Siri on the meaning of life
Day: January 2, 2012
Something is coming that will leave the world a different place. Not something wicked perhaps, though made necessary by wickedness. Certainly something sad, bad and dangerous.
I wrote a couple of days ago about what I thought was a likely sequence of events leading to a major war in the Middle East in 2012.
The initiating factor (underlaid, as always, by longstanding hostility and mistrust) is the imposition of stronger sanctions against Iran.
President Barack Obama has just signed into US law the strongest sanctions yet against any trade with Iran’s central bank. These sanctions are not only against Iran, but against any country which trades with Iran through its central bank. The US is effectively saying, you either trade with us or Iran. You can’t trade with both.
Meanwhile, the EU continues to consider sanctions specifically against Iranian oil. EU foreign ministers will meet again on January 30th to try again to formalise an agreement.
When imposed, those sanctions will cause huge difficulties for Greece, because Iran is the only major oil exporter still willing to offer Greece credit. Greece will need to be plied with promises of support and energy supply before it will agree. Some of those promises will not be kept, because when the time for payment comes, countries that made the promises will be in such financial straits they will be struggling to pay their own energy bills.
Meanwhile, Iran is flexing its muscles in the Straits of Hormuz, test firing a new medium range anti-radar missile, a weapon that could strike a US aircraft carrier, or more easily, other major shipping including oil tankers carrying Saudi or Kuwaiti oil.
Europe is weak. It has spent the last twenty years undermining the strength of its democracies and economies, and handing power to a bunch of mealy mouthed bureaucrats.
The US is economically weaker than at any time since the 1930s, and is lead by an ineffective and ill-informed president.
The West, in the sense of the world’s liberal democracies, will win. But the fight will be economically crippling, and tragically costly in human life.
By Bishop N.T. Wright at Durham Cathedral. Read the whole thing. It is a reminder that despite its mad follies and unfaithfulness, the Church of England still has men who care about the truth, and stand for it with courage.
John’s Christmas message issues a sharp and timely reminder to re-learn the difference between mercy and affirmation, between a Jesus who both embodies and speaks God’s word of judgment and grace and a home-made Jesus (a Da Vinci Code Jesus, if you like) who gives us good advice about discovering who we really are. No wonder John’s gospel has been so unfashionable in many circles. There is a fashion in some quarters for speaking about a ‘theology of incarnation’ and meaning that our task is to discern what God is doing in the world and do it with him. But that is only half the truth, and the wrong half to start with. John’s theology of the incarnation is about God’s word coming as light into darkness, as a hammer that breaks the rock into pieces, as the fresh word of judgment and mercy. You might as well say that an incarnational missiology is all about discovering what God is saying No to today, and finding out how to say it with him. That was the lesson Barth and Bonhoeffer had to teach in Germany in the 1930s, and it’s all too relevant as today’s world becomes simultaneously, and at the same points, more liberal and more totalitarian.
Discovering what God is saying No to today, and finding out how to say it with him.
I am not sure ‘earns’ is the right word, but it is, as Governor General Quentin Bryce noted in her congratulations to John Howard, ‘a rare and singular honour for his service to Australia.’
It is rare in that only 24 persons can be members at any one time (other members include Baroness Thatcher, Prince Charles, and Tom Stoppard), and singular in that he is the only Australian politician to whom this honour has ever been granted. Other Australians admitted to the Order of Merit include Howard Florey, Sidney Nolan and Joan Sutherland.
If you are not sure why he deserved to be honoured in this way, why not buy his autobiography?
The Kindle edition is only $15.25. It is a great read. Not only is Howard a good writer, but he is consistently fair to both colleagues and political opponents.
Or not…
Runaway Global Warming promises to literally burn-up agricultural areas into dust worldwide by 2012, causing global famine, anarchy, diseases, and war on a global scale as military powers including the U.S., Russia, and China, fight for control of the Earth’s remaining resources. Over 4.5 billion people could die from Global Warming related causes by 2012, as planet Earth accelarates into a greed-driven horrific catastrophe.
OK, so The Canadian is hardly renowned as a careful and accurate purveyor of news.
But just as Christian and other groups are rightly criticised when they make end-time predictions that fail, so scientists should be subject to criticism when their end-time predictions fail. Two things that characterise science are its basis in real world evidence, and its predictive power. The IPCC’s version of climate science has neither.
So it is doubtful whether global warming alarmism counts as as science at all. What happens in the real world continues to refuse to conform to the computer models on which the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) scare is based, and prophecies based on AGW theory continue to fail at a rate of 100% – a rate that would embarrass even Harold Camping.
Unlike Harold Camping’s fantasies, however, global warming alarmism costs billions of dollars every year. Those billions of dollars, if they had been spent on real problems, could have eradicated polio and malaria, and provided permanent clean drinking water for every person on the planet.
Now if only we can get these enthusiastic sceptics to be sceptical about something that is worth being sceptical about!
Not sceptical enough!
Qohel Blog Author Peter Wales
