Vladimir Khailo at Wem Baptist Church

01 March 2022

Original YT playout date: 23 September 2010
Duration: 1:20:45

A response to militant atheists who think it’s ok to fight religion by any means

 

The Amazing Atheist, an extreme anti-religious commentator on You Tube at the time this was originally

Vladimir and Maria Khailo during that trip to the UK.

posted, says that violence is sometimes the answer. Well, the recording in this video I’m appending is of Vladimir Khailo, a leader of the Independent (ie. unregistered with the state) Baptist Church in the Ukrainian SSR during the 1980s. Someone who knows all about what happened when the atheist regime of the Soviet Union decided to try to “heal” belief by the use of neuroleptic drugs and other psychological “treatments” – he was one of the more famous of their guinea pigs among the leaders of the persecuted Baptist Church. What happened to him and thousands more was violence perpetrated by a savagely zealous atheist state disguised and dressed up as medicine and social intervention.

A harrowing account

 

This is his harrowing story, well worth the listening. The guy in the high pitched voice translating for him was me. Thirty four years ago, I was his translator when he got out of the Soviet Union. This he obtained at the personal request to Gorbachev by Sakharov. One of the first things he did when he was freed was to come to Britain and thank the British churches for sticking up for him and remembering him when he was going through that hell. I had the great privilege of spending ten days in the company of this strong Christian leader who had faced the nastiest, cruellest things that communism had threatened believers with. Witness in his own skin to some of the worst systematic abuses perpetrated outside of wartime by a country on faultless citizens.

Everything changes, but anything can happen again

OK, in Russia, this tribulation pretty much stopped 34 years ago and the prayers of the church were answered. These days it is going strong in other parts of the world. And as long as atheists in America and other parts of the free world believe that violence is the answer, we can never be sure that it won’t be us in Vladimir’s position 34 years from now. Once again is it likely to be violence done to us in the guise of a moral State healing and having an ethical explanation for every piece of violence it will do to the believers.

Here we go again?

I am preparing this post on the day when Russia invaded Khailo’s country again, so we simply do not know what sorts of things now lie ahead for Ukrainians, including the believers of that country.  It looks like it is set to be a long conflict. And while this time it is not specifically Christians who are on the receiving end of the persecution, there are going to be the usual horrible effects that always happen when people place their political ideas above the Gospel truths of God.

Church details here: http://www.wembaptistchurch.co.uk/howtofindus.htm”
Continue reading “Vladimir Khailo at Wem Baptist Church”

What do the British call a television?

What do the British call a television?

The British native languages – especially Celtic.

Among the British languages we have Teledu in Welsh and in Breton the endearing term Skinwel, although despite Britannic it isn’t spoken in the UK. I couldn’t find the Cornish term, but another commentator has it. Nor Manx, although presumably they have them. Irish Gaelic is Teilifís, Scots Gaelic is telebhisean, and the Lowland Scots article in Wikipedia says “Televeesion” although I am not such if that’s official usage, and as far as the Old English word they use, I think we can be pretty sure that’s an anachronism.  As Abe Lincoln famously said, “don’t believe everything you read on the internet”. In that vein the Pictish term for TV is VOD as this enables you to “pict” what you like, when you like.

An early form of television from Chaucer’s time, needing a huge machine underneath to get it working and even then the screen was only in blue.  Legend has it that in the UK, in order to get that effect in “The Wizard of Oz”, they had to carry out your old black and white minstrel television and bring in a Sony Trinitron actually during the film.

British dialects of English

If you are thinking about British versions of English and the regional or slang terms, I can’t think of any regionalisms. “Telly” is an informal way of talking about television as a service or the actual set, and further slang words for the set exist such as “the box” or “the gogglebox”. The term “tube”, hwever, was not widely used in British English slang and is more of an Americanism which I am not sure many of us would have understood prior to YouTube popularising it.

Community languages

Immigrant communities in the UK exist and the Poles have telewizja, while the words in Indian languages are mainly recognisable as something sounding like the original Standard English word (ie Greek roots put together in such a way that Oedipus could have forgiven his father) but written in their own alphabets and there are quite a few of them.

You can probably get by in the British Isles just using “television”, this weird partly Greek partly Latin word which was put together in the UK by an inventor whose command of physics was clearly many metres per second better than his command of philology.

Continue reading “What do the British call a television?”

Warsaw’s Cross … Very!

Original YT playout date: 14 August 2010
Duration: 45:28

Here we see what is going on in Krakowskie Przedmiescie, the actions of the right wing group Solidarni 2010 and their demand to have the Smolensk disaster investigated as well as the victims properly remembered.

We see some of the atmosphere as activists engage with people on the streets and enter into discussion with someone who claimed that he was making private comments when as you will see he was de facto, whether he realised in or not, addressing a crowd of about 12-15 people. He asked for his comments not to be viewed as public statements, but that’s fine, because we can keep them just in my group of viewers which probably won’t get over a thousand views a year anyway, which is still pretty private by media standards.
Continue reading “Warsaw’s Cross … Very!”

The Unexpected Marathon (PV#31)

Original YT playout date: 6 June 2010
Duration: 37:15

There’s me going to the zoo forgetting entirely the fact that it’s marathon time, as it was never my original intent to be in Prague at a weekend.
Continue reading “The Unexpected Marathon (PV#31)”

Sophie’s Class visit the European Bison

20 December 2021

Original YT playout date: 29 May 2010
Duration: 49:29

This is a first ever on my channel – Sophie had a school trip to see European bison, deer, wolves, lynxes, wild boar and wild horses that there are in the Bialowiezska forest, which is the border between Poland and Belarus. It is the only place that the wisent, or European bison survives in its wild state, although some of them are in enclosures so that the public can look at them.

Sophie asked to take my old video camera with her and this is what she did, with no help from anybody. Even the postproduction I simply sat and took her instructions on the font for the titles, the colours, the choice of background music. could we have a film-maker in the making?
Continue reading “Sophie’s Class visit the European Bison”