The Episcopal Church

Infinita Highway

When I lived in Brazil, there was a very popular song by a group called Engenheiros do Hawaii that became something of a standard for a generation. The lyrics are not particularly deep nor the tune particularly complex, but the song has the classical four chords and some very nice alliterations that sound particularly good in Portuguese, with something of a modern angst message, couched in a love song, as many Brazilian popular songs were at the time.

Here are two versions, the first, by the original band, a very good "MTV Unplugged" version done in 2004, seventeen years after the original release. They sound like a mix of Sister Golden Hair America and Legião Urbana around the time of O Descobrimento do Brasil.

The second is a pretty awful distorted-guitar motion-sickness-inducing version by some nerd monkey who almost gets the lyrics right...

I'll have the definitive version with a slideshow next week.

Homosexuality, Abortion and Contraception

In a culture of contraception, we're all sodomites.

Anyone wishing to fight abortion and the homosexual agenda must fight from a position that fully embraces the Scriptural and Natural Law principles of the Culture of Life, and God's Will for families and human sexuality. Homosexual acts are condemned in Scripture and Christian moral theology because they violate Natural Law. Any non-procreative sex violates the purpose of sexuality in God's Plan and also violates Natural Law. Therefore any Christian living a lifestyle that embraces non-procreative sex has no moral standing from which to condemn other forms of non-procreative sex, such as homosexuality. Like homosexual acts, contraceptive sex is inherently sinful because it is inherently not open to life. Any pro-family or pro-life Christian that at once condemns homosexual sex yet permits contraceptive married sex as licit will fail in their ministry. They have no moral ground on which to stand.

The Protestant Reformers called contraceptive married sex, even by Christian couples, a Sodomitic Sin. Martin Luther and John Calvin are recognized as fathers of the Protestant Reformation, and John Wesley was the founder of Methodism. Their comments on Genesis 38 illustrate how far removed modern Christianity is from a proper understanding of the gravely sinful nature of contraceptive sex.

Martin Luther (1483 to 1546) - "Onan must have been a malicious and incorrigible scoundrel. This is a most disgraceful sin. It is far more atrocious than incest or adultery. We call it unchastity, yes, a Sodomitic sin. For Onan goes into her; that is, he lies with her and copulates, and when it comes to the point of insemination, spills the semen, lest the woman conceive. Surely at such a time the order of nature established by God in procreation should be followed."

John Calvin (1509 to 1564) - "Deliberately avoiding the intercourse, so that the seed drops on the ground, is double horrible. For this means that one quenches the hope of his family, and kills the son, which could be expected, before he is born. This wickedness is now as severely as is possible condemned by the Spirit, through Moses, that Onan, as it were, through a violent and untimely birth, tore away the seed of his brother out the womb, and as cruel as shamefully has thrown on the earth. Moreover he thus has, as much as was in his power, tried to destroy a part of the human race."

John Wesley (1703 to 1791) - "Onan, though he consented to marry the widow, yet to the great abuse of his own body, of the wife he had married and the memory of his brother that was gone, refused to raise up seed unto the brother. Those sins that dishonour the body are very displeasing to God, and the evidence of vile affections. Observe, the thing which he did displeased the Lord - And it is to be feared, thousands, especially single persons, by this very thing, still displease the Lord, and destroy their own souls.

Contraception was considered by all of Christianity to be as atrocious as incest, adultery, and sodomy itself. For Christians to justify "contraception" they must embrace a philosophy that is unscriptural and inherently "against life." Further, as the Supreme Court admitted in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, "in some critical respects abortion is of the same character as the decision to use contraceptives...people have organized intimate relationships...in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail." The Supreme Court at least understood that contraceptives will always fail, and abortion was necessary in a nation living under the contraceptive mentality, in order to "fix" the "failures."

http://www.marysremnant.org/Friends/DBK/BKHomoCondone.html

See also:

Children of the Reformation:
A Short & Surprising History of Protestantism & Contraception
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=20-04-020-f

Birth Control and Genesis 38
A look at Onan's sin and punishment
http://matt1618.freeyellow.com/birthcontrol.html

In A Nutshell

At some point in time, maybe I'll take the time to write about what an utterly disastrous pick Sarah Palin was for McCain, fatal to his chances.

In the mean time, here's a photo that probably captures at least part of the dynamic involved in his choice...

Frank Sinatra: Summer Wind

Frank Sinatra: Under My Skin

Domino, Lewis and Charles: Jambalaya

DOMINO, J.L. LEWIS, R. CHARLES Jambalaya
Uploaded by whatdisay

Maná: Te Lloré Un Rio

Happy Thanksgiving

In spite of reversals, political and economic, over the past few months, we are still blessed indeed to live in this, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oklahoma Is OK

Yet one more reason to love the great state of Oklahoma: it was the state that most went for McCain.

Amidst an horrendous national wipeout, the Sooner State stood firm and gave McCain 66%, versus 34% for his opponent, a 32 point margin. This was McCain's best result, better than Arizona where he resides and better than Palin's Alaska. (Wyoming also gave McCain a 32 point margin, but with a lower absolute total, 65%).


http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/president/

Here's another reason Oklahoma is OK: it's the only state in the continental United States in which every single county went for McCain.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2008_General_Election_Results_by_County.PNG

May God bless the good people of Oklahoma.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

Matthew 5:10-12 (KJV)

Well, that's over. A bad night for the GOP, but a good night for traditional marriage. I hope that the next four years go by quickly, with no major national disasters, and that the GOP rights its ship. One thing it needs to do is to jettison the identity politics that brought the disastrous Sarah Palin nomination. More on that later, but she is one of the two primary reasons that McCain lost (the other being his biffing of the financial crisis).

In any case, some Christians in the public eye are looking ahead to persecution.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, believes Senator Obama was elected, in large part, because the church in America has failed to address sin in its own ranks and also in society.

Perkins says Christians should pray for and return to a biblical model of holiness and righteousness. And believers in America, he adds, should prepare for persecution.

"We are going to see, I think, unprecedented attacks against our faith through measures like the hate crimes [legislation] to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act," he says. "We're going to see attacks on innocent human life through the Freedom of Choice Act, trying to erase all the gains that have been made in the pro-life movement. And I think even our freedoms are going to come under attack."

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Church/Default.aspx?id=310956

May the Lord bless and keep His people in the years ahead

Rowland Taylor, Martyr, Feb 9, 1555

In this time of the insipid idolatry and depravity of the Episcopal Church and the empty ritualistic wanna-be Romanism of most of the "continuing church", it's hard to imagine that hundreds of good Anglican men died for their faith, burned at the stake at the hands of the Roman Church and her English Queen, Bloody Mary.

The most famous, perhaps, was Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop to Henry and Edward and author of the Book of Common Prayer, who perished in the flames on March 21, 1556. Another martyr, burned at the stake a year earlier, was Rowland Taylor, whose story appears in the great 19th Century Anglican Bishop J. C. Ryle's "Five English Reformers", an excerpt of which is available on the Internet as "Why Were Our Reformers Burned?"

The third leading Reformer who suffered in Mary's reign was Rowland Taylor, Rector of Hadleigh, in Suffolk. He was burned on Aldham Common, close to his own parish, the same day that Hooper died at Gloucester, on Saturday, the 9th February, 1555.

Striking and deeply affecting was his last testament and legacy of advice to his wife, his family, and parishioners, though far too long to be inserted here, excepting the last sentence : -"For God's sake beware of Popery: for though it appear to have in it unity, yet the same is vanity and Antichristianity, and not in Christ's faith and verity." -Foxe's"Acts and Monuments," vol. iii.p.144.

He was sent down from London to Hadleigh, to his great delight, to be burned before the eyes of his parishioners. When he got within two miles of Hadleigh, the Sheriff of Suffolk asked him how he felt. "God be praised, Master Sheriff," was his reply, "never better. For now I am almost at home. I lack but just two stiles to go over, and I am even at my Father's house."

As he rode through the streets of the little town of Hadleigh, he found them lined with crowds of his parishioners, who had heard of his approach, and came out of their houses to greet him with many tears and lamentations. To them he only made one constant address, "I have preached to you God's Word and truth, and am come this day to seal it with my blood."

When he was stripped to his shirt and ready for the stake, he said, with a loud voice, "Good people, I have taught you nothing but God's Holy Word, and those lessons that I have taken out of the Bible; and I am come hither to seal it with my blood." He would probably have said more, but, like all the other martyrs, he was strictly forbidden to speak, and even now was struck violently on the head for saying these few words. He then knelt down and prayed, a poor woman of the parish insisting, in spite of every effort to prevent her, in kneeling down with him. After this, he was chained to the stake, and repeating the 51st Psalm, and crying to God, "Merciful Father, for Jesus Christ's sake, receive my soul into Thy hands," stood quietly amidst the flames without crying or moving, till one of the guards dashed out his brains with a halberd. And so this good old Suffolk incumbent passed away.

May God bless his faithful, in life and death.

Somewhere In Time

I can't believe that I'm posting an actual ice skating video (as opposed to the monkey parody I posted a month ago) but this is such a nice visualization of John Barry's lovely soundtrack to Somewhere In Time.

Poetic justice I guess, that I come across an ice skating video that I actually like after making fun of the "sport" by putting a bunch of monkeys on skates up.

Hmm, I wonder if there's a version of the monkey video set to Somewhere In Time...

For you know who.

Why They Hate Her

Good article by the Weekly Standard's Jeffry Bell about the threat that Sarah Palin is to the Left.

The fact that the Pill was taken only by women gave them a greater feeling of control over their sexual activity and eroded their social and psychological resistance to premarital sex. "No fault" divorce, a term borrowed from the field of auto insurance, in reality amounted to unilateral divorce and began to undermine the idea of marriage as a binding mutual contract oriented toward the procreation and nurturing of children. Contrary to nearly every prediction, the ubiquity of far more reliable methods of contraception and the growing ideological separation of sex from reproduction, coincided with a huge increase in unwed pregnancies.

Though earlier versions of feminism tended to embrace children and elevate motherhood, the more adversarial feminism that gained a mass base in virtually every affluent democracy beginning in the 1970s preached that children and childbearing were the central instrumentality of men's subjugation of women. This more than anything else in the menu of the post-socialist left raised toward cultural consensus a vision in which the monogamous family was what prevented humanity from achieving a Rousseau-like "natural" state of freedom from all laws and all bonds of mutual obligation.

http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.3535/pub_detail.asp

Contrary to nearly every prediction, except that of the Vatican, which was vilified over it's continued opposition to contraception expressed in 1968's Humanae Vitae.

Interesting, is it not, how the pill is linked to so many pathologies that started in the 1960's. The pope was right.

“The End of Feminism”

A masterful piece on the Feminist attack on Fatherhood, with a wonderful tying together of Feminism and Genesis 3 and 1 Timothy 2.

For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety. 1 Timothy 2:13-15 (KJV)

Most pro-family advocates over the decades have pointed to the attack on motherhood as an integral weapon in this war. When a mother turns on the child of her womb as a competitor or even enemy, many rightly presume that civilization is in great peril. It is true that Satan approached Eve in order to bring about our fall from grace — and that diabolical strategy has had its successes ever since — but we cannot lose sight of the subsequent means of restoration. Motherhood was key to salvation and always will be, not only because of the life it fosters but because of the bridge it creates.

The motherhood of Mary is instructive for all mothers, in that she received the seed of God and that she restored our relationship with the Creator, thus placing motherhood within a constellation of family of relationships. The enemies of motherhood strategically attack it — not primarily because of its capacity for life but because of the truth it contains: motherhood is the bridge to fatherhood, and fatherhood is the icon of God Himself. The war on motherhood is of a transitive nature: fatherhood is the true enemy.

http://www.catholicexchange.com/2008/09/18/113780/

Is SNL Watchable Again?

This is actually very funny, and more critical of Hillary Clinton (and Obama) than the live Manhattan audience gets, I think.

Love the Palin character voguing while Clinton rants.



McCain-Palin in a landslide with coattails.

Change You Can Believe In!

Is Barack Hussein Obama such a wretched candidate that he will actually turn the State of Washington GOP? WA hasn't gone Republican for President since Reagan in 1984, actually going for Dukakis in 1988!

Well, according to Rasmussen, things are not looking good for the Obamessiah here in the People's Republic of Washington.

Washington is the latest state to show a strong western surge for John McCain since he added Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to the Republican ticket.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in Washington finds Barack Obama still ahead, but barely. It’s Obama 49%, McCain 47%. A month ago, Obama was up by twelve percentage points. Recent polls have shown McCain gains in Montana, New Mexico and North Dakota.

It was already clear that Obama is the single worst candidate that the Democrats have ever put forth, but if he can turn WA red, maybe he really is a miracle worker.

We may get the Governorship, to boot. It was stolen by the Seattle machine and Gregoire in 2006. Rossi is up by 6 right now. One joint appearance with Palin, and it won't be close enough to be stolen this time.

¡Sí, se puede!

Barack Hussein Obama? Thank you, Karl Rove!

Figure Skating For Guys

This is so much better than the normal stuff.

My concerns for America: Jon Voight

Oh, he's a Hollywoodie, so there's weirdness, but he does pack some punch. Think he'll get blacklisted?

The Democratic Party, in its quest for power, has managed a propaganda campaign with subliminal messages, creating a God-like figure in a man who falls short in every way. It seems to me that if Mr. Obama wins the presidential election, then Messrs. Farrakhan, Wright, Ayers and Pfleger will gain power for their need to demoralize this country and help create a socialist America.

The Democrats have targeted young people, knowing how easy it is to bring forth whatever is needed to program their minds. I know this process well. I was caught up in the hysteria during the Vietnam era, which was brought about through Marxist propaganda underlying the so-called peace movement. The radicals of that era were successful in giving the communists power to bring forth the killing fields and slaughter 2.5 million people in Cambodia and South Vietnam. Did they stop the war, or did they bring the war to those innocent people? In the end, they turned their backs on all the horror and suffering they helped create and walked away.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/jul/28/voight/

Alexander Solzhenitsyn R.I.P.

It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

http://www.spectator.org/util/print.asp?art_id=13642

However, in early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims.

Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were -- State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer.

http://www.almohler.com/blog_read.php?id=1193