religion
In Arrogance The Wicked Persecute The Poor
If I were to have a scriptural quotation in a gunsight I’d want to do better than this lot.
Coded references to biblical passages are inscribed on gunsights widely used by the US and British military in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has emerged.
The markings include “2COR4:6” and “JN8:12”, relating to verses in the books of Corinthians II and John.
Trijicon, the US-based manufacturer, was founded by a devout Christian, and says it runs to “Biblical standards”.
Come on. Christ the light of the world? That’s supposed to be inspiring for the squaddies?
Manufacturer: I’ll have mine with the full text of Psalm 10 please.
That's what she said
I can think of no better place than Mount Ainslie, if I were a Satanist in the ACT and I wanted to celebrate a Black Mass near Parliament. It’s not clear if it’s Crowley’s, LaVey’s, or some other kind of ritual, but then if you’re in Canberra, I suppose, you take what quasi-gnostic rituals you can get.
Catch the Fire Ministries pastor Daniel Nalliah has organised a “prayer offensive” to combat evil forces including witchcraft, homosexuality and abortion.
The discovery of a “black mass altar” at Mount Ainslie in Canberra by a group of school students had inspired him to organise a prayer gathering at the area on Saturday.
“The type of altar discovered on Mount Ainslie pointed to a black mass and the work of dark forces wanting to cast spells on Australia and federal parliament,” Mr Nalliah said.
That’s… what she said.
Resurrection In The Game Here To Save You
Lack of rhymes, meaningless punch lines
Battle for yo’ mind like Israel and Palestine
Good news in some fuckin’ hard-ass times
No more disses, repeated hook-lines or choruses
——Resurrection, Public Enemy (He Got Game, 1998)
It’s been a while since I hit [submit] here at stoush.net. Whether through the lack of anything to say, lack of time or sheer ennui, the place is in a bit of a lamentable state, no longer listed by Google, comments facility all but broken, template in shocking disrepair. Like the proverbial fire station, it needs a bit of work. Pretty soon I plan on blowing out the cobwebs, scrubbing off the pigeonshit and clearing for proper action.
As a matter of first steps, though, this place still works as a site for the sharing of interesting links as found on the web—and that’s an activity that doesn’t require futzing around with Drupal. That’s something I’d like to start doing again. Let this post serve as a declaration of Stoush.net’s resurrection; if not Christ-like and divine, then zombie-like, a shambling cliché of popular media and metaculture running in-joke.
I’m cool with either.
To kick it off, here are two thought provoking posts on Hillsong, pentecostalism and Christian worship in Sydney I read just now.
Now you read them. If I remember correctly, this is how the system of blogging works.
Gay sex causes earthquakes
I was wrong - it isn’t generations of conflict that kills thousands of innocent Jews, Muslims, Christians and athiests that pisses God off and makes him want to get Old Testament on us - it the hot gay sex of the inhabitants of Judea and Samaria.
AN Israeli parliamentarian says several earthquakes felt in Israel recently were a consequence of gays and the parliament’s acceptance of them.
Let’s ignore the natural movement of the tetonic plates, it’s actually the repetitive thrusting of a penis into a male anus that is the true hypocentre of the earthquake, sending seismic waves of sinful pleasure through the participants and, presumably, into the environment around them.
Shocking stuff.
Shlomo Benizri, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, said the way to stop the tremors was for parliament to reverse its trend of liberalising laws concerning homosexuals.
“Why do earthquakes happen? One of the reasons is the things to which the Knesset (parliament) gives legitimacy, to sodomy,” Mr Benizri said during a parliamentary debate on earthquake preparedness.
The root cause of earthquakes in the region, so to speak, is obviously the cruising of the african and arabian plates past each other. Yet another damning argument against gay cruising.
…and Alan Jones.
Urban Renewal II (The Arab Revolt)
Taking further cues from the last reel of the Blues Brothers (“Use of unnecessary violence has been approved”), I’d like to spend a little bit of time laying out a bit more of my own urban renewal plans for the city I love. The target of opportunity this time is the sleepy suburb of Camden in Sydney’s South-West.
It’s connected to the metropolis of Sydney only by the tenuous links of an electrified train line, a motorway, and the shame the father of the Prodigal Son must have felt halfway through the parable. There can be no instructive resolution here, though; I say we ought, like its more belligerent residents, to take matters into our own hands, and like the Chinese over Taiwan, keep the renegade province as isolated from the rest of the planet as is possible.
Some locals are threatening to take matters into their own hands if the 1,200-student school in Camden is approved by either the council or via appeal to the Land and Environment Court.
Pell Defends Human Rights Of Some
Pell makes his first foray into academic life with a book of ten short essays pondering the relationship between church and state. Depressingly, this is what he chooses to focus on:
Dr Pell said a “false analogy” between alleged discrimination against homosexuals and racial discrimination was beginning to appear in Australia. He cited English newspaper reports of two foster parents to 28 children being forced to give up their work because authorities wanted them to teach that homosexual relationships were as acceptable as heterosexual marriages.
A big problem with this sort of thing, apart from the obvious, is that Pell is often taken by mainstream political commentators to represent a Christian Voice; to speak with authority for the Christian Vote, or at least to be representative of Christian Views or something. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
At the weekend, Paddington Uniting Church held a candidates electoral forum which specifically addressed the outcomes of HREOC’s Same Sex: Same Entitlements report, and which was attended by a variety of lower house and senate candidates from parties other than the Liberal Party (who declined the invitation). From all reports, the most boisterous moment of the forum occurred when the Christian crowd questioned Labor MP for Sydney Tanya Plibersek’s inability to budge on the party line on gay marriage - which is, of course, that there shouldn’t be any. Thing is, they were heckling from the left.
Family First Endorsed By Southland Church - Footage
Stumbled across this recent footage of a worship service at Southland Christian centre which shows a Family First representative being given a ringing endorsement and speechifying during the service, and in return giving the promise that Victorian Senate candidate Gary Plumridge (who you may remember from his confused diatribe about petrol) will do something that I can’t quite hear but which seems to me to at least imply being a Fundo Christian voice or similar. I could be wrong. Of course, there’s no mention of any religious affiliation in Plumridge’s official bio [pdf], despite its thoroughness in describing how as a nerdy nerdy teenager Plumridge subscribed to Hansard and sat up many a late night reading with the copies which were specially delivered to his house.
Southland’s preacher man prefaces all this Love with:
We need to encourage people to get into areas of political parties to make a difference.
AND THE WHOLE TIME THE CHRISTIAN BAND PLAYS BACKGROUND MUSIC, which for the uninitiated is generally what happens in places like Southland and Hillsong when someone is Witnessing or giving a sermon.
Then they pray together.
Thoughts?
Mmmm... Political.
The Sectarian Snake
Tony Abbot, the veteran Liberal Party cultural-warrior, has backed the destructive and divisive influence of B.A. Santamaria, the Labor rat who masterminded the rise of the DLP.
Abbot, in launching a collection of Santamaria’s letters, said:
the Catholic-based party that came out of the split, was “alive and well and living inside the Howard Government”.
As former Victorian Premier John Cain noted:
Sectarianism was at its worst in Australia at that time and it took decades for the political system to recover.
Looks like sectarianism, the legacy of the DLP, is alive and well in the Liberal Party.