In which the pond contends that biblical drivel is the mainstay of the lizard Oz ...

The pond really does wish that the reptiles of Oz would publish defenders of religious texts other than the bible ...

No doubt the odds are low or high (depending how you do the book) that some barking mad Islamic fundamentalist was responsible for the most recent deluded attack, and it would be nice to rail about Saudi Arabia and fundamentalist Wahhabism, the treatment of women and the public executions in the square ...

It would also allow the pond to link to Adam Davidson's story in The New Yorker about the Donald's brand doing deals with oligarchs linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guard ... especially as Donald Trump's Worst Deal is outside the paywall at the moment ...

But perforce the pond must deal with the reptile hand it's dealt, and that includes bible bashers bashing away in the lizard Oz, even if the natural inclination is to hang out a shingle ...

Now the author will be familiar to many ...

Clarke hung around with John Dickson at the Centre for Public Christianity, one of those noisy, braying organisations that found plenty of chances for product placement on the ABC, and even enrolled Barney Zwartz in its ranks ...

Who can forget Barners' breathless report for The Age, I was raised from dead, woman tells ...

And so a woman was shamefully snatched away from the eternal bliss of heaven ... how wrong was that?

But back to Greg Clarke, who has to do a juggle of the usual: the bible is shamefully ignored and forgotten, the bible is at the heart of everything ... all told with the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed glow of the delusional ...

A kind of Switzerland? Are there chocolates and cuckoo clocks?

MARTINS: You used to believe in God. 
HARRY: I still do believe in God, old man. I believe in God and Mercy and all that. The dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here, poor devils. What do you believe in? Well, if you ever get Anna out of this mess, be kind to her. You'll find she's worth it. I wish I had asked you to bring me some of these tablets from home. Holly, I would like to cut you in, old man. Nobody left in Vienna I can really trust, and we have always done everything together. When you make up your mind, send me a message. I'll meet you any place, any time. And when we do meet, old man, it's you I want to see, not the police. Remember that, won't you? Don't be so gloomy. After all, it's not that awful. Remember what the fellow said. In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long. Holly.

Well it's some sort of aspiration, the bible and the cuckoo clock.

Of course we know what sort of god Harry believes in, from earlier lines of dialogue when he took to a ferris wheel and looked down at the mugs below ...

MARTINS: Have you ever seen any of your victims? 
HARRY: You know, I don't ever feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped moving, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. It's the only way to save money nowadays.

But enough of Harry and the sounds of the zither. It's obvious that the pond finds the company of Clarke tiresome, though it will cede the significance of the bible. After all, Agatha Christie got three of her titles from it - Evil Under the Sun, The Burden and The Pale Horse, and that's only one less than Shakespeare (Greg Hunt it here).

Of course the shameless nature of shamelessness operates on the basis that there should be no shame.

After the Coopers stuff-up, seize the moment to do more promotional work for the product ... and never mind the stuff-up ... and boast about the way that Christianity beavers away at thwarting separation of religion and state:

Really, all that said, do they have to produce gob-smackers of the kind like "The Bible has almost always been an instrument for free speech"?

Go tell that to the Inquisition. Try living with Luther. Hang out during the best Iconoclastic years ... and bung on as many religious wars as you like ...

These parrots purport a new cleverness and relevance to cloak their biblical fundamentalism. Hence the reference to VHS tapes, the acknowledgement of abuses of power by church and Christianised political movements, along with the notion that the bible bends the long moral arc of the universe in the right direction ... 

Apparently, if we are to believe the Ussher chronology, a universe that began its arc in 4004 BC, though the pond accepts that this is now hotly contested, and it might have begun its arc at a relatively ancient 6000BC ...

Well you can still find the odd angry Sydney Anglican blathering in all seriousness how Adam and Eve leads naturally to complimentary women.

Stupid people still talking about stupid things ... what's left but a meme?

About now, if there's no chance of dragging in some pretentious wanker like Scott Stephens, some other philosopher must needs be dragged in to blather on about normative, precursors, egalitarian universalism, and all the other bullshit used to elevate Xianity, and trash the Roman and Greek contributions, not to mention the valiant work of their pagan gods ...

Oh dear long absent lord, and the pond gave up a savvy Savva savaging for this sort of bilge?

Manna from heaven, or at least from Malware, and the pond settled for crap from Clarke? 

Yep, there's someone always up for a stoning, or a banning of the shellfish, or a mixing of the cloth, or silencing women or turning them complimentary or a bashing of the gays ... and it's not just the Wahhabists ...

The sheer cheek, the utter gall, of celebrating Xianity as peddling freedom and individual rights! Tell that to a woman wanting to control her body, tell that to a gay wanting to celebrate a partnership ... tell that to the likes of Alan Turing ...

They never give up, these bloody bible bashers, yet the moment they get a chance to go to heaven, they'd rather be risen from the dead.

Even more perverse is any attempt to turn their fundamentalism into freedom of speech, liberty and all the rest of the yadda yadda. How fucking weird and perverse is that?  Almost as good a trick as raising the dead back to the living ...

How many times does the pond have to run a Blake poem?

Luckily, the Pope has a different image, strangely inspired by a chocolate wheel rather than Dante's outer rings of hell, and more papal pronouncements here ...