religion
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.
Open Source Evangelism: Satanic Ubuntu
There’s little worse than being bailed up by evangelists of any stripe. For every clean-eared guitar-playing Book-of-Romans-quoting genuine religious transmitter of zeal, there’s an Amway seller, a jazz purist, a true believer in Fords over Holdens, someone whose every Austrian economic hypothesis is measured against Popperian falsifiability, or someone who votes Green because they got done over for Labor preselection in 1979. The common feature is an unassailable presumption to impose moral values on other people, regardless of convenience, appropriateness, right, and certainly regardless of embarrassment. Damn it, I don’t care if you believe that video games threaten children’s moral fibre, and it is meaningless to me what you think about the Greens’ many progressive social policies.
And so it is with operating systems.
Ubuntu Christian Edition has been out for a while, for those people whose religious sensibilities are just too fragile for an operating system without Bible study tools and anti-masturbatory filtering software. Yes, it’s a linux distribution, so it also fulfils the evangelist quotient of anti-Microsoftism and niche cachet. It’s the usual stock-standard brainwashing and cultism, fed by implied guilt and feelings of spiritual superiority: “You’re still running Windows XP? Aren’t you worried about your eternal future? If you just accept the GPL as your personal salvation”, etcetera.
I for one now will be rebooting using one of the two fingers in the famous salute of the evil and powerful and hailing, in the tradition of rock and roll, the Dark Lord. Thanks be to the minions of Evil for Satanic Ubuntu.
(The secular, non-religious ubuntu, which does a very good job in difficult circumstances on my decrepit as-yet unreplaced laptop, can be gotten here).
The farce that is 'Choice in schooling'
I congratulate Maralyn Parker on a frank assessment of the problems that religious schooling will cause to social cohesion.
I believe choice policy is the single factor contributing most to the growth of Christian fundamentalist and Islamic schools in NSW and Australia.
If we want to divide Australia and witness the growth of religious bigotry we just need this trend to continue.
She is not specifically targeting Christian or Islamic schools but is generally concerned with both. Some figures on how many of these schools currently operate in NSW:
51 mostly small fundamentalist Christian schools whose teachings include creationism and hatred of homosexuals.
13 mostly small Islamic schools
13 very small Brethren schools where true believers do not use computers (outsiders are employed to teach mandatory computer studies so Brethren will not be tainted).
Great. So how do you think the students of these schools will operate in the wider community? And do you think many of the students would pass a values test?
Maralyn ends with another call to arms for public, secular, education:
I would love to see our Prime Minister show his belief in Australian values by ploughing money into help building a strong, quality public school system.
A move like this from Mr Howard would be the best investment we could ever make for Australia’s future.
Here, here.
But would the Coalition act against their own best interest to support such a move?
Conservative Racism: Guest Post by Felix
A couple of weeks ago the Prime Minister appeared on talkback radio and wrote two opinion pieces for Australian newspapers to spruik one message of importance to Australians. What issue deserved so much of our Prime Minister’s time?
There are a range of huge challenges facing the Australian people. Spiralling personal debt? Third world conditions in Indigenous Australia? A coherent and serious response to global warming?
The PM devoted his pen not to any of these, but to the fact that—by his numbers—less than 1% of Australian Muslims haven’t learnt English and ‘refuse to integrate’. That’s 2000 people.