Human Rights and Christian faith

When I announced that we would be blogging for human rights today, someone called Bewilderbeast commented:
Please let’s remember human rights are just that, and religion should not enter the debate. All humans should be welcomed to debate their rights - and the absence of rights for so many - without feeling excluded on faith grounds. [...]

SA police arrest 1,500 in church

The South African Police now seem to be playing a game of “blame the victim” was we are seeing scenes that we have not seen since apartheid ended in 1994.The government has watched as Zimbabwe turns into a fascist dictatorship and hundreds of thousands of refugees have poured into South Africa. The SA government [...]

Consumerists, collectivists and welfarists

There is an interesting, if rather misleading, new way of categorising socio-economic groups and values in South Africa: as consumerists, collectivists and welfarists.

clipped from www.busrep.co.za

Strong economic growth has seen poorer people becoming less collectivist and more consumerist, and conversely wealthier citizens have come to care more about societal issues than individual prosperity.

The survey [...]

The sin of Sodom

“Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy” (Ezekiel 16:49).
Of the many Sodomite sins, neglecting the poor and focusing on self angered the Lord more than any others.
I was driving through Johannesburg a few days ago with [...]

Human tissue and organ transplants

Judging from the amount of money and publicity devoted to it, one would think that HIV/Aids was by far the most serious health problem in South Africa, but at a seminar on Organ and Tissue Transplants held at Unisa this week, it seems that other widespread problems are getting far too little attention, such as [...]

George Bizos: Odyssey to freedom

I’ve just finished reading George Bizos’s autobiography, Odyssey to freedom.
Actually it’s not so much an autobiography as a record of his court cases. Apart from the first hundred pages, which deal with his boyhood in Greece, and escape from the German occupation in a leaky boat with his father and seven New Zealand soldiers, most [...]

Moral regeneration

South Africa is not the only country that needs moral regneration, it seems.
I don’t much care what these women wore to go to court. It’s what they were in court for that shows that moral degeneration proceeds apace.

Ubuntu and moral regeneration

In South Africa we’ve been having an on/off debate about moral regeneration. A couple of days ago on talk radio — Morning Talk on SAFm, hosted by Xolani (or is it Cwelani? People seem to call him both) Gwala there was some guy saying that we should make spirituality rather than religion the basis [...]