By most standards the Church of England is a failed church. Its peculiar brand of English Christianity is neither charismatically exciting nor is it intellectually rigorous. Its academic approach owes more to higher Biblical criticism than it does to modern deconstruction. Theologically it is caught in a time warp. Occasionally a bishop will emerge who challenges the nostra of faith…
General Topics
Fasting and things
The “Three weeks” start with the Fast of Tammuz and they end with Tisha B’Av, the Ninth of Av. No weddings, no parties or public festivities and for some, no music, T.V. or radio. It all depends on how far you want to go, because the main source of Jewish Law, the Shulchan Aruch, is rather minimalist. The author actually…
Osama Bin Laden is right!
Osama Bin Ladin is right! The Saudi Arabians are the real threat to world peace. The ruling clique is so corrupt that like many such cases I know of, they resort to supporting religious extremism as a sort of easy penance. And, like all such self-deluding oligarchs, they always blame someone else for their own faults. So I read in…
Religious Coercion and the Pig
The big news from the Middle East this week is that the Supreme Court in Israel has overruled a long-standing convention to forbid shops in Israel from selling pork. This convention is part of what is called The Status Quo. This was an arrangement that the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, entered into with the religious parties…
Bugs in your Hair!
Now I know why Israeli Public Relations is such a disaster and we Jews keep on shooting ourselves in the foot. It is clearly a built in feature of our religion to make ourselves out to be bigger idiots than we really are. I have written before about bugs and the industry that is developing in bug spotting machines and…