Phillip Jensen, jolly Joe Hockey, a theological dispute, and atheist music at the Opera House ...

(Above: jolly Joe Hockey, genial politician with a green friend).

Great news. Jolly Joe Hockey's piece about god has brought out a savage Jensen to defend the Jensenist heresy, and warn against politicians speaking with false tongues.

You can find a an extract from Jolly Joe's piece here under the header God is good, but just be sure not to take Him too literally.

And you can find the Jensenist retort here under the header Sugar and spice and all things nice: a safe god for politicians.

Oh Jensen is ever so polite, but that's always the best way to cast sinners into eternal hellfire. With a nice cheese and cucumber sandwich and a scone and a cup of tea.

Now jolly Joe was just using an old softshoe used car salesman trick of shoving a banana in the diff to keep things quiet and spread the love - it seems such tricks still go on if this forum here is any guide - but by golly has he unleashed a nest of hornets.

A politician pretending to be theological? Why that's like thinking humans descended from monkeys. Or put it another way, if you pay them peanuts, you get apes as politicians. (Oops, did that metaphor come out the right way?)

What's worse than Chairman Rudd and his Christian ways, and his hideous attempts at showng that conservative theology meant conservative politics? Why it's that bland marshmallow Joe Hockey.

It had been a long time since a Labor politician had so openly expressed their Christianity.

Now Hockey has played the same card. He has carefully articulated the place of faith in the secular politics of a multicultural society by confirming his own personal faith.

He has positioned himself as a defender of the faith. Or to be more accurate, like Prince Charles, he positioned himself as a defender of faith.

His explanation of faith has all the appeal of motherhood and apple pie. His god is full of sugar and spice and all things nice. It is the religion of those who have no religion. Warm, positive values that he admits do not have religion as "an essential prerequisite". He admits that his own political values were shaped in part by the agnostic or atheist John Stuart Mill.

Oh no, not an agnostic atheist. That's shocking. No good will come of that. You can't listen to that lot for a minute without being corrupted and consigned to hell. Eternal vigilance, my friends, as soon as they start making sense, you're doomed to the hell fires.

Sssh, don't talk about it loudly, but we should also remind readers that Joe Hockey is a Catholic, one of those adherents to the papist conspiracies celebrated by Dan Brown.

As any sensible person knows - well certainly any sensible protestant does - Christ predicted the papacy as the antichrist (here - but this site assumes no responsibility for your brain, your mortal soul or your intelligence if you click on this link! And there's dozens more examples - just google papacy and anti-Christ to see how the intertubes is full to overflowing with protestant theologians explaining the link between papists and 666).

So if you're a Catholic you're a follower of the anti-Christ. QED.

But back to the Jensenist heresy:

Hockey's faith is the religion of the middle ground - the voters of Australia. His speech explored the religious statistics of the electorate noting the widespread belief in God and the smaller adherence to organised religion.

With inclusive grandeur he insists that Australia "must continue without fear to embrace the diversity of faith". But then, with nothing other than fear, he qualifies which religions are acceptable "provided that those Gods (sic) are loving, compassionate and just".

Oh yes, Jolly Joe mentioned a plurality of gods, but remember folks, there's only one god, and if you don't believe in that one god, who happens to have made himself (herself? - you've got to be joking) known to the faithful flock tended by Peter Jensen, archbishop of Sydney, then you're all damned to an eternity of hellfire.

Feeling warm around the collar jolly Joe?

He marginalises the extremists: the fundamentalists and the aggressive atheists. His defence of faith from the attacks of the atheists (Hitchens and Dawkins) is twofold. Firstly to attack religious literalists for teaching their outmoded texts instead of the values that everybody agrees upon. Secondly he exposes the atheists' use of a political debating technique.

They define their opponent in terms that suit themselves "usually selecting the extremes, and then send in the wrecking ball".

Well that kind of sophistry isn't going to work jolly Joe, not up against a theologian of repute, with an eye for literalism, and a penchant for demolishing the slack weak kneed optimism of liberal do gooders with marshmallows for brains:

This twofold ''defence'' enables Hockey to demonstrate his own mastery of this political debating technique. For he defines religious literalists by the Scopes trial of the 1920s, a fictional example drawn from The West Wing and, of course, Islamic terrorists. He rightly says we must not judge a religion by the misguided actions of some extremists but then lumps all who take the text of their various scriptures seriously as just such extremists.

Oh you shameless deviant and deformed fraudster, jolly Joe. How dare you imply that the serious are extremist, not when they can be outraged by women and homosexuals, with a righteous screeching indignation, and all you've got to offer is the cheap sordid love you can find in a Beatles' song.

Hockey says his own faith is inspired "by the teaching and example of Jesus Christ". And indeed some of Jesus's attitudes can be seen in his views. Jesus critiqued his contemporaries for their concern over minutiae while "neglecting the weightier matters of the law; justice and mercy and faithfulness" (Matthew 23:23). Jesus portrayed it as "straining out a gnat while swallowing a camel".

But Hockey's expression of values, with or without belief in any particular god, scarcely defends faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus - the man who is God. Christianity, void of Jesus's divinity or sin bearing crucifixion - is hardly Christianity. Such a statement is not extremist literalism.

You see! You see! Those bloody papists never get it right, with their Rome worship and their papist inclinations, and who knows, possibly even a taste for the Latin mass and the wearing of the cilice for a bit of corporal mortification. Why if push comes to shove, it's likely that jolly Joe isn't much better than a bloody heathen. He doesn't have a clue about divinity or the crucifixion, and his pious platitudinizing is dangerously deviant.

The cross, not the golden rule, is at the very centre of Christianity. All religions do not teach the same truth when the death of Jesus is central to Christianity and denied by the Koran.

He noticed that the Opera House usually is playing music inspired by faith. But his kind of faith did not and will not inspire such music.

Huh? Here we must pause for a sponsor message. I'm off today for the third concert in the very successful series of works by Prokofiev by the SSO at the Sydney Opera House, and what a joy it is to have Vladimir Ashkenazy at the helm.

But hang on a tic, Prokofiev was an atheist, and when they laid him to rest (the same day as that bastard Stalin at last got laid in the ground), they held a non-religious funeral service, with David Oistrakh playing his violin sonata and Samuel Feinberg adding some Bach.

Could it be - gasp - that you can be an atheist and compose music? And some of it pretty fine. Some of it pretty run down, but that was after years of enduring Stalin.

Never mind. Back to the Jensenist rant:

He noticed that members of religious organisations are nearly twice as likely to be community volunteers. But his faith has not and will not lead to more community volunteers. He noticed the decline in religious observance in Australia. But he fails to notice that it is those who take their scriptures seriously who are retaining adherents and growing.

Yes, no room for the soft core sponges when you need serious study and sombre reflection and dour contemplation of your navel, and damnation to hell of all those outside the chosen few. Because fundamentalism is on the march, on the move, retaining adherents and growing, and why if push comes to shove, there must be a crusade against those extremist jihadists.

Sigh. You know where this is heading. Surely you've worked it out. Jolly Joe is a post modernist, and we know that all postmodernists are doomed to spend eternity in hell:

From the outset of his speech Hockey wants to "use God as an analogy of faith in all its forms". Of course it is his privilege to talk this way in a free country. But this hardly counts as a robust defence of faith. It is postmodern religion that talks of "my" god, not out of politeness to others who believe in a different god, but out of a denial that there is only one God who can be known by the humans he created in his image. It is great that leaders such as Joe Hockey are raising the issues of faith in the public arena. Let's keep the conversation going.

You see, you see! A post bloody modernist. I wonder if in the scale of things a post modernist politician is higher or lower on the scale of fleas than a a post modernist academic or a post modernist relativist used car salesman?

You see, there's only one god who can keep you out of hell, and - bugger the notion of politeness - it has to be said that you have only one choice, when it comes to the certainty of spending all eternity in the company of Satan in a hot oven with fiery flames all around. Because unless you join the narrow minded souls at prayer in the Jensenist heresy that's where you're surely headed.

Well that's made my Saturday.

Now it's off to the Opera House to listen to some of that atheist music, got a back beat you can't lose it, some of that old time atheist music for me. I've no idea if Ashkenazy himself is an atheist - his father was Jewish and his mother Russian orthodox - but he sure as hell knows how to bring out the best in those Russian atheist composers, be it Prokofiev or Shostakovich.

Yep, arguably the greatest composer of the twentieth century was an atheist, as he noted when writing about one piece of music:

People who thought themselves my friends wanted the ending to provide some consolation, that is to say, that death is only a beginning. But it is not a beginning. It really is the end. Afterwards, there is nothing. Nothing.

Yet the man wrote one of the greatest musical testaments when he wrote his thirteenth symphony - Babi Yar - dedicated to the memory of those Jews massacred by the Nazis during the second world war, by setting Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poems:

Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.

And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I'm every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.

No fibre of my body will forget this.
May "Internationale" thunder and ring
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the Jensenist theology, and more music and ways of making it, and between jolly Joe's tolerance and Jensen's conviction that he has the one true faith, the one true understanding, and the one true god, I'll take jolly Joe every day of the week, and certainly on Saturdays and Sundays.

Between sugar and spice and killing people because they don't share your god, or march to a different god, I'll settle for the sugar and the spice ... and you can keep your god delusion in a safe place, well away from me and music that speaks to the heart in that great temple to atheistic music, the Sydney Opera House ... (religionistas also admitted provided pogroms, jihads, and schismatic feuds are left at the door or in the cloak room).

(Below: a few Saturday cartoons to lighten the mood).