Who Cares?

Last week CTV News reported on an Ipsos poll which looked at the relationship between buying habits and the ethical manufacturing of clothing. They surveyed over 18,500 people in 16 countries, including Canada and the United States. They reported that, “the majority of shoppers are willing to pay a bit more for clothes to help improve conditions in Third World garment factories”. I guess you could say that this was the good news. The bad news is that, “more than 40 percent strongly or somewhat agreed that they don’t really care what kind of conditions employees have to work in and just want choice and low cost.”

Canada fared a bit better than the average but still, among Canadian respondents, 36 percent said “they don’t care about factory conditions or feel any responsibility about where clothing is made.”

What does this mean? Well, it’s pretty simple really. It means that more than one out of every three people you work with … play with … bump into each day JUST DON’T CARE.

Of course there are questions about whether extra money paid would actually get to where it needs to go. There is always that issue and I believe our skepticism on that point is well deserved. But still, to take the position that you just don’t care! How can that be?

To further the indictment, the poll was conducted over a two week period in May shortly after weeks of horrendous visual images coming out of Bangladesh as rescue workers raced frantically to try and find and save any survivors from an eight-story factory building that had collapsed, killing more than 1,000 factory workers, making it the “worst garment-industry related disaster in history”.

There are a lot of people that think that our world is becoming a better and better place to be. They see the social, political and judicial changes taking place around us as victories for mankind that signal our upward and onward movement to become what we should be; that man is evolving and society is becoming more and more enlightened and …

I just don’t see it.

Lack of Ethics

Nova Scotia MLA Trevor Zinck changed his plea this week to guilty; guilty of fraud that is. I can’t help wondering why he waited so long thus wasting even more of the tax payers money. But Trevor seems to have a different take on the situation anyway saying that he hoped to maintain his seat and feels that his accomplishments outweigh his mistakes.

Trevor is part of an elite group. Rob Ford, the embattled Toronto mayor has been in the news for his escapades almost every week for months. It was revealed this week that Federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has been charging charities as much as 20 grand a pop for speaking engagements. Last week, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair blew through several stop signs pursued by a police cruiser with lights flashing. When he finally stopped and was approached by the officer, Mulcair is reported to have said, “Don’t you know who I am?” and then warned the officer that he would be in a lot of trouble. Later Thom said it was all just a ‘misunderstanding’. And then this week as well, interim mayor of Montreal, Michael Applebaum, who was brought in to clean up the corruption in the city, was arrested and is facing 14 charges including fraud and conspiracy.

I caught a very interesting interview on Canada AM yesterday morning. Veteran Montreal Gazette Columnist Henry Aubin who has covered the political scene in Montreal since the 1970s, as both a reporter and a columnist, was being interviewed about Applebaum’s arrest. When asked by Canada AM host Beverly Thomson what he made of the whole thing in terms of what it says, Henry responded with these words:

“It says that Montreal is deeply corrupt. It’s a pervasive syndrome. It doesn’t apply only to Montreal. It applies to the province’s third largest city Laval … where 21 out of 22 city councilors were found to have taken illegal money. It speaks to a broad sense of a lack of ethics … I’m not sure what the cause is. Perhaps the decline of the church has something to do with it. People don’t go to church anymore. They don’t learn ethics. Very often they come from dysfunctional families. Their parents don’t teach them ethics. They get their values from television and other popular media, so the traditional teaching of values has dissipated.”

His comments surprised me. I wasn’t expecting them. It’s not very often (understatement) that you hear anyone in the media willing to recognize the real reason for the disintegration of public life. One can argue that there was plenty of corruption long before the decline of the church in Quebec, or anywhere else, and surely there was. This kind of corruption is part of human nature. But, it is significant when you find someone in the secular media who is willing to admit that the present secular humanist society which we have been busy creating has in fact no foundation upon which to base, nor any real means of sustaining, any real ethical system. Expect things to get worse but don’t expect a whole lot of people to admit the real reason for it.

“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.”       2Tim 3:1-4

The Wonder of Water

We’ve been getting a lot of rain these days in these parts, and I know that a lot of people find it somewhat

depressing. However, it has me thinking about the wonder of it all. You know, we really should be mindful not to complain about something that is so absolutely essential to our very lives and to all life on our planet.

This time of the year we can look at the grass, trees and shrubs and we can appreciate how water serves to create such an amazing beautiful land that we are blessed to live in. But it is much more than that, isn’t it. Planet earth consists of three times as much water as it does land mass, but only about 1% of that water is readily available for human consumption. The human body, likewise, is about 60% water. Our brains are 70% water and we need to replace at least 2 litres of water every day in order to live and stay healthy. Working in our bodies, water dissolves essential minerals as well as oxygen. It further transports and distributes nutrients throughout our bodies. And of course water also cleanses our bodies ‘flushing’ out the waste.

And it isn’t as if we have other options. Water is absolutely distinct and totally unique. No other substance has these same ‘life giving’ properties. Science reveals that the water molecule is comprised of two hydrogen atoms attached to an oxygen atom and these things aren’t just ‘thrown together’ in some kind of haphazard way. The oxygen atom within the water molecule has a negative electrical charge while the two hydrogen atoms are positive. Further to that, they are attached in the shape of a V at a 104° angle. This is no accident but is obviously a key part of God’s whole design for life on this planet.

“… of all the temperatures in the universe from the –270°C (–454°F) of outer space to the tens of millions of degrees inside the hottest stars, water is liquid in a very narrow range. At normal atmospheric pressure, water is only liquid from 0–100°C (32–212°F). It should not then be surprising that Earth is the only place in the universe known to have liquid water. And this depends on having the right kind of star—neither too bright nor too dim, and thus neither too big nor too small. And the planet must be at the right distance from it.”   Dr Jonathan D. Sarfati, Ph.D

So, don’t get depressed by the rain. Open your eyes to see it for what it is – life giving – a gift from God. So wonderful that the Bible adopts it as a prime metaphor for eternal life.

(See for example  Jn 4:13,14 ; John 7:37-39 ; Rev 22:17)

Would you like to read more of the wonders of water?   Article by Jonathan Sarfati

Oh Henry

Abortionist Henry Morgentaler died last Tuesday, May 28^th at the age of 90. It made for a big news story. He is hailed by many as a great Canadian hero. In 2008 he received the Order of Canada. Due in large part to his efforts, Canada has been without an abortion law for the past 25 years. We are one of only three nations in the world in that category. The other two countries are China and North Korea (quite the company we keep eh!).

Upon receiving his award in 2008, Morgentaler proclaimed how proud he was to have been given the “opportunity coming from a war-torn Europe to realize my potential and my dream - that is to create a better and more humane society.” What a sad irony those words contain. What Henry did to those little unborn babies was every bit as violent as the ravages of the war in Europe and there is nothing ‘humane’ about the violent taking of innocent human lives.

However, on the weekend just prior to Morgentaler’s death, another story broke, coming out, of all places, China. It was the story of the remarkable rescue of a new born baby from a 4 inch sewer pipe. The little one had apparently been ‘flushed’ by his mother upon her giving birth to him but, amazingly, his cries were heard, and that led to the dramatic rescue of the child, placenta still attached, by local firefighters. Since then strangers have flooded the hospital with gifts and even adoption offers for the baby.

So, here’s the thing. The abortion crusaders have always argued that being ‘wanted’ is what determines the value of a life. But if that were actually true then these firefighters wouldn’t be heroes at all. At best they would have only been wasting their time.