jeynes worked until SSG filed for bankruptcy on June 4. My sorrow at Stephen’s passing from this life is inexpressibly profound, but I offer sincere condolences to his widow and children.

This Mark Brewer gave an email address at bplaw.com. This company seems to be law firm where he is one of the partners.

Today another person, also giving his name as Mark Brewer, left this comment:

The posting attributed to me (no. 5) was not posted by me.

This person gave an email address at spckonline.com, the old site of the SPCK chain, still apparently in use, despite the Brewers having lost the licence to the SPCK name. Ironically, they can’t even spell the name of the Worcester shop, but seem to think it is Worchester.

My question, dear readers, is what’s a blog host to do when this happens. I’ve chosen to note the problem. My own guess is that the original comment is from the real Mr Brewer for two reasons:

1. Someone impersonating him is much more likely, I think, to use the SPCK email address, than the obscure BPLaw one.
2. I can more easily imagine someone faking a denial of condolences, than faking the condolences themselves.

Of course, I could be wrong.

I have been refraining from saying much more about Todd Bentley’s bizarre “ministry” than I said in this post, though I remain baffled by some people’s credulity. But I remain concerned that the power of rational thought seems the first casualty of any enthusiasm for Bentley.

Now Peter Kirk gets very upset over the claim that Todd Bentley tried to heal someone by kicking them in the stomach.

it seems very clear that Todd could not possibly be kicking the man with his foot, as both his feet are close to the ground throughout. What Todd later says he has done is that he has kneed the man, and that is what I think I am seeing on the video.

You see, it’s quite all right, he didn’t kick him, he kneed him. Peter says:

I accept that there are questions about whether kneeing someone in the stomach is a proper thing to do in such circumstances.

No, Peter, there aren’t questions. Kneeing someone in Christ’s name is wrong. Claiming the Holy Sprit told him to drive out demons by beating up the oppressed – which seems to be the underlying view, if I’ve understood it rightly – is wrong. There aren’t any questions about it at all.

Oh - hang on, was that Holy Spirit telling me there’s nothing wrong with you that wouldn’t be cured by a swift knee in the groin? Oh no, it was just a tempting thought.

Peter Kirk’s enthusiasm for the revivalist Todd Bentley appears to lead him into some strange places. Today he seems to report as fact that through this ministry someone has been raised from the dead. Less committed reports tell a somewhat different story.

The teenager in question seems to have gone into heart failure for 16 minutes – a figure he provides rather than his doctors who are bound by confidentiality, but which I will assume to be accurate for the sake of argument. At the time he was undergoing emergency surgery following a car crash.

As is routine in all hospitals, the medical team would immediately have gone into full resuscitation procedures. 16 minutes is a fair length of time to be in cardiovascular failure, but well within the limits of what would happen before brain activity is assumed to have ceased and someone is pronounced dead. Resuscitation even after longer time spans than 16 minutes is by no means unknown, and seems to have occurred around the world irrespective of the faith of the patient, the family or the doctors, or indeed the numbers of people praying for them. It would seem to be more related to the age and constitution of the patient, the skill of the surgical team and the extent of the injury.

If therefore people are going to claim that in this case God raised the dead, there would seem to be a number of other cases when doctors have raised the dead with no specific request for divine intervention.

Some will no doubt say I am unduly cynical, especially since I note my reservation about the 16 minute claim. The story as reported, however, does seem to have elements of exaggeration in it, most noticeably the claim that there were 130 million people praying for this. It suggests a greater logistical miracle in the international phone system than any medical miracle in what is one of the better coronary units in the world.

I in no way wish to rule out of existence the apparently coincidental ways in which prayer and happenstance seem to combine to draw us into God’s activity. I do, however, want to suggest that calling what is a fortunate, but not unknown, outcome of surgery “the resurrection of the dead” is to make a very odd sort of claim, especially in the light of all the other medical resuscitations that occur in theatres and casualty units around the world.

I’ve no idea how I missed this gem. Pestilence is a bloke called Gordon, and he belongs to a breakaway Jehovah’s Witness sect. His only training for riding the first of the four horses was a bit of pony-trekking. Enjoy!

Harrison Ford Elected to the Board of the Archaeological Institute of America
(HT Jim Davila)

Coming Soon:

• William Shatner appointed to NASA oversight committee?
• Arnold Schwarzenegger made president of cyborg research at MIT?

Two pieces of paper have passed my desk recently (the second coming today). The first reminded us all of the importance of bats as a protected species. Even if they were filling the church with their droppings, you could do nothing to get rid of them, but simply cover your furniture and floors with dust sheets when the church wasn’t in use. Any high level work in a church needed you to swear that there was no evidence of bat activity before you would be allowed to mend the hole in the roof.

The second piece of paper I saw today was advice on bats and rabies. A few years ago someone in Scotland caught rabies from a bat and died. The leaflet wanted to reassure us that while a significant proportion of bats (perhaps 20%) were carrying rabies, it did not easily jump between species. However, we were strongly advised to wear gloves if handling a bat. If a bat flies into your home, you are allowed to take it outside, but you should wear gloves to do. If it nests in your church, you may not even disturb it.

So there you have it. In the name of conservation you must permit a rabies carrying species to take over and dictate the use of your church. Stuff the idea of pleasant user-friendly surroundings, and stuff the health and safety of the people. Diseased flying rodents must be protected.

They call this nature-loving. I call it unnatural.

I am surprised that Peter Kirk is impressed with this. It’s not just that I’m sceptical, I’m positively repelled. Being a fool for Christ is one thing, being a complete idiot is another. When I read stuff like this:

Many on the platform are ON THEIR BACKS ON THE FLOOR!!! 
It appears that no one can take the mic.

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Todd starts having visions of healings happening right now
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We are in a GLOBAL atmosphere of CREATIVE MIRACLES… 

TOUCH YOUR COMPUTER RIGHT NOW!!!

A man had donated a kidney to a friend…   he has been asking God for a new kidney…  when Todd called out a new kidney…  he felt the power of God go through his body!!!

My first reaction is to wonder if it’s a spoof. My second is to think there’s more preying than praying going on. My third is to remember that people in Florida were too stupid to vote in 2000, so why should I be surprised.

Perhaps Jon Birch should have the last word.

Feeling completely stumped about what to say at a school Ascension Day service this week, I tried Googling for some ideas. After all how do you explain the ascension to young children in a fresh and stimulating way? I did come across some ideas for visual aids that could help. But typing in various search phrases including “ascension” and “explain” proved to be a big mistake.

I have decided that, after looking at pages like this one, or this one, that I have been mercifully innocent of the crazy whacko world of DIY religion and pseudo-scientific spirituality.

We are AMBASSADORS OF LIGHT who serve as the “BRIDGE” between consciousness paradigms by assisting others into the higher dimensional system of new earth energy.
We live and love from the Unified Field of Higher Consciousness. Children of the Sun is an organization of people that are dedicated to Self Mastery while serving in impeccable integrity and self responsibility. We are the Avatars and Christed Ones, emerging in collective power.

No love, you’re a bunch of deluded people who’s lives must be really boring to make up stories like this.

In addition to each chromosome’s 2 strand double helix of DNA, there are an additional 10 etheric strands of DNA available to each human, which have been dormant since the beginning of recorded history. … This is the Original Divine Blueprint, what man USED to be. It has been written that Jesus had 12 strands of DNA activated.

Not, however, written by anyone who knew what they were talking about.

It is hard, I think, to know whether to laugh or cry.

I wish I could believe with a clear conscience that Matt Taibbi is exaggerating in this report. (HT Andrew Brown) Unfortunately, I’ve come across, or had friends who’ve come across, similarly bizarre and scary stuff done in God’s name.

We don’t get to see the utterly batshit world they live in, when the cameras are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other words, there’s a ready-for-prime-time stage act — toned down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that won’t scare the advertisers — and then there’s the real party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets let down.

To fit in, Matt invents the most wonderful problem past

“Well, uh, OK, then,” he said. “Matthew, do you want to tell your story?”  …
“Hello,” I said, taking a deep breath. “My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes.”
“He’d be sitting there in his costume, sucking down a beer and watching television,” I heard myself saying. “And then sometimes, even if I just walked in front of the TV, he’d pull off one of those big shoes and just, you know — whap!”

The trouble is, this is far less bizarre than the kind of stuff that happens on “deliverance camp”:

“In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of cancer!” said Fortenberry.
“Oooh! Unnh! Unnnnnh!” wailed a woman in the front row.
“Bleeech!” puked the bald man behind me.
Within about a minute after that, the whole chapel erupted in pandemonium. About half the men and three-fourths of the women were writhing around and either play-puking or screaming. Not wanting to be a bad sport, I raised my hand for one of the life coaches to see.
“Need . . . a . . . bag,” I said as he came over.
He handed me a bag.
“In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of handwriting analysis!” shouted Fortenberry.
Handwriting analysis? I jammed the bag over my mouth and started coughing, then went into a very real convulsion of disbelief as I listened to this astounding list, half-laughing and half-retching.
“In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, I cast out the demon of the intellect!”

You really couldn’t make it up.

That last phrase seems to say it all: “the demon of the intellect”. It is exactly this kind of dangerous nonsense that the church needs to be delivered from, and a healthy application of our God-given intellect is the best way forward. No wonder these idiots think the intellect is dangerous: the exercising of the intellect is the exorcising of this dreadful and demonic drivel.