Piers Akerman, David Penberthy, Steve Fielding, Christopher Hitchens and insights from the gentlest religion ...

It's catch up time, and there's some great news.

After a couple of weeks away - perhaps studying up on the best forms of academic citation so unruly quotes about climate change won't jump the shark - Akker Dakker is back, and is in a mean mood.

Yep, in his first outing this week (he's already got a new column up today), Piers Akerman tears into the Australian Muslim community with Muslims kick own goal in PR stunt. Much better than Piers Akerman kicks own goal with misquotation.

Actually truth to tell the column's mainly Akker Dakker quoting Alison Bevege at length, as she tears into the Islamics, so let's hope he's cited all the quotes in good style. Inverted commas flourish with wild abandon, and Akker Dakker goes on to quote several Islamics.

Next week a raging storm from Akker Dakker about prattling priests meddling in affairs of state, as is the regular habit of the Pellist heretics, and the nepotic Jensenist fundamentalists?

No need. Everything's sweet Jake:

Bevege reasonably argues that some might say that similar violent exhortations are contained in the Bible, and that religion is all in the interpretation. They are right. But the difference is that Western countries have a well-defined separation of church and state. The courts are secular. Priests are not judges.

Akker Dakker bash the Christians? In your dreams. As always, the eyepatch is donned with a swashbuckling piratical air and a monocular vision is the go.

But let's not stand in his way when it's Islamic whacking day.

Over at The Punch, David Penberthy seems to have a different, slightly more jaded view, as he rants For God's sake, can our MPs just stick to their day jobs:

I am not a violent person either but there was something about the creeping Jesus quality of Monday night’s show that had me wanting to kick a hole in the plasma, wondering angrily whether anyone can remember the French Revolution and the quaint conviction that the Church is over there, the State is over here, and never the twain shall meet.

It seems Steve Fielding, and Richard Dawkins, and life and love and pain and the whole damn heartburn you get from watching Q & A set him off, as good a reason for not watching Q & A as any you can imagine.

Steve Fielding, the Christian idiot par excellence, managed to deliver this howler in the session God, Science and Sanity:

STEVE FIELDING: Look, I'm not an expert on these issues whatsoever and I think people in Australia have different beliefs and their faith may driver them one way or the other. I actually believe in creationism. I think the Prime Minister does as well, so I suppose at the end of the day each person will come to their own conclusion on the issue, Tony.

And then had to apologise, as if it was anything other than another day at the office for the idiot who lost the savant tag long ago. Fielding also led with this:

In actual fact I first met the Prime Minister when I was first elected and it's funny, you know, he sat there, pulled out his Bible out of his top pocket and started to lecture me and give me a sermon and I thought, that's interesting. I've never done that to anyone and here's the Prime Minister, first meeting, never met the guy, he pulls out his Bible. He's probably still got it in his top pocket, I think.

Since he didn't seem to know that Rudd wasn't a creationist, I find this a little odd, but what the hell, even if he's over-egged the story, Rudd always wears his faith on his sleeve and in front of a camera outside a quaint little church. That set Penbers into a frothing, foaming frenzy - it seems he recently swung a crucifix in the federal parliament and kept on hitting Christians:

... I’m less troubled by the candid fundamentalism of Fielding than I am about the apparent fact that our Prime Minister has got a Bible handy in his top pocket for a behind-closed-doors sermon in the nation’s Parliament. Or his decision some months ago to become the chief cheerleader for Mary Mackillop, who was always going to be canonised anyway.

Or the fact that his opponent, Tony Abbott, sometimes seems undecided as to whether he wants to be the next prime minister or the next Pope.

But then in the standard way of journalists who get a little frightened when they get beyond the first set of breaking waves, and the rip gets them in its clutches, Penbers goes to water. Well you know what I mean, it's a surfing metaphor, you grommets:

In closing, this isn’t an attempt to ridicule Christianity either. It’s one of the gentlest of faiths.

Oh yes, from the centuries of crusades, up to Christian nations bunging on a couple of world wars, I've never come across a gentler faith. Come to think of it, can you imagine anything gentler than nuking a couple of towns, or firebombing Dresden and Tokyo? All in the name of a gentle god who wiped out humanity in what Tony likes to call a great big new flood ...

Penbers compounds the big suck up to Christians by ending with a finger point at the Taliban, Iran and Osama. Hellfire and brimstone, I wouldn't have to spend a second roaming through recent history to find equally splendid acts of destruction by Christians thinking that they're acting in the name of their god.

And as usual Penbers trails a get out of jail card by saying how offended he is by the rudeness of militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, but that's the fun thing about the militants. They give no quarter and expect none.

There's Christopher Hitchens hammering away in Yamani or Your life, A nasty attempt to coerce Danish newspapers into apologizing for the cartoons of Mohammed, and he makes Akker Dakker sound like a pussy cat as he stews about some astoundingly stupid and nasty documents landing on his desk.

It seems that a law firm in Saudi Arabia - the country that keeps on giving the world Wahhabism even if no one wants it, funded by the world's petro dollars, has been scribbling letters to newspapers in Scandinavia:

Over the past months my law firm has been contacted by several thousand descendants of the Prophet, who have learned about your newspaper's republication of the drawing, depicting their esteemed ancestor as a terrorist suicide bomber with a bomb in his turban.

As descendants of the Prophet, these individuals feel personally insulted, emotionally distressed and defamed by your newspaper's re-publication of the drawing. They have therefore retained my law firm and instructed me to approach you …

Naturally the first thought at loon pond is to provide a link to the relevant Danish cartoons, not because you haven't seen them already, and noted that they lack aesthetic refinement, but because you can still find them on the full to overflowing intertubes here. And long may they remain as a reminder of zealotry.

Hitchens of course goes into splendid fury about the supernatural world creeping into daily life, not to mention descendants of the Prophet taking an action for defamation (think how Christ's heirs, successors and assignees can spend a lifetime with lawyers):

.. it is in the material world that newspapers are published and in which laws and constitutions exist that inscribe their right to print material without censorship and intimidation. It is also in the material world that laws protect grandfathers and their granddaughters from homicidal religious maniacs. Are we to surrender these hard-won rights in favor of the hectic emotions of people who claim a distant kinship with a quasi-mythological figure who was uneasy with both reading and writing and preferred to recite? This is without precedent. Are we now to be dogged with lawsuits by those in whose veins the blood of Henry VIII, Mussolini, Columbus, or Ivan the Terrible can be alleged to flourish? (At least—unless you believe Dan Brown—this will not be such a problem in the case of the Virgin Mary.)

But the good thing about the militants is that they don't have an eye patch over one eye, like Akker Dakker, or a failure of nerve, like Penders. None of that stuff about Christians being gentle:

The thing would be ridiculous if it were not so hateful and had it not already managed to break the nerve of one Danish newspaper. In Ireland a short while ago, a law against blasphemy was passed, making it a crime to outrage the feelings not just of the country's disgraced and incriminated Roman Catholic Church but of all believers.

Trust the Irish. A fine of up to 25,000 euros for blasphemy produced headlines of a comical kind as Ireland's atheists test blasphemy law. If you want to read the list of twenty five blasphemous quotes the blasphemous Irish atheists conjured up, you can head off here. Typical of these reprobates to mock and test the law. The first one shows their style, which is to verge towards the exotically academic:

1. Jesus Christ, when asked if he was the son of God, in Matthew 26:64: “Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.” According to the Christian Bible, the Jewish chief priests and elders and council deemed this statement by Jesus to be blasphemous, and they sentenced Jesus to death for saying it.

Well of course Jesus was a blasphemer. Meanwhile, Hitchens is happy to smote anyone he finds wandering around in a fit of piety and repression:

The same pseudo-ecumenical tendency can be found in the annual attempt by Muslim states to get the United Nations to pass a resolution outlawing all attacks on religion. It's not enough that faith claims to be the solution to all problems. It is now demanded that such a preposterous claim be made immune from any inquiry, any critique, and any ridicule.

The Irish atheists managed to find a little irony in that issue, providing a bonus to their twenty five quotes with this:

... Micheal Martin, Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, opposing attempts by Islamic States to make defamation of religion a crime at UN level, 2009: “We believe that the concept of defamation of religion is not consistent with the promotion and protection of human rights. It can be used to justify arbitrary limitations on, or the denial of, freedom of expression. Indeed, Ireland considers that freedom of expression is a key and inherent element in the manifestation of freedom of thought and conscience and as such is complementary to freedom of religion or belief.” Just months after Minister Martin made this comment, his colleague Dermot Ahern introduced Ireland’s new blasphemy law.

There's nothing like religion to produce squawking, but let's finish with this insight from Steve Fielding:

STEVE FIELDING: Well, as I said, I believe that people, you know, started from being created. But, look, there are some other views out there about people evolving from other types of animals.

Winner Steve. Well played. Now let's keep funding those private schools who like to keep teaching creationism as an alternative science ...