Laurie Goodstein ‘Closing Arguments Made in Trial on Intelligent Design’, New York Times, 5 Nov. 2005, quoted on Australian Christian Lobby website (the ACL are creationist sympathisers):

[America's] first trial to test the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design as science ended Friday with a lawyer for the Dover school board pronouncing intelligent design ‘the next great paradigm shift in science.’

[So from now on you'll be able to earn a science doctorate by simply describing a complex problem and concluding with the following standard sentence: 'This is the way God wanted it.']

Warwick Marsh, Fatherhood Foundation, email, 6 Nov. 2005:

Our generation was also taken in by the lie … that men and women are the same except for the different body parts. The reverse is actually the case. Women are almost a new species.

[So that's why my wife keeps calling me a gorilla.]

Peter Jensen, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, ‘Does Jesus Have a Future?’, Melbourne Age, 12 Nov. 2005:

…[I]t is simply a fact that [Jesus] is one of the two or three most influential people who have ever lived.

[One step at a time, Peter. First convince us that such a person actually existed - an increasing number of scholars don't accept that he did - and then perhaps we can start arguing about the degree of his influence. Christian leaders must understand that they can no longer get away with airy assertions like this one.]

Jensen again:

Think of how the biblical story sustained the American slaves.

[Not to mention the American slave-owners. Slaves, obey your masters ring any bells?]

Australian Christian Lobby (ACL), WA, State Directions, Oct. 2005, 1:

The ACL strongly opposes the WA laws that allow same-sex couples to be considered as adoptive parents and foster carers. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that it is in the best interests of a child to be raised by both a mother and a father.

[Always hold Religious Right authors to account when they make unsubstantiated claims like this. You will usually find that they cannot identify any such 'evidence', and anything they do quote often emanates from American fundamentalists and their think-tanks. They also tend to have little or no idea of any countervailing arguments, there being only 'one right answer' to any question. Undocumented claims of this sort are completely worthless.]

Jennifer Meister, Ivanhoe Vic., letter in Age, 9 Nov. 2005:

Even though there is a premium placed on being ’sexually active’ in today’s world, why not give the message that it is actually OK for teens not to have sex? Forget about wasting money on auditing teachers and sex-ed programs.

[To my knowledge, all Australian school sex education programs specifically teach 'that it is actually OK for teens not to have sex'. 'How to say no' is normally an integral part of these courses. Apart from this obvious 'straw man', abolishing sex-ed programs would almost certainly lead to increased teenage birth-rates and sexually transmitted infections. Is this what Jennifer really wants?]

Roger Fernando, biology teacher at Mount Evelyn Christian School, Vic., in Shane Green ‘Science, with just a twist of God’, Melbourne Age, 5 Nov. 2005:

If God is God, then you can’t eliminate Him from any experiment. If a science experiment is about changing one variable at a time, the so-called independent variable, how do you eliminate God from an experiment?

[Roger, there are a very large number of claimants to the title of 'God'. Do we really have to work through the whole lot of them every time we do an experiment?]

Professor Ian Harper, head of the proposed new Fair Pay Commission, speaking at an Australian Christian Lobby conference in Canberra, in Phillip Hudson ‘”God” to guide deal on fair pay’, Age, 30 Oct. 2005:

Slavery is economically efficient (but) slavery was overturned because it is wrong, morally wrong.

[It wasn't too 'economically efficient' for the slaves.]

Heidi Baker, missionary, Australian Prayer Network Newsletter, 24 Oct. 2005:

Those who know me well know I often long to depart and be with the Lord. I am so in love with Him. Several very powerful, life-changing trips to heaven in the Spirit have caused my heart to desire to stay there.

[Heidi, you've never thought of consulting a ...? Oh, never mind. So long as she's happy.]

Helen Woodall, New Life editorial, 20 Oct. 2005:

… [P]erhaps we should pay heed to what a Chinese house church leader told an American who interviewed him: ‘Stop praying for persecution in China to end because it is through persecution that the church has grown. We are praying that the church in America will taste the same persecution as us so that revival will come to them too.’

[And you think this is good advice, do you, Helen? Look, I'd like to introduce you to Heidi. I think you'll both get along very well.]

Paul Weyrich, American Religious Right leader, ‘What conservatives should champion’, News Weekly, 5 Nov. 2005:

Subsidiarity [i.e. rendering central government far less influential] would move many decisions away from state and federal governments and back to the local level, where they belong. It would also reduce the power of government generally, which conservatives have always seen as a good thing.

[Paul, both the United States and Australia currently have avowedly 'conservative' federal governments assisted to office by the Religious Right vote. The Australian Government is very centralist indeed, while your President Bush wages interminable wars, builds lots of prisons and runs huge budget deficits. You're quite sure you're backing the right guys here?]

William C. Shumay Jr., author of Germ Theory, review in New Life, 27 Oct. 2005:

[Shumay] has uncovered a new understanding of human chronic disease that points away from the role of eating habits, exercise and attitude. Hundreds of new medical studies suggest instead that sexual abstinence and monogamy may be the ultimate strategy to keep dangerous disease at bay throughout an individual’s life.

[How does the old joke go? Sexual abstinence won't help you live any longer but it'll certainly seem like it.]

Peter Stokes, Salt Shakers/Rise up Australia Prayer Briefing Notes, Oct. 2005:

Tasmania and WA are both reviewing ‘advanced [sic] life directive’-type legislation. This is often a precursor to euthanasia. [The directives] are designed to take major medical decisions away from doctors and give ‘us’ control. This is all part of the ‘my right to control my life’ secular humanist thinking sweeping the world.

[Peter, a fundamentalist Muslim would have no problem with this at all. Should we all just surrender to the will of Allah and have done with it? Do away with all that messy 'freedom' and 'independence', you know, that stuff that makes us human?]

Chuck Colson, convicted Watergate conspirator and now a Christian guru much admired by Australian fundamentalists, ‘Our Teenagers, Ourselves: Soul Searching’, New Life, 27 Oct. 2005:

[Researchers] talked to Christian kids who attend church every week but can’t explain who Jesus is. Take Heather, whose mother teaches religious doctrine at their Catholic church. The 15-year-old told an interviewer: ‘I don’t really get the whole thing about how, well, with the Catholics, how God is Jesus and Jesus is God, I don’t understand that.’ And Heather’s not the exception to the rule.

[No, Chuck, as a Trinitarian believer, you're the exception to the rule. Think about it. All non-Christians are non-Trinitarians, whether they believe in God or not. So are Unitarian Christians and there are a lot more of these around than you might think, including a swag of Pentecostals. Add to these the approximately half of nominally Trinitarian Christians who don't believe the Holy Spirit exists - (see Brian's Blog, 'Most evangelicals aren't',15 Oct. 2005) - and then add the hordes of Christians who, like Heather, 'don't get ... how God is Jesus and Jesus is God'. I reckon that leaves about two men and a dog who are genuine Trinitarians and I notice the dog's started scratching his head.]

Senator Steve Fielding, Family First Party, regarding the Bracks Government’s decision to dump plans for a cooling-off period for women seeking a late-term abortion, in Farrah Tomazin and Carol Nader ‘Minister hits back at abortion plan critics’, Melbourne Age, 26 Oct. 2005:

[Senator] Fielding, who has proposed a 72-hour cooling-off period for all abortions, was angered by the change, accusing Mr Bracks of ’succumbing to minority views’.

[Coming from a Senator elected by less than two per cent of the primary vote, that's a very telling criticism, Steve.]

C. Heyward, Watsonia, Vic., letter in New Life, 20 Oct. 2005:

… Meanwhile, our beautiful youngsters don’t know what they’re doing. It’s called ‘education’ by curriculum developers, but plainly [it's] pornography and provision for fornication and worse …

[What's the name of this school again? And do they accept mature-age students?]

Burt Prelutsky, ‘humour columnist’, ‘Moms make lousy Dads’ in Endeavour Forum Inc. Newsletter, Nov. 2005, 8:

I used to say that American women, thanks to increased salaries and well-stocked sperm banks, had reached a point where they only needed men to open ketchup bottles and get stuff down from high shelves. Ladies, I was joking! I had no idea that so many women took the line to heart. Thanks to my good joke and Gloria Steinem’s bad one - that crack about fish needing bicycles - women have become increasingly wacky.

And some more from Burt:

[H]ow could anybody dare suggest that a single woman isn’t equally capable [as a married couple of raising a normal, healthy child]? Well, she isn’t. This is especially true when the child is a boy … It simply makes sense that a boy needs a man in his life to act as a role model, to show him not only how to curb his temper and to temper his testosterone, but also how to avoid being feminised into something resembling a well-dressed eunuch … [W]hen it comes to rearing male children, we’d all probably be better off if the ladies simply dropped the kids off in the woods for wolves to raise.

[Having trouble keeping girlfriends, Burt? I think I can spot your problem.]

Filed in: Their Own Mouths