(Above: just a few mood-setting cartoons)
Yippee, it's Sunday, and for Sydney folk, that means it's Sunday Terror day.
What pleasures, what treats:
Oh okay, it's just tedious dull business as usual.
There's van Onselen bashing up electricity Bill, and there's war-monger Akker Dakker explaining how everything's for the best in the best of all honourable war-mongering, and there's Miranda the Devine suddenly discovering history and using it to bash up the unions (but ssssh, don't mention Pig Iron Bob).
Oh okay, you could be excused for just rolling over in bed and catching an bonus couple of hours of sleep.
If inexcusably, the hard copy is lurking on your lawn, why not give it to the dog as something it can play with before chewing the thing to a pulp.
Your playful pooch will be doing something useful for your brain, and for civilisation in general.
In the digital fickle-fingered carousel at the top of the page, there's only one variation from the ceaseless tide of Labor and union abuse and war-mongering with honour, and that's Maiden musing about what fun it will be to see Tony Abbott lie down with the outrageous greenie horde to get his paid parental leave scheme up and running.
Hypocrisy, moi? All those years spent reviling and demonising the greenies and their alliance with the ALP? Yet there's a fair chance he'll need to do a dance with the greenies to get his signature policy over the line, albeit with some amendment. Any shameless port in a shameless storm.
Hypocrisy, moi? Mais certainement ...
And now, it seems, by weight of repetition, it's official.
Tony Abbott's spiritual mentor, advisor and confessor, Cardinal Pell, has been given a place amongst the stars in the digital carousel yet again.
He can stand tall, alongside Miranda the Devine and Akker Dakker and the union and Labor bashing ...
Sadly, turns out if you bother to read A marriage of church and society (outside the paywall because who would pay for Pellism?), it's the usual Sunday sermon blather ...
It provides the curious sight of a man who took a vow of chastity, refused family life, refused to have children, and married himself to the church, ranting on about the virtues of family, and marriage and children and family life ...
Pell gets one thing right:
A society cannot function well when too many are untruthful or corrupt or psychologically damaged.
But that's all he says about the priesthood.
The rest is the sort of simple-minded tosh about family life they were peddling, along with picket fences, back in the 1950s:
Building good families is not rocket science, but struggling to maintain the basics in their proper place.
Three steps are open to all believers, even if only one or two are possible for unreligious or unchurchy people.
Families should regularly eat together and talk, not sitting too often for meals in front of the television.
Ah television, the great 1950s phobia, which replaced comic books and radio as the source of much concern for family life.
It shows how far out of touch Pell is with the real world.
These days the damage is done by people sitting around with tablets and phablets and mobile phones, relentlessly checking things by the minute, and googling to look up a factoid and settle an argument in a trice.
Back in the day a family could have a decent, ill-informed argument that could run for hour upon satisfying hour, with plates hurled, and sulks and shouting.
Likely as not the dog had chewed the relevant volume of the encyclopaedia and it would take a trip to the library the next day to get the facts, and return to the argument, and then there could be more hours disputing the sources and the interpretation.
These days there are Greg Hunts everywhere, looking up a wikipedia entry, and ending a decent argument in a few minutes. Where's the pleasure in that?
It'll be the ruination of family life, the pond guarantees it. But do go on:
Families who are blessed with a faith should pray together each day, however briefly.
And finally religious people should worship together each week.
What's interesting here is that Pell doesn't peddle the "saying of grace".
It never really caught on in (Irish) Catholic Australia, with a quick prayer before bed the routine for kids, and the pond is grateful for that, because staring at the ceiling, mouthing empty, meaningless words to a long lost, invisible, ineffective - and let's face it, completely useless deity - was a handy precursor to atheism ...
For Pell of course, it's a nostrum. Turn up each week and be tithed, and do a little worship, and bingo, the snake oil will deliver the goods:
Not surprisingly families which do all this are more likely to have happier children, be happier parents and experience higher levels of communication and forgiveness.
Families should regularly eat together and talk, not sitting too often for meals in front of the television.
Ah television, the great 1950s phobia, which replaced comic books and radio as the source of much concern for family life.
It shows how far out of touch Pell is with the real world.
These days the damage is done by people sitting around with tablets and phablets and mobile phones, relentlessly checking things by the minute, and googling to look up a factoid and settle an argument in a trice.
Back in the day a family could have a decent, ill-informed argument that could run for hour upon satisfying hour, with plates hurled, and sulks and shouting.
Likely as not the dog had chewed the relevant volume of the encyclopaedia and it would take a trip to the library the next day to get the facts, and return to the argument, and then there could be more hours disputing the sources and the interpretation.
These days there are Greg Hunts everywhere, looking up a wikipedia entry, and ending a decent argument in a few minutes. Where's the pleasure in that?
It'll be the ruination of family life, the pond guarantees it. But do go on:
Families who are blessed with a faith should pray together each day, however briefly.
And finally religious people should worship together each week.
What's interesting here is that Pell doesn't peddle the "saying of grace".
It never really caught on in (Irish) Catholic Australia, with a quick prayer before bed the routine for kids, and the pond is grateful for that, because staring at the ceiling, mouthing empty, meaningless words to a long lost, invisible, ineffective - and let's face it, completely useless deity - was a handy precursor to atheism ...
For Pell of course, it's a nostrum. Turn up each week and be tithed, and do a little worship, and bingo, the snake oil will deliver the goods:
Not surprisingly families which do all this are more likely to have happier children, be happier parents and experience higher levels of communication and forgiveness.
Yes, all this can be yours:
By implication and by its absence, the Pell piece is a compare and contrast with the evils of gay marriage, but ssssh, don't mention gay marriage.
Stay positive and exclusive, and remember, shoving guilt up the straights is the best way forward for them. Talk about divorce and the wicked way they ruin themselves and their children, and sure enough, the church has an ongoing pastoral business model, counselling the wicked and making sure they stay locked in hellish marrige:
Social scientists speak of "the Divorce Cycle". In 2006-7, 25 per cent of Australians aged 18-34 had experienced the divorce or permanent separation of their parents before they were eighteen. They were less likely to marry and more likely to have marriage or relationship breakdowns than those from intact families.
While we recognise that there is no inevitability about these patterns, we are better able to respond when we acknowledge them. Neither should we forget that when a man and a woman commit to a total, lifelong and exclusive relationship, open to new life, to children, this brings security to their children as well as themselves.
A classic guilt trip, from a man who decided he'd get married ... to the church ... which boldly offered all sorts of hideous insecurity to the children in their care.
But it's led to a serious worry this Sunday for the pond. What of the Sydney Anglicans? Oh sure they keep trying, but nobody pays any attention any more ...
The Sydney push was in the thick of it at GAFCON, doing their usual best to thwart women and gays, with the Jensenist heresy on parade, as you can read in this report here, but with Peter Jensen strangely proclaiming that the church was an epic failure:
Dr Jensen characterised the Church's problem as a failure of commitment. "We have failed to make disciples through teaching the commands of Jesus found in the Bible at depth. That is why so much of the Church in the West has simply collapsed, capitulated, and compromised before a virulent, antagonistic secularism." (here)
Yep, it's stuffed, fucked if you will, and it's all the fault of those soft, deviant, kind-hearted Poms and damned Yankees, and it seems the only way forward is with the Sydney Anglicans and African funadmentalists, intent on building a new empire to replace the old one:
The old ways of the Anglican Communion were as "dead as the British Empire", Dr Jensen said and a commonwealth of Churches would replace it.
What's amusing is that the Sydney Anglican report on the fundamentalists and their resolutions failed to mention the usual disputation:
Delegates from provinces that support women in episcopal leadership, however, fought for the inclusion of language in support of women bishops. The move was blocked by the dominant Nigerian bloc (almost 500 of the 1300 delegates), in alliance with conservative Evangelicals. When the final document was offered to the conference, a Ugandan woman clergy delegate voiced a lone "No" vote.
One lone female voice amidst the angry male voices ...
No wonder they're sliding into irrelevance, and Phillip Jensen is fading into a kind of historical dream in Don't make the Reformation History.
It seems that Jensen has discovered that the Protestant Reformation - let's do the conventional thing and date it to 1517 and Luther's 95 theses - is at last, some five hundred years on, becoming history, thanks to evil secularists and governments:
The Reformation is becoming history.
If “history is written by winners”, secularists are writing our history and materialistic governments, are setting the curriculum. Because such governments are concerned with national peace, harmony and unity, not even the multiculturalists will be able to save the Reformation from the dust and ashes of negligence and ignorance.
Dear sweet long absent lord, he's brooding even more than the Irish manage to brood about Oliver Cromwell, and Cromwell was a newbie who did over the Irish in 1649.
Why that's only three and sixty odd years ago, and there's still some wretches who think it's old history (say that in Belfast in certain areas and see how you go).
Jensen delivers a fine old rant, which perversely suggests to the pond that the Sydney Anglicans are feeling the heat:
Secularists want to understand the world, including its history, without any reference to the supernatural. Begrudgingly they allow the study of religion as yesteryear’s superstitions that led to bondage and war. But there is little motivation to understand the deep convictions of people that changed their way of life or to credit any religious movement with advancing the welfare of society.
Oh go tell that to the Catholic Irish and see how far you get regarding the wondrous advances of Protestant fundamentalism ...
But wait, that's exactly what Jensen does. Forget the evil secularists and materialist governments. Jensen spends much of the rest of his piece praising the Reformation, and by implication, damning the wretched failed church it replaced.
You can just feel the seething resentment of the Catholics, now on parade, on the digital carousel of doom in the Sunday Terror, and in the corridors of power.
Oh you posturing, posing tykes, remember it was a proddy show:
Australia was settled by a Protestant nation, which established our institutions on Protestant views of society, government, economy and culture. Of recent decades, multiculturalism has made people of all views, philosophies and religions welcome in Australia. By affirmative action we have sought to make all people feel at home. It almost does not matter how small and obscure a culture is, we are happy that it has some place under the Australian sun. The mainstream cultures, upon which our society has been built, are considered strong enough to promote their own views and look after themselves. However, this marginalizes the mainstream history into an enclave of true believers and leaves the wider community ignorant of the forces that have shaped our nation. The social capital of the nation is depreciated as the common history is ignored in favour of minority groupings. Consequently, the Reformation and Counter-reformation, that are so important to understanding Australian culture, are omitted from public consciousness.
Paranoia? ✓
Persecution complex? ✓
Feeling of alienation and marginalization? ✓
Undervalued, spurned and resentful? ✓
Enclave of true believers? ✓
There's much, much more, about the many wonders and glories of the Reformation, and how it fixed up everything.
For starters it fixed up that bloody preening Catholic church, now on parade in the Sunday Terror and with a whole gaggle of Catholic trained pollies driving the country to ruin:
The Reformation did more than reform the abuses of organized religion. It was a recovery of the gospel that transformed the very nature of the church. Thus it became the foundation for our Protestant pattern of church life. We cannot truly understand ourselves without a proper grasp of the events of the Reformation. Through the work of Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin and many more, the great doctrines of salvation were once more hammered out and explained to the people. Their hymns and prayers, books and translations taught their own and subsequent generations the great doctrines of God’s grace in saving us through the death and resurrection of His Son, and of the Spirit’s work in regenerating us to repent and put our faith solely in him. It was a gospel understanding that freed us from priestcraft and religiosity, from false doctrine and authoritarianism. During the 16th century a new flowering of Christian understanding, scholarship, evangelism and conversion reformed the church.
Freedom from Priestcraft and religiosity, from false doctrine and authoritarianism!! Take that, posing ponce poseur Pellists!
Yes, and the proddies knew how to beat the shit out of women - a lot of them were witches, don't ya know - and to beat the shit out of gays, because it's what fundamentalists do best ...
The Reformation was not the perfect golden age of Christianity but it was one time when, under incredible pressure of life and death, men and women took God’s word seriously and proclaimed clearly the gospel of our Lord and Saviour.
We mustn’t let the Reformation become history.
Indeed.
It turns out - get out your phablets and do that Greg Hunt wiki thing - that, according to the pond, Australia was settled by a Roman and Greek loving culture, which established our institutions on Roman and Greek views of society, government, economy and culture.
For the love of the long absent lord, we mustn't let those Roman and Greek days become history ...
Quick, dust off your copy of Kubrick's Spartacus, and watch it today, and let his proclamation of democracy ring in your ears as only an American writer blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten could manage ...
Remember it's only a few thousand years ago, and we mustn't let the golden days of oyster eating become history.
And now, because the Sydney Anglicans are clearly sinking into despair and irrelevance, and wandering back to dream of long lost times five hundred years ago, here's a few more Catholic cartoons ...
Samantha Maiden seems to be a real nasty piece of work. Must be due to group think and/or working in close proximity to other nutters in that particular publication of propaganda. Have they no shame.
ReplyDeleteI admire your stamina in ploughing through this 'newspaper', and find no surprise to learn of its declining sales. After this effort even its most hardened readers would require a sick bag before the end of the first section.
ReplyDeleteThank you for wonderful efforts.