SATANIST STATUE IN OKLAHOMA

A large plaque of the 10 Commandments erected on the Statehouse lawn in OK City has prompted a group of satanists to demand equal status for the so-called “prince of darkness”. They have commissioned the statue (pictured) and they argue that it’s hypocritical to allow one faith to be publicly represented and not another.

Of course, this unorthodox new demand has met with stiff opposition from Oklahoma officialdom. I quote from a Fox News online report.

“Oklahoma officials say there is no way in hell that a statue of Satan will ever assume a position at the Capitol. There will never be a satanic monument on the grounds of the Oklahoma State Capitol and the suggestion that there might be is absurd," Alex Weintz, spokesman for Gov. Mary Fallin, said in a statement to FoxNews.com.”  (Emphasis mine – sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Where is the audacity in all this? The legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Brady Henderson, said: “We don’t think the state should place religious artifacts on state property unless the people of the entire state agree with its message.”

Sounds reasonable. Until you remember that the 10 Commandments are a well-known and accepted moral code of behaviour. They are not religious artifacts but reminders of the ethical foundations on which the nation was built.

In seeking to give satan his thoroughly undeserved recognition in American public life, the perpetrators of this farce are taking the attitude: “We’ll show ‘em!” It’s not about reverencing the un-reverent one but about annoying and upstaging those who hold to Christian values.

p.s. I hope no-one is worried that I posted the picture. Satan (capitalised only because I'm starting a new sentence) has no authority or power in my life. If a picture of a statue representation of him bothers you, call on Jesus, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He will set you free. Greater is He (Jesus) that is in us than he that is in the world. Amen!

FEMINIST AGENDAS - ARE WE THERE YET?

Deborah May is “a feminist guru… being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach federal public servants to be fairer to women in the workplace” (Herald Sun 12/5/14).

On her blog page, I found an article titled: “Women and the Glass Ceiling: Are we THERE yet?” Here’s a pertinent quote from that article.

“I’ve been working to advance women’s leadership for the last 15 years and frankly if we don’t start getting creative nothing is going to happen before I die!

Are we there yet? Far from it, but I guess it depends on where ‘there’ is and I would suggest that ‘there’ should be 50% women at all levels across all organisations within all industries and sectors.”

All levels. All organisations. All industries and sectors. Wow!

There are many organisations and sectors where women dominate: think teaching, hospitality, nursing, social work. But, according to May, there should be NO organisations or industries dominated by men, even to the point of 51% domination.

May’s goal, her description of ‘there’, is thus heavily biased against men.

Do women have equal opportunity in Australia? I guess this would be a point of contention. May laments that: “In smaller companies – especially those in industries generally regarded as ‘blokey’ – IT/engineering/manufacturing/construction there are far fewer women and there is no particular imperative to change.”

But then she goes on to quote figures that, in my view, clearly indicate that women in fact have BETTER opportunities than men.

“This is the case despite the fact that:

• Women comprise 50.8% of our population.
• 87% women attain year 12 qualifications or above, compared to 82% men
• Over 50% of university graduates are women.”

Well, what if some women don’t WANT to be the CEO of a mining company or a major engineering enterprise? What if there are some jobs that demand time and energies that women are not willing to commit, given that work is not their whole life? What if some women actually want to stay at home and be hands-on raising a family?

God has given both men and women certain unique characteristics. It makes sense that men are more suited to some jobs and women are more suited to others. We have just celebrated Mothers’ Day and women have been loudly appreciated for the very role that no man can fill.

I’m certainly not saying that women cannot flourish in the workplace, or that they cannot assume important leadership roles, but the calling to motherhood should never be denigrated or trivialised by foolish ideals about female quotas in occupations that are more suited to men.

TEACHING CHILDREN TO HATE

Apologies that I missed doing this blog last week. But a picture in today’s Herald Sun made sure I was motivated to write my Answers for Audacity for this week.

The annual May Day march in Melbourne, organised by unions, included children wearing t-shirts that read “F--- Tony Abbott” or “Abbott Hater”.

In what moral universe is that OK?

There are many heated political and cultural issues. I fully appreciate, of course, that people get angry. But don’t we all want to live in a decent, respectful society? Don’t we want our children to grow up in a society where people can state a case and make a point intelligently, without obscenity and hatred? Have we discarded the old mantra that you “play the ball” not “play the man”?

The problem, of course, is that we are a media driven society now. And the media aren’t interested in nice, peaceful arguments. They would rather report obscenity than decency. If you want your protest to get air time, you have to do something shocking.

And as for the organisers of the march this past weekend – shame, shame, shame! John Roskam, from the Institute of Public Affairs, was reported as saying: “The idea that children are being used to push offensive views reveals the depths of (sic) which the Left in Australia will dive.”

How sad that we have come to this.

 

IMPRESSIONS OF EASTER 2014

It’s Easter Monday, a public holiday in Australia. And my thoughts today are probably getting a bit away from the Audacity theme. Easter 2014 has been a mixed bag.

The media always gives some time to reporting the Christian emphasis of Easter, especially Good Friday and Easter Sunday. But, if you’re a church that wants more than a token exposure, it’s a good idea to preach a sermon about something that’s currently high on the agenda of mainstream Australia. One Queensland Church focused on the problem of domestic violence. Others focus on ongoing problems of poverty or bullying.

The Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne ran their most successful Good Friday appeal ever this year, raising almost seventeen million dollars. Would such an appeal work as well on any other day? Who knows? It may be that sacrificially giving to those who are suffering is a subtle outworking of the Christian heritage that we have as a nation.

There have also been suggestions that next year the AFL will abandon it’s long-standing policy of refusing to stage football matches on Good Friday. I think there’s a general willingness to respect the day but it seems inevitable that commercial interests will encroach still further into Australian spirituality. We have become an extremely secular nation that gives the occasional nod to Christianity but then gets on with the “real” purpose of life – the pursuit of happiness through financial gain.

Perhaps, in the end, the ultimate audacity of a godless society is not to rail against Christian culture and ritual but to marginalise it, to divert attention away from it, and to condescend to it like the party hostess who finds an unwanted acquaintance and quips: “Oh, are you still here?”

Yes, Christians are still here. And we are an important part of this nation. We will continue to testify to the death and resurrection of Christ because that is the only real hope for life that anyone can possess.

THE DEBATE ABOUT CRE IN VICTORIAN SCHOOLS

When you visit the religionsinschools.com website, you are immediately confronted with a picture of Fr Bob McGuire and a quote: “At school, there ought to be a general religious curriculum to introduce children to the ideas and motivations and rituals – in a word the ethos – of all the religions.”

Really? All the religions? Must schoolchildren be taught about Sikhism, Shinto, Scientology, Mormonism, Bahai, Unification Church, etc, etc? And what about all the multiple sects of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism? Sorry, Fr Bob, there literally wouldn’t be time for anything else in the school curriculum.

Christianity is different because a basic understanding of Christianity is necessary for understanding Australia and the values that have made us what we are.

Back to the FIRIS (Fairness In Religion In Schools) website. Another headline quote comes from Cathy Byrne who, among other things, a sociology and ethics teacher. She says: “It is time to expel dogma, discimination and special privileges and to teach children to think critically about religious ideas and ethical worldviews.”

Well, Cathy, the CRE program in Victoria is certainly not pushing dogma. Volunteer teachers cop a lot of very unfair flak on this website and others like it. They are actually trained to say “Christians believe…” rather than to dogmatically assert their own beliefs.

Jacqui Tomlins, another freelance writer, says: “Why would you expose your kids to unqualified volunteers teaching a curriculum you know very little about? And do you really believe they’re teaching acceptance, tolerance and open-mindedness – or something else entirely?”

Well Jacqui, you can always opt your own children out of the CRE program. But the truth is that CRE helps to open the minds of children to things that are otherwise kept from them in school. Do you really think that your lack of “acceptance, tolerance and open-mindedness” when it comes to CRE is helping to broaden the minds of children. I would suggest you are doing the exact opposite.

The battle over religion in schools is dangerous because it’s being fought on the wrong issues. A truly comprehensive, multicultural approach to religion in schools is impossible but, I repeat, Christianity deserves special privilege in Australian schools because Christianity has been by far the dominant religion ever since the First Fleet.

If you are a Christian reading this, I urge you to pray for Access Ministries, the provider of CRE in Victoria. They really are facing extraordinary pressure at the moment, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of schools appreciate the half-hour CRE class each week and the volunteers who work so hard to do it well.

EMERGING AUDACITY IN CHRISTIANITY

OK, so it’s not only non-Christian heathens who come out with outlandish stuff. Some Christians are very good at it. Hey, I might even be accused of audacious writing myself at times.

Today, I’m sharing a book review that I did back before Christmas last year. I have no doubt that the author is a very sincere Christian but… well, the review can speak for itself.

BOOK REVIEW – THY KINGDOM CONNECTED - Dwight J. Friesen

I understand that some people will love this book, especially those who are following in the footsteps of Emergent Village. The back cover contains the following gems of praise: "a treasure chest of insights" "for a unified and healthy body of Christ in a connected world", "the first contextual ecclesiology for a networked world."

But, to be honest, this book just annoyed me.

It didn't help that the author goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid using masculine pronouns for God. 'Godself' instead of 'himself' just seems too ridiculous to be cute. But this is only the beginning. A whole new vocabulary is invented to make subtle nuances seem like radical new thinking. Language becomes almost fluid. For the purpose of "reimagining the body of the institutional church" a local church becomes a "Christ-Common". For the purpose of "reimagining the soul of the local church", gatherings of Christians become "Christ-Clusters"."Chaordic life" is a strangely positive term for the interaction of chaos and order in the Kingdom of God. Pastors become "network ecologists", whose main task is "stewarding" a network of nodes and links. Even worse, relationships between different things are often described in terms of a "dance".

The occasional stories in this book that are intended to demonstrate the practicalities of these supposedly new paradigms are unconvincing. There are plenty of churches doing innovative things in their communities but they don't talk a foreign language amongst themselves.

Ultimately, I think the message of this book is that networks are everywhere in nature so the Kingdom of God is learning to function more connectively, with "flattened leadership".

Without its excessive verbosity, this book could have been much shorter, and possibly more helpful.

THE AUDACITY OF MODERN SCIENCE

Some of the most audacious (and ridiculous) comments are coming these days from otherwise respected scientists and academics. I’ve just finished reading a 2013 book called “The Science Delusion” by Curtis White. Here’s a part of my review of the book.

“From a Christian perspective, one may cheer from the sidelines as one anti-faith mentality is thoroughly and wittingly dismembered, but then, we must shake our heads at the stubborn refusal to consider the possibility of a Creator God as the answer to the supposedly unanswerable questions posed in the book. Art is put forward as our best approach to the unknowable metaphysical aspects of life but, ironically, in a discussion of what it means to be an "I", the author fails to even mention the God who identified Himself to Moses as ‘I Am’
 

This book strongly challenges the philosophical self-limitations of science and the deterministic idea that we are all basically just very complex machines, but it fails to break free of a different kind of self-limitation, the idea that humanity must find its own way to explain its own existence without reference to God. The author accuses science of ruling out any knowledge outside its own but, really, he does the same thing by ruling out, in effect, the knowledge of God.”

So the book is a rather audacious attack on the audacity of science. (How could I resist doing a blog about that?!? I hope I didn’t come across as audacious in my review!)

To be clear, we are talking here about neuroscientists, evolutionists and molecular biologists who have been making grandiose claims that their scientific disciplines are on the verge of explaining things like human thought, creativity and personality. Richard Dawkins talks about ‘memes’, which are basically the cultural equivalent to genes. In other words, we inherit a set of genes that determine how tall we will be, what colour eyes we will have, etc, and we also inherit a set of views and values (memes) that determine our culture and personality. Why is this audacious? Because it’s presented as fact (or so highly probable that we may as well present it as fact) when it’s actually nothing more than sheer imagination.

The great obsession of science is to be able to explain everything – yes, literally everything! But, by ignoring the evidence for God (eg, in the brilliant natural design that we see everywhere in the world) on the basis that they will someday be able to explain these things without reference to God, these modern scientists only demonstrate their own foolishness.

(By the way, if you can't read the slogan on Dawkins' shirt, it says "RELIGION - together we can find the cure."