A Challenge

Here is a challenge: can anybody provide one single example where ordinary working and law-abiding people have directly benefited from government? And by 'government' I mean any policy from any administration within living memory, and the benefit needs to be one that is of lasting value.

They Need Us..

They need us:

• To earn money that they can extract from us in large proportions through direct and indirect taxation - to support their opulent lifestyles;

• To be in awe of their pompous institutions and courts;

• To treat us as if we were people who are as criminally degenerate as themselves through CRB checks;

• To systematically remove our Common Law rights and hold us for indefinite periods of time under the guise of 'terrorism';

• To criminalise us with more draconian and stupid laws - so that they can screw more money out of us through fines;

• To dictate how we live our lives, precisely what we eat and drink - and in what quantities;

• To tell us how evil the motor car is - and to cajole us into using inadequate public transport;

• To make us fear them and become guilt-ridden neurotics;

• To lecture us about the evils of smoking - and those who indulge in this satanic habit;

• To tap our phones, constantly watch us through CCTV cameras and monitor our internet usage;

• To frighten us with apocalyptic stories of climate change, global terrorism, Islamic jihad and monetary collapse;

• To make us spy on each other and thereby remove any sense of community and social cohesion;

• To give our children nightmares by showing Robert Peston on the news before the 9:00pm watershed;

• To indoctrinate us through the BBC into the Fabian ideology that they want to inflict upon us;

• To influence our opinion as to which communitarian collective of criminal incompetents should be mishandling our economy and destroying our lives in Westminster;

• To subsidise through taxation myriads of petty bureaucrats, quangoes, tyrannical councils, the 'diversity' industry, Common purpose losers.

They need us. But we don't need them. Ever.

Another Front in the Battle

The battle for the shape of the Church has manifested itself recently in the ranks of the Roman Catholic church - in view of the impending visit to the UK by Pope Benedict: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/7987774/Catholic-group-accuses-Church-of-intolerance-ahead-of-Pope-visit.htm

For the record, I'm no fan of the Catholic church - in fact, I'm one of its card-carrying detractors. There are various reasons for this: primarily, I have serious doctrinal issues with its claims and beliefs in all areas where they've replaced Scriptural teaching by papal decree. Since the RC church is constitutionally unable to reverse its historically-established doctrines (e.g. papal authority, the priesthood, celibacy of the clergy, the authority and exclusivity of the church and its teachings, the doctrines of the Virgin Mary, transubstantiation among many others), it's stuck with them. It is literally a prisoner of its own history, tied up by the bonds of its own decrees. Furthermore I find it difficult to summon any respect for an institution which for years has systematically concealed the gross sexual misconduct of its ministers - some of them high-ranking - towards the vulnerable and weak. Without doubt this is wickedness and betrayal of the highest order.

Despite all this, I recognise that there are many fine Christians in its ranks, and must admit a certain amount of sympathy for them through these times; their church has had a lot of (albeit deserved) bad press. But it's also noticeable that such an organisation - notoriously inflexible - now shares with the protestant churches the steady corrosive attack of the secular age and its values. It has become fair game for the homosexual lobby, who have been whittling away at the Church of England for years. It's a sad feature of many of the protestant denominations that they have generally failed to fend off their secular assailants by a vigorous and determined grasp of scripture. There is a morbid fear of appearing to appear to be irrelevant or bigoted to the proponents of the zeitgeist. Many of the aforesaid proponents of political correctness and so-called 'diversity' have been among the ranks of the church, so the attack has been from within.

As I perceive it, the secular battle against the Roman Catholic church is a lost cause. The Pope and his cardinals won't budge on the matters of homosexuality and similarly contentious issues. They won't move on abortion either. This at least earns from me a glimmer of respect - but I suspect that their reasons for fending off these issues differ from my own. I oppose them for one reason: Scripture, which is the revealed word of God - proscribes them, either by plain textual statement or by doctrinal weight where textual statements are not present. On the other hand, the Roman Catholic church opposes them for no other reason than the fact that it always has - since its traditions are as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians.