happy new year

Friends, I'd like to wish you the very best for this new year.

I'd also like to invite you over to my exciting new blog at WordPress:

ninetysixandten.wordpress.com

At this stage you can be fairly sure the actual contents of what I say is unlikely to change, but there's a much nicer layout for you to look at and my writing experience from behind the dashboard is a bit more pleasant. (Plus, dear silent readership, the comment function is at least as easy to use ... nah, it's okay, I know you won't!)

Things might be a bit messy for a wee while until I'm completely happy with it, but please do change your bookmarks and feeds etc, as I'm not planning to write anything more at this site.

Come on over!

pondering

Just wondering whether I should move over to Wordpress instead. I'm playing around with it but haven't completely decided. The biggest problem is that I've just switched to the beta version of Blogger. And you can't import your old posts into Wordpress from the new Blogger. You could with the old version, but as of several hours ago, that's not an option any more. We shall see.

a disturbed conscience

Another quote from Robert Traill, from p84-85 of the Banner of Truth edition of his works. This time he's basically talking about the cure for a guilty conscience.

The sin is committed, the guilt is contracted, the conscience is defiled, the defilement is seen, disturbance and trouble is felt in the conscience; what should such a sin-sick soul do? Will anyone say to him, Wash thyself where thou canst, and cast away the burden of thy sin the best way thou canst, and then come to the throne of grace? This would be strange gospel indeed.

We know no other course a person should take in this case, but coming to the throne of grace, to have the conscience sprinkled with the blood of Christ, the only cordial for a disturbed conscience, and the only purger of a defiled conscience.

Therefore Peter was quite out in his prayer; he prayed backward, when he said, 'Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.' ... He would have said better if he had prayed, 'Lord, come near to me, and abide with me, and let me always abide with thee, for I am a sinful man. Where better for a sinner to be, than with the Saviour of sinners?' But Peter's prayer is the natural prayer of every one that seeth his sinfulness, and is ignorant of Jesus Christ. The publican understood prayer and plied it better, when he said, 'God be merciful to me a sinner.' 'I feel my sinfulness, I see thy mercy, Lord, let them meet; thy mercy shall be glorified, and I shall be saved.'

Whoever therefore are distressed with the guilt of sin in their consciences, or with the power of it in their hearts and lives, must seek all their relief at this throne of grace. It is only the power of the grace whichis revealed and dispensed at this throne of grace, that is too hard for sin and all its powers.

In other words, a guilty conscience should have the effect of sending a person to the Saviour, to get the reason for their guilt dealt with. Nobody needs to struggle on through life with a nagging conscience, as if they were consigned to do nothing but add to the reasons for their conscience to be disturbed. There is an alternative, in the gospel, and it's summed up in the prayer which Robert Traill quotes: God be merciful to me a sinner. Couldn't that be the first step to a person getting rid of their guilty conscience?

illegitimacy

Something has been really annoying me, this 'festive' season. Several days ago the person doing Thought For The Day was drawing a somewhat stretched parallel between the misery and despair in the situation of women who end up as prostitutes (and the compassion with which we should regard them) and the situation of Mary in Bethlehem when there was no room for them in the inn. He'd been in a brothel in India, he said, and there was nothing glamorous about it: doesn't that remind you of the gritty realities that Mary faced, which don't quite match with the sentimentalised version of events portrayed in nativity scenes and carols.

As he pointed out, prostitution in Britain is almost always, in something like 90% of cases, linked with one or more of these three factors: addiction, abuse, and dysfunctional personal relationships. (This observation not only shows the futility of the arguments in favour of legalising prostitution in this country, but also highlights the sick desperation of the men who provide the demand in this exploitative trade: that by the way.) Prostitution is not a choice, in other words, for the majority of women involved - unless it's the choice between that and thieving, as one of the women recently murdered in Surrey was quoted in the papers as saying.

But my point is, basically, that the situation of these women is worlds away from how Mary was placed in Luke 2. There was no addiction, there was no abuse, and she was honourably engaged to be married to a very decent man. They weren't particularly well off, and a manger wasn't maybe the most luxurious of cots for a newborn baby, but everything was going according to plan and both Mary and Joseph were content with the situation.

All these associations which people try to draw between Mary and women in difficult situations today, don't really hold water. However old Mary was, she wasn't 'a teenage mum.' Although Joseph wasn't the biological father, the child was not illegitimate. They might have been poverty stricken, and only able to offer a pair of pigeons for a sacrifice, but it wasn't a poverty inflicted by substance abuse and inappropriate lifestyle choices.

It doesn't bother me in the least to think of the gospel message mingling with the grubby realities of our miserable contemporary society. That is, after all, what it's for - and the even more miserable, grubby reality of our situation is something called sin, and original sin at that, which tends not to come too sharply into focus when Thought For The Day types blether away about society's problems.

But the gospel message isn't primarily a message of sympathy - it's a message of rescue. It may well be helpful to a person with problems to know that someone else has gone through an equivalent tough time, but the gospel is better than that - a way of escape from our misery which is caused by our sin - and escape from the eternal punishment which is the consequence of our sin, and ultimately escape from our sin itself. The reason why the hope and joy of the gospel is lost has a lot more to do with the minimising of the problem of sin which it is designed to deal with, than a failure to find any meaningful parallels between a given person's situtation and that of some bible characters.

do you have your own bag with you today?

It was with only the tiniest hint of accusation that the woman behind the till in Sainsbury's asked me this. Actually it's the first time I've heard it put like that: you must be more likely to say yes to this question than no to 'Do you need a bag?' Proud to say, I did indeed have space in another bag. Every little helps, we agreed, in spite of that being Tesco's slogan; she should technically have said, Try something new today. In fact (or so she implied anyway), I've just gained us 500 years longer as a planet by making this choice. Good to know eh!

christmas repeal

Radio 4's Christmas Repeal is not, alas, proposing to abolish Christmas, as I thought for a mad moment of optimism. Instead it means you get to vote for the piece of legislation which you think is Britain's 'least useful or most damaging' law - the votes will be counted on New Year's Day.

The problem is, there's just too many to choose from.

The 1967 abortion act?
The ID cards act 2006?
The 1972 European Communities Act?
The Antisocial Behaviour Act 2003?
The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006?

These are just the ones that spring to mind immediately.

And it's noticeable how recent they mostly are. It reminds me of this article by Nick Clegg (the Lib Dems' home affairs spokesman), where he says:

"The current Labour government is addicted to legislating; this has led to the curtailment of freedoms, confusion in business and crisis in our public services. In less than a decade in power the Blair government has clocked up over 50 Home Office Bills and created more than three thousand new criminal offences. They have added over a hundred thousand new pages of legislation to the statue book..."

How worried should I be, incidentally, to discover that I agree with almost all his Top Ten To Go?
1. Restrictions on protests in Parliament Square
2. Identity Cards
3. Extradition to the US without proper evidence
4. Police power to impose conditions on public assemblies of 2 people or more
5. Criminalising trespass in areas designated by the Home Secretary
6. Control orders
7. DNA retention of those not charged, or found innocent
8. Removal of the public interest defence for whistleblowers
9. Removal of the right to silence under arrest
10. Admissibility of hearsay evidence in court

not just liberals!

A ridiculous starter question on a BBC Have Your Say discussion about some bizarre supposedly Christian video game where the post-"Tribulation" forces of good go out and fight unbelievers. The discussion question is: "Are liberal groups right to call for a boycott...?"

Nice that liberal groups care, but "liberal" is not the opposite of "weird". Plenty Christians right across the spectrum would be well within their rights to boycott this rubbish.

And here's a great comment on Have Your Say which makes exactly that point. Chris from Langley, BC will probably never read this, but it's the best of the comments so far.

As a Christian, I am deeply saddened that people would think that this game is in anyway a representation of Christianity or the message of Christ. Christ's call was to love one's enemies. I'm pretty sure loving your enemies means not killing them (someone might want to let Bush know this too...). This game is a horrible idea. It shouldn't just be Liberals protesting this game. Christians more than anyone need to reject the promotion of violence in the name of religion that this game offers.

Chris, Langley, BC

Whatever the detractors of the game have a hatred for, it would be good if they realised that it does not, as its makers suggest, represent anything like "biblical Christianity."

religious liberty again

The Christian Institute are springing into action to ask for a judicial review of regulations which Peter Hain is overseeing in Northern Ireland, and which are due to come into force this New Year's Day. It's to do with outlawing discrimination in the provision of goods and services on the grounds of sexual orientation, which sounds awfully tolerant on the surface, but in common with a depressingly large number of pieces of legislation ("reforms") emanating from New Labour, it is so wide-ranging and loosely worded that it leaves itself wide open to abuse by anyone who might want to take advantage of its provisions.

Harrassment is defined in the regulations as conduct which creates "an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating, or offensive environment" for another person on the grounds of their sexual orientation (Regulation 3(3)). Since most of us tend to prefer to avoid creating hostile and humiliating environments for anyone, regardless of their age, gender, race, and regardless of their particular lifestyle choices, this sounds great. But the trick is that an 'offensive environment' can be perceived or identified when no offence was intended, or at any rate on less than objective grounds, and this problem is only exacerbated in Regulation 52, where the burden of proof is reversed (such that a person accused of harrassment will have to prove their innocence). All this is explained in this (pdf) briefing from the Christian Institute.

Apparently exemptions are given for churches for some purposes, but according to the CI's press release, "the homosexual harassment provision is so broadly drafted that it nullifies what partial exemptions churches are given. A minister can say to a practising homosexual (as he would an adulterer), 'I'm sorry, you can't be a member of my church until you repent and turn to Christ,' but his explanation could be the subject of a harassment claim if the individual is offended."

Whether or not you have moral scruples about people's sexual orientation, this proposed legislation clearly goes way beyond protecting people from discrimination and harrassment and gives a privileged status to one particular aspect of a person's identity. It's hard to see how its provisions could be seen as in any way necessary, even for the group who are most obviously in mind as its beneficiaries, and in fact considering how it aims to eliminate even conversations on topics which could in some way be perceived as offensive, it's hard to see how it can even be seen as helpful.

Peter Hain isn't, from what I can gather, one of Northern Ireland's best loved Secretaries of State, and this illiberal, far-reaching, discriminatory piece of legislation (which was arrived at after a consultation period lasting all of 6 weeks), is hardly going to win him any favour. That's his problem I suppose (although we were reminded in church very recently that one of Paul's epistles to Timothy mandates the church to pray for all those in authority, so that we can all live quiet and peaceable lives in all godliness and honesty ...). You can also contribute to the CI's legal defence fund, if you are so minded: click here.

getting the moon into orbit

I don't remotely understand the physics involved, but if you're into this sort of thing, take a couple of minutes with this wee simulation to try and get the white ball to start circling the green ball following the red dotted line: How did the moon get into orbit? (Scroll down to read the instructions.)

You need to be using Firefox btw!

cold and wet

Yuck. I slept in (machine died between one press of the snooze button and another) then ended up walking to my office in a raging gale and torrential downpour when the No 2 sailed past me just as I stepped out the door.

Now I'm here: forgot to get milk, feet are soaking, and someone who shall remain nameless amongst my officemates is insisting on having the window open again. So not only is it kinda chilly but I'll have to venture out again for milk before I can even begin to think about the comfort that only a cup of tea can bring.

Anyway, I do have one or two things to say which will hopefully be less moany, but I'm due to finish writing a report tomorrow and there are still some puzzling unanswered questions in the stats to grapple with first. I'll be back.