Wallace Benn, Bishop of Lewes, really riled some folks in England when he likened the debate over allowing female bishops to the “serious threat” of warfare posed by “someone” months before the beginning of World War II. Lewes was explaining his view of women bishops to a conference of conservative Anglicans when he told his audience: “I’m about to use an analogy, and I use it quite deliberately and carefully. And it slightly frightens me to use it, but I do think it’s where we are at.”
The bishop continued: “I feel very much increasingly that we’re in January of 1939. We need to be aware that there is real serious warfare just round the corner. It’s actually arrived in some places already. And we’re in a challenging and serious situation.”
Gee, I wonder what the bishop could be referring to??? Well, most people thought he had the Nazis/Hitler in mind. Benn attempted to explain his comments:
“I was thinking in… terms of the storm clouds being on the horizon.
“People in January 1939 knew there was war coming, they knew there were some big issues, that unless something amazing happened there would be catastrophe.
“I was thinking in Churchillian terms and not of Hitler at all, except in the sense that Hitler was the problem.”
Benn urged the Reform members who attended the conference to “wake up” their parishes to the fact that their conservative style of ministry could be resigned to history if women are ordained as bishops.
That awful Eve–she started all the trouble! Bishop Benn is wise to the ways of women. Women spoil everything.
Sources:
Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Toots,
Gotta have the email address to get the avatar … ask Byron, he’ll help you out … he’s got lots of pearls …
… uh huh
“You wrote “Tootie’s a Zebra that flits from herd to herd looking for a perfect fit, ever mindful that the lions are stalking every move.”
In truth, it is as a sheep among wolves. Leftists being the evil wolves. Naturally.
Oh. And I’m aware of not throwing pearls to swine so I do try to avoid that.
When the pigs squeal, I close my satchel. And it isn’t until they squeal that I know they are pigs.
Frank,
You think you know what is stupid, or else you wouldn’t have commented on it, but yet your post ABOUT me and my person was only an ad hominem attack lacking any substance. You didn’t even have the brains to point out an error or flaw in thoughts or reasoning.
And if you couldn’t even manage a logical rebuttal to anything I said to prove to us how much more clever and intelligent you are than I, how is anyone but a nitwit going to believe your flimsy assertion about my stupidity?
Preachy patriarch Paul
was a misogynist overall
his biggest and worst fail
was thinking the universe male
and denying that female is all
Males are the derivative mutation which is why the Bishop claiming for original authority is so frightened of female power.
Sorry, a typo that reverses the intended meaning.
“The quantitative EEG showed massively greater activity in the back of my brain than is statistically (in the frequentist sense) very abnormal. Then there is the book by R. D. Laing, “Mad to be Normal.” And there is his book, “The Divided Self.” ”
“than” in the second line in the above excerpt was intended to be “that” and I intended what I wrote to read as follows:
The quantitative EEG showed massively greater activity in the back of my brain that is statistically (in the frequentist sense) very abnormal. Then there is the book by R. D. Laing, “Mad to be Normal.” And there is his book, “The Divided Self.”
It is my consistent, nearly life-long observation, that, the more words I learn to use, the more able I become at getting a few words to work in ways that do not astonish me into near-utter dismay.
In the solving of a seemingly-critical problem which is intractable to every identifiable analytic method, the only method I have ever found to work at all is the method of successive approximations.
The art of successive approximations is the evaluation of whether the method in use is diverging from a useful solution or converging to one.
The first person who can solve that evaluation process analytically probably merits an infinitude of Nobel-Prize-like rewards. I shall not bother to try.
Herewith is illustrated the successive approximation method, more likely, I surmise, as a demonstration of divergence than convergence…
I find that I am autistic, and the only way I have found to be less autistic would be effective biological suicide, which I, as a matter of religious (NOT Religious) faith, reject because I do not know any better.
Autistic I am, I am who I am, and I need not to know who I am.
Autism is, for me, a condition in which the self is an object of study. I learn who I am not more than I learn who I am.
I sometimes wonder. If psychological defenses are mental mechanisms which distort reality in the service of the socialization-generated sense of self that is the basis of, for example, Sigmund Freud’s notion of the Ego, then, to the extent that my work peels away the layers of psychological defenses people tend to accumulate, the less sense my work will make to the “Freudian Ego” and the more sense it will make to the (subconscious?) “Freudian Id” brain state. Or not…
For what, plausibly nothing, it may be worth, my research is not declarative/cognitive/intellectual in its basic nature, it is rather procedural/affective/emotional, and is directed far more toward the activities of the cerebellum and limbic system than to the activities of the cerebral cortex.
With me, and I can tell about no one else, there are no words within my cerebellum and limbus. And yet, it is in them that my center of consciousness resides. No one is like I describe? That is what the psychiatrists and psychologists thought until a quantitative, spatially mapped EKG informed them that my description of my conscious life was obviously demonstrably valid.
It is my personal experience, and I find it validated by what I have studied of human embryology, the first part of a typical human brain to attain sentient awareness is the limbus (when the embryo becomes aware and then aware of having become aware), followed by the cerebellum (which sentient awareness sets of “the quickening”) followed by the cerebrum (which sentient awareness begins the process of symbolic representation of experiences).
The quantitative EEG showed massively greater activity in the back of my brain than is statistically (in the frequentist sense) very abnormal. Then there is the book by R. D. Laing, “Mad to be Normal.” And there is his book, “The Divided Self.”
What is peculiar about me, what is peculiar about that QEEG, is that, unlike “normal” people, I do not have “a divided self.”
In the absence of paradoxical thinking, more is more by definition, and especially more is more as incontrovertible fact.
In my own personal life, the notion that more is less would favor- retention of delusional thinking. In my own personal life, as in my engineering work, the more I understand and the more accurate my work, the better I am able to engineer designs that work according to design intentions.
To whatever extent psychological defenses both distort reality and are deemed essential to socially-defined reality, the less my work is understandable to people who use psychological defenses, the more accurate I am inclined to deem my work to have a chance of being.
The more reality-distorting psychological defenses tend to hide my work the more my work has a chance to unmask reality-distorting psychological defenses?
Because I can not find fault with any person, I do not find fault with myself.
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.,
You might be experiencing a “mystic” moment … the thought is clear but the words fail to convey the meaning …in fact, the more words you use the more the meaning hides yet, you see it in your mind as a perfectly cut diamond.
Suppose the core notions of George Vaillant’s “Adaptation to Life” were extended to the whole of human adaptation to human life in situ?
What if those whose belief systems contravene mine have useful notions about human adaptation to life which would be of help to me in my living my life?
Were I to regard with any aspect of disrespect anyone whose life-philosophies I experience subjectively as though of horrible atrocities, how can I learn from those of my peers with whose beliefs I inwardly take absolute exception what I may wisely make an effort to learn to avoid in the process of living my own life?
Sorry, that jumble of words is the best I can do for now. The meaning is clear to me; alas, the words make almost no sense to me.
“In the work of the late neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Abraham Low, knowing that one does not know is “a secure thought.” (J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.)
… thus I rest secure in my incomprehension of the unknowable free from all religious dictates and financially ahead of the game due to the 10% tithe that never leaves my pocket.
Tootie’s a Zebra that flits from herd to herd looking for a perfect fit, ever mindful that the lions are stalking every move.
Please pardon my typo. I meant to capitalize one particular “r” in what I typed, I intended it to read, “Would that not strike a sense of terror in those who relish the addiction of Religious authoritarian despotism.” However “Religion” is, methinks, a proper subset of “religion,” so it works for me either way.
In the work of the late neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Abraham Low, knowing that one does not know is “a secure thought.”
Ah yes, to know the unknowable and in that knowing be special, unique, like a Zebra … visible to all when alone yet perfectly disguised when within the herd …
Frank,
The key part of your statement there is “rational sounding”.
Mockingbirds have used that strategy for years.
Tootie – in some ways I am more frightened by your rational sounding explanation of this stupidity than I am by the bombastic one provided by the Bishop.
Its easy to spot the stupidity in his remarks, but you make it sound reasonable to support stupidity.
“Could increasing unconditional love help sort out the human mess? Would that not strike a sense of terror in those who relish the addiction of religious authoritarian despotism?”
Yep.
Methinks there is Religion and there is religion. Methinks Religion may be as much an atrocity as religion is a necessity.
To me, Religion is a pack of lies which claim to understand what is not understood, and religion is the acknowledgment of the possible existence what is not understood.
Because I am religious (my ignorance being infinite, if not greater than that), I am absolutely and utterly not Religious.
My paternal grandparents were both ordained clergy. While my dad’s mother died when my dad was about two years of age, my grandfather was miffed (though less the longer he lived) throughout his life because the members of the churches they both served much preferred my grandmother’s sermons to those of my grandfather.
Might paternalistic clergy be psychotically afraid of what my grandfather learned?
Paternal love is supposedly conditional, maternal love is supposedly unconditional. Could increasing unconditional love help sort out the human mess? Would that not strike a sense of terror in those who relish the addiction of religious authoritarian despotism?
Such nonsense … simply defrock him for stupidity and move on …
Oh well I’m sure the leftist will get spastic and make this out to be something that it is not. What else to nitwits have to do?
Speaking from a conservative Baptist point of view, we are taught that, at the time of Christ and during his ministry, women played a crucial role. They continued to play a crucial and visible role in the Apostolic age following Christ’s death.
Paul, in his many writings, continually refers to women who aided him in the ministry. They aided him personally and they aided others in many ways which not only served the cause of the Christ but saved lives.
In conservative Baptist churches women continue to play a very prominent role, but they do not teach the Bible to mixed groups of people. They do not preach to them either. Or, at least they ought not to. And this is according to scripture. Yet there is no command for a women, for example a scholar, to not teach about Christian subjects at schools or to mixed groups of Christians. She is merely not to teach at church. She can instruct her children, male and female. And so forth.
Anyone who doesn’t like this can associate themselves with another religious group that doesn’t care what happens. They are free to leave.
I don’t know what the function of the Bishop is at the Anglican church. But if it includes women preaching and teaching mixed groups at church, it is, according to scripture forbidden. And while the fellow has every right to disagree with what might be happening to his church (even if it is true that the Bishop teaches and preaches), it was stupid of him to mention it in terms of WW2.
The only reason why I see that he put his problem in the terms he used is because he is putting his church above Christ. I believe this explains his foreboding and dark language. When I find I don’t agree with the church I am at, I move on to find one that suits me better.
It is really that simple and it has nothing to do with storm clouds, Chancellors, or wars.
He sounds like the Anglican bishop in Ft. Worth that split from the Episcopalalians. Nancy Pelosi ruined the country too. The majority of men think that.