'What some people say on earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.'
'Ye see it does not.'
'I feel in a way that it ought to.'
'That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it.'
'What?'
'The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.'
'I don't know what I want, Sir.'
'Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to inflict it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye'll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye'll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe.'
... For what is required, on all these levels alike, is not merely knowledge but a certain insight; getting the focus right. Those who can see in each of these instances only the lower will always be plausible. One who contended that a poem was nothing but black marks on white paper would be unanswerable if he addressed an audience who couldn't read. Look at it through microscopes, analyse the printer's ink and the paper, study it (in that way) as long as you like; you will never find something over and above all the products of analysis whereof you can say "This is the poem". Those who can read, however, will continue to say the poem exists.
The inspiring, magnificent story of Douglas Bader, legless fighter pilot, who led his Spitfire squadrons to victory in the Battle of Britain.
This video debuted in April 2006 in the US after the song Happy Birthday made waves overseas hitting the charts at #4 in Germany, #3 in Sweden and was in the top 15 in Austria and Switzerland. In addition, Happy Birthday, was in the Top 10 downloads on ITUNES in Germany, Sweden & Denmark. Piper, the lead singer of Flipsyde wrote and sings this song to the baby he helped abort as a young man. Filled with introspection that only one who has truly realized the ramifications of the decision to abort, Happy Birthday should serve as a warning to young men and women seeking abortion as an answer. The reality of fatherhood lost is felt, as you hear Piper wonder out loud what his baby would look like, act like, and if the child could forgive him for what he has done.
On 6 May Nadine Dorries MP launched the official parliamentary campaign to reduce the upper limit for abortion from 24 weeks to 20 weeks. The matter will come to the vote when the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is debated in the Commons later this month...Visit the 20 weeks campaign website for more information. For those of you in the UK, there's a petition to sign, if you'd like.
For those of you tired of global warming hysteria, take heart. From later in the same article:Not surprisingly, the Tories are ecstatic at the local election results. And they are to be congratulated on running a smooth, disciplined and shrewdly judged campaign, not least in London where their strategy of getting out the anti-Ken vote paid dividends in the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor.
But there is a distinct risk that the Conservatives will misinterpret their great victory. Already, there are claims that it has vindicated the Cameroons’ strategy of tacking to fashionable Left-wing thinking in order to head off any charge that they are just the ’same old Tories’.
This is to misunderstand what happened in London. For Boris’s appeal was not as a representative of the new look, politically correct Conservative party. On the contrary — his appeal was to be the gloriously politically incorrect, anti-politics candidate. As one voter told canvassers: ‘I’m not voting for you Tories; I’m voting for Boris instead.’
It is the very things that get Boris into such trouble — his shambolic manner, his inability to be diplomatic, his grandstanding instinct to do anything to get a laugh — that make people adore him. Even though party minders zipped up his mouth during the campaign, his appeal is that of someone who will never be corralled by any political machine.
And Boris was running against the quintessential machine politician.
Ironically, Ken’s original appeal eight years ago lay in his image as the Labour anti-Labour candidate. A vote for him was a kick in the teeth for the out-of-touch political elite. But then Ken himself turned into a key member of that elite — and what a distasteful, corrupt and arrogant spectacle it was.
A vote for anti-politician Boris therefore does not necessarily mean a vote for the Tories. Boris himself grasped this immediately when, in his acceptance speech, he said people shouldn’t think for a minute that London was now a Tory city.
Read the whole article here.The triumphant Cameroons are in danger of missing the point that what happened last week was a mighty vote against Labour rather than an endorsement of the Conservatives. Indeed, such an endorsement would make little sense since, among the issues that most cheese off the electorate, there’s precious little to choose between the parties.
There’s no more delicious example of this than global warming. For the Cameroons, green policies are their totemic proof that the party has moved with the times. But Boris is actually a green sceptic who has called environmentalism a religious phenomenon and mocked green policies as ‘pagan yammering for sacrifice’.
And on this, he is far more in tune with the public who, sceptical of global warming hysteria, are deeply unimpressed by the prospect of green taxes. Indeed, Mr Brown is reported to be about to ditch the proposed rise in fuel duty in a panicky attempt to assuage public fury. So where does that leave the Cameroon carbon crusaders?
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The Alliance Defense Fund announced a new initiative Friday that will challenge the tactics of groups that use the Internal Revenue Service to intimidate churches and pastors into silence on important issues of the day.
"Pastors have a right to speak about biblical values from the pulpit without fear of punishment. No one should be able to use the government to intimidate pastors into giving up their constitutional rights," said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Erik Stanley. "The government can’t demand that a church give up its right to tax-exempt status simply because the pastor exercises his First Amendment rights in the pulpit. Groups like Americans United intentionally trigger IRS investigations that will silence churches through fear, intimidation, and disinformation.
"The new initiative will equip, protect, and defend pastors who wish to exercise their First Amendment right to openly discuss the positions of political candidates and other moral and social issues from the pulpit. Participating pastors across the country will deliver a sermon along these lines in their own churches Sept. 28.
Prior to 1954, churches were free to evaluate the positions of political candidates on moral issues without fear of the Internal Revenue Service revoking their tax-exempt status. That year, then-Senator Lyndon Johnson amended the tax code to add the threat of IRS action against churches if their pastors mentioned the positions of specific candidates from the pulpit. Citing that rule, groups like AU have repeatedly threatened to report churches to the IRS if they speak out on such issues.
Many tax-exempt organizations are permitted to evaluate candidates’ positions based on the values important to those groups. Organizations which are tax-exempt but do not have the same speech restrictions the IRS places on churches include civic leagues; labor, agricultural, or horticultural associations; business leagues; chambers of commerce; real estate boards; boards of trade; professional football leagues; clubs organized for pleasure, recreation, and other nonprofit purposes; fraternal beneficiary societies; and cemeteries.
"The intimidation of churches by leftist groups using the IRS has grown to a point that ADF has no choice but to respond," said Stanley. "The number of threats being reported to ADF is growing because of the aggressive campaign to unlawfully silence the church. IRS rules don’t trump the Constitution, and the First Amendment certainly trumps the Johnson amendment.
"Pastors who want to learn more or who wish to be considered for participation in Pulpit Freedom Sunday Sept. 28 can visit www.telladf.org/church.
The Sky Beyond has a copyright date of 1963. My copy is a Ballantine Books paperback, published by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company, first printing August 1970. I understand that it was later published by Bantam as part of its Air and Space series. For all that, though, it's awfully hard to find a copy (and we've just taken another out of circulation). May I suggest that somebody reprint it?To carry the experiments on to the next phase I bought a de Havilland Moth twin-float seaplane. I had never flown a seaplane but had heard that the take-off was only for special beings called seaplane pilots; that only by some sort of involved technique denied to ordinary mortals could a waterborne airplane be persuaded to become successfully airborne.
Firmly believing this to be true, I made various inquiries of people who at some time or other had flown seaplanes, and with natural caution checked the advice of each expert against the others. All differed in some important respect. The only point upon which agreement was unanimous was that without this special knowledge of how to take off from the water, disaster was certain.
I was so confused by all this that I took the seaplane out on a good open stretch of water and, ignoring all conflicting advice on the subject, steadily pressed the throttle forward and went with the airplane, which I believed knew more about it than I did. It ran a reasonable distance and with light backward pressure on the control column became airborne quite smoothly and definitely. There were, I later discovered, some refinements to this procedure, to meet different sea conditions and the demands of different airplanes to them; but on the whole the thing turned out to be governed by the normal laws of behavior of a flying machine.
The operations of this seaplane had to be made to pay, to cover the economic facts of life: so I flew it to remote lakes and harbors where there were enough people to provide some traffic for passenger flights. I did the maintenance myself and, to economize on personal expenses and to live as I liked, I camped with my dog on the edge of accessible but, as far as possible, uninhabited lakes. A large Alsatian, he was the most good-tempered fellow, with traditionally good manners, but his formidable appearance was a strong deterrent to anybody with ideas of interfering with the airplane if I happened to be away fishing.
He loved the flying and, like all dogs in a car, liked to put his head out the side into the wind from the front seat, in which he traveled; but finally he would get disgusted with the force of the airstream and would just curl down in the seat and go to sleep. The only trouble I had was to teach him to jump out of the cockpit onto the plywood walkway alongside the fuselage and not to put his feet through the fabric of the wing when we came to anchor...
