A quiet Sunday stroll through Thomas Gray's country churchyard, now infested with Jensenists and Pellists ...

(Above: a Sunday thought).

It being Sunday, it's been in recent times the pond's habit to move amongst the messages to the faithful, and brood and think and meditate, and even though they're always a week old when they reach the pond - buy the Sunday Terror when you could buy a copy of Hustler, and get better interviews without phone tapping? - the thoughts of Cardinal Pell are always inspirational.

By golly, the way he starts off Praising God's Name is a zinger:

The Old Testament prophet Hosea married Gomer and they had three children. To his dismay Hosea discovered he was not the father of the two youngest and later Gomer left him to become a prostitute in the temple of Baal, a pagan god.

Years later, her beauty gone, Hosea finds Gomer on sale in the slave market. He buys her and takes her home despite the fact that the Law required that she be stoned to death for her sexual sins.

Uh huh. All heart not to get on with the stoning, which, let's face it, the cheap harlot hussy richly deserved.

Actually for an intelligent study of the meaning of the metaphors involved in the Hosea/Gomer story, you could do much better heading off to the wiki about the Book of Hosea than spend too long with the simplistic blatherings of Pell, most particularly Pell's singularly obnoxious endorsement of a patriarchal interpretation of the most condescending kind.

But where, you might ask (or you might not, not giving a toss for Pellist heresies), is this leading us, and naturally it leads us to this:

Jesus understood our timidity and perplexity and launched us in the right direction with the first petition in his prayer the "Our Father" that God's name may be glorified or "hallowed".

Yep, it's yet another interminable variant on the "our father", as opposed to the "our mother" routine. And where on earth, apart from the garden path, is this leading us?

Obviously nothing we might do can make God holier or greater than He is, but believers pray that God will show his power so that outsiders start to consider godly questions and enemies of God are forced to reconsider.

Jesus' preferred term for God as father shows God is personal, not Gaia, not Tim Flannery's life-force in the world. "Heavenly" Father also demonstrates that God is not a super creature, not earthly, not the best the cosmos has to offer. We now say that God is transcendent, spiritual, outside our created world and the Our Father begins with the request that these basic notions might be widely understood as true and hugely useful.

Get it? Gaia of course is some kind of primordial earth goddess, and we can't have any of that idle superstition, not when you can have a primordial earth god going about her business.

If that isn't the most charming amalgam of patriarchal blather to contemplate on a Sunday, truly and hugely useless, cop this:

We believe that God is more loyal to us and more forgiving than even the ancient prophet Hosea with his prostitute wife. The "Our Father" is a communitarian prayer which reflects this mix of awe and familiarity.

Is it possible to suggest that Pellists take their condescension towards women and hookers, and shove it?

Never mind, it's time for a little interfaith evangelism:

Today Muslims recite the traditional prayers in beautiful and classical seventh century Arabic and in Jesus' time the public reading of the Jewish bible and prayers was in Hebrew.

Jesus taught his followers to pray in their daily language of Aramaic.

The father God is near and dear.

No, I have no idea what on earth this means, except that the tower of babel still lives on in Cardinal Pell's patriarchal world. What a pity the mother goddess seems lost and abandoned as the patriarchs go about their mind-numbing business.

Speaking of mind-numbing, we just have time to go across and check up on the Sydney Anglicans, last noted dabbling in the witchcraft of Harry Potter and thereby risking their eternal souls.

The pond was immediately traumatised by Michael Jensen quoting Stanley Hauerwas in Why bad liturgy can make you a murderer:

One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend.

Say what? Watch The Sound of Music, and the next thing you know, you've turned into a natural born killer in a bloody Oliver Stone movie? Sing Climb Ev'ry Mountain with guitar and choir, Singing Nun style, and you'll murder your best friend? What about Harry Potter leading to bad ethics?

Come on Michael, say it ain't so.

Sorry, after an extensive wander through Anglican liturgy, too tedious to contemplate or inspect in detail here, Jensen says it almost might be so:

... shallow corporate worship leads to shallow Christians – or worse.

That’s what US theologian Stanley Hauerwas is getting at in the quotation I began with. He is, of course, exaggerating. But not by a great deal.

Not by a great deal? What, you mean after watching The Sound of Music, we might only turn into vampires and suck the blood of humans? Well that mightn't be a big deal to you, even if it's only a slight exaggeration, but it strikes the pond as a pretty unhappy return on a little liturgical lightness of being ...

As for it ain't necessarily so, the things you're liable to read in the bible liturgical points:

And that I think is the question for those modern Anglicans who see themselves as the heirs of Cranmer. We know that merely following the form of Cranmer’s services isn’t the point. But are our Sunday gatherings schooling our congregations in the riches of a ‘reformed spirituality’ in a way in which Cranmer might have recognised?

Oh heck, you're right, maybe it's no big deal turning into a vampire and feasting on human blood, not if if means turning yourself into an heir of Cranmer (wiki the treasonous, heretical, recanting, opportunist, Nicodemite lickspittle lackey of absolute royalty, divorce and Henry VIII here).

And as one of our readers has already noted, while visiting, make sure you drop in on Phillip Jensen's splendid In Defence of Science. If you can hold it together until the very end, you'll come to this tremendously insightful paragraph:

... when groups with particular vested political interests use science to promote their view, it is science itself that comes under attack. When ‘evolution’ and ‘intelligent design’ are weapons in the hands of atheists and theists, it is very hard to weigh accurately the evidence. When catastrophists and sceptics discuss global warming, the truth is lost in politics and sadly for us, science itself gets a bad name.

Yes, yes, because intelligent design is such a scientific concept, and evolution a barely credible one, at least when that bastard last week called me the child of a monkey's aunt, and so science gets a bad name rather than the monkey's uncle.

How is it possible to weigh the evidence between the earth starting six thousand years ago, and the earth cranking up three and a half billion years ago, when politics and the Book of Genesis get in the way?

Meanwhile, one Andrew Mackinnon, who bobbed up a couple of weeks ago to assert the historical existence and literal truth of Adam and Eve, turns up in the comments section to sagely advise us that global warming is a myth, along with a whole bunch of disputational 'scientists' of the amateur theological kind keen to prove that the Sydney Anglican site is riddled with ratbags.

So there you go. Phillip Jensen ever do delicately dips his toe in the water of climate science denialism, in a way worthy of the Pellists, and gets his just rewards.

... of recent times the politicisation of science has undermined its credibility in the community. In one debate, the ecological catastrophists’ claims about global warming and our contribution to it, has enabled sceptics to cast doubt about science and scientists. In another debate the arguments of evolution and intelligent design have been used by atheists and theists in such a way as to compromise the standing of science itself.

Uh huh. Let's see how Jensen manages to cast said doubt:

Certainly the consensus of scientists around the world should not be lightly discounted but the evidence of one scientist (or even a non-scientist) is as important as the collective understanding of the many. The narrative of modern science is built on stories like Galileo overthrowing the Aristotelian collective that dominated the academy in his day.

The nature of scientific knowledge is conditional, never final. It is always possible that new evidence will be found, or a new way of understanding our existing evidence will arrive, that will change our present conclusions.

QED really. One non-scientist is enough to shake, rattle and roll the foundations of science, since the present world of science and scientific practice so deeply resembles the medieval mindset of the religiously inclined, and now the religionistas can claim Galileo as their own main man (speaking of heretical, recanting, ratbags as we were, in our own priestly way, and never mind his persecution by the religionistas at the time).

Even god couldn't invent the Sydney Anglicans, but what joy we don't have to rely on the Jensenists for scientific understandings of the world ...

After taking a stroll through the Sydney Anglican website, I'm inclined to the view that it isn't science and scientists that are getting a bad name, it's the Jensenists and the Sydney Anglicans, and come to think of it, lets add in the Sunday Terror and the Pellists while we're at it ...

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

(and the rest of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard here)

And now, it being Sunday, a few more cartoons, including an oldie Doonesbury, click to enlarge.