A bag of mixed Christian lollies for a Sunday, from a Catholic denialist sherbet to a trinitarian all-day sucker to a Mormon bullseye ...

(Above: eek, watch out Harry, the beasts and the Medowie Christian School are out to get you).

And so to our usual Sunday tour of Christian eccentricities.

Pride of place this week must go to Medowie Christian School, located in the Hunter Valley, which marked book week by banning Harry Potter garb, for fear the children might be introduced to witches, warlocks and wizards:

Ms Van de Mortel said the Harry Potter series, which is about witches and wizards, was not available in the school library because it had been the subject of many international debates.

Indeed. Shocking to imagine a book subject to international debate! Books should be debate-free!

And Lisa Taylor chimed in with a most incisive point:

"In the lead up to Halloween the shops are full of so many grotesque, frightening costumes and I've got two little boys," she said. "It's supposed to be a celebration of literature." (Harry Potter banned by Christian school).

Yes, indeed. A celebration of literature. Excluding the bible, of course, which is perhaps the most amazing collection of grotesque, fanciful stories about ghosts, ghoulies, angels, devils, Satan, crucifixions, and risings from the dead (way better than a vampire flick), genocidal murder, rape, pillage, burning bushes, demons, the anti-Christ, plagues, rivers turning red with blood ... and yadda yadda, more than enough to appeal to that showman Cecil B. DeMille ...

It goes without saying that that the Medowie Christian School has been regularly sucking at the teat of state and federal government taxpayer support since its foundation. And its statement of faith is a classic (pdf the full text here):

k) We believe in water baptism and the sharing of Communion.
l) We believe in the existence of Satan and the reality of spiritual warfare.
m) We believe in all the works and gifts of the Holy Spirit according to the biblical witness.
n) We recognise the jurisdiction of civil authorities except in matters conflicting with the biblical witness and/or conscience.
Note: These doctrines are intended as evangelical interpretations of the Old and New Testaments. Where further clarification is required, the 1979 Baptist Statement of Faith should be consulted.

Your educational taxpayer dollars at work. Hallelujah. Well done wild rocker Peter "Short Memory" Garrett ...

And by golly they can spring for a fancy flash intro to the website. Caught out right there. Don't they realise that Flash is the devil's work?

What next? Well a poignant lengthy profile of Jerry DeWitt in the New York Times, under the header From Bible-Belt Pastor to Atheist Leader is well worth a read.

DeWitt was an evangelical preacher in the small town of DeRidder, La., when he lost his faith, and rather than pretend, he outed himself to family and friends, with dire consequences to his marriage, his job, and his home ownership.

The pond can sympathise with what it's like to be out of step with other people in a small town (oh Tamworth, Tamworth, what a heartbreaker you are), but the funny thing is that being an evangelical preacher, DeWitt did what seemed right and proper by becoming an evangelical in the cause of atheism.

It's a curious journey, treated with sympathy and understanding and insight by reporter Robert F. Worth, especially when it comes to dealing with the trauma of DeWitt in relation to his love of the people and the place, and the trappings of his lost faith

“Religion does a lot of good, especially the loving kind, like at Grace Church,” he said. “I know people who went to a more liberal kind of Christianity and were happy with that. The problem is, for me, there was a process involved in moving from Pentecostalism to a more liberal theology, like Grace Church. What makes me different is that process didn’t stop, and it took me all the way. In the end, I couldn’t help feeling that all religion, even the most loving kind, is just a speed bump in the progress of the human race.”

Amen, brother. The pond isn't big on evangelising - live and let live, and just leave the pond and gay marriage and women's rights alone - but when fundies get to banning Harry Potter, it's time to make a stand. Next thing you know Santa Claus will be on the hit list because of his willingness to share his North pole retreat with Superman ...

What next? Well the Sydney Anglicans have attracted attention with yet another epic effort to role back the clock on women's rights, as celebrated in To love and to submit: a marriage made in 2012:

Brides will be promising to submit to their husbands under a new marriage vow the Anglican diocese of Sydney is expected to approve at its synod in October.
It requires the minister to ask of the bride: ''Will you honour and submit to him, as the church submits to Christ?'' and for her to pledge ''to love and submit'' to her husband.

Truly the Jensenist fundies are off in a la la theological world of their own. Naturally it produced a few snappy responses about the patriarchy and bad theology and derogatory wording, but it's enough already for the pond to think for a nanosecond about submitting to a Sydney Anglican. Eek, nightmares for a week.

Mr Judd, 27, who is studying to be a minister, said a Christian marriage was akin to dancing: ''The male always leads, even if he's not necessarily the best dancer … as long as you take the definition of male leadership that we're operating on, which is giving yourself up and putting others' interests ahead of yourself.''

And an agony of stubbed toes and trodden-on feet for a lifetime. No thanks.

Strong is the spirit of Todd Akins style fundie Republicanism in Sydney Anglicans.

Or perhaps Fifty Shades of Grey?

Not likely, they don't have the imagination, but the pond would like to let loose a femdom amongst them. Just for fun.

Meanwhile, instead of finishing off his seven epic sins of Sydney, Michael Jensen fudges with a review of a book by Sam Allberry, The Trinity: what's the point?

Trinitarianism is as absurd as transubstantiation, and it never fails to amaze the pond how Sydney Anglicans can swallow a three-way elephant while baulking at a crackers camel. All the same, it provides an epic moment of Jensenist gobbledegook:

Human beings resemble God the Trinity in many ways, but crucially not in others. For example, we are embodied; God is Spirit.

Except of course that God was embodied in Jesus. But do go on:

Our unity with each other in marriage and in church is not exactly the same as the divine unity, though it resembles it. Likewise, the pattern of gender relationships that Allberry explores, is not to be simply understood as a direct analogy between the relationship of the Father and the Son. Also, while it is true that God is in eternity as he is towards us in history, it is also true that God is not simply as he is reveals himself to us in history.

Phew. What a slippery, tricky fish this long absent god is ...maybe more like an eel than a fish.

There are a few other distractions on offer - Jodie McNeill is tortured by ugg boots and tracky dacks in The call of casual Christianity - but really the best own goal of the week has been the splendid work of Cardinal George Pell, as outlined in George Pell puts abuse at arm's length (paywall protected):

Australia's most senior Catholic, Sydney Archbishop George Pell, has authorised an extraordinary 4000-word statement publicly distancing himself from responsibility for the church's mishandling of sexual abuse investigations around the country.

It's an old riff, but a goody. There's no head of the church, no one to accept responsibility, no one with Australia wide authority, no way to sue, etc etc. While at the same time you can't stop the average Catholic priest from yammering on about personal responsibility and personal guilt:

"The church is very clever in dividing the different dioceses around Australia. It means that if a priest has molested a child in diocese A, and only that diocese's bishop can do something about it, he is able to transfer the priest to diocese B and not tell the bishop there," he told The Australian.
Dr Keon-Cohen said the NSW Supreme Court in 2006 held the church cannot itself be sued, and litigants who are successful against individual priests are unable to win significant damages, as church assets are "concealed behind a corporate veil of property trusts".

Oh yes, as Keon-Cohen points out, it's right up there with the tobacco companies. Or companies who've set themselves up in nice tax havens in the Bahamas. Your friendly local tax-dodging church at work ...

Here's how you wash your paws in a bowl of water, in best Pellist style, as explained in Countering Sexual Abuse:

As Cardinal I am not the head of the church in Australia. My authority is limited to the Archdiocese of Sydney. The Catholic Church does not have a state or national general manager. There is a division of responsibility in the Church somewhat like the separation of powers in a democracy. Each diocesan bishop supervises his own priests and church workers.

Yep, I'm not the king of the dirty castle, you can't get me.

And a further irony? In his homily for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Pell had this thought to offer:

We all know that it is no defence legally for someone travelling over the speed limit to reply that he was only following the traffic, part of a group, all of whom were travelling at the same speed.

Uh huh. But what if I'm not responsible for any of the other drivers? After all, I'm only a cardinal, nothing to do with me, if they get caught it's their tough luck for not knowing how to set up a decent defence and a handy corporate tax-free structure, so if the children suffer when they come unto me, they can just bugger off ...

That just leaves enough time to note a recent piece by Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker, I, Nephi Mormonism, giving context to the LDS and its meanings (currently outside the paywall).

Gopnik writes the way the pond would like to write, and right at the moment, as he notes Mormonism is everywhere, what with one of its leading members aiming to be President of the United States.

It's a bizarre, concocted religion, with strange beliefs (anyone want a planet of their own?), made up in the nineteenth century the way scientology was made up in the twentieth (a remark, as Gopnik notes, guaranteed to get teeth on edge).

Gopnik covers all the bases in a sympathetic way and with just the right edge. Here's a taster:

Scholarly opinion on Smith now tends to divide between those who think that he knew he was making it up and those who think that he sincerely believed in his own visions—though the truth is that, as Melville’s “Confidence Man” reminds us, the line between the seer and the scamster wasn’t clearly marked in early-nineteenth-century America. Mark Twain read the Book of Mormon and, knowing what Smith would have read, not to mention knowing about frontier fakery, came to conclusions about both the sources of its prose and the sequence of its composition:

The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James’s translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel—half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern—which was about every sentence or two—he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as “exceeding sore,” “and it came to pass,” etc., and made things satisfactory again. “And it came to pass” was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.

The pond must be one of the few, apart from Twain and thee, who've actually read the wretched inflated absurd thing. As Gopnik notes:

The powers that possession of the Book of Mormon conferred mattered more than the doctrines that it contained. “Rarely did missionaries draw on the verses and stories of the Book of Mormon in sermons,” Bowman explains. “Rather, they brandished the book as tangible proof of Joseph Smith’s divine calling.” Some holy texts, the Gospels, for instance, are evangelical instruments meant to convert people who read them; others are sacred objects meant to be venerated. The Book of Mormon is a book of the second sort. As the French religious historian Jean-Christophe Attias points out, in traditional Judaism the physical presence of the Scripture is at least as important as its content: when the Torah is unrolled during the service, it’s meant to be admired, not apprehended. That the Mormons had a book of their own counted for almost as much as what the Book of Mormon said.

The New Yorker recently had a presence at the Melbourne Writers' Festival. They seem to have finally realised that there's a market in Australia for signs that wit and intelligence still live in the United States (none in the current crop of Republicans, but any sign will do, especially when done Gopnik well).

Gopnik is particularly fine on why Mitt Romney is a flip flopper - the whole religion routinely flip flops (sssh don't mention the blacks) - and why adherents just love to make money:

Elsewhere among the Western democracies, the bursting of the last bubble has led to doubts about the system that blows them. Here the people who seem likely to inherit power are those who want to blow still bigger ones, who believe in the bubble even after it has burst, and who hold its perfection as a faith so gleaming and secure and unbreakable that it might once have been written down somewhere by angels, on solid-gold plates.

Oh yes, a holy salutation unto Mr. Gopnik for providing a fine meditation on the bizarre world of exceptionalist native American Mormonism ...

And so ends the readings for the week.

(Below: Harry Potter? Eat your heart out, William Blake knew how to draw a damn fine demonic diabolical biblical beast, fierce enough to make the Medowie Christian School quiver and quake with fear).

Now if you've managed, by a Herculean feat, to get this far, here's a bonus, David Letterman's ten excuses for Kevin Yoder, committed Christian, skinny dipping in the Sea of Galilee. (Politico broke the yarn here). There should be more of it. Come on Sydney Anglicans, come on. Don't let Republican Christians steal a march, get down to Bondi and do some skinny dipping. Dorothy promises to watch submissively, while finalising the epic tale of an ancient tribe of Israelites who landed in Australia just before Christ ascended to heaven. If you need any good excuses, here they are: