Classic Miranda, 2011: “The Greens are the party of punishers and straighteners, the wowsers of the 21st century, the fun police, the Malthusian pessimists, the pinched-face moralists lecturing the rest of us on our sins, forcing their god Gaia down our throats. “Repent! Repent! Before it’s too late!” they cry.
Classic Miranda, 2010: “AT last the NSW Opposition has showed some backbone in rejecting social engineering “ethics” classes in NSW primary schools. There has been a whiff of subterfuge about the classes ever since Nathan Rees proposed them in the dying days of his woeful premiership. For one thing, there is the enthusiastic support of the Atheist Foundation and the Greens, who see the classes as a backdoor way to impose their own unrepresentative beliefs on children. For another, do we know enough about the motivations and funding of the St James Ethics Centre, which ran a trial of the classes, and would provide course material and volunteer teachers, paid for by anonymous donors?
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“A High Court challenge, which contends the chaplaincy program contravenes the separation of church and state will be heard next month. It has been mounted by a Queensland father, Ron Williams, who was concerned chaplains had delivered religious counsel rather than impartial advice. Despite the definition on the federal government’s website, Dr Cowling said that ”there are thousands of [chaplains] around the country and they’re each defining it as they see it or their schools are defining it as they see it”. The term might also mislead the religious community ”into thinking that these people are promoting religion when in fact they’re not supposed to”. The lack of any minimum welfare qualifications demanded by the federal program was also a concern, he said. ”In this particular area, we’re pretty much saying, ‘This is a pretty serious issue you’re dealing with but you don’t need to have any particular credentials’.”
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/anglican-church-queries-school-chaplain-program-20110701-1gv6l.html#ixzz1la7WUTFJ
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Classic Miranda, 2008: Humility has been the mainstay of Christian societies, and central to the Protestant ethic of the American Midwest of the last century, which fuelled the greatest period of prosperity the world has ever seen. Humility was the core value of people who built great wealth and created the moral capital for generations to come.
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look at those Protestants working up a sweat.
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Miranda finally comes out of the Islamophobia closet, though I always suspected
Miranda likes to pretend her support for the War in Iraq was partly due to wanting to help the Iraqi people. But with her latest article it seems she doesn’t really care anymore about helping those who aren’t Christian. She even thinks we should allow dictators like Gaddafi and Assad to stay in power because they supposedly keep fundamentalist groups in check. She admits “Gaddafi was a brutal dictator who promoted terrorism abroad” but his brand of terrorism wasn’t Islamic so we could live with it. She then goes on to doubt Gaddafi was brutal at all because Amnesty International was unsure about some of the unsubstantiated claims of the rebels. But Amnesty never denied all the footage that came out of Libya of the army shooting at civilians. But hey if they’re Muslim how can you trust them?
She goes on to argue that we should never help a population that is mostly Muslim because there may be a section of them that is fundamentalist. The exception I’m assuming is a dictator/ regime who could be a danger to us in someway (how very Christian of her). So lets say we didn’t intervene in Libya; the National Transitional Council would have a more difficult job and Libyans may decide that to topple Gaddafi they will need to rally behind the subsection of fundamentalist Muslims because at least they can get support from abroad. Then we really would have a country to worry about; because not only did we sell arms to their former dictator and didn’t help them when they asked for it, but now the fundamentalist Muslims are in control. People turn to fundamentalist Muslims because they’re looking for support and can’t find it elsewhere. While people are being brutalized by a dictator like Gaddafi and Assad, fundamentalism is able to exist in hiding because they provide support and in turn receive support.
If we help them help themselves we can halt the growth of fundamentalist Islam. It’s not that hard when the fundamentalists keep blowing up mosques and killing family members of moderate Muslims. That was what the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were supposed to do, but alas the tactics used led to civilian casualties and the handing of power over to crony capitalists; both which turned out to be counter productive surprise surprise. The no fly zone over Libya allowed the Libyans to self determine with enough support so that they don’t have to turn to fundamentalist Islam. It also allows fundamentalist groups to come out of the wood work and try to seize control; but at least now they’re less likely to do so. Gaddafi was going to fall, it was up to us to decide who was going to still be standing in the aftermath.
How can me win the “War on terror” if we turn our backs on moderate Muslims out of fear of them turning fundamentalist, thus forcing them to seeks support from fundamentalists? But Miranda isn’t interested in winning the “War on terror”, she wants to start and win a war of religion. She writes “as a predominantly Christian country, you could say it is our duty to actively discriminate towards Christian refugees”. So Miranda is saying religion should be a judge of character; well whether you’re a Christian or not should be the judge of character. Being prejudiced towards religions other than your own and allowing those of different religion than you to be harmed because hey they’re not our kind sounds an awful lot like fundamentalism to me. But hey; fundamentalist Christians never go around killing people.
It is not that we in Australia and the West are intrinsically morally superior to the Chinese who walked past little Yue Yue, or the Libyans who delighted in killing an evil dictator. It is that the Judeo-Christian basis of our society, with its tradition of the Good Samaritan, “Do unto others”, “Turn the other cheek,” and so on, for 2000 years has tempered and modulated the worst human tendencies. Even for non-believers, it has fostered social norms which honour the actions of a Good Samaritan like Xianmei, and create a society that reinforces qualities such as kindness and compassion. Perhaps what scares us most is that the death of little Yue Yue and the barbaric end of Gaddafi give us a glimpse of a post-Christian world.
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I don’t know how you can see Judeo-Christianity as the source of morality when humans are the ones that created its best features. Those features of charity didn’t just spring up when Christ started preaching, he found an audience because they already existed; they’re innate, human nature. If Judeo-Christianity was our only source of morality, then why don’t we follow the worst parts of it? As many of the Daily Telegraph comments noted (between the usual crazy Left bashing shit) many do and have done. But for the mentally sound there seems to be something biological which makes us want to support each other. Is it because charity helps keep the race alive and multiplying or because it’s in our self interest to help others so they can help us? Maybe it’s something else, but religion is the product not the cause.
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