Musings for the meditative Sunday ...

(Above: for more "work is worship" indoctrination, head off to the school's website here)


In all the recent fuss around the fate of Malek Fahd - NSW school inspectors recommend closure of Australia's largest Muslim school - the pond hasn't noticed too many people get agitated about the question of why Australian taxpayers were funding the school in the first place.

Some three quarters of the school's funds come from state and federal government funding.

Allegedly there has been some hanky panky at a board level, for all the pious mouthings of the school's mission statement:

6. Quietness in Salaat. Listen to the Imam and never occupy yourself with anything which distracts you from listening. Hazrat Abu Hurairah (RAA) relates that the Holy Prophet (PBUH) said: “One who makes his Wudu carefully and comes to the Friday Salaat and listens to the sermon attentively, has his sins from the previous Friday and three days more remitted and one who occupies himself with pebbles during the sermon has not done well.” (Muslim). (more here in pdf format)

The pond has no problem with anyone who wants to spend their own dime on wudu and salaat, and whatever else lights your religious candle, but the blame for the proliferation of religious schools rests at the door of conservatism.

Once it was just a two door racket - Catholics and Protestants of various denominations - but then the "fair dibs" blather that conservatives went on about caught up with them, and the next thing you know the taxpayer is funding creationist-affirming, theory of evolution denying, Scott "speaking in tongues" Morrison believing clap happy fundamentalist Xian schools indoctrinating young minds in all sorts of weird John Howard affirming Exclusive Brethren philosophies.

Before you can say boo to a fundamentalist goose, there's money going to schools dedicated to the scientological beliefs of wacky zany L. Ron Hubbard.

The funniest thing? Well your average Bolter will always get his or her knickers in a knot deploring relativism. Yet same conservatives have produced the theory of a relativism thousand flowers of thought blooming in the education sector, provided their particular preferred form of ratbaggery gets their funding moment in the sun, and never mind the odd creationist ...

Meanwhile, the tabloids are fascinated by the Muslim faith as the deepest expression of "other" doing the rounds (clearly not having read The Book of Mormon, which the pond is currently dipping into amidst a welter of "and now beholds" and a plethora "and it came to pass" - what a fanciful, fraudulent rip-off of the King James' bible it is).

Here's the Sunday Terror, blessing Allah for combining Islam with thugby league in both its hard copy and digital editions:

The story itself is a complete non-event, except for the implication that the conversion is a cynical manoeuvre, as encapsulated in the header Bad boy Blake Ferguson converts to Islam in a bid to save his ailing career.

Like, because what's faith and hope and belief in eternity up against bashing the shit out of someone else in a blaze of godly glory on a rugger bugger field of dreams ...

Never mind. You can't expect intelligent analysis of anything from fuckwitted Murdochian tabloids, and the donkey has well and truly bolted when it comes to the funding of religious schools by government. 

But to be fair, the tabloids do offer wondrous sights, now that the Pellists have been elevated to front page digital status on a Sunday:

Yep, a little sinful sexiness with the girl next door will fix what ails you, and then you can repent with a bout of Pellist rebirth and hope rhetoric ...

A Cardinal of Rome cheek by jowl with sex in the suburbs?

Not that Pell has anything interesting to say, because he's still peddling the mumbo jumbo of purgatory, a racket designed to lure the faithful back to church to pray for the redemption of loved ones. You know, Amway and Tupperware learnt everything that was needed about pyramid schemes and pyramid selling just by watching the Catholic church in action:

In November Christians remember their dead. Catholics in particular believe some or many who have died are still being purified so they can cope with the sheer-goodness and overwhelming love of God's presence. 
Catholics believe their prayers can help the faithful departed pass out of this time of cleansing (purgatory) into heaven. For those who believe in an afterlife of reward or punishment a funeral is not just a celebration of the dead person's achievements, but looks forward to eternal life and happiness. Throughout history and even here in Australia today most have believed in life after death.

Don't you just love the flourish "even here in Australia today"?

What's astonishing is that a man who trots out "purgatory" - nowhere explicitly mentioned in the Bible, with a pathetic, feeble, fleeting reference in the second book of Maccabees the only window-dressing available (get the excuses here),  is that Pell himself and others took it as right and fitting that Pell was an expert climate scientist ready to tear apart climate science.

You see, that's what happens when you have the delusional learn their science in a religious institution.

More to the point, Pell shows exactly how you can recognise a trading off humbug, ready to use any name - from Lord Monckton to Aristotle - to gain a little credibility:

The finest Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who laid the foundations of our Western civilisation, believed in the immortality of the soul. 
When family and friends, often young people, place crosses and flowers on our highways where fatal crashes have occurred, they too are announcing their hope for life after death. They belong to an ancient tradition.

The finest Greek philosophers argued many things, but the one thing they didn't accept was the simplistic, reductionist tosh embedded in those two Pellist pars. The Pellists have been ripping off ancient philosophers for centuries to give their mumbo jumbo a thin veneer of classical philosophical respectability, in the process denying all the interesting aspects of the early Greek philosophers ...

You see, that's what happens when you have the delusional learn their philosophy in a religious institution.

Even more amazing is that this time Pell dresses in Mungo man, the Jewish Pharisees and the dead Pharaohs, as proof of an "ancient tradition". Completely shameless, as if anyone needed any evidence that superstition endures ...

You can tell Pell is getting beyond the valley of the desperate when he leads with this:

One difference between humans and animals is that humans bury their dead - not just in the sense of putting them under the ground but in the hope that their death is only a stage in a longer journey.

Words fail the pond. He can't even imagine a world where there are above ground burial rituals ...

What ultimately does it all mean?

Well Pell's ascending to tabloid heaven, given the front page "sex in the suburbs" treatment has got the Sydney Anglicans in a total twist, and it seems the Jensenists don't know where to turn.

However for a hoot, Michael Jensen's epic The Wimp that Won is highly commended for a Sunday meditation.

Jensen starts off by quoting Algernon Swinburne, a poet these days most fondly remembered for being an alcoholic dedicated to algolagnia - which not to put too fine a leather point on it, involved a bloody good whipping.

Then he follows up with Nietzsche, and somehow arrives at the notion that Christ was a wimp.

Jensen seems intoxicated by the notion of submission, at which point the pond decided to leave the rest of the analysis to Krafft-Ebing ...

The purest form of weirdness, however, came from David Mansfield, in relation to gambling (Is the Melbourne Cup just for mugs?). The Melbourne Cup is now long gone, but the pond urges everyone to remember Mansfield's advice on how to handle actually watching the Melbourne cup:

• During the running of the race, pause and pray in the way I was encouraged to in 2009. Your work or home context will determine how you do this. Perhaps quietly at your desk or under your breath if you are watching the race with your colleagues at the office Melbourne Cup party or pray with a few Christian colleagues in your section.

Watch and pray? WTF?

What is it with these Sydney Anglican wimps and their submissive ways?

Tell your colleagues horse racing is cruel to horses, thousands ending up in the glue factory each year, that punters are mugs, and you'd rather be in the toilet wanking off to the sexy suburban pet featured next to Cardinal Pell (this might be tricky for women, but as Sydney Anglican women are required to be invisible and silent in churches, maybe they should just don a veil and no one can tell if they're watching or not).

Sheesh, how are the Sydney Anglicans ever going to get back on the tabloid front page with all this mamby pamby nonsense?

Never mind, with a bit of luck, the pond has now insulted most of the mainstream forms of religious belief - next week the Hari Krishnas and George Harrison - and that's all we can ever aim to do in our meditative Sunday moments ...

Enjoy the day, and may your god, one of the many thousands still available to you thanks to the ancient Greeks, go with you ,,,

And speaking of Dave Allen ...