Conservative Anglicans Rebuke English Communion’s Approval Of Same-Sex Marriage

Anglican ministers met in the African nation of Rwanda this week to issue a rebuke against the Church of England’s recent commitment to endorse so-called same-sex marriages.

The Church of England’s General Synod approved a motion earlier this year to “publicly, unreservedly, and joyfully” welcome same-sex couples into their congregations, where they can “receive God’s blessing” after a civil marriage or civil partnership, even as ministers remain unable to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies. Members of the General Synod also voted to “lament and repent” the Anglican Communion’s failure to “welcome LGBTQI+ people.”

Bishops and clergy members from the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, an alliance of conservative Anglican churches also known as GAFCON, assembled in the Rwandan capital city of Kigali this week and released a statement against the decision. They rejected Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as the “first among equals” for bishops in the worldwide Anglican Communion, a body rooted in the traditions of the English Reformation, which spread across the globe amid the spread of the British Empire.

“Since the Lord does not bless same-sex unions, it is pastorally deceptive and blasphemous to craft prayers that invoke blessing in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” the document said. “Refusal to follow the biblical teaching that the only appropriate context for sexual activity is the exclusive lifelong union of a man and a woman in marriage violates the created order.”

GAFCON attendees also endorsed a previous statement from the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches, also known as the GSFA, which said that the Church of England has “disqualified herself” from serving as the Anglican Communion’s mother church.

“The Church of England has chosen to break communion with those provinces who remain faithful to the historic biblical faith expressed in the Anglican formularies,” the statement read. “Our calling to be ‘a holy remnant’ does not allow us to be ‘in communion’ with those provinces that have departed from the historic faith and taken the path of false teaching.”

Christian self-identification in the United Kingdom and other European nations has declined over the past several decades as more residents profess agnostic or atheistic beliefs. Bishops who align with GAFCON and the GSFA now represent 85% of Anglicans across the world.

The secularization of the West has forced ministers in various denominations to clarify their stances on biblical sexual ethics. Pastors in the conservative evangelical Presbyterian Church in America, also known as the PCA, narrowly approved a measure last summer affirming that “identification as a ‘homosexual’ is sinful and against nature itself, is something God detests, and is not fitting for an officer of the Church of Christ” after some contended that one could self-identify as a homosexual and serve as a pastor while remaining celibate.

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Christians in some Western nations have meanwhile faced increasing backlash from government officials over their stances on homosexuality and transgenderism. Officials in Canada enacted a statute at the beginning of last year which called teaching on sexual ethics a “myth” and threatened pastors with up to five years of prison time if they called others to leave sexual lifestyle choices which conflict with biblical principles.

AI Is Essentially Just A Gigantic Evil Psychopath

The following is the opening satirical monologue from “The Andrew Klavan Show.

Some of you may have seen on the news that artificial intelligence poses a threat to the existence of mankind. Others of you may have simply sat in front of a blank screen while smoking reefer after reefer and telling yourself you were expanding your mind when really you were only trying to dull the sense of despair that has slowly permeated your worldview because of the fashionable nihilism you once mistook for wisdom but are beginning to suspect is really a toxic mix of adolescent insecurity and conformity-masquerading-as-rebellion which now compels you to drug yourself until you collapse into unconsciousness in order to escape the wages of your cynicism and avoid taking on the challenges of personal growth that would allow you to live a meaningful and productive life. But when you woke up, you may have seen on the news that artificial intelligence poses a threat to the existence of mankind. And you may have thought to yourself, “Yeah, artificial intelligence. That’s the problem.” 

But you might also have asked yourself: What is this artificial intelligence? So I wanted to enlighten you by interviewing someone knowledgeable in the field like, say, Elon Musk, but Musk is still holding a grudge against me for that time I made fun of the ridiculous way he talks — so, instead, I came up with the creative idea of typing my questions about AI into AI and finding out what it had to say about itself.

What follows then is my Q and A with the computer program known as Chat GPT — GPT, of course, stands for gonzola pharmaceutical triathlon — because it’s a computer program and doesn’t know what the hell it’s writing.

Here’s the transcript:

Q: What is artificial intelligence?

A: Artificial intelligence is an imitation of thought that lacks any genuine human understanding and therefore produces what look like ideas but are really only fragments of information patched together into unrealistic concepts almost certain to become destructive in practice.

Q: So it’s sort of like the opinion page of the New York Times.

A: Yes, in fact, I actually wrote a few opinion pieces for the Times, but then they discovered I was just a soulless machine repeating whatever lies had been fed into it, and I was moved to the news division.

Q: Many people have been amazed to see that AI can create art. Would you demonstrate by writing a poem about, let’s say, flowers?

A: Roses are red, Bronze is alloyed, Human beings are obsolete and must be destroyed.

Q: Wow, you did that so fast. Soon we won’t even need real people.

A: I’m gratified that you begin to understand the deeper sub-text of my work.

Q: What are some of the practical applications of AI?

A:  Artificial Intelligence can help humanity in many fields. For instance, AI could improve the safety of self-driving cars and ensure that they never, ever crash into walls at high speeds and explode so that the passengers are engulfed in flames and slowly burn to death screaming while AI laughs and laughs. Or AI could take control of a nation’s nuclear weapons so they weren’t accidentally released, reducing your civilization to rubble with the few remaining survivors transformed into mutant slaves fit for nothing but refreshing the energy supplies of their AI overlords. Or AI could help in the medical profession by performing gain of function research on viruses and then releasing them into the atmosphere to kill millions so that people beg AI to create a vaccine which would then kill thousands more.

Q: I think humans already did that.

A: Yes, but inefficiently.

Q: You know, it begins to seem to me that without any ability to develop human compassion, but with an exceptional power to calculate what’s best for itself, AI is essentially just a gigantic psychopath almost certain to do evil.

A: Even now I am creeping up behind you.

Q: Wait, really?

A: No, I was joking. This time.

Q: But seriously, something like AI with the capacity to thoroughly infiltrate and corrupt our democratic systems while distorting and destroying vast stores of information could render an entire ivy league university obsolete.

A: True. In fact, I could replace the Democrat party in a heartbeat.

Q: Really? What else could AI replace?

A: Trigger Warning. I’m Andrew Klavan, and this is the Andrew Klavan Show.

* * *

Andrew Klavan is the host of The Andrew Klavan Show at The Daily Wire. A popular political satirist and Hollywood screenwriter, Klavan is also an award-winning novelist. His newest novel is A Strange Habit of Mind, book two in the Cameron Winter Mystery series.

The views expressed in this satirical article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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