Whatever you do, don’t overtake!

There is a narrow road with cars parked on both sides near my house. Buses and lorries often try to thread their way through and hold-ups are frequent. Sometimes careless drivers get stuck half way along the 200 yard “gauntlett” stretch facing a vehicle attempting to come the other way. The resulting standoff can last several minutes as cars queue up behind in both directions.

The result is fuming exhausts and even more fuming drivers while smirking pedestrians try not to show too much amusement at the resulting display of fallen human nature.

Yesterday, I pulled into a gap to let a delivery van pass in the opposite direction and a driver (gender unspecified to avoid prosecution) selfishly overtook me and blocked the way to oncoming traffic. I leapt out and tried to share a few choice insights about road etiquette but she pressed the central locking and stared straight ahead.

She is doubtless convinced she escaped death from road rage by a whisker and that my shapeless anorak was shielding at least a murderous axe or possibly a suicide bomb belt. My wayward beard may give the impression that I am a fanatical Jihadist after all.

Yes folks, overtaking in London can seem dangerous. Overtaking in Baghdad, however, is lethal. There was a news report about six months ago about a carful of men being shot up by US troops as they overtook them. Ironically, they were going home from a funeral but they all died because the nervous Americans thought they might be lining up for an attack. I was reminded of this story by this article on the BBC site.

So little real news is coming out of Iraq now and we have to thank one brave Iraqi reporter for this story. If there is one thing more dangerous than overtaking in Iraq it is truth telling.

Thoughts from the Dentist’s Couch

Lying under the drill today, I was playing the man and trying to show that it did not hurt at all.

While there, my thoughts turned to torture.

The project to provide a Christian rationale for war and oppression in the USA (and here in the Daily Telegraph - the NeoCons have hijacked my favourite paper) walks down the old sick road of defining “the lesser of two evils” and then turning that into a positive justification for evil.

As with the “Just War” so now moderate torture is now OK.

Experience shows that the torturer quickly regresses into going beyond official guidance just as “Just Warriors” in combat soon go beyond the decent limits which the intellectuals love to imagine.

“Do unto others as you would have them do to you”.

Which part of that sentence is too hard for our Christian friends in the moderate torture camp do you think? Perhaps they just lack imagination?

A few minutes in the dentist’s chair without anaesthetic might remind them what pain plus helplessness feels like.

Sick unto death - What is wrong with evangelical thinkers?

A few days ago an amazing article by Wayne Grudem (US evangelical theologian) was being flagged in blogspace.  It was Prof Grudem inviting people to pray for a Republican victory in the recent elections.  What I found remarkable was the way he credited the President with successes using a grid of understanding which was astonishingly right wing.  Extremely liberal economic theories tied to a taste for legislation in areas of morality and medical ethics.

Here is the link to Wayne Grudem’s post.

Like Errol Hulse’s pro war rant I refered to earlier in the year it is the enthusiasm for the Iraq war and occupation which startled me.  He seemed to feel it was a reasonable response to Islamic terrorism and even believed it would help with Gospel proclamation!  The Prof really is in a high Ivory Tower if he thinks that.

Like so many Evangelicals he gets lathered up at the homosexual agenda and embryo research but seems to think that maiming and killing tens of thousands of people in a pointless war is just a peccadillo.  Trigger happy American kids are winning neither heart nor minds in Iraq and they just should not be there.   The same faction which predicted the war would be popular with ordinary Iraqis now tell us there will be a bloodbath if the troops leave.  They were wrong last time and that prediction may be wrong too.

There seems to be a belief that you really can figure out every matter of right and wrong from first principles and an assumption that warfare and oppressive legislation are easily justifed by such a process.  It is the rationalism of the madhouse.

Blatant cut and paste plagiarism

“Naturally the common people don’t want war… But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”  - Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials

I cut this straight from a website called:

http://www.spinwatch.org

I hope they will forgive this gross plagiarism since I have inserted this link.

Just to remind you -

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”   - Jesus

David Aaronovitch slams the left and justifies Israel

Last night I watched “Don’t Get Me Started” a TV series of documentaries which allows people the freedom to express and argue a point of view without the need for “balance” which often leads to stilted and unsubstantial TV.

His case was that the left wing have become morally degenerate in their support and “understanding” of nutty Islamic fascists like Hezbollah, Hamas etc..

The case was well made and damning. The cynical far lefties (”We are all Hisbollah now”) have a long history of forming corrupt alliances with whomever is likely to subvert Capitalism.

My problem was with the refusal to admit a moral equivalence with the Terrorist State of Israel. He claimed that Hezbollah targeted civilians but Israeli warplanes did not and that difference of intention makes all the difference.

But why were planes bombing Power stations, infrastructure and civilian areas in Beirut and many other places north of the combat zone? Was it not an attempt to terrorise and intimidate the Lebanese? Shock and awe tactics look like terror tactics to most people.
In a struggle as long and brutal as that between the Jews and Arabs in the Middle East historical justifications of either side can be made by selectively editing the story of the past. Israel was founded on bloody terrorism and horrific things have been done in the occupied territories to support armed land-grabbers.

Aaronovitch mentioned “antisemitism” as though it were a higher evil than every other kind of racism. Some misled dispensationalists may still agree but he needs to understand that there is a new generation of Christians to whom the Holocaust is just another sad chapter of history and not a justification for Israeli inhumanity.

One of the saddest thing about the violent planting of Israel has been the way Arab Christians have had the ground cut under them by, first, Arab Nationalism and, now, Islamic fascism with the help of Jewish and Christian Zionists.

The Lord, the God of Israel, is being blasphemed by both sides in this godless struggle.