Not a prayer?

I had a bit of a giggle recently at http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/68672/ramsey-company-answered-our-prayers-says-beach-buddies.

Why?

Well firstly, I doubt if anyone had to pray about it, given that the company directors and most of the Beach Buddies go to the same church.
Secondly, those most involved were present at a local course given a few years back by CARE - a nasty little gang of bigots posing as an educational foundation with rather more influence at Westminster than is healthy.
They owe this influence to their practice of providing interns to members of the Christian Conservative Fellowship free of charge. One such intern was the daughter of the Manx government minister who invited CARE over to run the course, and who used their dubious “research” himself a few times while trying to push his department's policy through Tynwald (thus contributing to the public's general impression of him as a flat-earther who needs to read a lot more).
The topic of the course was how to give your business a Christian ethos. In a nutshell, it sold ways to avoid tax and present your business as a religious charity, without either the cost or the inconvenience of registering as a charity and thus having to produce audited accounts.
Nice tax strategy if you can get away with it. And as long as such companies have a friend who works in the offices of the temporary Attorney General I suspect few checks will be made or awkward questions asked.

Evangelicals steal Christmas from the poor - again

According to a story at http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_184186.html
“Over 4000 shoe boxes filled with gifts are on their way to disadvantaged children from the Isle of Man.”
If you believe that, I have some shares in a tapioca mine you might like to buy.
On the basis that Samaritan’s Purse demand £1 from anyone daft enough to give them a box, what we do know is that the con-artist behind this scam - Franklin Graham, the repugnant offspring of televangelist Billy Graham – is at least another £4,000 richer because of Manx people with more money than sense. I also wonder if it will get to him the same way funds from other offshore havens used to.
SP, having failed to find anyone dim enough to register and front a bogus Manx or Channel Isles ‘sister charity’, used to have a strange aversion to receiving the donations in a cheque. On at least one occasion, under the guise of a visit to a regional headquarters, a volunteer was instructed to get on a plane with the hard cash in a briefcase, so that it could be added to the donations from that area rather than being traceable to an offshore source.
This, by odd coincidence, would mean the parent charity in the US had no audit trail to a place the IRS takes a particular interest in. In the drug trade (so a helpful Agent Scully lookalike from the FBI once explained to me and others on an FSC money-laundering course) this is known as ‘smurfing’. Funnily enough, in times further back, it was also the favoured method by which rogue Irish politicians delivered their skim-offs and pay-offs to Manx and Jersey banks to hide it from the Irish tax authorities.
What we also know is that those trying to prevent religious conflict in some poorer countries have just got 4,000 new problems, courtesy of the same idiots. Because we also shouldn’t believe the statement that “Children in countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Liberia and Romania will benefit from the gifts.”
SP have a habit of switching the destination after the boxes leave the donors, but never telling them. For example, a few years back, having led everyone to believe they were going to Russian ‘orphanages’ which had been handily photographed during a flying visit in a previous year, the boxes were reloaded onto an SP owned plane flying to Pakistan with one of their US media crews. Once dropped in a Pakistani disaster zone, they were filmed by SP’s PR unit and paraded in front of the world’s press. The PR unit got back on the plane and flew back to their luxury Carolina media headquarters, where the film and photos were glossily repackaged for next year’s campaign literature.
The boxes? Who knows – but by that time they were unfit for use anyway, so probably dumped on the nearest rubbish tip.
As if Franklin Graham and his despicable cohorts would care about starving Muslims anyway. This is, after all, the guy who even Southern Baptists shunned after he suggested the US Army fly Bibles into Iraq along with the initial invasion force.
This is the outfit who would only allow victims of a Southern American disaster to use tents provided to SP by a US government agency if they formally renounced Catholicism first, and whose tame US Army chaplains told astonished refugees from bombing in Iraq that they could only use the refugee centre showers after attending prayer meetings and bible classes.
Every year I’m pleasantly surprised by the continued willingness of Manx people to help the less fortunate.
But I’m disgusted by the evangelical pondlife who take advantage, and line their pockets by stealing from the world’s poorest people.

A Religious Marriage of Convenience?

Tucked away in the Order Paper for Tynwald this Tuesday (see http://www.tynwald.org.im/papers/orders/2010-2011/ko21122010.pdf) we see as Item 4:

“The Hon Member for Glenfaba (Mr Anderson) to move –That under Standing Order 4.34, on the petition of the Promoters, John Bingham, Robert Terence Easton and Avril Kneale Teare as the Trustees of the Broadway Baptist Church, and as the Trustees of the Alpha Centre Trust, and of the said John Bingham, Robert Terence Easton, Avril Kneale Teare and Clive Graham Swift as the Trustees of the Well Trust, the petitioners having certified the required compliance with Standing Orders, leave be given to introduce the Broadway Baptist Church Bill 2011.”

So, what’s that all about?
Well, if anyone was to ask officials at our second most bonkers local evangelical cult, they’d probably explain that the 19th century charitable trust which established the church was a little out of date, and so they’re tidying up a little, also combining the charitable trusts which established their bookshop/café and their various ‘outreach’ programs.
This is true – sort of – in that charitable trusts can only carry out the tasks mentioned in their charter, and benefit those named. Charity law – even on the Isle of Man – is irritatingly obstructive to faith-based fraudsters and tax dodgers, especially if the trust was drawn up way before the modern business and charity law which paved the way for our offshore finance sector.
But closer analysis of the Bill reveals more interesting things.
What the Batshits are actually doing is winding up the trusts, in particular the 19th century one for the church itself. The problem is, winding up a trust requires that you hand what assets are left over to the named beneficiaries, who my guess would be are something like paid up bona fide members of the church or other local Christian worthies, and my other guess is those now controlling the gaff don’t want to do that.
What they actually want is for real ownership and power to pass from ordinary local Christians (who can’t be trusted to go with the program the cabal running Broadway Baptists are drawing up) and to an English silent partner in their shady deals. The way they seem to be planning to do it is to close the charitable trusts and regroup the assets and enterprises into a limited by guarantee company, which will also be registered as a Manx charity.
The main advantage of this is that a limited by guarantee company has named guarantors (usually three or four folk playing a trustee-like role who agree to contribute a token pound or so if the company is wound up) not named shareholders. So, the real ‘owners’ of the company are not on record, or even traceable through any nominee shareholders who represent them.This would be extremely advantageous if those owners were, say, a religious organisation in another country which doesn't want the world at large to know it has offshore assets, or religious zealots in an offshore jurisdiction to know that their place of worship is owned by money-grubbing foreigners who will flog it to the highest bidder.
The real clue comes in section 8 of the explanatory literature, that dealing with dissolution, where it casually mentions that “The ultimate beneficiary shall be Spurgeon’s College”.
Oh dear!
Just a short guide to trust law jargon here. Trusts have ‘beneficiaries’, who are individuals or institutions who the person or institution settling the property of the trust wants to have some day to day benefit – could be, for example, a relative of the settlor needing school fees, the homeless or someone getting a grant to study something. The ultimate beneficiary is the person or thing that gets everything when the trust is wound up.
Another clue is in the blurb about the ‘Statement of Faith’, and the desire to change this so as to fit in with the Evangelical Alliance ‘basis of faith’. The EA has come up in this blog a few times (for example, their attempts to prevent civil partnership ceremonies, their opposition to schools tackling bullying of seemingly gay pupils, their strange decision to revise the definition of a ‘cult’ so as to allow the dangerous Jesus Army cult to join the Alliance), but would be familiar to anyone who studies nutjob evangelicals of the UK.
To anyone else - they’re Fruitcake Central, with numerous links to Westminster, seats on all the QUANGOs going, and also pretty much run the religious advisory bodies at the BBC. Most baffling of all, although they’re amongst the most homophobic and sexist elements of the UK Christian community, their head honcho, Joel Edwards, sits on Equal Opportunities bodies on the dubious basis that he and a few other EA figures are black, ergo nasty educated liberals and gays are somehow ‘discriminating’ when they object to the theofascist cretinism sometimes spouted by EA affiliates as ‘sincere’ faith.
Spurgeon College , which is named as ‘ultimate beneficiary’, is, by the way, the EA’s ‘educational resource’ – more accurately, a fundie bible college which actually detracts from the sum of human knowledge.
This, added to various adverts which have been appearing since early 2009 in UK Baptist newspapers and magazines unsuccessfully appealing for a new Broadway pastor, suggests that the place is in serious trouble.
Will it close?
Sadly, I fear not, and I also doubt that it’s a sign that pitifully poorly informed civil servants and politicians will finally pull the plug on dubious ‘social outreach’ schemes which run from the Alpha Centre.
What it might signal is that the only serious asset the church has left, i.e. the property, is being lined up for sale and redevelopment at a convenient future point. The area immediately around it is deteriorating fast and, as coincidence would have it, the property developer most likely to snap it up used to employ the retiring Attorney General (to whom the whole current deal has to be referred) and also the only local legal authority on ecclesiastical law.
Convenient coincidence or cunning planning?
We may have to wait another year or so to find out.

U2 can be a superstitious irrelevance

Recent reports of a commiseration of the first year’s disservice to the island by an unelected spook merchant (see for example http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Celebration-to-mark-the-Bishop39s.5357903.jp) could be a chance for us to snigger at Sentamu’s Apprentice yet again. Frankly, what’s the point when it’s like shooting fish in a barrel? Our politicians are too apathetic to stop the aforementioned spook merchant squatting in Legislative Council, and nobody literate or under 70 on the island seems to vote any more, so Paterson retains his privileges courtesy of a coalition of crooks, crusties and canting cretins.
Instead I’ll take aim at a bigger fish – the Archtwit of Cant.
I read in the Torygruff that:
'Christian services that feature DJs, songs of the Irish band U2 and prayers for the chief executives of Google and Wal-Mart are being promoted by the Church of England.'
Read the full report and weep with laughter at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/5523904/Church-of-England-attempts-to-broaden-appeal-with-songs-by-U2-and-prayers-for-Google.html .
The Fresh Expressions initiative is apparently ‘spawning churches for surfers as well as commissioning priests to work in night clubs and skateboard parks.’
No, I think what they mean is churches sniff new public money being thrown away on fresh excuses for ‘community work’ spawned by panic stories in right wing rags.
But the book sounds hilarious.
For example:
‘A psalm is recited in "beat poetry" style to the accompaniment of African Djembe drums, and prayers are said "for the corporate world, for influential CEOs who oversee billion-dollar industries".’
This would be the same CEOs and industries the Archtwit keeps berating for a culture of greed – or was it just not answering begging letters from superstitious halfwits who want their subsidised, untaxed and pointless employment underwritten a while longer?
And also we are told that:
‘The prayers continue: "We pray for John Chambers of Cisco Systems, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Dr Eric Schmidt of Google Inc, H Lee Scott Jr of Wal-Mart Stores and others who have already made commitments to justice." ‘
The only commitment to justice a union-bashing, sweatshop-employing Walmart executive could make, in my humble view, would be to commit suicide. But that’s probably against his evangelical beliefs, so it’s not going to happen, is it?
I’m also amused to hear that amongst the ‘alternative services’ in a book co-edited by the Rt Rev Steven Croft, the new Bishop of Sheffield, are so-called ‘U2charists’. These are services in which the congregation gets the holy gutrot and biccies while singing U2 songs instead of traditional hymns.
If that doesn’t clear a church of young folk in seconds I’m not sure what will.
I also have a feeling all this ‘down wiv da kids’ stuff doesn’t go down well with all the Archtwit’s employees either.
For example, the Reverend David Houlding, prebendary at St Paul's Cathedral (where, incidentally, the predecessor to the current Bish of Sod 'n Man now skulks for a living) remarks:
"All this is tosh. It's just a passing fad, irrelevant, shallow and pointless…."
"There's no depth to it and it's embarrassing because it'll make people think that we're eccentric and silly."
No, David, we already knew that. This just proves you are.