If I decide I like it there, I might even stay.

Although I’ll leave this version blog up, I’ve closed comments; please see the link above for the new location of Anglican Samizdat.

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Archbishop Hiltz, who has made the MDGs a hallmark of his primacy, has been chosen to lead the Canadian interfaith delegation.

At the Winnipeg summit, leaders from 10 different faith traditions-including Muslim, Christian and Shinto-will listen to and report to one another about important issues in their nations. They will hear several high-profile speakers including Canadian senator Romeo Dallaire; the Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine, USA; and H.E. Sheikh Shaban Mubajje, grand mufti of Uganda.

“We’ve got five weeks or whatever left until the G8 starts. Shut the fuck up on this issue,” she says. “If you push it, there’ll be more backlash. This is now a political football. This is not about women’s health in this country.”

She went on to say, “Canada is still a country with free and accessible abortion. Leave it there. Don’t make this an election issue.

There are definitely those in Africa who believe that the constant references to issues of human sexuality are the hobby horse of a handful of bishops. There are also those who can tell when an African voice delivers a message that has been crafted in the “west.” Many African bishops feel that a few of their colleagues are being used by elements from the United States to continue an American agenda. They are increasingly frustrated by this colonial dynamic.

As Bishop John Chapman says:

It may be a hot-button topic in the mainstream media but the issue of human sexuality – including homosexuality – hardly saw the light of day at the gathering in England Feb. 24-26 of six African bishops and five Canadian bishops, including Bishop John Chapman. “We had an initial conversation on human sexuality on the first evening together and that was the last time we talked about it,” said the bishop in a recent Crosstalk interview.

It’s true that Bishop Michael Ingham has a web site dedicated to the subject and John Chapman hit the headlines of the Ottawa Citizen – but that was just a media plot to make him look as if he thinks about little else. The Anglican Church of Canada has a similar problem; this extensive Wikipedia article is clearly part of the same plot.

To show how far the enemies of the ACoC are prepared to go to make it look ridiculous, here is a remarkably lifelike simulacrum of Fred Hiltz describing how he went all the way to the UK to discuss unnatural sex with Rowan Williams. In spite of the patent absurdity of this hoax, it presents conclusive evidence that the concocters of this devious conspiracy have reached a worrying level of technical sophistication. You can see from this video that the counterfeit is almost as dull as the real thing; an astonishing achievement.

That is what has happened, of course, and the iPad is a good example: it doesn’t really do much, but it does it with such flair that both computer nerds and normal people want one.

BumpTop outdoes the iPad, it is Canadian, and it has been bought by Google:

Google has acquired BumpTop, a Toronto-based tech startup that built a 3-D computer desktop that makes files behave like physical objects.

Neither Google nor BumpTop disclosed details of the deal, but the Globe and Mail said the purchase price was believed to be between $30 million and $45 million.

Dawkins regales the audience with examples of what he views as stupid religiously inspired morality.

He then goes on to list what he believes are “good”, “acceptable” or “reasonable” examples of morality, implying a he has reference by which he is judging them. If his reference is little more than a personal preference seasoned with a pinch of contemporary middle-class pseudo-reasoned tendentiousness, why would he think he has the right to impose his version morality on the rest of us; if it is an absolute reference, he has denied his own premise.

A grandmother has shocked her friends and family after revealing she is having a baby with her own grandson.

Pearl Carter, 72, says she has never been happier after beginning an incestuous relationship with her 26-year-old grandchild Phil Bailey.

The pensioner, from Indiana, US, is using her pension to pay a surrogate mother so they can have a child, reports New Zealand’s New Idea magazine.

She said: “I’m not interested in anyone else’s opinion. I am in love with Phil and he’s in love with me.

Anglican bishops announced that Episcopal permission is to be given to a limited number of parishes, based on Episcopal discernment, to offer prayers and blessing (but not the nuptial blessing) to grandmother-grandson couples in stable, long-term, committed relationships, as an extension of the current pastoral norms.