Uniting Church of Australia consents to same-sex marriages at its premises

The Methodist church of old stood for both rationality and a serious study of the scriptures.  When they combined with the more wishy-washy end of the Presbyterians to form the Uniting Church, however, the desire for compromise seems to have led to the whole of the new denomination suddenly becoming spineless. I am pleased that the congregation of my old Presbyterian church stood outside the union

And attitude to homosexuality is the litmus test of whether a church is still a Christian church or not.  The Bible is crystal clear on homosexuality.  It is an abomination.  See Jude 1:7; 1 Timothy 1:8-11; Mark 10:6-9; 1 Corinthians 6: 9-11; 1 Corinthians 7:2; Leviticus 18:32; Leviticus 20:13.  There is ZERO wriggle-room in the scriptures for any expression of approval for homosexuality.  You are for the Bible or not. "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth" (Matthew  12:30).

But the Bible is the source of Christianity so rejecting it is rejecting Christianity.  So the Uniting "church" may be many things but it is not Christian, nor are its adherents Christians.  They are pretend Christians, disciples of the Devil.

I wonder if there are some Bible-loving congregations among the Methodists who might break with their "church" and join the continuing Presbyterians.  Such independence of mind would be very Presbyterian and they would be welcomed


SAME-SEX couples wanting to get hitched in a church can now breathe a sigh of relief. This is because the Uniting Church of Australia has finally given the green light for such unions to take place inside its premises.

The church will now have two equal yet distinct views on marriage to show the “diversity of Christian belief” among its members after the denomination’s national body met on Friday night in Melbourne’s southeast.

Members of the church’s national decision-making body agreed to adopt a second statement during a seven-day triennial assembly at Box Hill Town Hall.

“Marriage for Christians is the freely given consent and commitment in public and before God of two people to live together for life,” the new additional statement reads.

Under the new ruling, ministers will be allowed to conduct — or refuse to conduct — same-sex marriages.

The existing belief statement reads: “Marriage for Christians is the freely given consent and commitment in public and before God of a man and a woman to live together for life.”

Uniting Church president Deidre Palmer said the decision came after years of reflection, prayer and discernment, thanking members for their response to “a difficult conversation for many people of faith”.

“I know that this conversation is painful and difficult for you,” Dr Palmer said while addressing LGBTIQ church members.

“We also acknowledge those who for whatever reason have not been able to support this change — and your pain and difficulty in this space. “Please rest assured that your rights to follow your beliefs on marriage will be respected and protected.

“I thank you all for modelling a loving Christian community, holding together and caring for each other, across our diversity of strongly and faithfully held views.”

Same-sex marriages in the church are expected to start taking place in coming months.

SOURCE 






Lauren Southern appears on Sky News Australia, making one point very clear



CONTROVERSIAL alt-right YouTube star Lauren Southern has appeared on Sky News Australia making it clear that she is “happy to be white”.

The 23-year-old Canadian activist, who touched down in Australia yesterday, told Sky News host Rita Panahi that she feels “zero shame whatsoever for being white.”

“If I were black I could say I’m proud, if I were Asian I could say I’m proud, if I were any other ethnicity I could say I’m proud because that’s how our culture is, but if I’m white and I say I’m proud the media will go nuts.”

Ms Southern, who previously worked for Canadian website Rebel Media, was barred from entering the UK earlier this year for distributing “racist” flyers reading “Allah is a Gay God” and “Allah is trans” outside a restaurant in the English town of Luton.

Ms Southern is in Australia to headline a tour that advocates for free speech.

She was originally denied access from entering the country, but her visa was approved by the Home Affairs Department on Tuesday.

After landing in Brisbane on Friday sporting a “It’s okay to be white” T-shirt, Ms Southern claimed to have received online rape threats. “I was just reading the comments on the article that came out about the ‘It’s okay to be white shirt’, and someone was saying, ‘I hope she gets raped’,” she told The Daily Telegraph.

She told the publication she believed the “unprecedented” number of hurdles being put in her way to enter Australia were due to her criticism of radical Islam. “There are so many people that are offended by debate and free speech that sometimes governments cower. It’s just way easier to play into the hands of people who are totalitarian,” she said.

“I have criticised radical Islam, I have criticised the increasing blasphemy laws that are being brought into our societies. You won’t see Christians violently attacking people for criticising their religion like you do with Islam, things like the Charlie Hebdo attack.”

The outspoken activist will tour Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and Auckland alongside commentator Stefan Molyneux later this month.

Ms Southern’s visit will also feature screenings of her documentary film Farmlands, which delves into the racially charged issue of South African farm killings.

The alt-right activist has also revealed that she plans to have dinner with Pauline Hanson after receiving a Tweet from the One Nation Leader on Tuesday.

“Sorry to hear about your trouble getting a visa @Lauren_Southern,” the senator tweeted. “If you are still in Oz when Parliament sits in August you have an open invitation to dinner. “I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on the situation in South Africa & on Islam. “Good luck with your tour.”

In a wide-ranging interview with The Daily Telegraph, the activist said Australians should be allowed to own guns to protect themselves against a “totalitarian” government.

“I think the Americans have it right. The idea of having guns is essentially to protect yourself from a totalitarian government,” she said.

“You can see that, for example, in Paris — where they have horrific shootings and terrorist attacks, the theatre attack, the Charlie Hebdo attack. They have some of the strictest gun laws in the world in France yet these horrific attacks and shootings still happen. Unfortunately there will always be bad people and bad people don’t follow the law.”

Australia has had just one mass shooting — a domestic violence incident — since former Prime Minister John Howard banned semiautomatic and other military-style weapons in 1996. America has had 154 this year alone.

During her week-long visit in Australia Ms Southern, a friend of confessed troll Milo Yiannopoulos, told The Daily Telegraph there would be heavy security at her shows to protect herself from “crazy protesters”. She said she regularly received death threats.

SOURCE 






Hanson to revisit 'ban the burqa' bill

DENMARK has become the latest country to ban the burqa, as a push to outlaw face-covering Islamic garments worn by women and teenage girls gathers pace across Europe.

At least 10 European countries have now introduced full or partial burqa bans, as Senator Pauline Hanson launches a new bid to have the face-covering garment banned in Australia.

Many of the countries are democracies similar to Australia with similar social policies, including Denmark, Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Norway.

One Nation’s Senator Hanson returned last month from a visit from France, where the burqa is banned in public, and announced she would renew her bid to criminalise the wearing of a burqa in Australia.

While Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has ruled it out, several Liberal and National MPs told News Corp they were privately supportive of the move. Some individual Australian magistrates have taken action against women who refuse to show their faces in court.

“This isn’t something that should be controversial. All over the world countries are taking action,” Senator Hanson said last week. “This is about national security … also, many women are forced to wear the burqa by their male family members and this measure will help free those women from this oppression.”

In Denmark, Justice Minister Soren Pape Poulsen described burqas and face-covering niqabs as “incompatible with Danish society and disrespectful to the community,’’ as the parliament voted to introduce fines of around $213 for those wearing the garments in public.

“With a ban on covering the face we are drawing a line in the sand and underlining that in Denmark we show each other trust and respect by meeting face-to-face,’’ he told the media.

The move came despite estimates only around 30 women in the country completely cover their faces.

The Scandinavian nation has followed France, Belgium, Austria and Bulgaria in banning the burqa. There are partial bans in the Netherlands, Norway and regional bans in parts of Spain and Italy. In Switzerland, the district of Ticino has introduced bans in public areas, and the country is preparing a referendum on a proposed national ban.

Even Germany, the European nation which most enthusiastically welcomed Muslim migration when it opened the doors to one million refugees in 2015, has expressed concern, with Chancellor Angela Merkel urging people to “show your face’’ and saying the burqa “should be banned.’’

German drivers have been banned from wearing the burqa, as have women working in the public service, judiciary or the military.

In Canada, the province of Quebec banned women wearing burqas from accessing services or holding down government jobs, to the displeasure of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It was the first western democracy outside Europe to implement such bans.

The move to outlaw the garment is usually justified by politicians on security grounds, and comes off the back of growing uneasy at the scale of migration from Muslim countries.

Supporters of bans say burqas oppress women and girls, limit normal human interaction, and pose a security threat.

Critics say governments should not be involved in telling women what to wear, and that forcing them to uncover could result in some women being socially isolated and unable to go out in public.

Danish Muslims told News Corp the ban was an attack on their freedom and claimed it would incite more violence in the community against them.

Copenhagen mother-of-three and student Sarah, who asked for her last name to be withheld, has been wearing the niqab — the veil that covers the entire face except for the eyes — for more than 10 years and vowed to defy the ban.

“I won’t stop wearing it, because I feel like this is a very unjust ban and it’s a discriminatory ban and I feel like this is just the beginning of bans,” she said.

Danish-born to Muslim parents, Sarah said the niqab gave her “empowerment”. “I feel very strong when I wear the niqab, I feel like a strong connection to God,” she said.

She said she thought the proposed ban was unconstitutional and contradictory to Danish values which emphasise freedom and religious choice.

Sarah is one of a group of local Muslim women who have formed a group Kvinder I Dialog — Women in Dialogue — an organisation protesting the ban.

She estimated only about 30 women covered their face in Denmark.  “We’re really like a minority within a minority,” she said.

Annette Bellaoui, a 59-year-old chef in Copenhagen, converted to Islam 19 years ago, covers her hair but not her face, and said she too opposed the ban.

“Personally I’m vehemently opposed to face coverings, I absolutely hate it, I detest it. I think it’s a vile violation of Islam,” she said. “There’s nothing in Islam that says anything about covering your face and I think it is a dismissal of your identity as a person.

“On the other hand if you want to wear it that’s alright by me, I’m very much in favour of personal freedom. “I would rather die than wear it, but I should not prevent you from wearing it if that’s what you want.’’

SOURCE 






School funding review makes the grade

After the platitude-heavy and detail-light Gonski 2 report, it was refreshing to read the concisely-written methodical analysis of government school funding policy released last Friday by the National Schooling Resource Board, chaired by businessman (and CIS board member) Michael Chaney.

Federal government funding for non-government schools is dependent on an estimate of the school’s socioeconomic status ­­(SES) — non-government schools receive less money if they have a higher deemed SES score, calculated by an area-based aggregate measure.

The Chaney review recommends moving to a direct measure of parental income to determine school SES scores, to replace the current area-based measure. Until recently, a direct measure of income would have required schools to collect tax file numbers, with attendant privacy issues.

The Chaney review vindicates the Catholic school sector’s claim that the area-based model tends to disadvantage Catholic system schools compared to independent schools.

However, modelling suggests the overall effect of moving to a direct measure method will not be particularly dramatic. The majority of non-government schools would have little or no change in SES score. Catholic schools would see a relatively small increase in funding, while independent schools would see a relatively small decrease in funding, on average — but there would still be many schools in both sectors with the opposite impact. The difference is the Catholic sector could smooth out these impacts within their own systems.

It is important to remember this simple fact: federal funding is going up significantly for all school sectors, at rates well above inflation and enrolments. And the Catholic system retains the right to distribute the money to its schools however it wishes.

Enough is enough. The Turnbull government should finally realise that spending more taxpayer money on schools will never silence demands for even larger funding increases. And there is no evidence more money will inevitably improve school results.

SOURCE 






The Nuclear alternative is the greenest

Globally, nuclear power, in case you were wondering, generates just over 2,000 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, about 8 times more than solar and more than double wind power.

Now let’s run some basic numbers and compare the ecological impact of renewables with that of nuclear power.

First let’s deal with the inevitable cry from people who are anti-nuclear without ever having thought much about it: “Nuclear isn’t clean, think about the mining and the waste!!!”.

Mines? Nuclear power is miserly on mines. The amount of mining required for hydro, solar or wind is many times greater. The recent ACOLA report made this point, let me repeat the relevant graph from a previous article.



As you can see, nuclear requires minimal mining.

So why do so many people seem to think mining is some kind of nuclear achilles heel? That’s an interesting question. I’ll try to answer it later. But the graph massively underestimates the mining required for renewables on two fronts; it ignores mining for batteries and it ignores mining for all the extra transmission lines needed by wind and solar. I’ve dealt with the relative ease of nuclear waste handling many times in the past … most recently here.

But mining is a minor issue compared to the massive habitat destruction associated with renewables.

Hydro-electricity, as we’ve seen produces roughly 4,000 terawatt hours per year globally from reservoirs covering 343,000 square kilometres, so, using global averages, you need to flood about 82 square kilometres per annual terawatt-hour. Let’s compare that with the land used by nuclear power. The power station itself uses very little land, but what about the mines?

The Ranger Uranium mine is about 16 square kilometres of open cut mine (including the tailings dam) producing enough uranium on average each year during the past decade to generate 148 terawatt hours of electricity per year. To get that using hydro electricity, you’d need to flood, on average, about (148×82) 12,136 square kilometres.

And what about generating 148 terawatt hours with wood? Vaclav Smil is an expert’s expert on energy. He estimates that using wood to power a 1 gigawatt electric power plant with a 70 percent capacity factor requires about 3,300 square kilometres of fast growing tree plantations. That works out at about 538 square kilometres per annual terawatt-hour. Which means that matching the output of the 16 square kilometre Ranger mine, you’d need to be harvesting 79,647 square kilometres of tree plantations; and considerably more if you were harvesting non-plantation forests.

How much uranium do you need to power a 1 gigawatt reactor for a year? With current reactors, about 200 tonnes. With those of the future? About 2 tonnes.

We can summarise the relative land use impacts of nuclear and renewables in one simple image. When the Fukushima Daiichi reactors failed in 2011 the Japanese effectively lost 4.7 gigawatts of power from their grid. Should the Japanese rebuild with new reactors on or near the site? New reactors of the same power but modern reliability could deliver about 37 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. So how much land would renewables need to generate 37 terawatt-hours annually?

The following figure tells the story. If you wanted to use solar, then you’d need to level most of the 20 km “evacuation” zone to install panels. I’ve seriously underestimated the land required by assuming Japan had Australian levels of sunshine!

If you used hydro power, you’d be flooding a semicircle with a radius of 44 kms.

And what if you did what Germany and the UK are doing, and just started burning forests? Then the semicircle would have a radius of 114 kms.

Here’s a summary map. You can imagine the size of the biggest possible uranium mine (open cut) required to supply uranium to a plant like this. It’s about a square with sides of 2km.



Remember when the environment movement was about protecting forests and rivers? Remember when they cared about maximising habitat for wildlife? Not anymore.

The obvious alternative to hydro and biomass electricity is nuclear, but globally and locally the Green movement is either anti-science or counts far too many in that group among its voting base. Either way it bases its rejection of nuclear power on science formulated in the DNA dark ages; meaning well before the most basic of information on radiation, DNA and cancer was understood.

At the dawn of the anti-nuclear movement, nobody knew anything about the daily churn of normal DNA damage and repair; they didn’t even know that repair of DNA damage was possible; let alone an essential part of staying alive.

The best scientists back in the 1950s and 60s thought DNA damage was an incredibly rare chance event which was permanent and cumulative. But those who study such things now know that both damage and repair are ongoing during every second of your life; due to the entirely normal processes of energy metabolism, simply staying alive.

Let’s suppose you wanted to raise background radiation levels to the kinds of levels that would cause the level of serious DNA damage caused by normal energy metabolism. What do I mean by serious? Breaks across both strands of DNA. Those kinds of breaks are tough to fix and may go on to cause cancer. You get about 50 of these in every cell every day.

How much would you need to increase background radiation to cause this level of double strand breaks? About 219,000 times.

When Japanese Prime Minister Nato Kan ordered the evacuation of Fukushima, he was acting contrary to the best expert opinion, based on 30 years of science, as specified in the IAEA guidelines.

The result of Nato Kan’s fear, ignorance and defiance of the best available science, was cruel and deadly. Sick, frail and elderly people died after being shunted onto busses in the middle of the night in a crazy and totally unnecessary panic spawned by decades of anti-nuclear propaganda; some younger people committed suicide. One radiation expert called the Japanese handling of the Fukushima accident “stark staring mad”; which it was. And continues to be.

No radiotherapist, geneticist, oncologist or DNA biologist trained in the past 40 years believes the assumptions that were used back in 1959 by Linus Pauling to predict cancer and birth defects from weapons test radioactive fallout… except the anti-nuclear movement which those predictions spawned.

Look at any textbook on DNA or cell biology and you’ll find a chapter or two or three on DNA repair. There are whole textbooks on DNA repair. The IAEA guidelines didn’t spring out of the imagination of the nuclear industry, but from bog-standard science. But it’s only bog-standard science if you are paying attention and not stuck in the oral tradition of Green policy which involves passing down mantras about radiation that go back to the 1950s.

Environmentalist George Monbiot called the movement out for its misleading claims about radiation back in 2011, during the Fukushima meltdowns. He began what was a devastating critique of Helen Caldicott as follows:

"Over the past fortnight I’ve made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged and wildly wrong."

When he questioned Helen Caldicott over her many failed disaster predictions, she retreated to a grand conspiracy theory about a cover up by the United Nations.

In conclusion

Starting some time before Monbiot’s devastating critique, many environmental scientists had already rejected the fear-mongering and were shifting toward nuclear as simply the cleanest, greenest, safest energy on the planet, including some of the world’s leading climate scientists. Many, like me, had gone back to the basic science and found, like Monbiot, that the anti-nuclear position was built on, at best, misinformation and obsolete science.

What do you say of people that simply refuse to read any kind of information which may challenge their radiation slogans? Technically it isn’t lying if you believe it, but deliberate ignorance is arguably worse; particularly when it threatens so many horrid consequences.

The Green movement has been incredibly effective in using misinformation to make people frightened of nuclear power. Which has been an absolute godsend for those who love building dams, pelletising forests, fracking gas and, yes, even digging coal.

The climate needs fixing and wildlife habitat needs protecting. The latter has been shrinking for decades as wildlife is replaced by more and more animals for those who eat them. The global environment movement doesn’t get that either.

The consequences of basing policy on slogans and populist ignorance rather than evidence are dire for the planet. It’s time for the global Green movement to move to rational evidenced-based policies. Many luddite supporters may abandon it in the short term, but it has to lead and transform it’s support base rather than pander to dangerous ignorant populist bullshit.

We desperately need a strong global evidence-based environmental movement, given that both politics-as-usual and the Trump/Brexit alternative are both just minor variations on poll-based populism.

More HERE 

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here