UK: Book your pew for church this Christmas, CofE guidance says

From the grandest cathedrals to the snuggest village chapel, it will be ticket-only for Christmas services

Welcome to Covid Christmas. At least going to church this festive season will provide your family with some semblance of normality.

Think again. Just as there was no room at the inn for the Holy Family as Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem, so it’s likely there will be little room in the pew for you and your own loved ones at church this Christmas.

Church worship has been a seesaw experience during the pandemic. First there was full church closure, then limited opening for private prayer, progress to socially-distanced services, back to lockdown and now services are allowed again.

During the deep lockdown of early spring, the Church of England upset many when it ordered church doors to be locked and its clergy took to their kitchen tables and livestreamed from there. The Roman Catholic Church, also mindful of contagion, directed churchgoers to livestreaming of Mass but kept its priests at their altars, broadcasting solitary services.

A week into Advent, doors have opened again after public health experts showed that masks, sanitiser and regular cleaning make church buildings safe spaces. Regular churchgoers now regard QR codes, no handshaking at the sign of peace and definitely no congregational singing with its risky aerosol particles as the norm. Choirs, though, have returned.

Given that most parishes have congregations small enough to accommodate even when socially distanced, church services have gone pretty smoothly. But Christmas itself is different. People who usually only go to church for hatching, matching and dispatching add Christmas to their attendance.

Tis the season to be jolly and to do God as well. They want to hear that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Singing O Come All Ye Faithful with gusto matters, even if the rest of the year they are, well, pretty faith-lite. The hush that falls as people queue up for Communion while Silent Night is sung, soft as a lullaby, means it truly is Christmas.

Covid has put paid to that. The usual rugby scrum for a seat will not be happening. From the grandest cathedrals to the snuggest village chapel, it will be ticket-only for Christmas services.

The Church of England has already recommended to vicars and cathedral deans that they set up a booking and seat allocation system for all Christmas services. “Let everyone know that attendance must be booked”, its guidance says.

One alternative is first come, first served. But lengthy queues with people getting crosser and too close for comfort will hardly encourage the Christmas spirit and could even be lethal.

Considerable numbers have tried church by watching online in the privacy of their home. But Christmas is Christmas: people need smells and bells, music, candlelight, sonorous voices intoning the Gospel and a high solo treble rising to the rafters, not peering at a flickering screen.

When Boris Johnson announced the Government’s relaxation of restrictions for Christmas, it was a recognition that after all the sacrifices people have made, families really do need to be together at Christmas. A true celebration is a communal experience and religion too is about people gathering together. For most of us wanting to mark the birth of Christ, a digital, streamed experience just isn’t enough. We need the comfort and joy of being together, even if we are a safe two metres apart. And if the churches can’t help us do that, it really will be a bleak midwinter.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/11/book-pew-church-christmas-cofe-guidance-says/

Who Is Responsible for the Loss of Faith in Science?

In an essay in the liberal UK broadsheet The Guardian, multiple authors chart out the most important task for the incoming Biden administration: to “restore the faith in science.”

“Joe Biden’s most important promise to the American people was a policy platform taken for granted prior the Trump presidency: believe science,” the article suggests, adding that “Restoring trust in science will not be simple after four years of lies, half-truths, misdirections and conspiracy theories.”

Days later, the academic journal Nature was under pressure from a concerted effort because it dared to publish a paper showing that “increasing the proportion of female mentors is associated not only with a reduction in post-mentorship impact of female protégés, but also a reduction in the gain of female mentors.”

Why are those two instances important? Because lately, oblivious to the internal contradictions, a section of the elite is determined to restore faith and trust in a somewhat religious idea of “science” as long as the conclusions adhere to a Whiggish liberal worldview.

Conversely, it is also that same section of elites that are opposed to any scientific conclusions that contradict their worldview. That makes this whole charade a sort of faith-based activism, where the definition of “science” is somewhat of a mystery.

The Nature brouhaha is instructive.

The paper argued that, in simple terms, the number of female mentors is proportional to post-job success. A dataset of over 222 million scientific papers, this study found female academic advisors who mentored female protégés gained 18 percent fewer citations than those who mentored males. The paper further concluded that same-gender mentorship is perhaps detrimental.

“While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia, our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career,” the paper argued. Naturally, it is under extreme criticism and facing activist open-letter campaigns even when the science on same-gender academic competition is quite clear.

Science is, naturally, not a deity to be believed or trusted. Having faith in something renders it a form of theology, not theory. Science depends on critique, skepticism, and a willingness to challenge long-held beliefs, be they scientific consensus, morality, or something else.

But science as a process is challenged by this clueless idea that one has to have “faith” in science. Yet it is gaining traction and forms the foundation of the politicization of science. The problem is that the same section of the ruling hegemonic soft-liberal socio-economic elite, mostly permeating the upper echelons of our media and academia, are also opposed to any scientific conclusions that rub against their ideological priors, as the Nature fiasco demonstrates.

Sadly, this deification of science is not isolated. It is partly responsible for a hefty mass of people losing trust in the entire idea of scientific expertise, as science is now considered akin to ideological activism. Prior to the U.S. election, Nature came out with four different articles taking sides. On October 15, it argued that scientists should get more political if they are “tired of being ignored.” It also endorsed Joe Biden for president. Prior to that, on October 8, Nature published an editorial arguing that science and politics are inseparable.

Around the same time, Scientific American, the premier American science journal, also broke its long tradition of political neutrality to endorse Biden. “On COVID-19, (Biden) states correctly that ‘it is wrong to talk about “choosing” between our public health and our economy… If we don’t beat the virus, we will never get back to full economic strength,’” Scientific American argued, without mentioning that it is not a scientific, but a political decision.

Nature then topped it with a panicky op-ed after the election, stating that scientists are aghast that there was no Biden landslide. “With so many votes cast for Trump in the US election, some researchers conclude that they must work harder to communicate the importance of facts, science and truth,” it concluded. Similarly, the Lancet, one of the oldest medical journals, has taken to publishing “personal view” articles that use a “Marxist ecofeminist” analysis to warn of the influence of “neoliberal capitalism.”

Of course, the idea that science can be purely neutral is flawed. Likewise, science has been consistently weaponized for policy ends that consistently help one political worldview.

Consider the recent coronavirus-related lockdown and gathering rules, which are stringently enforced depending on the cause. Scientific processes and methodologies are rigorously designed to eradicate biases. But they get more complicated when policy questions are involved—which are, by definition, political questions involving a set of choices with historical and economic variables and assumptions, and ultimately decided by humans.

The desire to simply “follow the science” wishes away those complications. Science can inform our choices, but it can’t guarantee wisdom.

The “restoration of faith” in science is, therefore, a dubious quasi-theological concept akin to “scientism,” which is the imitation of scientific methods without the rigor, as Karl Popper and F.A. Hayek argued. It also results in a peculiar problem. Science here is treated as a faith. If science mostly supports climate change, any question about the effects of climate change would render an individual to be an apostate to the faith of “science.”

On the other hand, the moment any science shows intra-sexual competition, biological and genetic heritability, gender and sexual difference, then that is considered bigotry.

The short-term political gains by weaponizing science could have long-term costs that leaves society in a worse place. Scientism reinforces dogma, which creates echo chambers, flawed predictions, and erodes trust. For example, there is documented evidence of collapsing trust in expertise in America, as well as evolving polarization along ideological lines, about trust in science.

This decline in trust is a vicious cycle. More political activism in science as advocated by Nature and Scientific American will push the academic community away from their goal of building influence, not closer to it.

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/12/who-is-responsible-for-the-loss-of-faith-in-science/

A Michigan Politician's Sickening Incitement to Violence

Dems are the party of The Mob, which makes Cynthia Johnson's words even more dangerous and despicable.

One sure sign of a country in turmoil is political violence. And we’ve experienced our share of it this year thanks to the thousands of antifa and Black Lives Matter thugs who’ve taken to the streets to vandalize and intimidate and burn and bludgeon and wreck and loot and murder. Oh, and the odd assortment of 13 anti-government types who plotted to kidnap Michigan’s Democrat governor a few weeks back.

But when our elected representatives themselves, rather than being voices of calm and reason, resort to calls of physical violence against their political opponents, we’re getting into dangerous territory. And so it was earlier this week with Michigan State Representative Cynthia Johnson.

As Craig Mauger reports in The Detroit News, “On Dec. 2, the House Oversight Committee took testimony from Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney. Johnson pushed back on Giuliani’s unproven [sic] claims of voter fraud and accused witnesses presented by the former New York City mayor of ‘lying.’ Afterward, Johnson, who is Black, received violent and racist threats, including one in which a person left a message telling her: ‘Your time is coming … from the (expletive) gallows you’ll be hanging.’”

Clearly, Johnson started all this with her idiotic and ill-advised smear of citizens and eyewitnesses who, under penalty of perjury, have sworn affidavits to the electoral fraud they saw. But when angry, anonymous partisans responded to her with threats of violence, she should’ve turned the matter over to law enforcement. And that should’ve been the end of it. Instead, though, she took to her Facebook page to post a video with an ominous call to violence against “Trumpers.”

“This is just a warning to you Trumpers,” Johnson says. “Be careful. Walk lightly. We ain’t playing with you. … And for those of you who are soldiers, you know how to do it. Do it right. Be in order. Make them pay.”

Reaction to Johnson’s sickening comments was, rightly, bipartisan. There’s no room in our politics for bile like that. Her fellow Michigan Democrats condemned the statement, and she’s been stripped of all her committee assignments.

As Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff noted, “It reminds me of the Black Panthers, except those thugs weren’t elected officials. … Johnson’s defenders suggest that she was only talking about hitting ‘Trumpers’ in the pocketbook. It’s true that she mentions that. But the phrases ‘we ain’t playing with you’ and ‘those of you who are soldiers’ undermine the ‘pocketbook’ defense. Even Johnson’s fellow Dem legislators aren’t buying it.”

One elected official who might be buying it, though, is the one who has the greatest reason not to: Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. As we mentioned above, Whitmer herself was the target of a kidnapping plot not long ago, so it’d seem that she, more than anyone else, should have zero tolerance for this sort of behavior. And yet there she was just yesterday, saying that Michigan House Republicans, who are in the majority and therefore control the legislative body’s committee assignments, have gone “too far.”

“I think this is a woman who has been through a lot,” Whitmer said. “And I think it’s important that every single one of us give one another a little bit of compassion and grace.”

Strange, though. We don’t recall any “compassion and grace” from Whitmer during her recent “Meet the Press” interview in which she proudly displayed her “8645” sticker — as in, “86” our 45th president.

The Left, as we know, is also The Mob. And it’s historically the political faction that resorts to violence. The rest of us should always be mindful of that reality, and ever vigilant against it.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/76412-a-michigan-politicians-sickening-incitement-to-violence-2020-12-11

The Attorney on a Political Witch Hunt Against the McCloskeys Has Been Removed

The zealous prosecutor, a black female, who charged Mark and Patricia McCloskey with felonies after they defended themselves against a Black Lives Matter mob at their home this summer has been dismissed from the case by a judge. From local NBC 5:

A St. Louis judge has disqualified Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner and her office from prosecuting Mark McCloskey's case, saying campaign fundraising emails she sent before and after issuing charges against the couple “raise the appearance of impropriety and jeopardize the defendant’s right to a fair trial.”

Judge Thomas Clark’s ruling comes about six weeks after the attorneys for Mark and Patricia McCloskey argued their motion to disqualify Gardner and her office from the case, saying her emailed solicitations for campaign contributions demonstrated she and her office have a personal interest in the case and jeopardized Mark McCloskeys’ right to a fair trial.

In her rebuttal, Gardner argued she sent the emails merely to respond to criticisms from the governor and president.

But, in his 22-page ruling, Clark disagreed.

“Ms. Gardner has every right to rebut criticism, but it appears unnecessary to stigmatize defendant – or even mention him – in campaign solicitations, especially when she purports to be responding to others,” he wrote. “In fact, the case law and Rules of Professional Conduct prohibit it.”

Should Clark's ruling stand, a special prosecutor will be appointed to handle the case. In St. Louis, the presiding judge picks the special prosecutor.

Gardner's office responded to the ruling by saying they were not "officially informed" prior to media coverage of the decision.

When Gardner filed the charges against the McCloskey's in July, she urged them to take advantage of a program designed to "reduce unncessary involvement with the courts," indicating she doesn't have a legitimate case against the couple.

Shortly afterward, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed a brief calling for the dismissal of the charges.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/12/11/the-attorney-trying-to-prosecute-the-mccloskys-has-been-dismissed-n2581409

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