Monthly Archives: June 2015

Marriage Under Attack: Athiests Try To Police Faith: Dr. John Coulter

Posted on 02/06/2015 by Compound| Comments Off on Marriage Under Attack: Athiests Try To Police Faith: Dr. John Coulter

Marriage under attack: Atheists try to police faith

 

Churches across Ireland better shift their defence of the religious marriage ceremony into top gear otherwise this traditional Christian institution is well and truly scuppered.

Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin, one of the most senior clerics on the island, really understated the crisis which faces Irish Christianity when he said the gay marriage referendum victory in the Republic was a “reality check”.

While the gay and lesbian community is one of the best organised and most vocal in Ireland, would the Catholic Church faced a similar 64 per cent defeat if the referendum had been about abortion, divorce, assisted suicide, or designer babies?

The referendum result was not so much a victory for the gay community – it was an ‘up your’s’ to the Catholic hierarchy for its alleged cover-ups of sexual and physical abuse by clerics and nuns over the generations.

The gay marriage defeat for Christianity in Southern Ireland represents a treble whammy which the faith has suffered in recent weeks.

Firstly, devout Baptist and DUP MLA Jim Wells was forced to quit as Stormont health minister as a result of remarks he made about homosexuality during the North’s general election campaign.

Then Ashers bakery – owned by devout Christians – lost the gay cake row. Now the Republic has joined the ever-growing league of nations to formally support gay marriage.

Christian Churches will react in a number of ways. Firstly, they could ask the question – what would Jesus do? How would Christ Himself treat the gay and lesbian community?

The ‘reality check’ is for Christians to find a theological answer to the sensitive question – is homosexuality a sin as defined by the Bible, or are people born gay? Whatever the answer, it is bound to split many churches as clerics line up on both sides of the debate.

This will also spark further rows over the issues of gay adoption and gay men donating blood – and the ordination of openly gay clerics.

The LGBT lobby now has its sights set on getting gay marriage legalised in the North. But its campaign could become hijacked by militant atheists hell-bent on being ‘offended’ by anything Christian.

Could churches now be forced to conduct religious weddings for gay and lesbian couples? Will we see the creation of a ‘preaching police’ who tour evangelical and fundamentalist churches seeking out clerics who preach ‘offensive’ sermons?

Unfortunately this will create a situation where genuine clerics who hold devout Biblical beliefs will find themselves in court, being fined, or even jailed.

But there is also the real danger that some on the fundamentalist lunatic fringe of Christendom will deliberately preach provocative sermons to get themselves jailed.

These hell-fire preachers will want to become the modern-day equivalents of the Biblical martyr Stephen.

After all, the political career of former First Minster and DUP founder the late Ian Paisley senior did not take off until he was jailed in Crumlin Road goal.

Stand by too for a range of fundamentalist sermons warning of God’s Judgement on the South for supporting gay marriage.

Ironically, could the referendum victory spark a new wave of homophobic crime as militant fundamentalists target gay bars, clubs and activists?

Already rumours are rife that some even more looney militants have formed the so-called Anti Sodomite Army (ASA) as the LGBT lobby scores victory after victory.

There’s nothing Christian about the ASA – its leaders are the Ku Klux Klan under another name! That’s my opinion of the ones I’ve talked to.

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A View From the South: Jacob

Posted on 01/06/2015 by Compound| Comments Off on A View From the South: Jacob

A VIEW FROM THE SOUTH

Some observations of the past week.

I’m wondering if Barra McGrory is a football fan? If he is, he obviously has some sympathy for dear old Sepp Blatter. Mr. Blatter has been at the helm of FIFA for God knows how many years and just this week was successfully re-elected for the fifth time – unprecedented. Blatter’s obvious joy has been spoiled by the vitriol of the opposition with regard to the FBI arrests and raids in the USA. Opponents of his re-election listened with ever-increasing dread to the pledging of support from around the football world for Blatter – Europe and isolated parts of the rest of the footballing world apart. They wondered how someone could survive the allegations heaped upon individuals, FIFA and Blatter himself with regard to the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup venues. Calls for Blatter to resign were many fold and multi-lingual and tempered with the right amount of righteous indignation. Enter young Barra.

The Maria Cahill saga is also refusing to go away, despite Gerry Adams continuing denial of IRA interference and his own brand of spin. The role of the PPS and Barra’s stewardship has also been scrutinised at all levels over this, and other affairs. Let’s remember that  McGrory was Adams’s legal representative at the time of these allegations and when Liam Adams was confessing to his brother Gerry about the disgusting abuse of his daughter. It has been acknowledged that Maria Cahill and other rape victims have been let down by the PPS, resulting in the allegations being withdrawn. The stink surrounding Blatter and McGrory is overwhelming, though, seemingly, non-transferable.

An article in the Independent.ie recently reports that Police in the UK make a request to monitor e-mails, txt’s or internet searches every two minutes and that fewer than 1 in 10 requests is refused! How many people are required to monitor these requests? That’s a lot of snooping – it must be an interesting interview for that job, though we all know someone who would be great at it.

The legacy of ‘the troubles’ continues to haunt the people of West Belfast – according to Paul Maskey. Figures just released show people receiving DLA in West Belfast sits at 19.9 % compared to 11% for the country as a whole. North Belfast comes second with 15.5%.

This compares with a 5.23% rate for ‘across the water’. Is it no wonder Sinn Fein are opposing the welfare cuts?  ‘If you don’t eat your vegetables you won’t get your pudding’ Paul.

The Panorama programme ‘Secret Terror Force’ and some of the allegations made has resulted in a financial windfall for some sharp operators around the country.

When Lord Stevens stated that ‘ of the 210 people arrested during the ‘Stevens Inquiry’, 207 were informers or agents’. ‘I’m one of the Stevens 3’ t-shirts are available online now.

Jacob

 

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Labour Needs To Follow DUP Lead: Dr. John Coulter

Posted on 01/06/2015 by Compound| Comments Off on Labour Needs To Follow DUP Lead: Dr. John Coulter

John Coulter

Written By: John Coulter
Published: June 1, 2015 Last modified: May 28, 2015

After its calamitous general election defeat, Labour should take a leaf out of the Democratic Unionists’ tactics book and rebrand itself as a slightly left-leaning social democratic party – and go hunting in traditional Liberal Democrat territory.

For almost a generation since its inception in 1971, the DUP was invariably branded as a hard-line, right-wing, working-class loyalist movement, fusing together an unholy political marriage of working class Protestants and Christian fundamentalists.

For decades, both these factions had been the voiceless minorities of the Unionist family in Northern Ireland, which was dominated by the religiously liberal, upper-middle-class landed families from The Unionist Party.

But at the start of the new millennium, the DUP embarked on a new strategy – selling its policies to middle-class Protestants who formed the bedrock of the rival Ulster Unionist Party’s voter base.

By 2003, the UUP had lost control of Stormont; by 2005, the DUP had more MPs’ and by 2010, the UUP had no Westminster MPs.

Ironically, Sinn Fein implemented a similar strategy against the moderate nationalist SDLP, snatching its European parliamentary seat, Westminster constituencies and eventually becoming the latest nationalist party in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Labour can get back into Downing Street by adopting the Irish model – electorally plundering the centre ground which was once the bastions of the Liberals.

Granted, this is a high-risk strategy and sceptics may say that what works in Ireland may not work in Britain.

But the DUP and Sinn Fein strategies were not simply about canvassing raids into their opponents’ bases – in these cases, the middle classes. This was about capturing and holding those voters.

Indeed, it was about more than this. It was not just a protest vote – it was about seeking out a whole generation of new voters.

Just as Tony Blair conceived of New Labour to undo the years of Thatcherism and develop a new brand of Labour voter that was almost right-wing, so Labour now will only defeat David Cameron and rampant Scottish nationalism by developing the concept of Patriotic Labour.

Both the DUP and Sinn Fein had past links to paramilitary groups in the Irish conflict and were viewed globally as representing the extremes in their respective communities.

Patriotic Labour – like the DUP and Sinn Fein – must come to dominate the centre ground. By capturing and holding the Unionist centre ground, the DUP has gone from an ultra-fundamentalist movement to a party which operates a power-sharing Executive with Sinn Fein.

Similarly, Sinn Fein has gone from a group which gloated over the IRA bomb blast that killed Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1979 to a modern party whose president, Gerry Adams, shook hands with Prince Charles, a direct blood relative to the murdered Mountbatten.

Sinn Fein is currently expected to make substantial gains at next year’s Stormont and Dail elections using this centre-ground strategy.

The DUP has become such a liberal unionist movement that even the man the party was set up to oppose, the liberal Unionist Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, would be very happy to lead it

This is forcing the revamped Ulster Unionists to have to make a stark choice – does do they fight the middle of the road Alliance for the centre ground, or do they reposition themselves as the voice of the new right in Unionism?

Regarding Scotland, Labour’s strategy should be to rebrand itself as a patriotic Scottish party. That doesn’t mean you have to abandon the Union.

In Britain, the Lib Dems have been left with the same number of MPs as the DUP in Northern Ireland. Just as the DUP embarked on a charm offensive in the middle classes, so should Patriotic Labour target middle-class Liberal families.

The time has come for Labour to develop its own unique appeal to undermine the Lib Dems, SNP, UKIP and even Tory wets.

What it must not do is fall into the same trap it did after Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979 and become a party of the hard left. To defeat the Tories, Patriotic Labour must box clever. Stage one: win over traditional Liberals to its cause.

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