Phillip Jensen, and a fundamental view of the evils of the secularists ...

(Above: William Hamilton's 1788 portrait of the fundamentalist Methodist preacher John Wesley, one of some thirty portraits held by the National Portrait Gallery in London. The rest here).

It would be remiss not to catch up with the Jensenists at the Sydney Anglican website on a Sunday, and so to Phillip Jensen's effort Making Sense of the Senseless.

His column's an effort to make sense of the Norway mass murderer Anders Breivik, and perhaps the most singular accomplishment is to write an entire column without once mentioning Breivik - "he", "the perpetrator" - by name.

On the other hand, secularists get five mentions, and provide the wrap up to the piece:

Nothing should surprise us when it comes to humanity’s capacity for good or ill. Humans are the creatures made in the image of the God of truth and life who have chosen to follow the god of lies and death. The sinner is not ‘other’ - he is me. It is the naivety of secularists that teach ‘all people are good and we should have faith in human nature’. Utopias have the unrealistic myth of human perfectibility where all people learn to live in harmony without tribalism, envy, greed or fear. But this man’s fear of others arouses our fear of others – others, like this man.

Uh huh. So far so Calvinist and to be expected, but surely the penultimate sentence is worth relishing, perhaps rolling around on the tongue, and savouring the sweet tang:

Utopias have the unrealistic myth of human perfectibility where all people learn to live in harmony without tribalism, envy, greed or fear.

Well speaking of unrealistic myths, that takes care of heaven as a concept, and perhaps the Garden of Eden along with it.

Meanwhile, earlier in the piece, we learn that Breivik was mildly acceptable to secularists:

... as the week wore on people read the writings of the Norwegian perpetrator and it became abundantly clear that he is not really Christian. He wrote: “If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian”. This is no fundamentalist Christian, nor even a religious Christian, but purely a tribal, cultural Christian – the kind secularists find mildly acceptable.

Yep Breivik isn't really a Christian - no matter that he fancied himself as a Knights Templar Crusader Christian - because he's secularist approved.

But perhaps the best bit came with this lengthy par:

To the secularist mindset all religions are the same – they are ‘not us’ but superstitious nonsense. Secularists make no attempt to differentiate between religions, for ‘they all have the same intellectual architecture, the same psychological pathology’. That is why journalists apply a word like “fundamentalist” to any religion. It is a generic term that means something like “an extremist who actually believes and lives by their religion in the full flower of its irrational, unenlightened, supernatural, superstitious literalism.” The origin and development of ‘fundamentalism’ as a vilifying swear word is ignored. A few years ago I complained to the National Portrait Gallery in London that to label Wesley and Whitfield “fundamentalist” was questionable to say the least but as an historical label put them in the wrong country in the wrong century! To find out more about this see http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/media/video/fundamentalism/

Yep, it turns out that Jensen's explanation doesn't have much to do with Breivik at all, but has a lot to say about the secularists, the secularist press, and wild talk of fundamentalism (never mind the chatter about Islamic fundamentalism this past decade).

Isn't there something entirely piquant about a minister of religion bemoaning the notion of fundamentalism, and then in the same breath scribbling a fundamental complaint to the National Portrait Gallery about the labelling of Wesley and Whitfield as fundamentalists.

This is of course to take the current definition of fundamentalism as it applies to nineteenth and twentieth century fundamentalist Christian and other religious movements, but if we were to take a standard dictionary definition ...

1. A usually religious movement or point of view characterized by a return to fundamental principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views and opposition to secularism. (here)

... then John Wesley would waltz into the category, as befits a plagiarist who helped found the Methodist movement:

Wesley embraced the Arminian doctrines that were dominant in the 18th-century Church of England. Methodism in both forms was a highly successful evangelical movement in the United Kingdom, which encouraged people to experience Jesus Christ personally. (wiki here).

By any order of merit, Wesley was a tub thumper and proselytizer of the first water, and the same could be said of the George Whitefield variant:

...an English Anglican priest who helped spread the Great Awakening in Britain and, especially, in the British North American colonies. He was one of the founders of Methodism and of the evangelical movement generally. He became perhaps the best-known preacher in Britain and America in the 18th century, and because he traveled through all of the American colonies and drew great crowds and media coverage, he was one of the most widely recognized public figures in colonial America. (wiki here)

You barely have to scratch the theological surface of this pair to see present day evangelical fundamentalism bubbling away like the devil's brew.

Presumably the National Portrait Gallery is run by hapless secularists who can't recognise the rich irony of Sydney Calvinist fundamentalists complaining about the mis-labelling of other fundamentalists when fundamentally it turns out that they are indeed bible-bashing fundamentalists.

Never mind. The column is perhaps most notable for the fun to be had in the comments section below the piece. A reader by the name of Grant Hayes determined to get amongst the Jensenists, and from the first post went hard at it:

"Secularists" are simply rife in this essay. Breivik becomes a convenient rod for beating them up - mark well, he's not a Jensen kind of Christian, oh no, he's a "secularist" kind. "Secularists" everywhere take note: you have all tacitly sanctioned massacre!

To this broad-brush tarring of secularists, the Dean adds inconsistency. He begins his piece by deploring the pain and suffering of "innocent citizens" at Breivik's hands, yet finishes by implying that everyone is a Breivik, i.e. "But of course he is just like us". In the eyes of the Dean's god, the victims of Breivik are just as evil as the man himself. The fact that they didn't commit massacre is a mere quibble - they may as well have.

So the victims of massacre are used to drive home a doctrinal point - that Breivik, far from being an aberration, is actually characteristic of the entire human race. He slaughters people, and apparently the billions who manage to go about their daily lives without slaughtering people are proven guilty. The extreme actions of one man are used to smear everyone with doctrinal reprobation.

Thirty posts later, and the flailing efforts of a few Jensen supporters brushed aside, Hayes was still at it:

... murder and jail seem to be God's preferred route for bringing certain chosen lambs into his kingdom. And integrity and goodwill seem to be God's preferred route for sending certain unchosen reprobates to Hell.

Odd, that God.

At that point, the quorum or the energy lapsed, and the motion - that Phillip Jensen is inclined to get fundamentalist when scribbling about secularists - was put, and carried on the voices, and so the wretched fundie secularists were declared to have carried the day .

It hardly seems fair to suggest that readers should do a little trolling on the Sydney Anglican pages, but really, what fun to see Grant Hayes frolic amongst the sheep ...

There should be more of it, especially when the writer of a column can't even bring himself to name "the perp" ...

(Below: John Wollaston's 1742 portrait of fundamentalist Methodist preacher George Whitefield, one of thirteen portraits held by the National Portrait Gallery of London. The rest here).

Cardinal Pell, and a healthy dose of pelloscepticism ....

(Above: yep, it's frock Sunday).

Ferreting through the week old thoughts of Cardinal Pell in the Sunday Terror, it was a wonder to behold the way the cardinal was taken with the word coinage "homosceptic" (or if a septic tank, inclined to yankee spelling, homoskeptic).

It led the pond to contemplate other half-baked, half-arsed word coinages with which to cloak snide prejudice, like RCsceptic, or tykeosceptic if you will, or perhaps papalosceptic, or cardinal or pellosceptic, or perhaps transubstantiationosceptic, and certainly trinitarianismosceptic.

Back at ranch homoprejudice, Cardinal Pell explained in Homosceptics to the Terror's readers why the coinage means so much to him, not wondering whether he might be encouraging a form of logophobia, or fear of words.

(Golly, how we would have liked to introduce verbophobia into the discussion, or better still, sesquipedalophobia, aka hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, a fear of long words, or onomatophobia, a fear of hearing a certain word or name, or any of the other phobias celebrated in The Phobia List. Talk about coinages).

Back at ranch homofear, it seems Cardinal Pell has his knickers in a twist over the changing meaning of the word homophobia, and shows he, or his source, are adept users of wiki.

Here's how it appears in wiki:

The word homophobia first appeared in print in an article written for the May 23, 1969, edition of the American tabloid Screw, in which the word was used to refer to heterosexual men's fear that others might think they are gay. (wiki it here).

And here's how it turns up in Pell's column:

When the term first appeared in a May 1969 edition of an American tabloid "Screw", homophobia meant a heterosexual man's fear that others might think him homosexual.

Uh huh. A subtle variation and distinction, but handy if you have a fear of the word "gay', commonly known as gayophobia.

Now it seems that "homophobia" has been appropriated, misused and abused:

Some homosexual extremists now define homophobia as a disrespect for, or hatred of, people who are homosexual; so that those who believe sexual activity should be confined within the marriage of a man and woman and that marriage should be protected by law are denounced as homophobes. They are not accused of fear, but of disrespect or hatred.

This tactic has been quite successful in entering into middle class opinion even beyond the inner-city and very rich suburbs, where political correctness rules.

Oh dear. Those nasty inner city and very rich politically correct suburbs at it again, ruining middle class opinion everywhere.

Sorry, time for a frock break, and a kit kat.

Ah, that's better. Hey ho, on we go:

Indeed it has become so successful that the meaning of the term has changed. Homophobia is now a fear of being accused of being bigoted, prejudiced or discriminating against homo-sexual people. To avoid this charge people become defensive or fall silent or pay the price if they persist. In the so-called Conservative Party in Britain the Prime Minister David Cameron had sacked a candidate who opined that homosexuality was not normal behavior.

Well I don't know where the errant hyphen came from in that use of "homo-sexual people" - perhaps from the Sunday Terror's original layout - but I do confess it awoke a latent hypen-phobia in the pond.

And since when has the cardinal become an American like the Labor party and dropped the "u" from "behaviour", in the American spelling style? This produced concern that a kind of "up-u-phobia" might be spreading in the church ...

A bit like the "up u Davo" reference to the "so-called" UK Conservative party run by that naughty David Cameron, what with him writing a letter to Julia Gillard in support of climate science and actions related thereto:

Whatever it means homophobia is pretty bad. It could even be worse than being a climate change denier.

Two strikes for the Pellists.

Anyhoo, now it's time for the big reveal. There's not an original thought in the cardinal's thinking, and he acknowledges the source:

An English doctor Peter Saunders has suggested that those who believe sex outside marriage is wrong could describe themselves as homosceptics; as people who respect homosexuals do not hate but do not believe homosexual activity is appropriate.

Well if you want to go to the original fount of wisdom - unless you're fountophobic - you can head off to Saunders' I'm coming out as a "homosceptic".

But in the meantime can anybody explain how the word "homosceptic" is acceptable to those who believe sex outside marriage is wrong?

Are the only people who have sex outside marriage homosexual? Don't heterosexuals, and Catholic priests wanting to show their love of the children, have the occasional fling?

Shouldn't there then be a variant word ... like "heterosceptic"? Or perhaps "pedosceptic"?

Never mind, if you're determined to be stupid, and to be prejudiced, you'll always find a way, and Pell, channeling Saunders, finds a way:

Homosceptics would also be sceptical of the claims that homosexuality is fixed or genetically determined or a biological characteristic like race, sex or skin colour. They are also sceptical of the presuppositions that same sex attraction should always be welcomed and acted out or that those who wish to resist or eradicate such feelings are dangerously wrong.

Homosceptics are inclined to believe that many homosexual lobby claims are more driven by ideology than based on evidence.

Uh huh. Well we can see why Pellists are "scientosceptical", especially when invoking old fashioned taxonomies like 'race', or being flippant in a couple of words about extensive research into biology and sexual orientation.

As if somehow Pell isn't being driven by ideology or perhaps theology, and certainly not by consideration of evidence ...

Apologies. I see it's frock break time.

Almost enough to make you trainosceptic.

Not to worry. If we summon up the sinews, avoid incipient fountophobia, and head off to the original source of Pell's wisdom, this is how that bit of garbled gobbledegook orginally read:

I’d like to broaden this definition to include “being sceptical about the key presuppositions of the gay rights movement” such as the beliefs that:

Homosexuality is genetically determined
Homosexual orientation is always fixed
Sexual orientation is a biological characteristic like race, sex or skin colour
Feelings of same sex attraction should be welcomed and acted upon
Offering help to those who wish to resist or eradicate these feelings is always wrong

Oh okay, one last frock break.

Well that led the pond to consider how to broaden the definition of pelloscepticism to include “being sceptical about the key presuppositions of the Pellist movement”, such as the beliefs that:

Marriage to the church and to Jesus Christ by adult males in a singular chaste union is determined by god
Pedophilic straying from this orientation is always invisible, no matter evidence that in the past the church has had a fixed approach to the forgiveness and covering up of said pedophilia
Marriage to the church and to Jesus Christ isn't a biological characteristic like race, sex or skin colour, not when it can be considered a kind of personal eccentricity, which might be dressed up as a "spiritual calling" to a chaste spiritual marriage with absent trinitarian deities
Feelings of attraction to Jesus Christ and the church, and a chaste spiritual marriage to said personage and institution should be welcomed and acted upon
Offering help to those who wish to resist or eradicate these feelings for a chaste "brides and bridegrooms of Christ" lifestyle is always wrong

Encouraging heterosexuals to have nine children to look after them in old age, and bolster the church's income by regular tithing, and then send the tenth off to the church's recruitment and training agencies isn't so much a religious or a biological or marital necessity as a giant Ponzi scheme, which can lead to ponziphobia.

Such assertions would of course be mere vile prejudice, dressed up in fancy words, and high falutin' prejudice, with fanciful coinages designed to cloak said prejudices.

It would be simpler to say that the pond doesn't think much of the mystical mumbo jumbo and snake oil peddled by the RC church.

In the same way, it would, of course be more simple and honest to simply say "we in the church don't like poofters" and "we encourage others to dislike poofters", but sadly the days of such simple minded fear, hate and loathing mongering have now been eradicated by the politically correct middle class.

These days we have to dress up such simple, easily understood concepts with a welter of blather, designed to disguise how the Christian lobby's claims are more driven by ideology and warped theology, than based on evidence.

In turn this leads to clever and cunning ploys, such as inking climate scepticism to euro scepticism to a brand spanking new word homoscepticism (perhaps not too much of the spanking if you notice Opus Dei lurking in the corner).

Meanwhile, you might wonder what Christ had to say about all this, seeing as he surrounded himself with twelve male apostles, never married, never had children (so they say), never apparently had sex (so they say), never had a brother (so they say), came upon the earth by way of a most peculiar sexual activity involving his mother, never spoke on the subject of homosexuality (never much talked about sex at all actually), and yet even in those long lost days a couple of thousand years ago, homosexually inclined people allegedly created by his father walked the earth, as they continue to walk the earth today ...

Perhaps he might have said:

Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.

Matthew 7:1-2

Perhaps he might have turned into a head banger, and grooved along to Corporate Avenger's lyrics:

Not saying that it's good,
Not saying that it's right,
But the Virgin Mary may have been
A hermaphorodite.

Motherfuckin' god!
Motherfuckin' god!
Motherfuckin' god!

God is good, God is great,
I think that he might be gay.

Not saying God is gay,
Not saying that at all.
But if Jesus Christ
was God and God
created all.
Then Jesus Christ
created the homosexual.
There might be a
little fag in us all.

Jesus Christ
Homosexual (repeat)

They say that God hates Fags,
They walk around so pissed.
Disguise their hate as love,
But have they thought of this.
He made us in his image,
Now listen to what I say.
Then it's a
possibility that Jesus
Christ was gay.

Jesus Christ
Homosexual (repeat)

Not saying God is gay,
Not saying that at all.
But if Jesus Christ
was God and God
created all.
Then Jesus Christ
created the homosexual.
There might be a
little fag in us all.
He made us in his image,
Now listen to what I say.
Then it's a
possibility that Jesus
Christ was gay.

Not saying that it's good,
Not saying that it's right,
But could the Virgin
Mary have been a
hermaphorodite?
She was with a child
without having a man?
And that's not the
only thing that I
don't understand.

Jesus Christ
Homosexual (repeat)

You can of course catch the song on YouTube here, but frankly, we like the lyrics better than the music.

It being Sunday, we'd prefer Ode to Joy, as conducted by that notorious homosexual Leonard Bernstein, who in his personal life and his professional career exemplified the contradictions endured by homosexuals living the lie of "don't ask, don't tell" , along with the petty snideries, cheap jokes, pathetic word coinages and pompous prejudices of all the Pellists who strode the earth before the most pompous Pellist of all came to scribble for the Sunday Terror ...

Christopher Pearson, and time to dig through the runes, the entrails and the polls one more time ...

(Above: the subbies at The Australian are now so tired, they can't even get out a photo for the splash for Christopher " " Pearson. Guys, guys, attention must be paid. Enough with the inverted commas already).


In the last few weeks, Christopher " " Pearson's column has become increasingly eccentric.

This will only be of interest to a coven of cultists, dedicated followers of conservative fashion, anxious to learn that Simon Crean should be PM, and that former chairman Kevin Rudd organised his heart operation so as to destabilise the Gillard government, and perhaps even more cleverly, use it as the basis for a coup.

Sadly, all good things come to an end, and this week's offering, Gillard walks, chews gum and is stuck with tax, is only remarkable for its unremitting banality and predictability.

It turns out that Pearson has an unhealthy obsession with the activities of Julia Gillard, right down to her capacity for taking gum for an early morning walk, and despite all the distractions offered during the week - world financial meltdown, hah, what financial meltdown - he's demanding that she continue to put the carbon tax front and centre of her activities.

The result's a kind of Fatal Attraction crossed with Play Misty For Me crossed with Misery column - yes, women always tend to be the stalkers in movies - though if you want some gender balance, perhaps you might think of The King of Comedy or the two versions of Cape Fear as suitable role models for wannabe columnist stalkers.

Pearson broods about the launch of Christine Nixon's Fair Cop, a most outrageous assault on the minions of Murdoch and their righteous search for truth and justice, and finds comfort in Niki Savva's scoop that Gillard's office is being run by "teenagers", when we all know young people will be the ruination of the planet - handed over in such jolly good shape by the older generations, and then the young handing it over to the apes, and next thing you know we've got a half dozen ape movies hanging around on the intertubes.

Even the prospect of the very fast train can't distract the steadfast Pearson, nor even the hope that riot squads will be deployed against aslyum-seekers.

No, it's the carbon tax, or nothing, proving that Pearson can't take gum for a walk, at least not if will get him off his pet theme.

So he spends the rest of his column contemplating polls about the carbon tax, and salivating at the prospect that all in Queensland save Rudd would lost their seats if an election was to be held right now.

Aye, but there's the rub. An election isn't about to be held. Oh the agony, the unfairness of it all.

Oh and then there's the matter of the science involved.

Pearson is a very sophisticated scientist - no talk of carbon dioxide being weightless from him - and he settles the science on the basis of polling:

Another sign of the way public opinion is moving is changing views about what's responsible for global warming.

The number who thought it was caused by man was the same last week as in April at 36 per cent. The number of those who thought it was caused by natural cycles rose by six points to 32 per cent.

Hang on, hang on, roll that first sentence back a bit.

... what's responsible for global warming?

Why reading that you'd almost think global warming was happening, and now we were consulting the polls to determine what was causing it, whether the activities of humans (men included) or natural cycles, or perhaps undersea volcanoes ....

Surely Pearson has stepped into some gum here, and it's clinging to his shoes, because he seems to have clean forgotten that the planet is actually cooling, as established by him as long ago as March 2008, with the compelling insights to hand in Climate facts to warm to ...

Or if it's warming it's simply because of those pesky undersea volcanoes (Pearson claims that undersea volcanoes cause global warming).

That way lies inspirational insights:

When Charles Darwin unveiled the theory of evolution, the world at once divided into rationalists and creationists. The theory that man-made greenhouse gas is causing potentially catastrophic climate change is another great divider. On one side are the sceptics, who want compelling evidence. On the other are the true believers.

Yep it's the creationists who are genuine scientific sceptics, and theory of evolution lovers who are the true believers. Or some such gobbledegook.

Guess we'll need to consult a poll to sort that one out.

In the meantime, we wait with bated breath Pearson's insights into Tony "carbon dioxide is a weightless gas" Abbott's direct action scheme:

A good question to ask climate sceptics in general, and one I put to Lord Monckton, was why he was so opposed to a carbon price and so quiet about Tony Abbott’s far more expensive direct action scheme. Tony Abbott has not found a single economist to publicly back his scheme, and an analysis by the Australia Institute estimates that bureaucrats will likely have to process more than 150,000 grant applications to achieve the Coalition’s target of 713 million tonnes of abatement by 2020. (Denniss: my tactics for debating Monckton).

Can you ever imagine a time that Pearson might, as a way to end his column, scribble:

On the strength of that I think it's safe to say that the voters have made up their minds on Tony Abbott's direct action scheme and the forthcoming debate in parliament and the media over the legislation is unlikely to have much effect apart from entrenching resentment.

Well you could, if you believed, like the character in H. G. Wells' story The Country of the Blind:

All the old stories of the lost valley and the Country of the Blind had come back to his mind, and through his thoughts ran this old proverb, as if it were a refrain—

"In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King."

"In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King." (the full story available at Project Gutenberg here).

Speaking of old proverbs, Randy Newman has been doing a tour of the antipodes, his voice now more a croak than a musical instrument, but for those who've grown old with him, here's a flashback to his younger days (and you can catch an amiable interview with him on ABC FM here).

Yep there's more to life than consulting polls and rabbiting on endlessly about the proposed carbon tax, but then you might end up in a healthy, obsession free relationship to the world, and better still, find Christopher " " Pearson's weekly column no more than a one minute distraction, an amusing blind alley down which you stumble, before doing a U-turn, and getting the hell out of there ...

Fred Nile and the unexamined ethics class worth giving ...

(Above: is that the Reverend Fred Nile dishing it out to the evil relativist secularist humanist Snidely Whiplash?)

In the old days, Friday used to be the day for whimsical oddity, as a way of preparing for a relaxing weekend.

So we offer up the peculiar sight of Ian Wallace punching on at The Punch with You 'like' your friends. But do you really LIKE them?

The semi-retired Wallace seems to have a bee in his bonnet about social networking:

The people who use these new technologies do often have large and diverse social networks but the problem is they live in an isolated virtual bubble devoid of face-to-face human interaction.

Yep it's another judgmental oldie who's taken to a blog on the internet to bemoan the way people get involved in dehumanising interactions on the internet.

Whatever else you do today, take pity on the long suffering young, who might at some point stumble on this kind of blogging by accident and take it seriously, and find themselves trapped, lost, alone, friendless, in an isolated virtual bubble with Ian Wallace ... the horror, the horror ...

Continuing on our thought-bubble, irony-free way, we were relieved to stumble across Fred Nile penning Ethics lesson two: tell the truth for the Fairfax press.

If Fred hadn't started out at the Wesley Central Mission, and now, as a politician, was determined to ensure that ...

... all legislation is brought into conformity with the revealed will of God in the Holy Bible, with a special emphasis on the ministry of reconciliation. (here)

... we'd have proposed a career as a casuistical Jesuit.

I have not sought to blackmail the NSW government. I simply reminded them: before they reject my Ethics Repeal Bill, they should remember they need our votes to pass their controversial industrial relations legislation. I never said I would vote against it, even though I have genuine concerns about its impact.

What's more, Fred utterly refutes the suggestion that he left a horse's head in Barry O'Farrell's bed.

My intention throughout the process was simply to hold the Coalition to their original policy, which opposed ethics classes. Unfortunately, before the election, the Premier wrongly believed the Greens would hold the balance of power in the upper house and told me privately that despite a desire to do so, he could not repeal the legislation and would maintain the status quo.

Uh huh. Well Barry O'Farrell told everyone publicly before the election that the ethics classes would stay, and so narrowly avoided his Carcetti moment when he almost folded last week to Fred's ploy, which if it isn't blackmail, could perhaps be called Nilemail.

Of course there was one splendid sight to arise from the kerfuffle ... an eleven year old by the name of Charlie Fine doing over Fred in fine style with Keep your politics out of our classrooms, Mr Nile.

Before ethics classes I studied Buddhism, which I found very stimulating. And before that because there was no alternative to scripture, many of my friends (myself included) were forced to spend many hours watching Lilo & Stitch on an old TV they had dug out of the janitor's cupboard.

Oh noes, not Lilo & Stich, and on a CRT of all things. The horror, the horror...

Next thing, they'll be making the hapless young read Ian Wallace and watch Snidely Whiplash in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Oh okay, it'd still be more fun than listening to Fred Nile, but you get the drift ...

The facts show that only 33 per cent of the world is Christian, and in NSW a quarter of children choose not to attend lessons on theological scripture. I think it is possible to be non-religious and a good person.

By all means, Mr Nile, you go out and be as Christian as you want; I respect that entirely. But that does not give you and your supporters the right to attempt to shape a future generation of adults in your mould – that is a religious conservative

As if to demonstrate that Charlie was on the money, in his comeback - which discreetly avoids taking on an eleven year old - Fred hurls around the usual epithets and insults, with a touch of hubris, as befits someone with an invisible entity on their side:

Our party thanks Almighty God and the NSW voters that we now hold the ''balance of prayer and responsibility'' and not the pagan Greens.

Then there's a bit of pre-emptive blather:

So, given the outcome of the election, the Coalition can now implement their original policy and vote for my bill, which concludes the ethics course in December so that principals can arrange quality education opportunities for children withdrawn from scripture classes by their parents next year.

I agree with the teaching of ethics in NSW schools, colleges and universities, provided it is based on history's greatest teacher of ethics, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Yes, Christ was always inclined to politics, and his running for office and his work as the governor of Judea, always with a fine awareness of the numbers in the senate, remains one of the least covered aspects of his life in the bible.

Sorry, we drifted off course there. Back to basic Christian abuse:

This course does not teach ethics as most parents understand the term. It does not teach children any definitive sense of right from wrong, but promotes the secular humanist relativist philosophy that there are no absolutes, such as ''You shall not murder, lie or steal''.

Oh no, not the evil relativists. Why next thing you know, these filthy vile relativists will be explaining how you shan't murder, except if it's a just war, or there's some oil for you to steal, and then explain how you might have to lie about weapons of mass destruction to trigger the fighting.

Hang on, hang on, does that make George Bush and Tony Blair secular humanist relativists?

I sincerely regret that some atheistic parents will prevent their children from learning about the most important aspect of Australian culture, our Christian heritage and faith. Even our atheistic Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has said all children should have a knowledge of the Bible.

Yes, but as Fred knows, what children absolutely should not have any knowledge of is the competition to the bible, or the way that the Christian tradition has ripped off many elements of the Greek/Roman legal and social and political and philosophical and cultural traditions, and claimed them as their own. After all, if you've got a monopoly, why share?

Contrary to the claims of Dr Simon Longstaff, the Christian churches remain fundamentally opposed to the so-called ''ethics course'', but are discussing the best approach now that it is law.

I do not repudiate the tradition of Western thought, as claimed, and I believe it unethical to engage in that sort of invective.

Yes, not that calling people pagan greenies or atheists wretched relativists is in any way a kind of invective, but rather just the friendly bickering of people engaged in philosophical discourse.

The fact that an eleven year old could mount a more civilised, and engaging argument with a killer cultural reference, seems to have passed Fred by ...

And then on cue, speaking of Christians looting and pillaging the past, Fred takes on Socrates as an ally ..

Remember that Socrates was ''virtually alone'' and executed because he dared to question the majority world view; to question what youth were being taught. This is all I am doing.

Yep, it's Fred and Socrates together against the world in a tag team match in the octagon, and damned if an atheist will get out of there alive.

Eek, hang on, hang on, it turns out that Socrates was charged with disrespect towards the gods - he questioned their abilities - and corruption of the youth, and as Aristophanes might say, he was the very paradigm of atheistic, scientific sophistry. (wiki Plato's Apology of Socrates here).

Strange company for Fred, you might think, but never mind the bizarre incompatibilities - it's a bit like Superman and Lex Luthor teaming up - Fred and Socrates have to arrange a smackdown of the low life atheists doing the rounds these days:

There are those among Dr Longstaff's supporters and organisations such as the Teachers Federation, the Greens and the Labor Left who wrongly believe in the separation of church and state, and want to abolish religious education from government schools.

They wrongly believe that when Sir Henry Parkes introduced free and ''secular'' state education, he meant ''non-Christian'' or ''non-religious''. That was never his intention. In the 1880s, ''secular'' was used to prohibit denominational teaching in NSW classrooms, not scripture classes, which Parkes decreed should fill one hour per day.

Yep, and it it was good enough for Sir Henry Parkes in the eighteen eighties, damn straight it's good enough for the twenty first century.

And if you don't like it, then it's off to watch Lilo & Stitch on the janitor's CRT screen, you pesky eleven year old, with your sordid modernist, relativist ways, and forget that inquiring mind curious about the ways of the world.

Bow down before Fred and Jesus!

I have never said the Premier should break his word, but simply uphold his original position.

Uh huh. But is that his original original position, or the original position he took to the electorate as an election promise?

If Dr Longstaff becomes militant and incites the mob to ''rise up'', his actions are akin to that which he despises. Maybe a lesson in ethics is required?

Wow. Fred thinks he's scored a killer blow, and thanks to the god-smiting Socrates, he cheekily urges this Longstaff chappie to take a lesson in the ethics classes Fred is intent on destroying ...

So how will Longstaff get his lesson in ethics?

Well it turns out ethics is copyrighted, patented and trademarked to Fred and Jesus ... and if you breach any of the monopoly's rights, they'll sic Socrates on to you ...

And Socrates? Hang on, hang on, how did that pervert get into the mix?

Well we said it was going to be an irony free day, but gee Fred makes it hard. The way that he appends Reverend to his name after that outburst of snarkiness, petulance and abuse makes you realise that fire and brimstone and Nilemail is still the biblical way for some ...

Now if only he'd just turn the other cheek ... we have some weightless dry ice waiting in the wings to help out Tony Abbott's science experiment, and we need to drop it from a great height on to a noggin ...

UPDATE: Barry O'Farrell has denied Fred Nile's claims in relation to their private discussion on getting rid of ethics classes, so one is telling porkies. Time for ethics classes for both of them?

And Fred Nile speaking in the upper house of the NSW parliament has compared secular humanism and the ethics taught in NSW classrooms to the Nazi ideology on view on the second world war ...

Time for a class in Godwin's Law? Second thoughts, when staging a three ring circus, you always need a healthy supply of ethical clowns ...

And so to the news this week, along with the fatuities of Paul Sheehan and Brendan O'Neill ...

(Above: Malcolm 'big Mal' Turnbull's incisive map demonstrating the remarkable similarity of New Zealand and Australia).

And so to the news.

In a major scientific advance for the Liberal party, big Mal has proposed that carbon dioxide does indeed have weight, and has devised an experiment to prove it ... drop a block of dry ice on toe from a fair height. (Malcolm Turnbull slams ignorant war on science).

This isn't rigorous enough for the pond. Only dropping a block of dry ice on Tony Abbott's head, from a very great height, and repeated a number of times to prove the results are replicable, will satisfy its rigorous high school science methodology.

In the meantime, big Mal has also noted that New Zealand is doing a national broadband network much better and cheaper, and to only 75% of the population.

We understand an even more incisive comparison to Singapore's roll out costs - a city state as vast as the Australian continent - or is it an island - or an island continent - will shortly be rolled out by big Mal. As the map above shows, apples is definitely apples, unless they have fire blight.

Still, it's pleasing to see that an NBN is now officially approved, and we're only arguing about the cost and the necessity of including agrarian socialists in the mix.

Frankly the pond was startled to hear that old home town Tamworth will cop fixed wireless connectivity next year. (Regional communities to get first wireless). So much for fibre to the home. Guess the need is to get it out quickly, so agrarian socialist Tony Windsor can cock a snoot at agrarian socialist Barnaby Joyce.

Well it's time all that nonsense stopped, and we cut 25% of rural areas out of the mix, and focussed on delivering the NBN to the inner west of Sydney! Now there's a policy viewpoint without the slightest hint of bias or special pleading.

Meanwhile, big Mal has proposed an incisive solution to the monopoly problem bedevilling the NBN. Hand it all back to Telstra, and make that august, hugely successful company the de facto monopoly. (Liberals up ante on internet).

Perhaps big Mal dropped a block of dry ice on his own noggin ... purely in the interests of science.

Meanwhile, the pond is wreathed in nostalgia with the news that Anthony Albanese has rolled out the very fast train vision thingie again (High-speed eastern rail link to cost $100 billion).

The pond was involved in some peripheral activities related to an earlier proposal a couple of decades ago, when it was fondly known to its friends as the very fast real estate scam.

Of course, with the federal government showing just how it can handle infrastructure - who can forget the enormous pleasure heading out to Sydney's brand new second airport, right up there with Singapore's - we look forward to riding on a VFT hours before departing this world for another one, or at least comfortable residence in a graveyard.

Was it the Whitlam years when a second airport for Sydney was proposed? And now, just look at it, a marvel of federal government ingenuity and planning.

Enough with the news, and on to the commentariat. These days the punters have a wealth of material on a Thursday. In a desperate attempt to save the national economy, Paul Sheehan has doubled his output, and so today you find him scribbling about Michele Bachmann in Motherly wrath for undisciplined US.

It almost goes without saying - but we'll say it anyway - that Sheehan finds much to admire in Bachmann and her telegenic, trenchant articulation of household values, and fully supports the right of conservative mothers to be angry.

It's like reading, instead of watching, a Dumb and Dumber movie, and as a corrective to aged eastern suburbs male writers infatuated with the telegenic Bachmann, we always suggest corrective spectacles, or a corrective cane, so as not to think and walk with a tilt to the ratbag world of teapartiers, or at least a little corrective reading, as can be found in Some History About Michele Bachmann's Radical Religious Right Agenda.

There's plenty more about Bachmann's extremism (and her love of government programs and the weird anti-gay world inhabited by her husband) on the intertubes, but in the meantime, can we suggest to Sheehan that he forget the productivity, and simply let the Australian economy collapse, by the simple expedient of producing only one column of gibberish a week?

But wait, there's more. It seems poor old Brendan O'Neill has been profoundly ravaged, and reduced to a simpering, gibbering wreck - much like Paul Sheehan - after being torn apart by the cardigan wearers on Q&A, as he explains at length in No job is lonelier than defending freedom of speech in Q&A land.

Apparently O'Neill was like a wildebeest caught in the headlights of angry lions intent on a casual kill, or a Christian in the colosseum, or whatever paranoid metaphor you can muster, as he suffered mightily from the looks of horror shot his way by his co-panellists.

Apparently Tanya Plibersek cast daggered looks at her tormentor, because he made her sick to her stomach, in her shameless way, but she was simply incapable of understanding the finery, frippery, subtlety and nuance of O'Neill's provocative discourse.

Lordy, lordy, it turns out that:

Q&A confirmed that, post-Norway, we're witnessing the rehabilitation of "media effects" theory, the stubbornly unproven idea that words directly cause carnage.

This will be a great relief to Islamic propagandists and terrorists, as they scribble away with fine sounding words urging carnage.

Sorry lads, you're wasting your time. Totally unproven, no way you can cause carnage, and so while you're at it, why not let a thousand web sites bloom on the full to overflowing intertubes.

That is the implication of Plibersek and Mayne's discomfort with provocative discourse: that the little Islamic people's minds are so putty-like that one shrill comment from an un-PC loudmouth, al Qaeda operative or suicide bomber recruitment officer might be enough to push them over the edge towards murder.

Damn you, unemployed Fairfax subbie, at least quote Mr. O'Neill properly.

The censorious implications of the idea that heated or experimental words and ideas provoke murderous behaviour are profound.

Yes, indeed, let a million fundamentalist ratbag sites bloom.

Or perhaps it's only J. D. Salinger, Brendan O'Neill, John Milton (such elevated company), and newspaper articles that can use the 'get out of jail' card, because it's simply impossible for newspaper articles to make men into mass murderers, as opposed to say reading the bible or the Koran.

O'Neill also offers a vigorous defence of the Murdoch empire, valiant card carrying elevated supporter of freedom of the press that it is - well his column is in The Australian, so what else do you expect him to say? Shut down the biased rag overnight?

O'Neill proposes a remarkable solution for anyone discontented with the state of the press:

Instead, if you really don't like what his papers have to say, you should set up your own post-Murdochian, pot-stirring paper. That's one of the great things about press freedom: anyone with the nous and the know-how and a fundraising sidekick can press their own ideas and offer them up for public consumption.

(Above: golly, is that Brendan O'Neill with cocked head tilted towards the left trying to look smart, alongside an utterly silly suggestion?)

Nous? Start a newspaper? Thank the lord O'Neill is a columnist, and not an investment manager or a business advisor, since starting a newspaper in this day and age would be the rough equivalent of pissing money against the wall. Even chairman Rupert only keeps his physical papers for the political influence they deliver, and certainly not the profits.

Still, it reaffirms O'Neill's willingness to offer bad business advice, along with really fatuous, stupid alternative solutions to current mainstream media monopolies, and the evils of phone hacking, corrupting police and so on and so forth in an empire notorious for its corrupt use of its power to further its agenda (shades of Berlusconi, and with a different page three kind of topless bunga bunga).

Yep, for such blessings, we can thank the freedom of the press, and the ongoing willingness of The Australian to print O'Neill's columns in support of chairman Rupert's empire. Now there's freedom. The right to affirm the rightness of Chairman Rupert ...

A whispered aside loud enough for the back row. No wonder the Murdoch press wants to kill off the NBN. Its columnists still think there's a future in newspapers ...

Can we propose an alternative? If you really don't like what Rupert's papers have to say, stop buying them.

Kill them off quicker, end the agony of actually paying to read the defensive mendacious posturing of the likes of Brendan O'Neill, and get on with reading all the information to hand on the intertubes ...

(Below: after all, we're with Chairman Rupert).

Janet Albrechtsen, and never mind the ideas when you can settle for a routine dose of abuse ...

(Above: George Orwell's personal account of his time in Spain fighting for the socialist cause).

The problem with Janet Albrechtsen of course, is not a question of free speech.

It's that no one can shut her up.

The drivel, always with a right wing bias, that comes from her keyboard is published on a regular, defensive, and inaccurate basis in The Australian, giving her opportunities to whinge, moan, lash, bedevil, excoriate and expound from a national masthead, backed by an unseemly amount of Murdoch money, without which the unprofitable rag would likely fold.

It's part of the victimisation process the right endures regularly, routinely, and even when in power. Access to a national masthead, and the right to yammer on endlessly, as in Mad march of political correctness. Oh the suffering ...

And it invariably involves simple-minded distortions of interesting truths.

And invariably George Orwell's name always bobs up - such an Orwellian dude - even though Orwell was an eccentric life-long socialist.

Here's Albrechtsen's typical invocation:

In Quadrant last year, Shelley Gare wrote that those who are totsched find "their efforts left to expire soundlessly like a butterfly in a jar". When Orwell wrote his 1938 classic Homage to Catalonia, which addressed Stalinist Russia's involvement in the Spanish Civil War, the left-wing literati simply ignored it.

Reading this throwaway remark, a reader might be inclined to forget that Orwell's 1938 classic Homage to Catalonia addressed Orwell's involvement in the Spanish Civil War fighting on the socialist side, along with the peculiar, idiosyncratic, personal events that led him to fight for POUM, rather than the Soviet-supported International Brigades, and the events in Spain that led him to become a life-long anti-Stalinist. (For that kind of information, you must leave the pages of the The Australian, and trot off to the book's wiki, here).

But then Orwell was a difficult author during his lifetime, with very mixed results. Albrechtsen makes great play of Homage to Catalonia only achieving sales of 1500 by the time of Orwell's death, but then only 1,100 copies of Down and Out in Paris and London, of 1,750 printed, with the left overs remaindered.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying was a turkey on release, lost during the first days of the second world war, and it was really only Gollancz flogging The Road To Wigan Pier to its newly formed Left Book Club that made it something of a 40,000 print run solid seller.

The deeper irony with Animal Farm? Well apart from that conservative banker T. S. Eliot turning it down for its Trotskyite line, and a restrained initial print run of 4,500, and a mixed reception in the UK, it only became a wider success when it hit the United States ... when J. Edgar Hoover and various US agencies found it to their political taste.

The Signet book in various printings has sold millions of copies. The introduction reprints a Times Literary Supplement article (August 6, 1954) which quotes Orwell: "Every line 1 have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism...," but omits the rest of the sentence "and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it."

Sssh, whatever you do, don't mention the democratic socialism. And when Time reprinted the 1954 edition?

The editors' preface echoes Time-Life's aggressive anti-Communism, and while seeming to appear fair uses catch phrases such as "Stalinist betrayal," "Communist duplicity," and "pig commissars." Muggeridge is a bit more even-handed; at one point he argues that "Animal Farm is as relevant to contemporary America – where the Century of the Common Man has become the Century of the Common Millionaire – as ever it was to Soviet Russia." (and there's a lot more fascinating information on Orwell and his first editions at this exhibition, here).

We've strayed far from Albrechtsen, but for a reason, because life is more interesting, diverse and lively than allowed for in her simplistic abstractions.

Suffice to say, Orwell at various points in his publishing life was ignored, and not for reasons of Stalinist conspiracies, and not just by the left-wing literati, but by the book buying public in general.

And routinely, he's been praised and used by people whom, in the normal course of things, he would have loathed, especially those who glibly ignore his devotion to his own peculiar brand of democratic socialism.

And that's the way it goes with all of Albrechtsen's litany of whinges and moans. As usual, climate science rears its ugly head:

It's used by those who tell us that climate change will destroy us all if we do not act immediately. The sceptics are being totsched. Opposing views? What opposing views?

To which one might ask, Opposing science? What opposing science?, unless of course you take the view that science is simply a matter of views and personal notions and contentions, and isn't subject to any kind of burden of proof, and so climate science can be utterly destroyed by reference to alarmists and warministas, in much the same way as intelligent designers and creationists can stand alongside Darwinists, and claim their scepticism is being totsched.

But perhaps the funniest routine is what Albrechtsen calls the consensus con, as if there isn't a deep-seated consensus amongst the commentariat.

Here's Gerard Henderson yesterday in the Herald:

There is room for a thoughtful discussion about Western culture, immigration and birth rates, which can readily co-exist with opposition to terrorism from the extreme right, the extreme left or militant Islamism ...

... mass murder in Norway should not be allowed to inhibit free speech. That would be counter-productive.

And here's Albrechtsen:

Over the past few weeks, some on the Left have claimed that those of us who have raised questions about multiculturalism, immigration and the relationship between Islam and modernity have blood on our hands for the mass murder in Oslo. Here, murder is used as a muzzle to close down free speech. And this is just the latest addition to a growing list of tactics to curb free speech, and even worse, to stifle genuine inquiry.

Talk about a consensus, the consensus of course being that the commentariat only wants to preach truth, justice and enlightenment, and has been unjustly persecuted by unholy leftists ...

As for a genuine enquiry into the relationship between European Crusader Christianity and mass murder? Seeing as how Albrechtsen has expended an enormous amount of energy over the years explaining how Islam results in rape, murder and mayhem, and so might be interested in a little balancing of the books?

Forget it Jake, this is Janet Town.

It turns out that this stifling genuine inquiry is part of a vast political conspiracy involving PC, which is to say political correctness and the PC crowd.

PC has victimised all sorts of people, from Mark Steyn to poor long suffering Andrew Bolt. The PC crowd, it seems, are Islamic:

The PC crowd is clever. They know there are no useful legal tests about hurt feelings and inciting hate. They enact nice-sounding laws, build bureaucracies and wait for them to blossom and bludgeon free speech. They have effectively co-opted Islamic-style oppression to prohibit debate; be it about Islam or anything else they wish to fence off from free speech.

Here's what the pond wants to know. If the PC crowd is so clever and so Islamic, why on earth can't they shut Janet Albrechtsen up?

Week after week she yammers on about nothing, and her final par is as good an example of this yammering as you might find:

The principles are clear enough: free speech is not a Left-Right thing as Mark Steyn said. It's a free-unfree thing.

Uh huh. Which presumably is why Albrechtsen constructs the entirety of her argument as a left-right, Islamic wrong-Janet right thing.

You don't get to cry in favour of free speech just to defend those with whom you agree. And free speech must include the right to offend. If we prosecute offensive opinions, we just encourage ever more ridiculous claims to protection. We fuel that marketplace of outrage. And we end up shutting down the true genius of modern Western civilisation: the contest of ideas.

Uh huh. Except everybody persecuting the commentariat must shut up, stop totsching ideas and deliver the consensus con that rightly belongs to the commentariat ... on George Orwell, climate science, and yadda yadda, what else ya got? Julia Gillard two legs bad, Tony Abbott four legs good.

Now there's a contest of ideas.

But here's the rub. Albrechtsen's piece is an ideas-free zone. She wilfully refuses to deal with Orwell on his own ground, she burbles that views are sufficient for science, she delivers a long list of hapless, long suffering commentariat victims, and best of all, she blames stifling political correctness for Pauline Hanson:

... remember this: the stifling political correctness that rejected an open debate about immigration in the early 1990s helped fuel the emergence and popularity of Pauline Hanson.

Uh huh. Pauline Hanson is all the fault of stifling political correctness, somehow enacted while John Howard was in power and encouraged the disendorsed Liberal candidate to speak her mind, and then took several months to make up his mind that he didn't much like what was on her mind (but in the meantime, how the possums had been stirred).

Well here's a thought.

John Howard = stifling political correctness.

Yes, after going down the rabbit hole with Albrechtsen, and biting into the mushroom, things get really weird. And paranoia can result:

The other trick is to quietly exclude certain people from the national discourse. It is best summed up by a German word: totschweigtaktik. To be totsched is to be subjected to death by silence: books, ideas, people that challenge the status quo are simply ignored.

Death by silence? Janet Albrechtsen? Tell 'em they must be dreaming ...

Hold on, I get it now.

I thought the column was about ideas and freedom and so forth and etcetera, and actually it's just a set of comedy stylings about the evils of leftists and Islamics.

Here at the pond, we'd love to earn a charge of Islamophobia, but truth to tell, Islamic viewpoints are almost entirely absent from the opinion pages of the mainstream media. Which is why we'll continue to settle for the Pellists, the Jensenists and the commentariat, such as Albrechtsen, who love to talk about the freedom of ideas, but can't deliver any ideas where it counts ... like climate change and George Orwell and extremist mass murderers with a Crusader Christian agenda ...

(Below: and speaking of an absence of ideas and facts, a reader recently reminded the pond of Janet Albrechtsen receiving a drubbing from Media Watch, long ago, and The Australian's considered response).

Gerard Henderson, and the right of the commentariat to go on blathering ...

(Above: and for more on Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (Latin: Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici), commonly known as the Knights Templar, the wiki's here).

This guy (Anders Breivik) isn’t a serious Christian. He’s a devoted New York Times reader, and he’s an extremely well-read guy. (Mark Steyn, here).

There you go, Christians, you dumb, extremely poorly read bunnies, out the back with you, and take your copy of See Spot Run! while you're at it.

Seriously. You have to be almost illiterate to be a serious Christian.

Well there's the bizarro comment for the day out of the way from Tim Blair's and Andrew Bolt's favourite freedom commentator - guess they must aspire to be illiterate too - and so we turn to our old favourite, Gerard Henderson, scribbling furiously in Right-wing extremism forces rethink on civil liberties.

Henderson fancies himself as a moderate thinker, so surely there'll be no dissembling, disingenuous nonsense about Breivik:

Last week, the New York Times ran a headline depicting Breivik as a ''Christian extremist'' while other media outlets have labelled him a ''white extremist''. Breivik is certainly white - so much so that he is said to have undergone plastic surgery to look like an Aryan Nazi. But he does not belong to any Christian church and he has condemned both the Catholic and Protestant faiths.

Uh ooh. Uh huh.

Clearly he isn't a serious Christian, and possibly reads the New York Times.

It's as if Christianity's long tradition of conducting pogroms and inquisitions against Jews, women, witches, secularists, atheists, Islamics, heretics, anarchists, socialists, communists (and who else have you got) can be swept under the carpet, and anyone calling themselves a Christian has to pass some kind of Steyn-Henderson theological test before they can call themselves Xian.

But Breivik's 'condemnation' of Catholic and Protestant faiths was unexceptional, even banal, and linked to the notion that Christians weren't doing enough to protect their heritage and fight off the Islamic hordes:

My parents, being rather secular wanted to give me the choice in regards to religion. At the age of 15 I chose to be baptised and confirmed in the Norwegian State Church. I consider myself to be 100% Christian. However, I strongly object to the current suicidal path of the Catholic Church but especially the Protestant Church. I support a Church that believes in self defence and who are willing to fight for its principles and values, at least resist the efforts put forth to exterminate it gradually. The Catholic and Protestant Church are both cheering their own annihilation considering the fact that they embrace the ongoing inter-faith dialogue and the appeasement of Islam. The current Church elite has shown its suicidal face, as vividly demonstrated last year by the archbishop of Canterbury’s speech contemplating the legitimacy of Shariah in parts of Britain.

In a nutshell?

Religion: Christian, Protestant but I support a reformation of Protestantism leading to it being absorbed by Catholisism. The typical “Protestant Labour Church” has to be deconstructed as its creation was an attempt to abolish the Church
Religious: I went from moderately to agnostic to moderately religious

And he takes the each way bet, what we might call the Oscar Wilde death bed strategy, in relation to eternity:

If praying will act as an additional mental boost/soothing it is the pragmatical thing to do. I guess I will find out… If there is a God I will be allowed to enter heaven as all other martyrs for the Church in the past.

A Christian martyr, in the grand tradition of Christian martyrs. As for his vision of Europe?

I fully support that the Church gains more or less monopoly on religion in Europe (government policies, school curriculum etc at least) in addition to granting the Church several concessions which have been taken from them the last decades. (and if you want to waste your time on brain-addled nonsense, you can catch a link to Breivik's full manifesto as uploaded to Scribd here).

Being a half-baked science and 'logic' orientated Eropean from a secular background, and clearly delusional, Breivik gives anxious Christians plenty of outs, so that Henderson can reduce him to the status of the "lone psychopathic killer".

Yet earlier in his piece, Henderson acknowledges that Breivik had connections to other European extremists:

Breivik appears to have been a narcissistic loner but he had some links with the Knights Templar movement and the lunar right English Defence League. McVeigh had a relationship with the American militia movement, which is hostile to government.

And that's the problem for the commentariat, because Breivik, in an ill-digested way, has scribbled out fifteen hundred pages that faithfully replicate many of the talking points of the right wing commentariat, aping their points, supporting their world view, but instead of yammering on about it, taking direct, if completely futile, action to bring it in to being.

What to do? Well in this context, the best form of defence is attack, and to rattle other boogeyman:

...the activities of the terrorist right should not be used as a cloak to diminish the real threat posed by Islamist terrorism - of the kind experienced in the United States in 2001, Bali in 2002, Madrid in 2004, London in 2005 and Mumbai in 2008. Moreover, it would be unwise to assume that extreme left terrorism, of the kind that took place in North America and Western Europe in the late 1960s and the 1970s, will not be revived.

Indeed. It seems these days we must even be careful of poor sods inspired by anarchism, perhaps still living in the Spanish civil war days of the nineteen thirties:

What should you do if you discover an anarchist living next door? Dust off your old Sex Pistols albums and hang out a black and red flag to make them feel at home? Invite them round to debate the merits of Peter Kropotkin's anarchist communism versus the individualist anarchism of Emile Armand? No – the answer, according to an official counter-terrorism notice circulated in London last week, is that you must report them to police immediately. (Anarchists should be reported, advises Westminister anti-terror police).

But back to Henderson, and his sensitivities.

You see, Breivik had the cheek to quote some antipodean luminaries in his manifesto, including such notorious ratbags as George Pell, fornicating former Liberal MP Ross Cameron, and historian Keith 'kill the black armband' Windschuttle, not to forget Peter Costello and John Howard.

Naturally there must be a cleaning of the Augean stables to make sure the named rise about the mess.

Cardinal Pell is cited as expressing concern about invocations to violence in the Koran and about the deeply anti-Christian views held by some secularists. Cameron's citation turns on his view that young men should commit to women and agree to have children. And Windschuttle is mentioned as someone who is disturbed about an anti-Western culture in many of our universities. That is all.

All of these comments are considered. None has provoked acts of violence in Australia.

Considered comments? Or the ritual incantations of those with a right-wing mind set?

Well it's about time to play the victim card, and to remind everyone that poor Pell and the others mentioned are just being victimised:

One problem with the reaction by sections of the left to the Norway murders is that it is intolerant in itself. If the likes of Costello, Howard, Pell, Cameron and Windschuttle cannot say what they said, there would be no free debate at all.

You might happen to think that Pell blathering on about secularists and the Koran is intolerance personified, and as for the hypocrisy of Cameron saying young men should commit to women ... (I've cheated: 'Family man' MP's bombshell).

Yep, these days if you point out that the emperor's clothes might be a little ragged, or perhaps even invisible in places, that's intolerant, as if the original intolerance isn't in any way provoking or provocative.

Two thousand years of Christians condemning secularists and atheists to an eternity of agonising hell, and suddenly Pell comes over all sooky about a few remarks directed against the church ...

Poor Henderson feels under siege:

An unpleasant tension currently exists in Australia - probably unmatched since the Great Depression in 1931 and the constitutional crisis in 1975.

In both those instances, the tension was resolved by political events that led to a general election. No such outcome is likely in the immediate future.

Uh huh. So meanwhile we have to endure talk of drowning Julia Gillard like kittens in a chaff bag (yes, I've seen kittens drowned in a chaff bag in the Peel river, it wasn't a pleasant sight), and ditch the witch, and so on and so forth, and a relentless cranking up of the rhetoric to fever pitch by Tony Abbott and the commentariat and minions of Murdoch, determined to establish that Australia is on the verge of utter ruination, when what they really mean is that the believe the government is illegitimate, and their 'born to rule' right to power has been snatched away from them, even though the vote is in, and there's no need to call an election to satisfy Tony Abbott's lust for power, and the precioussss ring.

Hence the death threats on independents, and even a voice in a jolly Joe Hockey meeting mounting a call to arms.

Naturally Henderson ends with the notion that he's the epitome of moderation:

There is an obligation on all involved in the public debate to moderate their language, to desist from exaggeration and to disavow symbolic or real physical violence. However, mass murder in Norway should not be allowed to inhibit free speech. That would be counter-productive.

Uh huh. But in this very column, Henderson hasn't desisted from exaggeration, by pretending that somehow Breivik doesn't have anything to do with an extremist pro-Christian world view.

Perhaps Henderson could explain where he intends to draw the line, and in the process have a quiet word with Tony Abbott and Alan Jones, rather than just blathering on about the intolerant left.

Who'd have thought we'd be quoting David Williamson?

... when Alan Jones suggests he is about to ''put her in a chaff bag and hoist her into the Tasman Sea'', it's something else again. To suggest our Prime Minister should be drowned like a helpless kitten was nasty and tasteless. (Time for Gillard to set the Bulldog on the bully boy).

No, Mr. Williamson, it's just free speech, please no inhibitions, and no inhibiting!

And now it seems the pond might Barry O'Farrell and his state Liberals an apology. The Carcetti moment we wrote about recently might be deferred, and according to the cardigan wearers in the ABC newsroom this morning, ethics classes in New South Wales might well resist the ravages of Fred Nile, and continue.

Well that'd be a nice outcome, proving that it's possible to stand up against the guile and blackmailing skills of extremist Christians ....

(Below: how about drown them like kittens in a chaff bag?)

Paul Sheehan, Glenn Milne, a crisis in confidence, and not to worry, the IPA will sort it out ...

After the emotional trauma of Paul Sheehan's last outing - wherein he wanted to donate free taxi rides to any Sydney sider waiting for a bus - it's a relief to turn to Stop the rot: debt crisis must end, and discover he's channeling Tony Abbott on carbon dioxide:

Confidence is intangible, invisible, odourless, colourless, shapeless and valueless in any measurable way.

Oh dear, I wonder if it's weightless too.

Thereafter what follows is a very dull and predictable berating of Obama and the Democrats in the current United States debt crisis, with a quite handsome endorsement of the products of the Tea Party movement, fervent proponents of a grass roots campaign to save billionaires from tax increases.

No doubt the billionaires will offer free taxi rides to poor sods reduced to catching buses.

Hey ho, on we go, pausing only to celebrate John McCain's mangled Lord of the Rings analogy, which led to a flurry of Tolkein references and homages, including a spot on Stephen Colbert.

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Well it makes for more fun than reading Sheehan's second hand account, when primary American sources are close at hand.

Meanwhile, over at The Australian, Glenn Milne seems to have returned to favour (Glenn Milne leaves the Oz).

Milne, who was dubbed "the Poison Dwarf" by Paul Keating, no doubt with a keen eye for Lord of the Rings analogies, today scribbles an entirely useless piece, Get out of perpetual election mode and just govern, seemingly designed to get the week off to a good start with a handsome bout of fatuity.

The theory, according to Milne, expounded at great and tedious length, is that Labor must leave the carbon tax debate behind, and get on and govern.

Milne then explains how it will be impossible to govern, by brooding about the planned tax forum, and then he comes up with a priceless insight:

This is the worst of all worlds for Swan. He gets to host a tax forum at the behest of the independents, which he must neuter from the outset by vetoing any changes to the GST, the mining tax or the carbon tax, but which still gives the Murdoch press, and in particular the Daily Terror, a licence for a scare campaign.

Oops, damn you, laid off Murdoch subbie, you know very well that Milne line actually talked of an "opposition licence for a scare campaign."

Anyhoo, by the end of the piece, it turns out that it's simply impossible for Gillard to govern, because she's going to lose either the support of Mike Kelly in Eden Monaro or independent Wilkie in Tasmania in relation to the poker machine club industry's desire to keep on fleecing the punters. How do they put it?

We will decide who comes into the clubs of this country, and the circumstances in which they are fleeced of their family fortune.

Yep, it's just another day at The Australian, destroying that special weightless, odourless, colourless substance, called fair and balanced opinion-making. Truly when Milne scribbles ...

For Gillard, it seems, no matter which way she looks, the road ahead just never gets easier.

... he and the minions of Murdoch will continue to ensure it's a rocky road, while Tony "carbon dioxide is weightless" Abbott will get plenty of room to write self-serving election mode tracts for the Oz like Why Gillard needs a new mandate from the people.

We have to admit that we read it hoping to discover how carbon dioxide was weightless, only to reach a point where a great chortle redeemed all the suffering:

Now, we still need a stronger economy but we need a stronger society too. Bodies such as the CIS and the Institute of Public Affairs have acknowledged this through the priority they give to social and cultural issues, as much as economic ones.

The Institute of Public Affairs? The pro-tobacco, pro-alcohol, pro-poker machine, pro-healthy weightless carbon dioxide, pro-what else have you got to ensure that the bandits can still make out like bandits, Institute of Public Affairs?

The home of Chris Berg running a valiant rear guard action against plain packaging in Plain packs pointless when smoke gets in our eyes?

The home of climate denialism (let's not dress it up with the honorary title of scepticism, since science is based on scepticism, not denialism), as outlined in The benefit of the doubt:

''Of all the serious sceptics in Australia, we have helped and supported just about all of them in their work one way or another,'' he says, listing some prominent figures on the local circuit. ''Ian Plimer - we launched his book - Bob Carter, Jo Nova, William Kininmonth.''
The IPA's operating budget is small but its influence in nurturing climate scepticism in the wider community is large. About a quarter of its $2 million in annual funding comes from corporations with a direct stake in the climate change debate, not including contributions from its 1000 individual members, some of whom also have a personal interest in climate change.

The home of Chris Berg celebrating the joys of alcohol, in Alcohol Is Good - So Let's Drink To That? Of course the point isn't to downplay the evils of alcohol, it's to celebrate the joy Fosters brings to shareholders ...

The home of Chris Berg celebrating the joys of industrial food, and deploring anyone who takes any interest in any other kind of food, in Dig in, don't wait. Our slow food nostalgia is misplaced.

The home of Chris Berg explaining how poker machines are just jolly good fun, in The Road To Hell Is Not Paved With Poker Machines.

Oh yes, the Institute of Public Affairs certainly gives priority to key social and cultural issues.

Thank you Tony Abbott, but the pond is still waiting for that explanation of the science behind carbon dioxide turning out to be weightless, briefly noted in a regional rag, The Canberra Times, under the header Abbott chokes on greenhouse gas.

It's going to be a long week, and no doubt there will be many crises of confidence, most likely induced by reading the commentariat and worrying about Tony Abbott being in bed with the IPA ...

(Below: this found on the tubes. Who knows what it means).