Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts

Sunday, 22 May 2016

RANDOM THOUGHTS

You'll love this one (well most of you will).

Suffolk Tories apparently accepted an illegal donation of £3,000 during the last election. There's no question about it. They owned up. The person who donated the money was not on the electoral register at the time the money was given.

The electoral commission ruled that they should be fined the sum of £1,100, but should not be required to return the donation.

If my arithmetic is right, they get a donation of £3,000, they are fined £1,100, so their net gain is £1,900. Not much of a punishment; not much of a disincentive to repeat the crime next time round.

Still, it's the Tories. They appear do whatever they want and walk off laughing.
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Erm, has Harriet joined the Tory party? We all know she is aristocratic and it wouldn't be stretching the imagination much to guess that she loathes Mr Corbyn, but what's this about. Don't tell us they just banged into each other.  

Waitrose I might just about swallow, but ASDA? Please!

Dodgy Dave down with people again, innit? Top button undone, not singing God Save the Queen (tut tut, what would your mother say Dodge?), but wearing a suit that cost more that the bloke he's talking to earns in a year. 
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A few months ago, the gross old duke of York was unhappy that he couldn't get through the gates at Windsor Great Park, where he has one of his houses...well, one of OUR houses. Apparently the mechanism for automatic opening had failed. So the fat boy decided that, as he had a great big 2.5 tonne, £80,000 Range Rover, he'd just smash the gates down...as you would, if a £5,000 repair to your car were of no interest.

The alternative would have been a 1 mile... yes a whole mile...detour. How utterly ghastly!

Well obviously a royal highness couldn't be expected to put up with that kind of inconvenience, so he broke the gates down. OUR gates that WE paid for.

If you lived in your own home and you decided that you would trash your gates to save yourself a little inconvenience, that would be your business. If you lived in a council house, or one owned by a housing association or the state, then it becomes their business.

Most people would call it criminal damage and charges would be brought.

Needless to say Air Miles is getting off Scot free.
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The same goes for tax pounds. 

Every so often David Cameron reminds us we are a Christian country. I can't imagine why he would do that unless he was trying to stir up bad feeling with Muslims or Jews or some other religious groups: Ya know, make them feel ill at ease, not at home?

But the very people who might be considered to know a little bit more about Christian values than Dodgy Dave, that is to say the bishops of the State Church, are rather less than enthusiastic about his policies.

Not that Church of England bishops are the only ones to criticise. The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has also laid into the Tories for their heartlessness in welfare reforms. Odd given what a devout Catholic Iain Duncan Smith is.
And even odder that his replacement is one of these OTT Christians that tells us prayer can cure anything... and apparently people with Parkinson's should just get out there and get a job.

Every year some of us (admittedly a dwindling number) listen to Her Majesty's Christmas message. It's a mixture of her family news, the stuff some folk write in long tedious letters at Christmas, but she gets to put on the BBC (ya know, Andrew losing his rag with a gate; the number of holidays that the blood princesses have taken; how little work William and Kate have done; how much money they screwed out of the people of Cornwall to keep Mrs Parker Bowles in diamond tiaras, etc) together with a religious message. 

She invariably talks about how she has tried to follow the teachings of Christ all of her life in everything she does. Clearly she misses out the bit about the rich man and the eye of the needle, given her immense wealth, and the "suffer the little children" bit of these teachings. 

Probably feeding the 5000 passes her by, as within a few miles of Buckingham Palace some of her loyal subjects are sleeping in cardboard boxes and eating out of soup kitchens. Children subjects of hers have little or noting to eat due to the policies that she reads out from her gold throne with her multi million pound hat on her head, having stepped out of a gold coach.

It's a long time since I was forced, in this Christian country, to read the bible as part of my core curriculum, but I can recall all of those things even if I maybe don't always live up to them. It's strange that the queen has such problems with them, having dedicated her life to following such teachings.

Saturday, 26 December 2015

THIS IS CHRISTIAN BRITAIN...

Read on Twitter.... If this is true then it's another example of Great British values.

I hope you and your massive family enjoyed Christmas lunch at one of your many state provided homes, your majesty.
No yellow cards for you. If you're fed up with Windsor you can go to Buckingham Palace or Clarence House, Kensington Palace, or St James's. Or you could travel to the colonies and stay at Holyrood.

The hypocrisy is beyond belief.

Thursday, 24 December 2015

HO HO HO

HE MAKES YOU LAUGH...


In his Christmas message to the world, Cameron, the UK's unbeloved prime minister, reminds us that the United Kingdom is a Christian country.

Probably, like every year, his boss will do the same tomorrow.

That's good of them, because it would be easy to forget it.

I've never understood how a country can have a religion. I thought religion was belief and it has never been clear to me how a country can believe in a particular philosophy. A government may have a philosophy which might be, in some way, related to a particular religion, but, when that government is elected by 37% of those who voted, it's not really a yardstick for how the country feels about faith.

So what Cameron presumable means is that the government is Christian. 

News to me.

So what exactly is Christian about it? As a schoolboy I was forced, at school, into Religious Education, which was basically Bible Study, and despite my lack of real interest in it, over the years quite a bit sank in. Frankly I find it difficult to reconcile my memories of the Bible with any of the government's policies. 


And it's not just me. It would be hard to recall the number of time recently that we have seen headlines about bishops of the Church of England criticising the policies of austerity followed by the UK government. 
Christianity Personified
Iain Duncan Smith even mocked them for it. Mr Duncan Smith feels free to do that, but his own sect of Christianity seems to be more in line with the C of E than it does with him.

Recently the Baptists, United Reformers, Church of Scotland and Methodists wrote to Smith asking him to look again at the social security system.

There are more examples here.

Still, what would bishops and popes know about religion compared to the likes of IDS and Cameron, huh?
Image that at your Christmas party
Tomorrow the head of state will undoubtedly tell us, yet again, that her whole life has been dictated by the teachings of Christ, which is probably why she gave her grandson an £8 a year helicopter so he could get home to see his son to bed, at the same time as allowing HER government to get the health service into such a state that, the bulk of hospitals in England are seriously understaffed by nurses, sick people die after being found fit to work by nurses or paramedics working to government targets to get the social security bill down, and dependency on food banks is rising by the day.

Perhaps today's story that mothers about to give birth are being turned away from maternity units across England is supposed to reflect the story of Mary and Joseph being turned away from the inn. Get like Jesus, be born in a stable.

That these people use Christianity at this time of the year is insulting to the religion. Someone needs to say that out loud.
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On a far more cheerful note, our long term reader and contributor, Arbroath, tweeted last night that, after a 5 year battle, her oncologist has just pronounced her cancer free. (She's never mentioned in all her comment on here that she was battling illness so we didn't know till now.)

Now as Christmas present go, you really couldn't ask for more. We're over the moon for you, Arbroath. Munguin is toasting you in his customary vintage champagne. I've got a small Irn Bru!!! (Well, I am quite junior in the organisation.)

Now you have the best Christmas you've ever had.