Fred Nile, George Pell, Michael Jenkins, and hark, hear how the crickets sing like angels ...

(Above: a parable of a snake and a joker. See if you can pick the joker and the snake).

"They always disappoint", as Parker says to Wilson in one of my favourite lines in The Wire, as Wilson grapples with the notion that Carcetti's political ambitions wouldn't allow him to take state money for the sake of the schools and the kids.

Speaking of schools and kids, it seems like NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell has already had his Carcetti moment, breaking an election promise not to abandon the ethics classes introduced into state schools as an alternative to scripture classes.

Such is his desire to crunch public servants, O'Farrell folded like a well-worn deck of Queen's Slipper playing cards, when confronted by Fred Nile's power of veto in the upper house.

Nile of course was intent on proving once again that hypocrisy, double dealing, political knavery, blackmail and fear of competition are standard tools for Christians embarking on a career in politics.

And the stench is likely to get worse in the coming months, as Nile practices the black arts:

Mr Nile, who has indicated a general willingness to support government legislation, has submitted 21 bills to the government.

While he would not say which were being discussed, they include bills to repeal legislation allowing same-sex adoption, to ban the possession of X-rated films and to ban alcohol advertising. ''That co-operative spirit is well and truly in place,'' Mr Nile said. (O'Farrell bows to Nile over ethics).

The co-operative spirit!

Well that's the fanciest way we've heard to describe Barry O'Farrell playing a foot stool.

Pity the moderate genuinely liberal mug punters, fed up with the wretched Labor government, who took O'Farrell at his word, and helped deliver his landslide.

Some people have suggested O'Farrell would benefit from having taken ethics classes during his schooling, but truth to tell, they always disappoint.

It's to be expected of politicians, and Christian politicians are part of the same pack of cards ...

Of course the commentariat has been yammering about the ways that the Federal Government is under the onerous yoke of the Greens, and the independents, and how duplicitous and scheming and fanatical they are in getting their zealous puritanical way. We look forward to a plethora of columns about Nile and his devious, puritanical ways.

Hark, was that the sound of crickets?

(Above: found here).

Back in the day, the pond fondly remembers being hectored by an extremely obese Irish priest, who had absolutely no interest in theology, the bible or the redemption of students, as opposed to an unseemly interest in food and drink, and a desire to rush off to the golf course the moment the class ended. We were wedged somewhere between a Chinese restaurant lunch and the nineteenth hole ...

This unholy wretch did much to arouse the class's interest in atheism, but really it's a great pity that by persecuting the innocent, the religious will drive even more in atheism's direction.

A general appreciation of the assorted gods, and the ethical and moral structures some humans derive from them, is a good way to spend a lesson. Speaking of lunch, they might begin to understand why in various places, pigs and cows and lobsters and crabs are off the menu (and fish on a Friday) and women shouldn't climb for coconuts, nor play the didgeridoo ...

But the Niles of the world aren't interested in education, so much as in indoctrination and compulsion and a lack of choice, in a way that matches the earnest theological niceties of North Korea.

Oh dear, Godwin's Law gone again, but hey, the Nile contagion serves as a good introduction to our weekly tour of the Pellist heretics and the Jensenist nepotics.

If BAPH states feel left out, please insert your own favourite brand of heresy here, but truth to tell, be glad that for some strange reason, the worst of the religious worst reside in Sydney, Orstralia, you bloody beaut, and for that, if she ever comes back, god forgive Sydney.

As we always do, we start first with the week old Sunday Terror thoughts of Cardinal Pell, because they never age, in much the same way as rotting fish never stink for those born without a sense of smell.

Pell turns his keen mind to the General Financial Crisis and comes up with a startling borrowed insight:

Hector Tedeschi who is the president of the Vatican Bank recently claimed that one cause of European financial stagnation is the decline in the birth rate.

The instinctive reaction of many would be to exclaim that only a Catholic could come up with such a hare-brained idea. However, the reasons he gives bear examination.

Okay, I'm game. Only a Catholic could come up with such a hare-brained idea.

The thesis is that because the general populace hasn't been fucking and breeding for Jesus and the pope that the demand for a better lifestyle has been financed by debt.

Somehow Pell manages to conflate the issue of Italy's birth rate and economic situation (okay Berlusconi, that get out of jail card has just landed) and Europe's, and the United States', with Australia's birth rate (just under the replacement rate of 2.1) and its economic situation and never mind the role the resources boom might be playing.

Of course if the thesis were remotely likely to be true, the demographics of the United States would be in a precarious situation, but as the wiki proposes here, a combination of births and immigration has kept population growth in the USA ticking over at a relatively fast rate

At the end of this outburst of silliness, Pell attempts a glimmer of sanity:

Good commentators would argue that the so-called GFC resulted from human and corporate greed combined with a failure of regulation rather than changed birth dates. But Tedeschi has highlighted one important reason why European governments are struggling to escape from the crisis.

Of course Pell, being Catholic, doesn't mind an affluent lifestyle (oh yes, the marble stolen from the Roman ruins for St. Peters tells you that), so if you want a corrective enema berating affluence, materialism and vile atheistic secularism, you can take a plunge into the world of Phillip Jensen and The Irony of Affluence.

Sheesh, if we shake off the economic crisis, it's only to be forced in to Jensenist socialistic ways of sharing.

Never mind. Reading the Pellist screed reminded me of the constant hectoring of women - including my mother - in the old days by Catholic priests operating under orders from Rome.

The primary directive?

To abandon any contraception, and fuck and breed for the Pope. It was populate or perish, to make sure that there was plenty of fodder to drop money in the weekly envelope and keep the church expanding, like a vast, giant, corrupt Ponzi scheme.

As the planet heads to a population of nine billion, this is the best economic nostrum the Pellists can offer? We must breed even faster to indulge in an extravagant lifestyle? Oh and along the way, Pell offers absolution, perhaps only a few 'hail Mary's' to the bankers, and pins the blame on government:

The lack of growth in the economy was compensated by an expansion of credit and the governments who allowed or encouraged these almost unmanageable debts are even more culpable than the banks who loaned money to people with little possibility of repaying.

Oh dear, it seems like only yesterday that the Pellists and George Bush were such jolly good chums.

Hey nonny no, and with Phillip Jensen's warnings Pellist-bred affluence ringing in our ears, off we go to Sydney Anglican Michael Jensen's latest offering, Who can we believe?

Despite his very best Christian endeavours, Jensen sounds somewhat cynical about politicians and political spin (especially that red-headed atheist really unreal hussy, Julia Gillard).

So how to we know if a politician is genuine?

... it seems to me the example of his (Jesus's) life tells us at least this: that the person who speaks and acts as if God is the only important judge of their words and deeds is the person who we know is genuine.

So Fred Nile is genuine?

Oh dear, it gets even worse:

This then ought to be the pattern for Christian public speech, if we are to cut through the world-weary cynicism of our times and say something that is really real, and known to be really real.

Really truly rooly real? Like Julia Gillard or Barry O'Farrell on steroids?

What, and say that ethics classes are unfair competition, and they should be stamped out forthwith, and even those who have no interest in scripture classes should be punished, banished to the library, or dragooned, conscripted into scripture torment?

Well Jensen has an answer for that:

We should seek opportunities to speak the truth in times and places and in a manner that shows that we don’t have self-interest as a primary motive; or at least, that we would declare this truth even if it would cost us to do so.

Uh huh. Well we look forward to the Sydney Anglicans rising up as one, and declaring that self-interest isn't the primary motive in the matter of scripture v. ethics classes, and smoting Fred Nile mightily from a great and righteous height.

Hark, was that the sound of crickets?

(Below: and since Fred Nile has had the floor, why not a final Fred Nile cartoon? We of course do not refer to, nor draw any implications from, that story of researchers accessing porn to check out that pornography exists on the intertubes - Fred Nile caught in web porn scandal. We were shocked, perhaps even startled, to discover that there is indeed porn on the tubes).

Kate : The internet is really really great
Trekkie Monster: For porn
Kate: thanks to the NBN, I’ve got a fast connection so i don’t have to wait
Trekkie: For porn
Kate: Huh? There's always some new site...
Trekkie: For porn!
Kate: I browse all day and night
Trekkie: For porn!
Kate: It's like i’m surfing at the speed of light
Trekkie: For porn! (Avenue Q).

Forget it nerdy, pimply Jake Trekkie. It's Barry O'Farrell and Fred Nile town now, and abstaining from an R-rating for video games is just the beginning ...

Oh and it being Sunday, and since Cardinal Pell took the trouble to explain the real cause of the current financial crisis in the United States, how about some real credit where credit is due:

Specifically, they(the Republican party) did four things: cut taxes (with a heavy tilt toward the rich), waged two wars on the national credit card (one of which was against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no serious threat to America), passed a prescription drug benefit with no pay-for (the first entitlement in American history without a revenue source), and deregulated Wall Street (which helped turn the American economy into a casino and touched off the Great Recession). (here).

If only there was a god to help the United States of America, because these days the gop ain't no god, and the words of the Pellists and the Jensenists no use at all.