• New Year Predictions 2015

    Here are my New Year Predictions for 2015

     

    1. Those who voted YES in the Scottish Referendum will continue to behave as though they won. This may be unhelpful.
    2. Those who voted NO in the Scottish Referendum will continue to behave as thought he referendum never happened. This may be unhelpful.
    3. There will, I fear, be a Tory Prime Minister at the end of 2015.
    4. The Liberal Democrats will retain 10 – 14 seats in the House of Commons.
    5. Nick Clegg will lose his seat and be Lord Clegg by the end of the year.
    6. The Labour Party will not be led by a Milliband by the end of the year.
    7. The Church of Scotland will begin a new procedure under the barrier act to determine whether to accept ministers in same-sex partnerships who are married (ie not merely in Civil Partnerships).
    8. There will be legal victories for those seeking to extend Civil Partnerships to straight couples.
    9. Elizabeth Warren will become a household name.
    10. (Some) straight liberals will lead the charge (such as it is) for (something less than) LGBT equality, (sometimes). Believe it or not, I’m excited by this and it is an improvement. [Remember that in 2011 I predicted that “No straight liberal in the church will feel the need to sacrifice anything at all for the gay friends they purport to support.” Things are changing a bit].
    11. Advances in e-learning in churches.

7 responses to “The Archbishop, the gays and their sins”

  1. fakepete Avatar
    fakepete

    Nicely put, he seems to feel entitled to freedom from criticism. It’s a censorious attitude that I thought the CoE put behind it when most of us learned to laugh at the Life of Brian and it is contradicted by the church’s own call to participation in democracy.

  2. Andrew Avatar
    Andrew

    The poor old Arch. He really is an old school establishment man who cant really understand where the deference has gone. The Green Report, the other Reports on the ‘future’ of the Church of England and the ‘Conversations’ all speak of a deeply controlling man who is deeply frustrated that there is no control to be had any more. When the split comes he will probably want to make what is left into a more confessional and defined group (the evangelicals have always wanted that) but I suspect the Church that will emerge will be more liberal than he likes even if it is outwardly more evangelical and enthusiast than the Church of England has been for a very long time

    1. fakepete Avatar
      fakepete

      @Andrew I’d switch that around. Justin Welby is someone who does not show deference to what has in Western society become The New Orthodoxy (definitions on a postcard please), this is why he provokes such puzzlement, and thus consternation and anger.

    2. Daniel Berry, NYC Avatar
      Daniel Berry, NYC

      Andrew, I don’t see how that can be, really: he hasn’t the pedigree to be “an old school establishment man.” He’s a late vocation who had been a high-power figure in the corporate world–meaning he’s undoubtedly accustomed to having the last word.

      As to his attitudes toward gay people, I’m disgusted with him and the many others who accept the natural sciences’ contradiction of bible, but just can’t bring themselves to the same place with the behavioral and social sciences, and even with medicine itself–ignoring along the way that homosexuality is found in upward of 450 animal species besides our own. Otherwise they seem perfectly comfortable with dispensing with the savagery found in much of “holy scripture.”

  3. Dharma Nicodemus Cuthbert Avatar

    I love the line “who am I to judge them for their sins, if they have sins” makes us seem angelic compared to those who have children. Only one problem we, according to the bible commit sin just by being together. Does this mean that he is disagreeing with orthodoxy, and we are not sinning by being together.
    God bless all and may his words of love bring more, troubled, souls to him.

    1. JCF Avatar
      JCF

      “Only one problem we, according to the bible commit sin just by being together.”

      I *think* you meant “according to false translations/interpretations of the bible…” (or should have meant).

      “Being together”: can we call sex, “sex”? If not, why not? [And can we call marital sex (same- or opposite-sex) “marital sex”?]

  4. Daniel Berry, NYC Avatar
    Daniel Berry, NYC

    best line for me:

    You say that stuff and you are going to get people observing that there’s a lot more archbishops who claim that gay people are their friends than gay people who claim archbishops are their friends.

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