‘Even excluding Covid deaths they were almost 20% above normal for the most recent week, and the trend is rising.
20 straight weeks of excess deaths.
Nothing to see here, folks. (Though even the BBC is now asking questions.)
Truth/Lies
All posts tagged Truth/Lies
It shouldn’t be a hard decision but it is for some even when the Scriptures explicitly say in Romans 1:21-27 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. 24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:
25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. 26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
God’s Word isn’t up for debate but for obedience! Nevertheless, ‘This week, North America’s oldest denomination will confront its gridlock over LGBTQ ordination and same-sex marriage. Votes cast in Tucson, Arizona, at the Reformed Church in America’s General Synod — delayed 16 months due to the pandemic — will chart the course for the already-splintering denomination.
In the past year, conservative factions have broken ties with the Reformed Church in America (RCA), with other churches threatening to follow. Delegates to the synod, which starts Thursday and will continue through Tuesday, will determine how the denomination might restructure to entice congregations to stay, if the church will establish an external mission organization and whether departing congregations can plan on taking their church buildings with them.
“At General Synod, delegates come from across the RCA to discern the mind of Christ together,” said Christina Tazelaar, RCA director of communications. “There are difficult decisions on the agenda, along with many things to celebrate, and we’re praying that the Holy Spirit guides every decision.”
The RCA is a historically Dutch Reformed denomination dating back to the 1620s, when New York was known as New Amsterdam. Today, the RCA has fewer than 200,000 members and 1,000 churches. While in theory RCA churches are united by their polity, history and Reformed convictions, they hold a range of political and theological beliefs.
The RCA isn’t the only Protestant denomination facing division over views on sexuality. Next year, the United Methodist Church is expected to vote on a proposal to split the denomination over the inclusion of LGBTQ members, and the RCA’s sister denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, will grapple with its contentious human sexuality report at its own synod.
“It’s a case study in how a church can or cannot navigate questions of identity, questions that are tense, matters of conflict,” said Matthew van Maastricht, pastor at Altamont Reformed Church in Altamont, New York. “We are just one part of a greater reshaping of the broader American Protestant landscape.”
According to the Rev. Dan Griswold, clerk of the RCA’s Holland Classis, the RCA debates involve specific questions: Can an RCA church host a wedding between a same-sex couple, and can an RCA minister officiate such a wedding? Can noncelibate gay people be elected as elders and deacons and ordained as ministers? While these questions are often framed as political, they are also theological.
“It’s really about how we view the Bible, how we understand God and the nature of the church,“ said the Rev. Lynn Japinga, professor of religion at RCA-affiliated Hope College. “It’s a fundamental difference in approach to the Christian faith that’s the source of all this. … Do you have more of a rule-based faith, or do you have a more grace-based faith?”
Ron Citlau, senior pastor of Calvary Church near Chicago, frames the question differently.
“I’ve dealt with same-sex attraction, and the issue for me and many of the people I know is, is it a thing for which Jesus Christ needs to come to redeem us, or is it a blessing he wants us to embrace?” said Citlau, who is married to a woman and whose church helped form the conservative non-RCA Kingdom Network. “If we get sin wrong, there are larger things at stake.”
The debate is also a question of polity. The RCA has a localized structure that gives classes — regional church groups — authority over matters such as discipline and ordination. While all RCA churches follow the Book of Church Order, they don’t have to follow the General Synod’s recommendations.
“There’s nothing in the Book of Church Order that says anything explicit about sexuality at all,” said David Komline, associate professor of church history at Western Theological Seminary. “The General Synod has repeatedly made statements that are more traditional in orientation about sexuality, but those are just statements. There are no mechanisms in place to hold people accountable to these statements.”
An ongoing question is whether the General Synod ought to be able to make dictates it can enforce. In recent years, conservative RCA members have pushed for General Synod to do just that. In 2016, the General Synod voted to amend the Book of Church Order to define marriage as between a woman and a man. However, the measure failed to win the necessary two-thirds approval from the classes.
“We found that the RCA is designed in such a way, intentionally or not, in which the vast majority cannot move to what they believe is right because there are just enough progressive classes that can veto,” said Citlau. According to Citlau, the two-thirds rule gives disproportionate power to classes with progressive views and fewer members. But progressive members argue the General Synod was never designed to issue top-down decisions in the first place.
In 2018, General Synod formed a team charged with discerning whether the RCA should stay together, restructure or separate. In their Vision 2020 Report, that team suggested a path involving all three avenues. First, the report recommends appointing a team for reorganizing classes by affinity rather than geography; churches would opt into classes and group themselves by shared values. The second proposal is to create an external RCA mission agency that would allow departing churches to continue supporting RCA’s global missions work. Third, the report recommends allowing a departing church to retain its property and assets.
These three proposals are scheduled to be debated on Saturday and require a simple majority of votes to pass — but the measures could be radically amended before then, and other overtures could be adopted as well.
Regardless of what happens at the General Synod, the RCA is already splitting. The Kingdom Network, an alliance currently composed of five churches in Indiana and Illinois, officially left the RCA on Sept. 9. The group was formerly an RCA classis that prioritized church planting.
“The RCA has this albatross around its neck, and historically it moves very slow,” said Citlau. “From our point of view, the house is burning. We can’t keep saying, we’re going to wait five more years and have a couple of committees. It’s already a bloody mess, and until you’re willing to get in there and make some choices, there’s no way through. And we did our best effort to make a way through.”
In May 2021, the Alliance of Reformed Churches was formed as an alternative to the RCA for conservative churches questioning their place in the denomination. According to their website, more than 125 churches have expressed interest in joining the alliance.
“The Alliance of Reformed Churches is praying with the RCA for the clear leading of God’s Spirit at its General Synod,” the Alliance said in a statement. “Our prayers will be with our brothers and sisters as they walk together through this significant moment in the RCA’s history.”
More departures are likely on the way. The 2020 Vision Report said: “We have informally learned of entire classes’ intention to exit the denomination in the near future.” These departures have been a long time coming; the RCA has been debating sexuality and LGBTQ inclusion since the 1970s.
“People on different sides of the spectrum have been fighting for about 40 years, and they’re sick of it,” said Komline. “They believe their fighting is impeding their mission. I think that’s the case on both sides. The liberals want to go pursue justice, as they define it, and the evangelicals want to share the gospel as they define that.”
According to Griswold, these divisions can be traced back even further. The RCA was originally formed by several waves of Dutch immigrants. Those in the earlier waves settled along the East Coast, where they eventually developed sensibilities that resembled those of their mainline peers, while migrants who came in the 19th century often settled further west. Today, the cultural and theological divides are still evident. All except five of the 44 churches listed as LGBTQ-affirming by Room for All — an LGBTQ-affirming network in the RCA — are in the Northeast.
“As America as a whole has shifted, the RCA has experienced some similar shifts,” said Komline. “Just as America now is very polarized, so is the RCA.”’https://julieroys.com/reformed-church-in-america-faces-rupture-lgbtq-gridlock/?mc_cid=2930a15c78&mc_eid=b13d34ad49
‘It is this simple: skyrocketing world electricity prices stem from renewables policies. Notwithstanding the avalanche of propaganda we are seeing throughout the country, no wind or solar gets built anywhere in the world without subsidies paid by taxpayers and customers. In Australia’s case these costs are $10 billion a year in grants and network spending.
The genesis of the current malaise has been closures of generating plants which have been demonised by the politically correct. In Europe this is mainly involves coal. Those countries that have been particularly severely hit by the present crisis are the UK and Spain, both of which have closed 80 per cent of their coal capacity – and Germany, which has closed about one third of its coal. Germany also suffers from having closed down most of its nuclear power plant. Japan also followed this policy.
Those countries which have fared well include Korea, where they have been building both coal and nuclear, and the US and Canada, which have gone through energy transformations based on gas from the same fracking process that has been falsely stigmatised in Australia and the UK. The US, however, is now becoming a clone of Europe, with the Biden administration blocking gas and oil developments while doubling up on renewables subsidies.
Around the world we also have seen other contributory factors which have brought on the current crisis, some involved supply constraints especially from Russia. Importantly, there was also a wind drought in Europe – a common occurrence that always leaves wind-dependent systems vulnerable. This coincided with high gas prices, so stocks were run down and prices of gas escalated.
In the UK this was further aggravated by disruption of the nuclear electricity from France. UK and German forward electricity prices are now 2-3 times Australia’s, and because UK prices are inflexible a number of electricity retailers have gone belly up. Germany is importing a great deal of electricity, as well as turning coal back on, and praying that it will receive extra supplies of Russian gas by Christmas. All this has meant a bonanza for Australian gas and coal exports. Ironically, these were interred by the Business Council of Australia report a couple of days ago. (The BCA’s full report can be downloaded here.)
The agitprop financed by woke alarmists and vested interests, as presented with qualification in the mainstream media, is seeking to accelerate Australia’s shift to phase out coal. In an indication that actually running a specific business requires more applied intelligence than making broad and illogical generalisations about the sector’s future, the Business Council actually claims we can flourish by reducing the present 75 per cent coal-and-gas share of electricity supply to 15 per cent by 2030 and virtually zero shortly thereafter. Kerry Schott, the departing chair of the Energy Security Board, one of the nation’s four regulatory authorities, is making similar remarks.
Joining the chorus is Malcolm Turnbull’s former top bureaucrat, Martin Parkinson, who says, with a straight face no less, that “We can very rapidly decarbonise the electricity market at zero cost to 70 per cent, and at mild cost to 90 per cent.”
Chalked up to replace Australia’s coal and gas are renewables with their proven record of high cost and low reliability. Due to subsidies these already comprise a lost fifth of supply. Energy Minister Angus Taylor, aware of the political dynamite from a transparent carbon tax, seeks to placate the greenhouse gods with subsidies for extracting hydrogen from water. At least this has the benefit of novelty, as Jonathan Swift reserved the notion of harvesting sunbeams from cucumbers some time ago. Hydrogen will no doubt continue to be promoted as the latest green miracle — there are billions of dollars in grants and subsidies to be snaffled, as the ABC reports:
Premier Dominic Perrottet says a hydrogen strategy unveiled by the NSW government that aims to help the state hit net zero emissions by 2050 is “world-leading”.
The strategy provides up to $3 billion in incentives for green hydrogen production, including tax exemptions, and includes plans for a “hydrogen refuelling highway” between Melbourne and Brisbane.
The truth is that hydrogen cannot be transported through the gas pipeline network and, as even the US Department of Energy acknowledges, there are a host of other technical obstacles and imponderables. If history is any guide, hydrogen is now being blessed with the same unquestioning optimism formerly bestowed on “carbon capture and storage” which, after 15 years of trials, is yet to see commercial relevance anywhere in the world.
The government is offering blandishments to the Nationals in the form of hand-outs for the bush. By all accounts all but a handful of Coalition MPs, led by Matt Canavan, have been seduced by such reprehensible deals.
The zero emission agenda will eventually collapse because the non-OECD world will not accept it. In the meantime, if Scott Morrison goes to Glasgow and signs up, great economic harm will follow.’https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/10/much-pain-for-net-zero-gain/
This is occurring in Australia as well.
‘Lithuania became the first country in Europe to enforce Covid Pass restrictions in all the society. People without a Covid Pass are banned from most public areas: supermarkets, shopping centers, stores, banks, restaurants, cafes, universities, gyms, libraries, repair services, haircuts, and much more.
At entrances to public spaces, people queue in line to have their Pass verified. Guards scan the Pass of each person, sometimes with a handheld scanner, and sometimes with an installed machine. If you have a valid Pass, the light flashes green and beeps. Then you may enter.
The Covid Pass is in the form of QR code on phone or on paper. A person without a Covid Pass may not enter any public space. That person is banned from participating in society. And employers suspend you without pay.
Now that they have accepted this, they can force them to do anything.’
Genesis 1:14 “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:”
An explosion causes material to be distributed randomly, and, on average, fairly evenly in all directions. But deep-time astrophysicists have a problem because their alleged Big Bang would appear to have produced a universe with a considerable amount of order.
Now it is important to be fair on secular astrophysicists. Although the dichotomy that I have set up is the impression of the Big Bang held by the average person, with only High School scientific training, we should remember that serious astrophysicists view things differently. They do not believe in an explosion that filled up space with matter; they believe in a rapid expansion, from nothing, of space itself, as well as the material in it. But the general accusation still holds. The Big Bang theory cannot account for the structure of the universe.
The universe is highly structured. Stars are grouped into galaxies. The galaxies themselves are not uniformly distributed but arranged into clusters of galaxies.
Of the many models suggested to overcome this problem, most involve material in the universe cooling, so that gravity could draw clumps of material together that would eventually begin the nuclear fusion required to form stars.
While research into gravitational fields and stellar motions is justified, we know that the relevant forces and structures were caused by design. It is God who put the stars in place and who orders their motions. The structure of the universe is fully consistent with God having created it according to His good purpose.’https://creationmoments.com/sermons/structure-in-the-universe/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=structure-in-the-universe&mc_cid=42297a9061&mc_eid=00c1dcff3c
‘Multiculturalism is meeting reality once again as Afghan refugees are making their presence known in the countries that welcomed them, and the fun is just beginning. One place that has experienced the richness and vibrance of diversity is Scarborough, North Yorkshire, England, which is a popular vacation spot. It’s easy to see why: It’s on the Yorkshire Coast in a beautiful area, and when its architecturally stunning Grand Hotel was built in 1867, it was the largest hotel in Europe. The hotel still boasts numerous attractions. It is described on Tripadvisor as “one of the town’s landmark features and instantly recognisable on the skyline,” taking “pride of place overlooking the town’s harbour and South Bay.” The description continues: “Our location is ideal in Scarborough from which to enjoy beautiful sandy beaches, promenade walks and all that Scarborough has to offer, all within a short stroll away. LIVE entertainment is available every night with our dazzling cabaret shows featuring professional dancers and entertainers dressed in stunning costumes.” A newer feature of the hotel, however, 200 Afghan evacuees, has quickly changed perceptions of the hotel. The staff, when confronted with complaints, called the complainers “racist.” But that’s an all-purpose objection nowadays, so frequently employed as to be emptied of all meaning. It’s clear that hotel guests at the Grand Hotel had plenty to complain about.
One of the hotel’s recent guests wrote:
Stayed in the hotel while working away contracting in East Yorkshire
I caught scabies and can only presume it was from this filthy hell hole
Also caught a man deficating [sic] into a carrier bag !
What the hell is going on in this hotel.
I would not stay ever again!!
What a shame that the government would do this to a seaside town
Disgrace
As revolting as it is, that bit about the carrier bag shouldn’t surprise anyone. The Wall Street Journal recently noted that new Afghan arrivals at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin were “confused and upset by hygiene practices. Every toilet on base was Western style, with a seat and toilet paper. But a number of Afghans are accustomed to restrooms that allow them to squat so they don’t have to physically touch the toilet. It led to some cases of Afghans relieving themselves outside.” And into carrier bags at the Grand Hotel Scarborough.’https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/10/afghan-refugees-were-placed-in-a-popular-vacation-hotel-heres-what-happened
This is unbelievable or is it? https://twitter.com/i/status/1446666065178660865
‘A 16-year-old student in Wyoming was arrested and the entire school was placed on lockdown — all because she refused to wear a mask.
Grace Smith, 16, had already been suspended twice from Laramie High School in Wyoming for refusing to wear masks in class.
As the brave student attempted to go to class unmuzzled once again, she was met with police and given a $500 citation. When she was told to leave the school, she refused to comply. At that point, she was handcuffed and arrested.
As the situation unfolded, an announcement over the loudspeaker said that “we are in a lockdown, please stay in your rooms.”
According to a report from RT, Grace will be expelled if she continues to collect suspensions — but the high school junior has no intention of backing down.
“I’m growing up in a country where I’m supposed to have my God-given rights to protect, and they’re being taken away,” she told the Laramie Boomerang. “Everybody has the freedom to wear a mask if they choose, but I believe everybody also has the right to not wear a mask if they choose.”
The Smith family has hired an attorney to fight back. A GiveSendGo fundraiser to help them has already raised over $18,000.’https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/watch-16-year-old-wyoming-student-arrested-not-wearing-mask-entire-school-placed-lockdown/
YouTube and Facebook would ban this video as it goes against their CCP rules.
‘Dr. Madej is a highly credentialed doctor who has been literally had to flee the country for her life. She is back now with a vengeance and shows us what is in the vaccines! She takes us under her microscope to show us what is really go on from hydrogel to computer chips.’
whatyareckon 