Over the weekend the BBC and other media was calling for the head of a certain David Silvester, a councillor of the UKIP party in Henley-on-Thames. His crime was to write the following letter to his local paper, the Henley Standard. Since I can find the complete letter nowhere, I think it would be good to post it here:
Divine disapproval
Sir, — Since the passage of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, the nation has been beset by serious storms and floods.
One recent one caused the worst flooding for 60 years. The Christmas floods were the worst for 127 years. Is this just “global warming” or is there something more serious at work?
The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war.
I wrote to David Cameron in April 2012 to warn him that disasters would accompany the passage of his same sex marriage Bill but he went ahead despite a 600,000-signature petition by concerned Christians and more than half of his own parliamentary party saying that he should not do so.
Now, even as Cameron sheds crocodile tears on behalf of destitute flooded homeowners, playing at advocate against the very local councils he has made cash-strapped, it is his fault that large swathes of the nation have been afflicted by storms and floods.
He has arrogantly acted against the Gospel that once made Britain “great” and the lesson surely to be learned is that no man or men, however powerful, can mess with Almighty God with impunity and get away with it for everything a nation does is weighed on the scales of divine approval or disapproval. — Yours faithfully,
Councillor David Silvester (UKIP)
Henley Town Council, Luker Avenue, Henley
These views, involving as they do the suggestion that unnatural vice is wrong, has provoked an artificial media storm, demanding his head pour encourager les autres. The BBC led the charge, and broadcast the “controversy” endlessly. Dr Goebbels would be very proud of the orchestrated “two-minute hate” now raging.
We are rather accustomed to these witchhunts, these days, in modern Britain. Those who do what they know to be wrong cannot stand the slightest reminder of their wrongdoing.
I was amused to read some churchy types solemnly pontificating about Mr Silvester’s supposed theological naivety. How embarassed they were! On the contrary the view he expresses is pretty solidly biblical. That it is unfashionable need not detain us.
Mr Silvester’s statements are thought-provoking. Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether, being unfashionable, he is right?
I had not, myself, seen the matter in these terms. I blamed the flooding on embezzlement and negligence. For I knew – what is fairly commonly known – that the authorities have long ceased to dredge the rivers, or to repair the flood defences properly. The money raised in tax to pay for this very necessary work has been diverted for other purposes. Until now, I had not thought beyond this, to the hand of God.
But maybe we should. For a nation with a corrupt ruling class, which is busy with its own pleasures and indifferent to the public weal, will indeed experience floods, fires, disasters of every sort. This is indeed the verdict of God on their corruption and selfishness; the one produces the latter. God has created a world in which vice usually has consequences; and thank God for that.
If those rulers were attentive to business, if they repaired the sea-defences and did the million duties which they are paid for, then such natural disasters would not occur, or would be merely signals for concerted public endeavour.
Instead the floods come every year, to much empty handwringing from the officials who should be preventing them, and from the BBC, which bears so great a responsibility for the climate of opinion in which dereliction of duty is presented as a virtue.
Isn’t this the mechanism where a nation that has abandoned God experiences the hand of God?
Of course the worst injuries affect ordinary people, and not those in power. So it has always been.
In the mean time we may congratulate David Silvester for his chance to tell the truth to the nation. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Nobody complained against King George VI when he announced a national day of prayer and we got some very unusual weather that enabled the troops to be brought back from Dunkirk.
Seriously? That’s why you folks are having all these floods like something out of the Green Knowe books? So basically, all the complaints about “climate change” are basically coverups, just like all the whining about New Orleans levees magically not working when they weren’t maintained?
So maybe the locals should just hire dredging out? It used to be the job of local organizations, from what I’ve read mentioned in books. Of course, there used to be a lot of local infighting, but it sounds like that couldn’t be worse than doing nothing, like now.
OTOH, it’s hard to see why you all pay such high taxes, if the government/s can’t even manage the basics. I’m guessing that not many of those neglecting these things could live anywhere in a flood plain.
Re: weather, the Redcoats and Canadians who burned Washington DC got caught in a tornado right afterward, which is not what you expect in Virginia or Maryland or anywhere around the Chesapeake. Although of course if we’d been doing a good job with the DC defenses, the good Lord wouldn’t have needed to send a rainstorm and tornado to minimize the damage. And yes, weather does seem to play a part fairly frequently in saving the butts of people who were losing, although possibly this is just people capitalizing on the fact that a bad weather situation makes it hard to keep at it, and a good weather situation makes it easier for beaten-up people to get the heck out.
Re: punishments, chastisements, and smiting — A lot of times, it’s true that people’s own neglect does the smiting. (Obligatory reference to Kipling’s poem, “Natural Theology.”) I really wouldn’t find it safe to say that God doesn’t do any smiting these days, as frankly that would be tempting God. (And He has command of Murphy’s Law as well as the natural laws, so He could make any comments like that very embarrassing.)
A fair number of US Episcopal churches housing various clerics who are spokesmen for various historically un-Christian opinions have been struck by lightning in the last few years, despite the presence of modern lightning rod technology; and one suffered an earthquake. This doesn’t seem to have given much pause for reflection, though I think it may have encouraged some of the discontented to depart a little quicker for denominations which remain Christian and Biblical. I think this may shed some light on why God doesn’t bother to smite people all that much these days; there’s no point smiting somebody if even lightning signs can’t penetrate their thick skin of self-consequence. As somebody among the Fathers said, the best He can do at that point is make their present life comfortable and long, because they’re not going to have much of a life in the next.
To be fair, it should be mentioned that Washington National Cathedral was built in an unstable-ish hill area where you’d have to be an idiot to build a cathedral — albeit the view looks cool. Other big churches in the DC area are built on big solid bedrock hills, which is another good reason why they didn’t sustain damage in the 2011 earthquake. But still.
Contrast this form of social martyrdom via the media for one’s beliefs to that experienced by believing Christians in Tertullian’s days in the amphitheater. Believers have to be prepared to endure new kinds of horrors today. Thanks for your blog and ‘projects’.
An interesting ‘take’. I personally believe that it’s the corruption that God hates, and actually He loves gays. How’s that for controversy…. 😉 – but still, yes, how else could God express His displeasure? Jestingly, an idea involving Him ‘smiting’ those in power would be attractive, but then He has supposedly placed them there Himself, hasn’t He?
I don’t think it is controversial in the slightest to claim that god hates corruption but loves gays. On the contrary, that seems entirely conformist and conventional – exactly what the establishment wants us to believe. The question you should ask, Tony, is whether you “personally believe” your god loves people whom the establishment hates? Such as “racists”, “homophobes”, the upholders of apartheid, Nazis, BNP, EDL, etc etc? 🙂
That’s not a gibe, by the way: I think there are a lot of people who solemnly repeat that they are being daring while in fact being entirely conventional and conformist. It’s like all those people in the 1960’s who shouted what rebels they were, and showed their “independent mindedness” by all buying jeans of the prescribed shade and style!
Never think in slogans. It rots the mind.
God certainly allows those in power to feel the effect of their vices. We merely hear less about it.
@Suburbanbanshee: I currently live not far from the sea. I have watched, with some disbelief and contempt, as the decaying sea defences have been patched up in various shoddy and incompetent ways. The older defences are now around 50 years old. The new ones consist of dumping large rocks on the beach; which, of course, are quickly undermined and will certainly be useless in a handful of years. Meanwhile villages in East Anglia are being allowed to fall into the sea while the paperpushers talk airily of “managed retreat”, and even threaten lawsuits on any local folk who try to build their own defences to protect their homes!
The floods began a while back, first a little, and then more every year. Nothing has been done to stop them.