The pond knew that another reptile crusade was on the move … for a start, pompous blowhard nattering "Ned" had felt compelled to speak up …
Now it's true the warning signal was remarkably short, as if the blowhard hadn't had his morning oats …the pond really must reprimand the trendy 'leet cafes of Surry Hills ...
But the reptiles also assigned the lesser member of the Kelly gang to do the usual reptile routine … write up a "news" story to draw attention to the main feature …
A nightmare?
The pond has been there before …
But if we're speaking of nightmares …
Here …with active links ...
Yes, it's enough to turn anyone atheist …what with futtocks rabbiting on about sundry matters but incapable of organising a chook raffle in a church hall …
Never mind, on with the crusade …
A far from perfect Catholic, but working towards a form of perfect political idiocy?
Please, do go on ...
Okay, in the usual way, the lesser Kelly's report is just an excuse for the big feast, so here it is …
Now the pond doesn't propose to argue. It's impossible to argue with silliness and anyone who can propose "the protection of religious freedom is the protection of all freedoms" is impossibly silly, though it does help explain why the persecution of the innocent by Centrelink is so common …
Can the pond just get it done and dusted ...
Uh huh … the pond can only dream of the day when a Tehan might wander in the door and the pond could do a denial of service when it came to his request for a coffee …and speaking of DOS, the pond was vastly amused to see this ad for a media reporter in the lizard Oz …
A 'leet gym and 'leet coffee on tap, and cafes and bars and a healthy work/life balance while churning out right wing crap mocking the 'leets?
It was too rich, but the pond must apologise for the distraction and press on ...
The pond has been there so many times before … and the only way through meant reaching for a cartoon …
Thank the long absent lord, there's only one gobbet to go ...
It was an edited version?
One can only imagine the suffering of innocent bystanders … but the pond felt the need for quite a few cartoons to wash away the taste … or perhaps a coffee in a reptile cafe to restore a healthy work/life balance ...
Kelly thinks Tehan is warning Turnbull? I bet Mal is quaking in his boots at the thought of the next war on rationality and the religious presenting themselves as victims.
ReplyDeleteThis war and the idea that the religious are being persecuted is as silly as the idea that men - do I mean all men - are victims of misandry
Tehan: "...one day in the future the Australians who are part of any religion will become a minority."
ReplyDeleteOh yes, yes, bring on the day - hopefully during what remains of my lifetime. But when will "the Australians who are part of any religion" become a minority in Australian parliaments.
More Tehan: "...this faith-based perspective ... has helped create societies with the most freedom, happiness, peace and prosperiy in history."
The religious nutcases really love repeating this 'Holy Lie'. We've just left a century that was full of wars that, directly or indirectly, killed well over 100 million; that had a plenitude of depressions and recessions, that held simple human variations such as homosexuality to be punishable and imprisonable offences, practised discrimination up to and including savage apartheid and in one place anyway, boasted of McCarthyism, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the KKK.
Oh yeah, free, happy, peaceful and prosperous indeed - and you'd have to be a religious nutcase to believe any of that.
I suspect the census data vastly overstates the religious affiliations of Australians. Just as my mother directed me to tick the "Church of England" box when I went to school, I think a lot of people are stating a tribal identity not professing actual belief. (I don't recall there being a box for "Godless Atheistic Humanist" back then). I know a number of people who are at best agnostics, but more likely atheists, who ticked one of those boxes because they saw the census as some sort of competition of cultures.
ReplyDeleteThe poor logical and ethical basis of the likely arguments is apparent from the lack of any detail. It's all in a subtext, up there in the frequencies that only dogs and bigots can hear. My suspicion is it's about tax and public funding not belief and ethics. Oh - and the right to force your views on others.
Well, being one of those 'Undoubting Thomases' (ie us ones that really have no doubt that religions 'aren't even wrong') I reckon that Tehan isn't on about 'religious freedom', he's actually on about 'special religious privilege'.
DeleteBecause, like his thoughtless mates, he wants religious organisations to be free from any charges of 'discrimination' so that they can discriminate against those who they declare should be discriminated against. Like us atheists. And them evil gays.
So, I want a true declaration of religious "freedom": that anybody of any religious belief can legally discriminate against everybody of any different religious belief. And in particular, that us atheists can sack and/or never employ, anybody who professes any "faith". Oh, and we can expel Catholic kids from schools, too.
Now that, unlike Tehan's special pleading for (Christian) religious privilege, is actual religious freedom, and I'm all for it.
Especially if it includes Miranda Devine's brainless version of Dada-ism.
The worst example of religious persecution is that a Newtown pub stopped serving Cooper's? Would have been a pretty tame boycott because it is well known people in Newtown only drink lattes. The Christian martyrs had to put up with far worse.
ReplyDeleteWill the legislation also apply to Muslims? Will have to be a neat piece of drafting if it doesn't.
https://mccrindle.com.au/insights/blogarchive/spirituality-and-christianity-in-australia-today/
ReplyDeleteThis appears to be credible description of the depth of Christian religious affiliation and belief in Australia as of 2012.
Worth a look and a think for the nuances.
The highlight is:
"Our population has actually doubled since 1966 (11.5 million), and at that time 1 in 4 Aussies attended church (2.6 million). These days, with double the population, our church attendance has actually dwindled to less than 1 in 14 (1.6 million)."
fred
1 in 14 ? Is it really still all that many, d'you reckon, fred. And probably about 400,000 of that 1.6 million are actually Muslims ... err, if they count mosques as 'churches' that is. Do they ?
DeleteTehan and co. don't seem to realise that there are thousands of religions, a lot of them not at all like Christianity. So, is Buddhism a religion? Shintoism? Pastafarianism?
ReplyDeleteYou are going to need a list, and trying to create a list would lead to Holy Wars.
And Scientologism and FSMism and so on. Oh, and I see that they executed an international religious leader and guru in Japan yesterday. So it seems that religious intolerance is still an international force.
DeleteBTW, is Dalai Lamaism a schism of Buddhism or is it a separate faith ?
"The Aztec religion is the Mesoamerican religion of the Aztecs. Like other Mesoamerican religions, it had elements of human sacrifice in connection with a large number of religious festivals which were held according to patterns of the Aztec calendar. Polytheistic in its theology, the religion recognized a large and ever increasing pantheon of gods and goddesses". (Wikipedia)
DeleteYeah, once you start down that "a God for everything" road it's really hard to know where to stop. Just ask the Indians: there's about 33 million Hindu gods (roughly one for every 40 Indians) according to some estimates.
DeleteThe featured item by the gormless Tehan was little more than a fluff piece. Just a stringing together of all of the usual superficial group-think cliches and paper-thin examples of presumed "persecution" promoted by the right-wing "religious" culture warriors.
ReplyDeleteThese words by Tehan were featured on the front page introduction - "tools of oppression sowing the seeds of division, conquest, manipulation and cultural division are being wielded by the minority against the majority" - which sounds like an accurate description of the modus operandi (or even mission statement) of the reptilian press, and of how right-wing reptiles have always operated.
Meanwhile most, if not all of the worlds political and cultural troubles are being caused, and turbo-charged by back-to-the-past religious "traditionalists" - the exponents of islam-ism, juda-ism and christian-ism
And Trump-ism and Duterte-ism and Erdogan-ism and Putin-ism and Xi Jinping-ism and ... naah, much as I'd like to, I just can't quite see there being any Turnbull-ism around.
DeleteThis country is, let's not mince words, fucked. I say this because, firstly, a Federal Parliamentarian writing in the country's only national broadsheet demonstrates his lack of basic numeracy and comprehension skills. Then, a journalist writing in the same broadsheet regurgitates his mistake uncritically.
ReplyDeleteTehan states, and Kelly regurgitates:
The change is especially stark among young adults aged 18 to 34, 39 per cent of whom indicate "no religion" - more than three times the number who identify as Christian.
Apparently they have deduced this from an article about the 2016 Census on the ABS's website, which states:
Young adults aged 18-34 were more likely to be affiliated with religions other than Christianity (12 per cent) and to report not having a religion (39 per cent) than other adult age groups.
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mediareleasesbyReleaseDate/7E65A144540551D7CA258148000E2B85?OpenDocument (Sorry, not paywalled.)
They have confused "religions other than Christianity" with "Christianity". It's an easy mistake to make - if your comprehension skills haven't evolved since Kindergarten.