Chris Patten, and Christians getting down with Confucius in much the same way as The Australian's anon is down with Mark Latham ...

(Above: bow down Christians, say hello to your new god).

Chris Patten will long be remembered as the man who handed over Hong Kong to the mainland Chinese government - earning such sobriquets as 'whore of the East', 'serpent' and 'criminal who would be condemned for a thousand generations' in the process (here at his wiki) - but those days are long gone ...

These days he turns up in The Australian furiously scribbling Let's forget the fire and brimstone, defending Christianity against the unseemly assault of the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens.

It seems these robust warriors are unfair and pick on easy targets - a man with a long beard watching over us, a rough equivalent to Father Christmas, Lapland reindeers and sacks of presents - while ignoring the atrocities of atheist totalitarians in the twentieth century.

Not Patten, who is firm but fair celebrating the Xmas myth while wailing about the failure of Christian right wing fundamentalist dogma - driving peculiar behaviour by the United States in the world - or Jewish fundamentalists obstructing peace in the middle east, or Islamic fundamentalists calling for a world caliphate ...

By golly, by the time you get to the middle of Patten's piece it's a litany of despair:

The strident and damaging dogmatism of fundamentalists of every stripe has a common feature: a truculent sense of grievance, rooted in fear and resentment of modernity. Christian fundamentalism in the US harks back to 19th-century populism and anti-intellectualism. Members of evangelical churches associate their beliefs with the rugged individualism of the early pioneers. They are contemptuous of the establishment.

Jewish fundamentalists believe Israel's critics are anti-Semitic or, in the case of Jewish opponents of Israel's harder-line policies, "self-hating Jews". Islamic fundamentalists reckon what the rest of us regard as the liberalising influence of technological progress and globalisation is a brash rerun of Western colonialism.

Yessiree Bob, I reckon with that assessment, Patten could fairly take his place alongside Dawkins and Hitchens. Not to put too fine a point on it, fundamentalism is fucked, and it's fucking the world ...

But hang on, what's this, late breaking bias in favour of religion?

For a happier New Year, we should listen to the core messages of all these great religions, above all the Confucian golden rule that we should never do to others what we would not like to be done to us. What religion should teach us is not how to hate, but to borrow again from Confucius how to develop societies that look after and welcome the poor, the stranger, and the oppressed.

Confucius? Forget Christ and follow Confucius? Is Confucianism an actual religion?

And if it is - and I'd love to see the reasoning - hang on, hang on, how on earth did Confucius get involved in a defence of Christianity and the other major religions?

Why bother with those other religions at all? Especially the stuff emanating from that wretched socialist Jesus ...

Why not just go with Confucianism, here, though it might involve a tad of ancestor worship and more than a dash of patriarchal thinking of the old school?

Confucius didn't give a toss in general about religion - the few concepts on view in the Analects are included in a peripheral way (you can get the nineteenth century translation by James Legge for free at Project Gutenberg here) - with the emphasis being on ethics and a kind of early humanism.

Confucius's moral system was based upon empathy and understanding others, rather than divinely ordained rules. To develop one's spontaneous responses of rén so that these could guide action intuitively was even better than living by the rules of yì. To cultivate one's attentiveness to rén one used another Confucian version of the Golden Rule: one must always treat others just as one would want others to treat oneself. Virtue, in this Confucian view, is based upon harmony with other people, produced through this type of ethical practice by a growing identification of the interests of self and other.

So let's get this right. According to Patten, religions should borrow from Confucius, who cared not a whit nor a toss for the likes of Jesus or Muhammad as a way of moving forward.

And an ancient Chinese ethical philosopher provides us with the best example of the core message of all the major religions?

Oops, can we just turn that around a little:

That is the most important message for everyone, atheists included, to take from the Christian story of Christmas.

The most important message for everyone, atheists included, to take from the Christian story of Christmas is to borrow from Confucius?

Well for befuddled thinking and lax metaphor thank the dear absent lord they're not borrowing from Patten.

Is this the result of too much time in the hot humid Hong Kong air and extensive abuse by the Chinese government?

Meanwhile, in another section of The Australian, the anonymous editorialist strikes again, and shows why the rag's deep 'anonymous' thinker hands down won the top loon pond award for the year.

If Patten lacks any logic, what to make of Those in agreement say aye?

First the anonymous scribbler boasts about how the rag turned down Mark Latham when it came to covering the election campaign, leaving the lad to do his work for the Nine network.

Uh huh. It also records his use of abusive private emails, and his notion that large parts of the electorate have low IQs. And who could fail to mention Latham's contribution to democracy, with his suggestion that a wasted vote is a sensible vote? Well The Australian might, because they discover the silk within the sandpaper, the pearl within the oyster:

Those familiar with Latham's style will know, however, that behind the invective there sometimes lurk pearls of wisdom. He acknowledges the crisis in political journalism and shares our amazement that the Fairfax broadsheets are reduced to quoting ancient US diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks to give an inside account of the Rudd government's collapse that their own staff reporters should have written.

Well said.

Oh dear. The crisis in political journalism? With Murdoch holding some 70% of the market share in Australia? WikiLeaks is suddenly an ancient source? But why then oh anal retentive rag do you spend so much time pouring over the tea leaves yourself?

If there was a psychiatrist's couch available for the media, The Australian would surely be revealed as having a deep Freudian complex, including Oedipal brooding, perhaps tending towards the sociopathic, and surely beyond the normal realm of bitterness at missing out on a few bits of the WikiLeaks scoop.

Sheesh, they'll even drag in Mark Latham, like a cat with a wayward bloodied rat, and triumphantly drop him on the mat for all to admire ...

Meanwhile, the rag currently has on the front page of its digital edition a little splash for WikiLeaks, "in depth latest news and analysis", but WikiLeaks gave Fairfax the heads up on some of its documents, leading to incredible continuing bile from The Australian, sprayed in the general direction of Fairfax, and not WikiLeaks, because after all who knows where your next story might be coming from.

That's how The Australian's editorialist can find comfort in having Mark Latham as a bedfellow, in much the same way as a Patten Christian can share a double bed with Confucius.

If you want curious examples of what is verging on the psychotic, why not have a read of Po-mo-mo! The Herald's editorial writer deconstructs Christmas, yet another part of Cut & Paste's ongoing war with Fairfax, or this bizarre piece Couldn't have put it any better ourselves, Mr Latham (except the bit about ancient Greece), which gives the world a gobbet of Latham from behind the paywall (and now we know how to behave when The Australian institutes its paywall, all in the name of fair dealing and criticism of course), and so on and so forth, which all invariably boil down to the way the Oz didn't get dished the dirt, and so must bray about Fairfax.

The internecine war has attracted the attention of others - More Fairfax-News Limited tension over WikiLeaks provides a couple of key links, along with a link to James Massola's extremely strange piece WikiLeaks revelations about Kevin Rudd put journalist back into the fray.

Massola will be remembered as the righteous crusade who unmasked the anon blogger Grog, as he boasted in Why I unmasked blogger Grog. His piece about Philip Dorling is extraordinary, not for what it reveals about Dorling but for what it reveals about Massola, The Australian and the state of paranoid fortifications within the rag ...

So isn't it about time that Massola unmasked the anonymous editorialist at The Australian, so we might discover who thinks the rag should lie down with that lamb Mark Latham on the matter of Fairfax?

Or does Christ Mitchell scribble all the bizarre musings of 'anonymous' himself?

And in much the same way as the Christian must become a Confucian to find the way forward, is The Australian joining with the hacktivists and anarchists of Anonymous to spread the one true, enlightened, and righteous interpretation of WikiLeaks? That it's ancient, and no substitute for The Australian's brand of bilious journalism?

Who knows, but surely, even if it's good for therapeutic purposes, helping emotional needs, the tone of The Australian's anonymous editorial needs to change ...

Or do they want to make 2011 another glorious year, winning the loon pond award for peculiar scribbling by Australia day?

Hmm, must consult Confucius ...

(Below: pick The Australian's anonymous editorialist?)