Barney Zwartz, Tom Frame, militant aggressive bloggers and putting Christianity in a closet

(Above: De toren van Babel 1563 by Brueghel. Yet another kindly deed by a perverse god, making sure that only the likes of Chairman Rudd can understand Mandarin).

The thick red orange dust that blankets Sydney this morning - causing fuss and consternation amongst radio jocks and startled innocent bystanders - reminds me of the old days in the bush, when as children we used to run around the house laying towels up against the chinks in doors and windows, as the winds howled and the dust filtered inside no matter what we did.

The dust came from out Broken Hill way (today's dust has made the same journey) but reaching Sydney is a new wrinkle on a weather novelty act.

Of course it portends the end of the world as we know it (where would we be without alarmism and hysteria) and so what better time than to examine the state of religion in Australia.

Thanks to the new National Times format in the Fairfax rags, we in Sydney now have a chance to benefit from Melbourne Age writer Barney Zwartz broodings on religion, in this case titled Losing our religion.

The sermon for the day takes as its theme the notion that Australians might be losing their religion, and Zwartz dances on a pin as he explains that while the current generation might have lost their religion, previous generations had also misplaced it on occasions.

It's all fairly low key until Zwartz gets down to the nitty gritty with Anglican Bishop Tom Frame - whose new book Losing My Religion: Unbelief in Australia - sparked his column, and then the battle lines are drawn. Frame writes:

Apart from agitated, sometimes aggressive bloggers, most Australians seem to take a very casual and carefree attitude to religion. They are neither disinterested nor indifferent.

Ah yes, those agitated aggressive bloggers, the latest stain on civilization provided by the intertubes. If only they'd understand the best arguments for religion - weddings and funerals and christenings and op shops and prattling priests playing comical characters in film and television dramas.

When religion curtails their lifestyle or makes demands that exceed what is deemed reasonable, or when they require religious rites of passage or borrow religious ideas to regulate civil life, Australians can become very interested in religion. But the ever-increasing majority who describe themselves as ‘not religious’ without every saying what they mean by the phrase are still grateful that religion is available if ever they want it and thankful to the extent that what is on offer fulfils their social needs. Anzac Day commemorations are a good example of religion’s social utility.

Well sure I can sit through a church service without fainting or frothing at the mouth, though preferably one with some damned good music. But isn't it interesting to have confirmation that it is indeed an increasing majority who see themselves as "not religious" (which is of course not the same as "not spiritual").

Then comes the melancholy sigh. People, why have you forsaken us?

Even so, he (Frame) concedes that belief is declining, and says it is for the same reasons as in Britain and Europe: the ideas that there is no evidence for God, that religion is dangerous, that religion belonged to humanity’s infancy, and that it’s just one possible explanation among many.

Australians tend to see religion as a personal pursuit to be practised in private, and do not criticise another person’s religion unless they make universal claims or try to impose their beliefs. The drift to unbelief has not been the result of deep reflection so much as that belief has gradually become implausible.

Well yes, and could that have something to do with the extremes of Islam offering up the kind of conservative attitudes that these days you can only see in the extremes of American religion (it almost goes without saying that Glenn Beck is a late breaking convert to Mormonism). Or perhaps the quaint notion of Scientology as a religion, as opposed to a way of dodging taxes and corporate inspection, where a belief in alien creatures beneath volcanoes seems no more absurd than a belief in the parting of the seas or sundry miracles.

Almost inevitably Zwart'z column then turns into a sales pitch because at the end of the day religion relies on it being a kind of pyramid selling scheme, with Scientology just the latest to role out the model. It's a Tupperware party for the soul, a social ritual where asking questions can create difficulties and embarrassment.

Okay, so pitch the product. And give it to me in humble form because I'm inclined to be a truculent, aggressive blogger:

... what Christianity offers is no longer fashionable. Frame says it offers access to transcendent truths at a time when there are doubts about God and wariness about truth-claims. It offers forgiveness of sins at a time when personal moral failure is not a priority issue. It offers a glimpse into life’s purpose and destiny at a time when most Westerners are living longer with greater material abundance.

You mean there's doubts about an absent god who just set the clock ticking and then disappeared with no maintenance program or even a battery replacement scheme? You mean I can get forgiveness of sin so I can go out and sin again knowing I can still get pie in the sky later on? That's handy. And the indulgence only costs a weekly tithe. Cheaper than a Radio Rentals scheme. And finally you mean I get to heaven with 72 virgins? Or is that offer discontinued these days, or only happens if you buy a Sony?

Oh damn you, you western materialists with your material abundance, living life longer when you should be happy to die early and go to heaven quick stix to live with god (but what if there's no god or heaven. Hmm, might try to live until at least the end of the year).

So what else does the product offer?

It offers an approach to ethical living at a time when most people are more interested in maximising their pleasure and minimising their pain. It offers difficult truths about individual and institutional conduct at a time when most prefer easy political answers. In the face of this, many churches have lost their nerve and their distinctive message.

Yes yes, all that and more, including tea and scones and sympathy. Sure I'd much prefer to maximize my pain and minimize my pleasure (unless a cilice will do it both ways for you). Sure I'd prefer easy answers to difficult truths, especially when the truths involve figments of the human imagination.

But, but ... what if all these gods just happen to be convenient inventions of the human mind? And what's this talk about Christianity no longer being fashionable? Was it ever meant to be fashionable. And if churches have lost their nerve and their distinctive message, could that be because the tower of babel that is Christianity - with its factions and its feuds and its luxuriant schisms and discordant theologies and conflicting truths - has slowly made itself redundant. Is the product faulty, and has the warranty period expired?

Well naturally then we turn to the downside and risk management.

So what next? That is something we should worry about. The militant disbelievers – the atheist equivalent of religious fundamentalists – have a negative program to decry religious belief but not much of a positive one. As Frame says, they carefully ignore their lack of an articulated vision of what a godless world will look like.

Ah yes, the militant atheist, the creature designed to torment hapless souls like Christopher Pearson. Well strangely enough, there have been any number of articulated visions of what a godless world will look like. Provided by that we mean the Christian god. Because the Romans and the Greeks got along fine without that brand of tupperware, and even devised a few laws and moral philosophies Christians were happy to call their own.

And with the recent retreat of Christianity from fundamentalism in some parts of the world (though not in the United States) it's possible to contemplate how much better off a country like Iran might be without fundamentalist Islamic thinking. Meantime, if I wanted to articulate a vision, where better to look than Monty Python's The Meaning of Life?

LADY PRESENTER: Well, that's the end of the film. Now, here's the meaning of life. Thank you, Brigitte. M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations, and, finally, here are some completely gratuitous pictures of penises to annoy the censors and to hopefully spark some sort of controversy, which, it seems, is the only way, these days, to get the jaded, video-sated public off their fucking arses and back in the sodding cinema. Family entertainment bollocks!! What they want is filth: people doing things to each other with chainsaws during tupperware parties, babysitters being stabbed with knitting needles by gay presidential candidates, vigilante groups strangling chickens, armed bands of theatre critics exterminating mutant goats... Where's the fun in pictures? Oh, well, there we are. Here's the theme music. Goodnight.

Oops, the meaning of life seems to have gone a bit funny peculiar towards the end, but you get the drift. Back to those risk management issues:

“Although they profess few common values or shared virtues, have no comprehensive answers to the world’s problems and are offering no positive program of action to deal with greed and selfishness, betrayal and violence, they assert that a world without God is always and everywhere to be preferred. They ask that others trust their interpretations, receive their pledges and have faith in humanity. I believe that to accept such an invitation carries significant risk.”

Um, a couple of thousand years of Christianity, a couple of world wars and a Holocaust, all staged by European nations allegedly under the sway of Christianity, and we're talking about significant risk if we don't keep on keeping on with Christianity? So we should prefer the motley collection of faiths, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, as an alternative? But which brand, which model? Seeing as how each model asserts the other's engine will fail well within the first 100,000 kilometres.

Well perhaps it's time to have faith in humanity, and to put away childish things, and to think and act like responsible adults, because otherwise things will get grimmer and grimmer.

The outright hysteria and loonacy on view in the United States at the moment - driven by conservatives and fundamentalist religionists - is as alarming as the kind of madness to be found in the current President of Iran. Up against these loons, the average unbeliever seems like a modest defrocked Catholic priest more interested in sex, marriage, and the quiet life than a fanatic intent on deflowering Christian souls.

Not that we'll ever get rid of religion or the need of it amongst some. On that we can agree:

Nor does (Gary) Bouma (sociologist of religion) think Australians will be much swayed. He has no doubt that Australia’s future features a significant role for religion and spirituality, because the needs they address are core to humanity: hope and meaning and connections. After two generations that seemingly deserted spirituality, it is on the rise among young people, he says. Modern forms will "neither be weak, insipid nor irrelevant; nor will they dominate the landscape . . . Hope will continue to be nurtured and quietly celebrated - a shy hope in the heart."

As it should be. Let's hope that Christianity is kept in the closet, in much the same way as it once kept homosexuality in the closet and women in the kitchen. Let overt ostentatious religiosity continue to be a form of bad manners, rather than an offence against the state (though maybe we should keep the state option open for ratbag forms like Scientoloy. Go the French).

Let's keep to a state of open-minded apathy, and a sensible conviction that it's better just to rub along as best we can rather than kill someone as a kind of direct conversion to a cause, especially a religious cause. Let's take note of the madness of suicide bombers dying for a religion and pie in the sky, and wonder that in the west that kind of mad fanaticism was once deemed appropriate and necessary as Christian-professing imperialists roamed the earth.

And above all, wouldn't it be nice to retain a sense of humor when confronted by life's ironies and absurdities, a feature singularly lacking in fundamentalist religions. Take it away Monty:

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space.
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

(Below: oh yes, it looks like heaven to me).