Jolley Joe Hockey, Shrek, Japanese Robot Penguins, Anglicans and Witchcraft, a bit of spam, and they say loon pond isn't loonish enough ...

Sometimes it's important to step outside the usual, and marvel at the wonders of the world.

Like the Japanese building a Penguin Robot, complete with pipe.

Poor jolly Joe Hockey probably wishes he's a penguin with a pipe, after proposing regulation of banks in relation to interest rates, and copping this back hander from fellow Liberal Don Randall, who mistook his comrade's idea for a hat ... or worse:

Liberal parliamentary secretary Don Randall lampooned the idea as one typical of the Australian Greens.

‘‘This is just another one of their...lunatic fringe-type ideas,’’ he told reporters in Canberra. (Hockey cops friendly fire for 'lunatic' rates call).

Oh no, anything but Green below the skin, and of the watermelon kind. And possibly a wax eater in secret:

Never mind, a quick segue, and we're off to The Punch, Australia's most uppercut, overhand hook, quick jabbing blog site, and Catharine Lumby stirring up the possums with What about the freedom of the non-religious.

The right to practice religion is quite rightly a cherished freedom in liberal Western democracies. So it’s a little puzzling that some in the Catholic and Anglican church hierarchies are unwilling to extend exactly the same kind of freedom to NSW children who want to learn about secular approaches to ethics.

Naturally the Christians weren't having any of that sooth saying liberal clever dickery. The Jensenist heresy has been conducting a vigorous campaign against ethics classes, desperate to maintain monopoly control for what some students clearly consider an inferior product.

Here's the ACL getting agitated about it:

CL NSW Director David Hutt today said there is widespread community concern that the NSW Government has already made up its mind on the introduction of ethics classes in the Special Religious Education (SRE) time slot despite valid concerns about whether the classes would compete with SRE for enrolments and whether the course material conformed to community standards on ethics. (here)

Unfair competition!

So much for a free market for ideas ...

So what's vexing the Anglicans this week?

Eek. Witchcraft!

As we've been warning here on the pond, Halloween is quickly approaching, and it represents a deep existential crisis for suburban dwelling Christians, as explained in Catriona Corbett's Halloween: A Christian Perspective:

Around this time of year the party shops are stocking up on skeletons, fake carved pumpkins, witches outfits and much more. The spectre of Halloween looms large again. When my children were little I remember just wishing it would go away.

I know what she means. The pond is a fan of William Hughes Mearns:

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away

But back to deeper considerations:

I never really understood it very well. I knew it came over from the USA where it was big, I knew that from American sit coms. There was pressure from my kids for me to allow them to go trick or treating because they wanted to be part of the fun.

Fun? Surely not. Surely it should banned, banned quick and hard and clean, like a Bruce Willis movie?

Some Christians I knew saw it as very evil. I’m not sure why but I pretty much ignored it and some of my children did go out trick or treating, on some occasions with me following them for safety reasons.

Well yes, that's wise. Here in the inner city where the sophisticated leet elites frolic and gambol, we love to trick children. It's just one of many sins designed to bring down western civilisation by COB Friday.

I feel a bit weak about my lack of resolve to ban it but I also feel that by doing so and drawing a lot of attention to it, I would make it all the more attractive to them. They wanted to be part of the fun. In the USA I am told that you can just dress up as anything… just dress up as Superman, or Snow White, or some other creature. It’s just a party.

Just a party? Dress up as Snow White? Has this Corbett no idea of the dark sinister way that the wicked witch persecutes Snow White? Does she want her child a victim of witchcraft this haunted Halloween?

Superman? Has this Corbett no understanding that Superman is actually Satan and Lex Luthor a valiant defender of earth and Christianity? (yes, amazingly you can read this thesis here).

It does have a somewhat dark past though.

Somewhat dark? Corbett then produces a garbled history of Halloween, perhaps to remind the world that the spirit of the wiki can produce better information, especially if you go to the source here, rather than reading her cut and paste.

Fortunately, Corbett makes a rousing recovery, and gets to the point by the end of her piece:

I imagine there are a lot of parents caught in the same quandary as I was. Is this an issue big enough to make a fuss about? Is there a way to explain it to kids and maybe reclaim it or reinvent it for Christians. For an extreme negative view I quote from the Jeremiah Project website,

It (Halloween) does not have even one single redeeming virtue. It is custom born out of pagan superstition. It is a demon-inspired, devil-glorifying, occult festival. It is an evening holy unto evil, death, and divination. The Scriptures tells us to “Abstain from all appearance of evil.” [1Thess. 5:22]

Indeed. And these are the most important spiritual issues to be contemplated in our troubled times, and those frivolous secularists, like that wretched Catharine Lumby will no doubt seek to downplay such troubling, vexatious quandaries and quagmires, and by destroying special religious education classes, plunge a whole generation into demon-inspired, devil-glorifying occultism.

Ethics classes on the meaning of Halloween conducted from the Anglican point of view! That's what children desperately urgently need.

Perhaps they can also enquire into the shocking and disturbing news that jolly Joe Hockey is a covert green, though whether Shrek or the Hulk or one of the three witches in Macbeth remains to be sorted.

Phew, the end of the world better come by COB Friday or the pond might burst its banks ...

(Below: and now since loonish light headedness is all the go, here's a celebratory piece of spam which we just love because of the spelling errors, which varied from spam email to spam email. Click to enlarge to learn how you can pay your feedral taxes. Even assuming one in a million click on spam emails, could this email prompt even that one in a million to be so silly?)