According to Denis MacEoin, author of Sharia Law or ‘One Law For All’?, sharia courts operating in Britain may be handing down rulings that are inappropriate to this country because they are linked to elements in Islamic law that are seriously out of step with trends in Western legislation that derive from the values of the Enlightenment and are inherent in modern codes of human rights. Sharia rulings contain great potential for controversy and may involve acts contrary to UK legal norms and human rights legislation
Civitaspress release
Whoa! Two things are being confused here. The only grounds we may have against Sharia courts, as for anything else, is that they are wrong. Not that they are ‘inappropriate’ or ‘out of step’ but that they are wrong.
1. We can say that they are wrong when they break the law. If we think that those operating these ‘courts’ are breaking the law we may either invite the police and Crown Prosecution Servant to decide whether there seems to be a case, and then to charge these people and bring the case to court, or we may bring a civil case against them ourselves. The court may then find whether or nor they have broken the law.
2. We may use our conscience to judge whether they are wrong. We can continue to maintain that they are wrong even if no law seems to say so and even if we receive no confirmation from the courts that interpret the law. We can say publicly that they are wrong (no one may stop us from expressing this belief) and we add that they break God’s law (we may give ‘religious’ reasons for our view).
But these ‘courts’ are not wrong because they are ‘out of step’, or offend our sensibilities or because it seems possible that they may offend anyone else. We should insist on talking about right and wrong and that we can all make this distinction between legal and moral. This ‘norms-values-rights’ discourse is going to get us all into trouble.
Civitas should attempt to bring some of these cases of ‘conflicting jurisdictions’ to court. It could suggest which legislation it believes such Sharia courts break.
About Sharia itself see No to Sharia Law in Britain
Ah well, it took me away from shouting at the television, for a while at least. To read it in Scribd, click Mode (top left of screen), View Mode then Book Mode. You can download and leave comments. The Related Documents are not mine. For more by me, see here
Nevertheless, both [the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the British National Party (BNP)] stand to gain because they articulate key issues of overriding importance to the public — such as mass immigration and membership of the EU — but which the mainstream parties obdurately fail to address. These issues are fundamental to the very identity of the country and its ability to govern itself at all. Indeed, their neglect can even be said to have contributed in no small measure to the expenses scandal. This is because parliamentary democracy itself has become steadily emptied of meaning and purpose, leaving a vacuum which has been filled by corruption. For more than three decades, Parliament has become increasingly powerless. In recent years, this was the result of the Labour Government deliberately outsourcing its powers — to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembliy; to quangos, management consultancies or unelected advisers; or to the courts through human rights law. But above all, the British Parliament has progressively surrendered its powers of national self-government to Europe, which has reduced the cradle of democracy to the status of little more than Westminster Regional Council.This whole process was summed up in 1998 by Peter Mandelson, who observed with menacing perspicacity that ‘the era of pure representative government is coming slowly to an end’… Paradoxically, the diminution of Britain’s place in the world has gone hand in hand with an increase in the power of the State over its own citizens. Determined to ram through its agenda for a new world order of which the EU is an important part, the Labour Government increasingly concentrated power in itself while it steadily took it away from Parliament. So there was more and more secondary legislation upon which MPs don’t have to vote, less and less time to debate important measures, and ever-tighter control by the party whips over MPs whose only career was in politics and who were, therefore, totally dependent for their livelihood upon political patronage. The outcome was an empty Commons chamber as MPs found they had less and less to do — and employed their creativity instead in filling in their expenses forms. Melanie Phillips No wonder British MPs turned to crime
Following St. Benedict’s example, “monasteries have, over the course of the centuries, become lively centres of dialogue, of meeting and of beneficial fusion among different peoples, brought together by the evangelical culture of peace. Through work and example, the monks were able to teach the art of peace, giving tangible form to the three elements identified by Benedict as being necessary to conserve the unity of the Spirit among mankind: the cross, which is the very law of Christ; the book, in other words culture; and the plough, which stands for work, mastery over matter and time”. The Pope continued: “Thanks to the work of monasteries, divided into the threefold daily commitment to prayer, study and work, entire peoples on the European continent have known real liberation and beneficial moral, spiritual and cultural development, being educated in a sense of continuity with the past, real activity for the common good, and openness to God and the transcendental. Let us pray that Europe may always appreciate this heritage of Christian principles and ideals which represent such an immense cultural and spiritual resource. “This is possible”, the Pope added in conclusion, “but only if we accept the constant teaching of St. Benedict: … that seeking God is man’s fundamental task. Human beings do not realise themselves fully, they cannot be truly happy, without God. … From this place where his mortal remains lie, the patron saint of Europe still invites everyone to continue his work of evangelisation and human promotion”. Benedict on Benedict - from Vatican news
Everyone’s situation is different, but overal this looks like an especially treacherous bear market, made doubly difficult by the actions of the Treasury and the Fed in bankrolling malinvestment, imbalances and corrupted price discovery. When in doubt, get out. Don’t get hooked by greed. This rally ‘could’ have some legs if it becomes a determined effort to reflate the credit bubble supported by the power of the Treasury and the Fed, as we saw in 2003-6, which was a reckless and disgraceful abuse of the Fed’s economic responsibilities. We doubt they can do it again, but never underestimate the power of greed and fear over memory and prudence….
Today reminds me of the briefly sunny period in 1930-1 when most economists and public officials agreed that the Depression was already over and the economy was back on track. President Hoover dismissed a delegation of businessmen who came to Washington with ideas on stabilizing the economy with “Too late gentlemen, the slump is over.” There are few things from my childhood that I remember more vividly than grandmother’s comments regarding this false recovery. “If we knew what was coming, we would have killed ourselves.” This from as strong a person as I have ever encountered, with a faith that would break rocks. The Great Depression left an indelible mark, or more accurately scar, on her entire family, and my father’s as well. And I never heard the name “Franklin Roosevelt” from her lips without it being preceded by “God bless” followed by “he saved my family.” Not all of her children unfortunately. She said she cried so much and so often that she was never able to cry again. And she did not, even at the end. Jesse’s Café Américain
Whatever governments do for the banks, credit will be a lot harder to obtain for businesses…we have now entered the period of an unprecedented convergence of the four planetary issues - financial instability, climate change, unemployment and the financial consequences of an aging society - that was described in the 2001 book, The Future of Money. To avoid a domino effect of massive layoffs and bankruptcies, the most urgent action for businesses to take is the initiative of creating a Business-to-Business (B2B) mutual credit system at whatever scale makes sense to them. The WIR system is a successful precedent of this strategy implemented in Switzerland since 1934. The degradation of the environment due to short-term financial priorities can similarly be addressed with pragmatic money innovations. Short-term thinking is shown not to be due to human nature, but to the prevailing money system. It is also possible to reverse this process, by using a currency designed specifically for multinational trade and contracts which would make long-term thinking a spontaneous process, focusing the attention on long-term sustainable solutions without the need for regulations or taxation. Bernard Lietaer
It is apparent now there remains only one way for ordinary Americans who love their country and want at least some of what’s good about it to be preserved for future generations: We must kill the FIRE Economy beasts (FIRE: Finance, Insurance and Real Estate). We’re the victims in a hostage situation, if you didn’t know, held captive and mesmerized by the soft, flat-panel-TV glow of the FIRE Economy, which depends on our sheep-like conformity and Stockholm-syndrome-like admiration of our captors, but it’s NOT too late to regain our senses, if only for the benefit of our children and grandchildren. Even if it is only wildly exaggerated - and it isn’t - that the Systemically Important Too Big To Fail (SITBTF) institutions completely have captured our flag, our capital, our political parties, our “democracy” and our very lives, we as regular, hard-working, country-loving J6Ps have only this one remedy remaining, as all others woefully have failed. Anecdotal Economics Starve the Beasts and read everything by John Médaille at the Distributist Review
And here’s Willem Buiter:
The long-term pain of higher taxes and lower public spending is not the result of public debt and deficits incurred because of a war fought by a united nation against a hated external enemy. It is the result of an economic civil war, a massive systemic peacetime economic failure, with a large domestic component. It is therefore not clear that the necessary social and political cohesion - readiness to accept joint fiscal burden-sharing - will be present. If the necessary fiscal tightening is not forthcoming because different groups and vested interests are engaged in a war of attrition aimed at shifting the fiscal burden to the other guy, markets could easily panic and Britain could face an emerging market-style “sudden stop”, with the rest of the world withholding financing from its public and private sectors.
Our current crisis is due to the fact that we have, as a civilization, refused to live within our means - and the means afforded us by the natural world - over roughly the past 50 years. Mistaking a temporary glut of post-war wealth and resource plenty as a permanent condition, we are told by our leaders - indeed, we demand of them that they tell us - that we can continue to have it all, costless plenitude. Yet these past thirty-odd years of our “economy” have been one in which we have maintained our wealth simultaneously by transferring the accumulated national wealth abroad, importing oil and debt, while refusing to face the mounting costs of this exercise…Meanwhile we continue to dismantle those cultural institutions that once taught restraint and limits - many of them religious, since they are an offense, above all, to our sense of sexual entitlement - in an effort to achieve ever more perfect individual autonomy….Yesterday the President told us that we were going to have to become again a nation that worked - and my ears perked up - until he described precisely what he meant. By work, more of us are to become scientists and engineers. That is, more of us are to become the kinds of workers who make it possible for the rest of us not to work, to engage in the sort of work that lies at the heart of the modern project, namely of extracting from a recalcitrant nature its secrets so that we can enjoy the “relief of the human estate.” More of us are to engage in that project that is being taken up readily by our Chinese and Indian competitors, to transform our world ever more into a useful commodity for our pleasure and enjoyment. Americans must cease trying to make easy money at the casinos of Wall Street and instead seek to extend the mastery and dominion of nature so that the rest of us will not have to work or think too hard about what makes living possible or even worthwhile. Fewer traders, more lab coats. Above all, no jobs that actually demand work. Top scientists are working to eliminate any possible drudgery from our lives, especially the need to do things with our hands, make or repair our own stuff, understand for ourselves how the world works and how we can best live in it. Patrick Deneen
Those expecting this deleveraging to result in a stronger dollar could not be more mistaken. The Obama Administration is scrambling to obtain relief from Europe and Asia, getting them to inflate their own currencies through ’stimulus,’ in order to continue to hide the unalterable truth - the US must partially default on its debt as expressed in the dollar and the Bond. This is the inevitable outcome of all Ponzi schemes. Several smaller, private schemes already have collapsed. The big one is yet to come down. And when it does, the foundations of democracy will shake, several governments will fall, and we will once again experience the kind of uncertainty more familiar to those who lived in the first half of the twentieth century. The sad truth is that the Obama Administration has barely begun the real work of rebuilding the economy. Everything to date is simple looting, paper-hanging, and the rewriting of history. Until the median wage improves significantly in real terms, and the economy is put back on a productive basis without relying on the unsupported expansion of credit, there will be no recovery. The middle class is particularly hard hit as they exchange their remaining real assets in an increasingly corrupted financial system. They are dulled by falling from crisis to crisis. We seem to be at the stage where the wealth transfer from the many to the few has it last parabolic gasp before the collapse. Jesse’s Cafe Americain
From the Kingsland High Road yesterday we walked down Stoke Newington Church Street singing All Glory, Laud and Honour to Thee Redeemer King, and Ride on Ride on in Majesty. In the afternoon we met again at St John’s Hackney and sang our way around the south of borough, We are marching in the light of God and God’s got an army marching through the land.. in this march I’ve got a part, stopping to pray at spots where young people have died in the last year. Lord, teach us how to pray.
There is only one mistake to make when talking about economics. That is to talk about economics first and the Christian faith second. If we put them this way around, nothing we say is either Christian or useful. When we do not put the gospel first, we are only repeating what all others say, and are not able to make any distinctive contribution to the discussion. What we say is this. Christian baptism makes us self-controlled persons, no longer entirely propelled by our passions. The ability to say ‘no’ to our own immediate desires is the irreplaceable gift given to Christians. It is the first step to freedom. God, the true judge, is able to release us from our sin and give us mastery of our passions. Through baptism we are freed to love and to act. When we achieve this elementary self-mastery, we can begin to act well towards one another. Only through Christian baptism, and within this Christian community and its discipleship, are we able to acquire this self-control. This baptism has a positive economic outworking, both long-term and immediate. This is what we failed to say at the ‘My Word is My Bond’ G20 meeting in St Paul’s Cathedral this week.
I have written two sets of Lent talks, for different audiences, on this subject and you can see them both at Scribd. The first and longer set ‘Long way to Easter’ contain the moral theology and economics, along with discussions of covenant, marriage, cultural confidence and demography. The shorter ‘Walbrook talks’ set out the theology and ecclesiology. But we need to spell out some of the theology, in particular baptism and the distinctive calling of the Church, before we talk about the world and economics.
On the eve of the G20, St Paul’s is hosting a high level debate about the moral questions raised by the dramatically changing world we find ourselves in. Can opportunities for society’s good come from the economic crisis? Has there been a disconnection between morality, policy-making and practice? What are the prospects for remaking the global order, rebuilding financial systems and re-establishing trust? How will a new global order actively include development goals and address climate change?
A few of the money-center banks, some insurance companies and many hedge funds made a series of bad bets. They are insolvent. There is a procedure for insolvency. The banks should be go into receivership and be broken up. The losses should be written off, and that’s that. Nothing new or radical in that solution, it happens time and again…
Even if the [bail-out] plan works, it will fail, because it doesn’t address the underlying problem. And that problem is that we no longer make what we consume. Unless we restore the real economy, the economy that makes real things and provides real services, we cannot restore the banks. Even solvent banks require productive enterprises to which they can lend money. But we ran out of these a long time ago. There simply isn’t enough demand, even in good times, for loans from our diminishing productive sector. Hence, the banks turned to lending it for houses people couldn’t afford and credit they shouldn’t be using, but must because the wages are too low. Making the big banks solvent again will not provide them with solvent customers. That can only come from a restructuring of the economy that shifts us back to real production rather than financial black magic. If we restore the economy, restoring the banks will be a trivial problem. If we do not restore the economy, it simply will not matter how “sound” the banks are.
John Médaille Worst Bailout Ever
Get a copy of his The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace
The Romanian Orthodox parish of Saint George invites you to join us in prayer for the celebration the Divine Liturgy and of the sacrament of the ordination to the priesthood of Deacon Liviu Barbu
His Eminence Josif Pop Archbishop of the Romanian Metropolis of Central and Western Europe will preside over the Divine Service
The Fourth Sunday of Great Lent of Saint John Climacus
The Romanian Orthodox Church
St Dunstan in the West
Fleet Street
London EC4
Sense again meets reader in Metropolitan John’s (Zizioulas) latest text in translation. Superb editing by Dr. Douglas H. Knight, coupled with a succinct introduction by the same, should move this book to the top of any reading list among students of theology, ecumenism, international politics, sociology, economics, languages and cultures.
Chapters were compiled across three decades by the author’s students in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, and Thessalonika. Therefore, references are far less in number than prior books, but scholarship and precision in language are no less exact. In effect, the method of inquiry is a three-decade long conversation with students, to whom the author dedicates the book. Mainstays of Metropolitan John’s “dogmatic hermeneutics” are collected in this book. These include the nature of dogma, doctrine of God and personhood, creation and salvation, and the Church. His approach identifies a relational method by which dogmatics might be interpreted by every age of history, including our own. Relations, he argues, stem from the “what” and “how” of God. God creates and saves according to divine substance or essence (”what”), but divine substance cannot be known. Instead, divine substance must manifest in a particular way, which is to say that God makes known three Persons. Of course, these ideas do not originate with Metropolitan John, but rather with a group of faithful Christians called the Cappadocian Fathers. However, the author does not simply re-state the Fathers. He presents dogma in fresh light.
Rumour has it that there is a group that meets in London to read the work of our greatest living Englishman. Email me if you would like to be put in touch with them.
Christ has laboured on our behalf: he is the provider of mankind’s only free lunch. We may provide for one another as we receive and distribute what he has provided for us. God has acted generously to us, and invites and enables us to be generous and active on one another’s behalf. From him we may receive the abilities by which we can act and trade on our own account, for we are ‘created in Christ Jesus for good works’, as the Letter to the Ephesians puts it. We may discover that labour can be its own reward, for we may take pride in those whom we have served and lift and present them to God in thankfulness, and then we will no longer be alienated from the product of our labour. God is the one who is able to tell the true worth of our labour and our lives.
It continues:
But others came after Smith who were convinced that the entire existing tradition of deliberation about what is good, of Plato and Aristotle, and Augustine and Aquinas and their heirs, had become hopelessly tangled. They decided to give up on it, and cut moral language loose from all previous discussion of what is good or true. This new generation of political philosophers were the Utilitarians, best known of whom is Jeremy Bentham. The utilitarians wanted us to give up talking about right or wrong, or good or bad, even in the sense of ‘good for some purpose’, as when we say ‘this will not look good to other people’. Any good is good to the extent that enough people want to raise its price to the point at which its present owner is prepared to sell it. They have encouraged us to think only in terms of good as this is established by the satisfaction of the person who employs enough money to outbid all others and so claim it. It is the price mechanism that decides on the value of a thing, so the utility or usefulness of a thing is decided by the price that reflects the preferences of all agents in the market. Within this Utilitarian account, all our acts are seen as ‘preferences’, that is, as private.
And ends like this:
When the entertainment industries have opened up the family by driving a torrent of new desires through it. If they cannot resist, family members cease to sacrifice individual desires for family cohesion and are not able to work for one another or welcome one another’s service. As the family starts to break up, the state is there to provide for each of the individual pieces that have been created. We no longer need of one another because the state follows the private sector in to provide each ‘need’ so that it never becomes articulated as the need of one person for another. The result is not that each single parent is that each single parent is married to the state. The state has become the universal mediator, driven to smooth out all inequalities and with them all the complementarities, by which we need one another. The state cannot love. But it may exhaust our national economic resources in compensating for the love that we no longer give.
Stuff will be getting a lot more expensive in the not-distant future, and you can bet that the Chinese are not going to be selling it cheaply to us in return for our increasingly worthless greenbacks. Perhaps the only thing more grim than our current economic moment is the economy that is awaiting us. We will either learn thrift by a new commitment to old virtues, or we will learn it the hard way. We will be able to afford fewer things, move around less and we will find ourselves facing a world that is not subject to our notional control. For most, this will be an occasion for lamenting. To my mind, it would generally constitute a better way, but a hard way when it comes by force and not by choice. Hard especially because - like our response to the current “crisis” (a word that reflects our belief that this is something extraordinary, unexpected, exceptional, a departure from the norm rather than the new norm), we will not believe in the reality of the reality that we face. We will deny its truth and its causes, looking instead for another cause other than ourselves. We will deny until the bitter end, avoiding the bankruptcy that awaits us in the belief that past returns are the guarantee of future results, most of all for no better reason than we wish it to be so. Patrick Deneen Unreal estate
