Jodie McNeill, the Jensen heresy, the worship of nature amongst the commentariat, and a dash of Ricky Gervaise along with dust radio ...

(Above: an inspired piece of Anglican design, worth celebrating before it shuffles away from the top of the magic faraway tree, which is here).

It being a quiet day on the pond, we thought we'd drop in on the Sydney Anglicans (sometimes cruelly known as the nepotic Calvinist Jensenist heretics) to see how things were going ...

And it seems there's turbulence in the air, with Ricky Gervais causing shock, horror and consternation, and insulting millions of American Christians by recycling Bunuel's old joke about thanking god for being an atheist (and who knows where Bunuel borrowed it from, though he did say it was an accidental aphorism, here, and retreated from it).

I'm not sure exactly why announcing you're an atheist is an insult, since I'm never insulted when someone tells me that they're a Christian or believes in Santa Claus or the Easter bunny.

Not to worry, the Anglicans provide links to Gervais on Not Mocking Christians, and Ricky Gervais's fundamental error was to attack God, a piece by John Harlow that escaped The Times paywall, and turned up like a starving refugee in search of food and readers in The Australian. Harlow concludes resoundingly:

God, apparently, cannot take a joke in America.

So far, so good for a Friday - must we always eat fish on Friday - but then I made the fatal mistake of clicking on a banner dubbed The challenges of a post-Christian society, alarmingly illustrated with a couple of battered boiled eggs (as above), and it led me straight to Jodie McNeill's When "thinking of you" is not enough ...

In it, McNeill spends his time rueing the absence of prayer in response to recent problems:

There was a time in our distant past that people used to say “we’re praying for you”, rather than “we’re thinking of you”. We knew that the prayers of those who cared would make a concrete impact on peoples’ lives as those saints of old raised concerns with their heavenly Father.

I'm not sure exactly how these prayers made a concrete impact on people's lives in the recent Queensland floods, seeing as how prayers don't seem to have stopped Queensland flooding in the past and are unlikely to stop Queensland flooding in the future (and as for bushfires, the absent god in recent years has been truly derelict and unresponsive).

McNeill seems to think prayers, rather than dams, or levees or flood mitigation or living with it might just be the solution:

The impact of having a believer bring prayers to their heavenly Father is an activity that reaps a double-reward. The prayers themselves bring concrete outcomes, and the announcement of those prayers to unbelievers is a bold demonstration and testimony to the love and care of the believers who graciously bring the requests of their friends, family and community to their heavenly Father.

If only we had more Christian politicians, journalists and everyday believers who would be brave enough to say “we’re praying for you.” Imagine the double impact!

Is this a bit like the double impact of the Maharishi and his TM and his plans to build a kind of yoghic coherent world consciousness, as outlined in detail in his wiki here?

Well no doubt prayers provide a warming sense of personal comfort, but if someone said they were praying for me, rather than mucking in and helping out, I'd be inclined to think of them as tossers. (No doubt Christians will unite and be willingly tithed by the government to send a little of their cash Queensland's way).

But where is the double impact, where are the concrete outcomes that are supposed to be derived from prayers? Did they bring an end to a couple of world wars, or the spotfire wars that have plagued the planet in the past couple of decades, or the starvation and misery and the suffering and the ...

Well it's an old argument, the power of prayer, and whose praying to the right god, and so who has the most influence and pulls the right results for the right team (next week Jews versus Islamics in a prayer down for peace in the middle east, strictly on Israel's terms), but McNeill faces an even bigger problem. You see, all the commentariat commentators on the right - even those who boast of a natural affinity with Christianity - have shown disturbing signs of being fearing, loving gaia worshippers.

Gerard Henderson provided the most perfect summary:

There has always been droughts and bushfires and floods in Australia, before and after European settlement. There always will be. If Sandell does not want to live in this kind of world, then the only solution is personal emigration. The problem is that most countries, over the ages, have experienced weather disasters. It's called nature. (Here).

Yep, it's not called god, it's called nature, gaia if you will.

In the old days, it would have been called acts of god, and I believe the insurance industry sometimes still prefers this quaint phrase as a convenient get out, gotcha clause, to avoid any fiscal responsibility for the imponderable workings of the deity (and/or deities, including but not limited to the god at work in your own parish).

Who'd have thunk that Henderson was a believer in gaia? Even Miranda the Devine seems to think that it's nature to blame:

We have been so busy fretting about carbon dioxide that we have neglected the real challenge -- how to adapt and protect ourselves from natural disasters. (here).

She trusts not in god, but in dams, and a jolly good greenie bashing, perhaps with hockey sticks.

Janet Albrechtsen was a little more evasive, calling the floods a calamity, (here), which leaves it open as to whether god or nature is the responsible party for the calamity, but she did seem keen that political leaders develop empathy rather than hold a prayer meeting. Yes, Dame Slap talking of empathy, in a weirdly sick touchie feelie kind of way ...

And in his couple of pieces, the grumpy curmudgeonly Paul Sheehan seems to think that Australia has been gushing rivers of blood and ruining the planet:

Dirt charts the history of soil depletion from ancient Greece to modern times. A depressing pattern sets in and never changes. When societies exhaust their topsoil, they collapse or are forced to move. The age of mechanisation merely sped up the process. (here)

Sheehan's solution to the natural disaster isn't a prayer meeting:

Backyard gardens. Planting fruit trees and other edibles in common areas on street fronts. Chicken coops ...

Grow local. Buy local. Eat local ... Rethink the back yard and the front street. Because food shock is coming.

Oh sweet absent lord, the world is coming to an end, must go get myself some Chicken Littles so that they'll run around in the back yard squawking and clucking and killing off worms.

It turns out that the commentariat commentators are useless, alternately blaming humanity or nature, so we had to turn to an infallible guide, one Ron Fraser in Queensland Floods Worsen:

This brings to mind the prophecy for our day, “… I caused it to rain upon one city, and I caused it to not rain upon another city; one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered” (Amos 4:7). The irony is that so much of Australia’s northeast was not so long ago in the grip of record drought, giving even greater emphasis to Amos’s prophecy.

How many will consider that the sins of a nation will bring a penalty from our Maker in the form of such catastrophes?

At last, someone ready to call it as it is, and bring back the good old days of hellfire, damnation, brimstone and thunder, and Elmer Gantry. Someone in to the book of revelation and the beast and the lake of fire burning with brimstone and the breath of Jehovah like a stream of brimstone (and there's more here on fire and brimstone). Sock it to us Ron:

Few indeed.

Few will truly heed any warning that rings of a flood of publicly declared “biblical proportions” being caused by biblically specified reasons, the results being predestined according to inerrant Bible prophecy.

Yes, few will heed until our Creator turns up the heat by imposing more and increasingly severe penalties of “biblical proportions” for the generations of rebellion against His law to force them to listen.

Oh you can hear the blood of the Sydney Anglicans quickening in their veins as they hear Ron's call to arms:

But, thank God that the floods and the fires in Australia are just one of many great indicators that our Creator has had enough—enough of mankind’s wayward rebellion against the very reason for which they were created. Thank God indeed that He will soon directly intervene to impose His government of peace and global unity for the good of all mankind! (Isaiah 9:6-7). Then humankind will understand its truly incredible potential and will move en masse to embrace it. But, only after it has suffered terribly for rebellion against its own Creator.

Ron goes on to plug a book - there's always a book to plug, and tithes to collect, and donations to seek, to sustain the mission and the cause - but it took me right back to the good old days when Garner Ted Armstrong, son of Herbert W. Armstrong, used to pollute country radio like a cockroach with The World Tomorrow, and there was a feuding and a fussing and a fighting between daddy and son, and what do you know, the old Philadelphia Trumpet is now to hand on our hour of need online in the digital form devised by god as theTrumpet.com.

It reminded me of a song by Chris Whitley, all about dust radio - the kind of radio you hear while on the road in the late or the early morning hours in the south of the United States or in the bush of Australia - where air time is handed over to whoever's got a free program that fills up the void:

Somebody receiving up there
On dust radio
Walk it with the spirit
Talk it with the spine
Mama sing "Open up yourself when worlds align"
My Secret Jesus,
The Good Red Road
On blood antenna
And dust radio

And then I thought, hang on a second, this is what happens when you read the Calvanist Jensenist nepotic heretics.

After a bout of Gervais heresy, you discover all the commentariat commentators are at one with the Gaia worshippers and the ancient druids in talking of the power of nature and the forces of nature, and nary a word about god or prayer meetings, and the next thing you know the Queensland floods are all the work of god ...

Truly either the Jensenists or the absent lord work in mysterious ways ...

(Below: Gervais having an argument with god. You can find the rest here).