The Church of England is obsessed with racial self-flagellation

Physical self-flagellation has often been regarded as holy so perhaps the C of E is reverting to a more primitive version of Christianity

The Church of England has been displaying distinctly masochistic tendencies of late. The Church has previously tried to return its tainted Benin bronzes, even though their specimens were crafted 80 years after the Kingdom of Benin succumbed to British forces and its palaces were looted in 1897.

This week the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice – chaired by the Blair-era Labour minister and subsequently High Commissioner to South Africa Lord (Paul) Boateng – issued its first report; there are five more to come over the next three years, so we can anticipate much more self-abasement. Needless to say, in the report’s opening message Boateng writes of a ‘sense of deep hurt and of pain’ with those ‘who have experienced and are still experiencing racial injustice within and at the hand of the Church of England’. The point of this Commission is to tell Anglicans how guilty they collectively are – and it dutifully does just that.

The report asks the Church to make amends, indeed to offer ‘reparation and redress’, for assets it may have accumulated originating from the profits of slavery. Although having to acknowledge that the extent of these holdings is not yet known, it makes much of the investments the Church may have held in pre-1837 slave-owning enterprises. The report has much less to say about the many Anglican clergy at the forefront of the abolitionist cause.

As has become the fashion, what really gets our Commissioners going are public statues – both the taking of them down but also the erecting of them: ‘There is still no national memorial to the victims and those who resisted slavery and this needs to be rectified.’ The report suggests that the Church of England should contribute to the building of such a – presumably suitably grandiose – memorial as part of its atonement for slavery.

There is a good case for a national memorial commemorating the wrongs of the slave trade, perhaps a stronger one than there is for the proposed Holocaust memorial near the Houses of Parliament, in that Britain was indubitably involved in slavery whilst it was in no way responsible for the Holocaust. But if the memorial is to tell the full story of Britain’s involvement in slavery and continue to educate future generations it must be more than a mea culpa and additionally acknowledge our central role in the global abolition of the malign trade. I suspect this is not what the Commissioners have in mind.

Where the report is much more troubling is in its eagerness to take down memorials. Earlier this year Jesus College, Cambridge failed in its attempts to take down a stone plaque from its chapel to its benefactor 17th-century trader and philanthropist Tobias Rustat, when the ecclesiastical courts ruled against it. The College’s Master Sonita Alleyne wanted to remove the memorial due to his wealth allegedly having been amassed through the profits of slavery. The Consistory Court of the Diocese of Ely found that this was not the case:

‘The true position is that Rustat only realised his investments in the [slaving] Royal African Company in May 1691, some 20 years after he had made his gifts to the college and that any moneys Rustat did realise as a result of his involvement in the slave trade comprised only a small part of his great wealth, and they made no contribution to his gifts to the college.’

The Commissioner’s response to this judgement is not that institutions should be more careful before embarking on divisive and expensive attempts to take down historic and artistically important monuments but that the ecclesiastical courts need to be reformed. It does not consider that Jesus’s move was wrong, merely that the judgment was wrong. Far from thinking that other institutions should not follow Jesus’s example, it is worried that they will be put off from attempting to take down other memorials.

The Commissioners note that: ‘there was, it must be said, a noticeable lack of ethnic diversity among the participants in this case’. The report accordingly recommends that ‘Assessors’ should be appointed to ecclesiastical courts who have ‘the lived experience of diverse communities and of the history of those communities within these Islands and beyond’. In other words, it recommends that people should be appointed to the courts on the basis of their colour and their ideological leanings. It seems to be saying, if your preferred outcome is thwarted, get yourself a new Court. Seemingly, if one is on the side of progress due process can go out of the window.

The Commission moans that the Church has been tardy in providing funding for its initiatives – ‘we have taken the view that a minimum of £20 million needs to be set aside at the outset of this upcoming period to fund the delivery of From Lament to Action’ and in establishing the Orwellian sounding Racial Justice Directorate. The Church leadership will surely hastily comply with these demands. The funding will inevitably be used to point out just how sinful the Church has been and make new demands for financial contrition. On past form, the Anglican hierarchy will love it.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/the-church-of-england-is-obsessed-with-racial-self-flagellation/

*******************************************

Did mass-migration topple Australia's Christian culture?

The first tranche of results from the 2021 Census, released last week, confirmed that Australia is experiencing a revolution in its demographic and cultural character.

For the first time in Australia’s history, those identifying as Christian are now a minority. Whereas 86.2 per cent of Australians listed a form of Christianity as their religion in 1971, by 2016, that was down to 52 per cent. In 2021, it had plummeted to 44 per cent, a decline of over 15 per cent in a mere five years.

Christianity arrived on these shores with the first British settlers and profoundly influenced the development of Australian society. It has been argued that Christian churches did ‘more than any other institution, public or private, to civilise Australians’.

For previous generations of Australians, Christianity was not simply a matter of private faith but a major ingredient in Australian public life, shaping our laws, politics, and culture. The unfashionable truth is that Christian tenets helped furnish us with a common moral and ethical framework.

But that common framework is disappearing. As The Australian’s Paul Kelly observed:

‘Churches have moved from the centre of our public life, religious figures are accorded diminished attention and the Christian faith is challenged in the public square… The consequence is apparent: Australia is more divided on the pivotal moral issues, once seen as the bedrock for a stable cultural order.’

The decline of Christianity in Australia is not the only epochal change captured in the 2021 Census. The Census also found that nearly half of the population (48.2 per cent) had at least one overseas-born parent and 27.6 per cent of the population was born outside of Australia – a record high. Almost a quarter of the population (24.8 per cent) spoke a language other than English at home. Of the over 5.5 million who spoke a different language at home, 852,706 reported that they did not speak English well or at all.

These shifts are in large part the result of decisions by successive federal governments since the mid-2000s to massively increase immigration levels. The numbers were ramped up during the final years of the Howard government, with an effective doubling of the intake. Immigration increased even further under Rudd and remained at extraordinarily high levels – around 240,000 a year in net terms – until Covid forced the closure of Australia’s borders. Despite the majority of Australians wanting lower immigration, the recently-ousted Morrison government was planning a return to ‘Big Australia’ immigration levels.

Australia, it has been remarked, is in the midst of an unprecedented mass immigration experiment the likes of which the developed world has never seen. No other major Western country has such a high proportion of foreign-born residents and recent migrants. Our 27.6 per cent of residents born elsewhere compares to 13.7 per cent in the United States and 14 per cent in the United Kingdom and Sweden. Even Woke-left, ‘post-national’ Canada doesn’t have such a high proportion of migrants.

In short, Australia is doing something very different from nearly every other country on the planet, and this has far-reaching ramifications. The millions of migrants who have come to Australia since the start of the century obviously include high-achieving people who add to this country. But they change it, too.

Migrants helped build this country, of course, but the successive waves of European immigration brought together people who were not as dissimilar as those arriving now. The bulk of new migrants to Australia now come from the non-Western world. While we call them minorities here, they are from countries that are vastly larger than Australia in terms of population. They also have strongly-defined cultures and belief systems, which are in some cases very different to the Western tradition.

In the past, new migrants were encouraged to assimilate into the Australian mainstream and become unhyphenated Australians (periodic slowdowns in immigration assisted with this process). But now, under the policy of multiculturalism, migrants are encouraged to retain their ancestral cultures, identities and, indeed, loyalties. At the same, Australia has seemingly lost all confidence in itself and its heritage. Whereas Australians were once proud of their achievements, nowadays schools, universities, the media, and politicians declare that Australia is an illegitimate project built on stolen land and guilty of all manner of sins. One is left with the distinct impression that nothing has been achieved in the last several centuries worth preserving and passing on.

Three decades ago, Geoffrey Blainey identified an emerging intellectual trend to view Australia not as a nation in its own right but as ‘a subsidised rooming house for the peoples of the world – a rooming house without any of the safeguards which a nation needs for its preservation’. As Australia’s population becomes more diverse and more international, some difficult questions arise: what will unite this disparate conglomeration of peoples? Without shared history, culture, belief systems, traditions, or even language, what will be the glue to hold our society together? How will Australia engender a sufficient sense of fellow feeling, solidarity, and shared purpose among a multicultural mass of peoples with little in common?

To these existential questions, I suspect our ruling class has no real answers. Call me a pessimist, but it appears inevitable that Australia faces an increasingly fragmented, discordant future. The worst thing we could do is exacerbate the situation by doubling down on reckless immigration policy, cultural self-loathing, and divisive, Woke identity politics

https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/did-mass-migration-topple-australias-christian-culture/

************************************************

Biden’s Fairy-Tale View of Land Mines Threatens the Lives of Our Armed Forces

The Biden administration last week announced it would dramatically limit the use of anti-personnel land mines by U.S. forces and destroy the entire U.S. inventory of such land mines, except for a limited number associated with defending South Korea.

Although the decision no doubt will be welcomed by the more progressive elements of the president’s party, experts know that this blatant virtue signaling not only could cause the unnecessary deaths of U.S. military personnel, but defeat in battle.

Despite military leaders’ repeated testimony that such land mines represent a useful military capability, the White House seemingly chose political expediency over warfighting.

Why else would President Joe Biden appear to place so little value on the lives of the men and women serving in our military? It seems no one in the White House has the ability, or perhaps desire, to differentiate the rightness of America’s defending itself and rendering assistance to friends facing the predatory behavior of Russia or Iran or China.

The Biden administration correctly notes that other countries have used land mines in reckless ways that harm civilian populations and pose threats to local communities long after a conflict has ended. But to imply that U.S. forces operate just as irresponsibly is insulting.

Again, as noted by the administration, the U.S. should take pride in the assistance provided to others around the world in humanitarian demining efforts. It is the right thing to do.

But it is a tragic mistake to say that, because mines have caused problems in other settings, U.S. forces should not be allowed to use mines to protect themselves and make it harder, rather than easier, for an enemy to prevail.

This is like saying that because criminals use weapons to commit crimes, police should be disarmed to set the example that leads us to a gun-free world. The whole notion is absurd.

In saying that the U.S. will align its policy with that of other countries forswearing the use of mines, Biden effectively has placed the nation on the same footing as Palau, Liechtenstein, and Cape Verde, all signatories to the Ottawa Convention.

This ignores the fact that America has vastly different interests and obligations, and that U.S. forces should be equipped to serve them accordingly. Russia, China, and Iran, which are not signatories, meanwhile are arming themselves to the teeth and repeatedly have shown little regard for the responsible use of the tools of war.

The framers of this policy appear to assume that the U.S. never will be in a war where there is a need to deny key terrain or routes to the enemy. Anti-personnel land mines force an enemy to slow down, thus giving friendly forces time to react.

These mines can overcome a relative lack of forces on the part of the U.S. by forcing an enemy off certain routes and areas. They simplify the dispersion of U.S. forces, enabling a smaller contingent to control a larger area and preventing it from being overwhelmed by an enemy that otherwise would be able to attack from many different directions.

Do the mines pose dangers post-conflict? Yes, but no different than any battlefield littered with the debris of unexploded ordnance from mortars, artillery, rockets, bombs, grenades, and missiles that did not perform as designed. This is an ugly aspect of war.

Another ugly reality is that war demands tools that kill the enemy while preserving one’s own people and combat power. Does anyone doubt that the Ukrainians want to have as many tools as possible to frustrate Russian advances across their country? They willingly will shoulder the burden of removing mines and other dangerous remnants of war once they have defeated the enemy trying to destroy them.

Biden’s policy to “not develop, produce, or acquire” anti-personnel land mines means that U.S. forces will not have this capability when the next war comes along—as history, unfortunately, suggests it will. Prohibiting the use of this capability is akin to fighting with one arm behind your back.

It also follows a troubling pattern in which this administration seemingly places more emphasis in the areas of climate change, diversity and equity, and extremist witch hunts than actual warfighting capability.

In short, the Biden plan to destroy America’s inventory of mines and to renounce their use will place our military in the greatest danger at the time of greatest need.

Biden effectively is sacrificing our men and women on the altar of progressive fantasy on the false premise that our enemies will observe the niceties of proper conduct on the next battlefield.

Good luck with that idea.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/06/29/bidens-fairy-tale-view-of-landmines-threatens-the-lives-of-our-armed-forces/

*************************************************

Australia: Religious group members arrested over eight-year-old Elizabeth Struhs' death

This is a recurring problem. There are always some people who are so confident in their religious beliefs that they are prepared to risk the well-being of their children over it. On this occasion the fanatics discontinued the girl's diabetes medication in the belief that prayer alone would cure her

This is not a problem of religion. 99% of Christians don't go to such lengths. It is a problem of egotism -- of being certain despite all contrary evidence that you are right in your judgements. Inflated views of yourself too often lead to great evils.

The four men and eight women, aged 19 to 64, are expected to be charged with murder later today.

Elizabeth's parents, 50-year-old Jason Struhs and 46-year-old Kerrie Struhs, have already been charged over the girl's death.

Police said the group was aware of the eight-year-old's medical condition and did not seek medical assistance.

More than 30 officers conducted a search at a residence in Homestead Avenue, in Harristown, where 12 residents were arrested.

Detective Acting Superintendent Garry Watts said the investigation was unprecedented. "In my 40 years of policing, I've never faced a matter like this," he said. "And I'm not aware of a similar event in Queensland, let alone Australia."

Detective Watts said the group were expected to be charged tonight and appear in the Toowoomba Magistrates Court on Wednesday.

Sources have told the ABC the religious group is a small and tight-knit group with no ties to any established church in Toowoomba.

Jason and Kerrie Struhs, who are facing charges including murder, torture, and failing to provide necessities of life, were last before the Toowoomba Magistrates Court in late June.

Appearing via video link the pair again chose to represent themselves. They were remanded in custody and will return to court later in July.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-05/religious-group-arrests-over-8yo-elizabeth-struhs-death/101208762

****************************************

My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

*****************************************