It’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, but here’s one last Fred, ibid., ‘Focus on Parliament’ section, 2:

[Question in the NSW Legislative Council regarding the cervical cancer vaccine]: Is there a danger that females aged from 10 to 26 who have been vaccinated will believe they are now free to engage in sexual promiscuity?

[Fred mournfully reports that the Minister for Health 'merely smiled and stated "I will take the question on notice."']

Family World News ‘Prayer Focus’, ibid., 8:

Please pray for lasting fruit from the report which made Egyptian TV news of the miraculous survival [of] two small girls found after being buried alive for 15 days … [T]he girls relate [that] a man fitting the description of Jesus appeared to them each day and looked after them.

['A man fitting the description of Jesus', indeed. Fascinating.]

More from ‘Prayer Focus’:

Once again we pray for rain in the country and the cities as a sign of the break of Australia’s spiritual drought, especially the southeast area of Queensland, Goulburn and Warragamba …

[Yeah, I have an auntie in Warragamba and she's about the most spiritually deficient person I know. See what you've done, Flossie, drying up two states like that?]

Levi’s mum, quoted in Mark Coultan ‘Soul-searching for kids: US documentary divides viewers’, Melbourne Age, 30 Sept. 2006, regarding American child evangelists:

Levi loves to preach, which he does to the summer camp. Levi is home-schooled by his mother, who teaches him that the world was created by God 6000 years ago and that global warming is not a problem. Science proves nothing, she says.

[Good to know the future's in safe hands.]

Russell Grigg, ‘Creation for Kids’, Creation magazine, Sept.-Nov. 2006, 46:

Q. Why can birds fly and we can’t? A. God designed birds to fly, but He designed us differently …

[And I bet you thought there was a more complicated reason.]

Russell rides again (ibid., 45) :

Some people say that whales evolved from an animal like a cow or from some other land animal that decided it wanted to start living in the sea and eating seaweed or other sea creatures instead of grass. But why would it do that?

[Well, was it a hot day?]

Jonathan Sarfati, ‘What? A Christian mind’ (editorial), ibid., 6:

… Jesus is called the ‘logos’ and His ‘greatest commandment’ included ‘loving God with all your … mind’ (Matthew 22:36-38)!

[Don't tell us, Jonathan, tell Russell Grigg. ASAP.]

Brian Pickering, Australian Prayer Network, 10000 Men, ebulletin no. 6, Sept. 2006:

… [T]he prayer that God answers is a fervent prayer. When something is fervent, it is hot and earnest. It is desperate. It is not a prayer that is rehearsed and has dignity …

[Let's see, first I could drop my pyjama daks ...]

Angela Conway, Australian Family Association, ‘The SHARE Program’, The Australian Family, Jul. 2006, 43, regarding a South Australian sex education course:

An explicit assumption of SHARE is that adolescents are sexual beings and have a right to enjoy their sexuality.

[Whereas everyone knows that only married people are sexual beings. And they can enjoy procreation, but not much else.]

Creation Ministries International, ‘Different strokes for different folks’, email, 21 Sept. 2006:

… [Our] ‘Journal of Creation’ is peer-reviewed. That means all of the arguments presented in it have been critiqued by other qualified scientists. It’s impressive and it’s information that people just won’t see in regular science journals.

[Let's translate this out of 'Creationese' into plain English. Most of the technical articles appearing in the Journal are by authors writing outside their specialised field, and this is probably the case with most of the reviewers. The vast majority, if not all reviewers are also convinced creationists. Journal articles are often impressive, it's true, but only because of their far-fetched nature. And the reason you won't see them in regular science journals is because these are regular science journals and not creationist comic-books.]

Peter Stokes, Salt Shakers, email newsletter, 14 Sept. 2006:

The Victorian State Labor Government have confirmed that if they win the November 2006 state election they will consider introducing legislation to decriminalise abortion …Currently it is estimated that around 20,000 abortions are carried out every year in the state of Victoria and more than 100,000 across Australia. This legislation, if passed, would open the doorway for tens of thousands more babies being killed.

[Peter, do you really think 'tens of thousands' of women will opt for abortions only if the statute law is changed to reflect current realities? And the last time I checked, foetuses were foetuses and babies were babies.]

Pat Byrne ‘Opening door to embryo experimentation’, News Weekly, 16 Sept. 2006, 5:

Instinctively, women know [embryos] are human beings.

[My local female fan club reckons they instinctively know that embryos are embryos. But who are they to argue with News Weekly?]

Stuart Piggin, Chairman, Australia’s Christian Heritage National Forum, ‘Christianity seeks to put its Australian house in order’, Family World News, Sept. 2006, 1, 4:

Jesus is the one thing all Christians have in common.

[Yep. Just a pity they can't agree on who he was, what he taught, whether he was born of a virgin or resurrected from death, whether he could perform miracles ... Apart from that, he's a great symbol of Christian unity.]

Piggin ag’in:

The Forum’s purpose is ambitious and probably unrealistic, humanly speaking, namely the reversal of the process of secularisation.
[At last one of these people has actually said something intelligent. Kind of gives you a warm glow.]

Pastor Ned Blaskow, Cronulla NSW, letter in Family World News, Sept. 2006, 3:

[Jesus] says: ‘I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end …’ The main problem with evolution is that its adherents have rejected the very existence of Alpha, the first letter, and are wondering why there are so many unpluggable holes in their theory! … Imagine our alphabet and dictionary with the letter ‘a’ missing!

[So much for my warm glow. Thanks, Ned.]

Rebecca Hagelin ‘How to rescue children from a toxic culture’, News Weekly, 2 Sept. 2006, 13:

So mums and dads should know that sometimes when Susie is upstairs being a good little girl reading her [school-]book, her mind is being filled with rot. Of course, you should also check out the sex-ed class materials that may include contests where kids race to put condoms on dildos and cucumbers.

[I can't remember, is that an Olympic sport?]

Fred Nile, Christian Democratic Party, Family World News [FWN] editorial, Sept. 2006, 2:

The ALP, Greens and Australian Democrats reject Australia’s Christian heritage and are strongly promoting a multi-culturalist and multi-faith society. They are gradually removing our Christian heritage from state schools and Bibles from hospitals etc. In place of Christianity they are promoting Muslim prayer rooms in universities and hospitals etc.

[Fred doesn't really improve with age, does he? And a few pages later he 'commends the Islamic community for their stance on sex education'! How magnanimous of him.]

Stephen Chavura, Festival of Light, ‘The Future of Australia?’, FWN, Sept. 2006, 10:

In the end secularists want to remove Christianity from society altogether.

[Stephen, this is an exceptionally silly thing to say. Even for a Fred Nile wannabe like you.]

Andrew Bolt, right-wing journalist and stirrer, quoted in Robert Manne ‘The cruelty of denial’, Melbourne Age, 9 Sept. 2006, regarding source documents supporting the aboriginal ’stolen generation’ thesis:

Bits of paper.

[Andrew, with that attitude towards evidence you'd make a fantastic creationist. Carl Wieland, take note.]

Janne and Murray Peterson, Good Report editorial, Sept.-Oct. 2006, 5:

Without [Religious Education] in our schools, we could soon become like the USA which has banned prayer and Christianity in their state schools and has ended up with students who are out of control - resulting in the Columbine High massacre and others. If Queensland as a state keeps God out of its schools, let’s not accusingly ask, ‘Where was God?’ when things go horribly wrong.

[Why do people like Janne and Murray worship such an impotent god, who can be effectively excluded from schools by the action of a human court or parliament?]

Murray Adamthwaite, ‘Our collapsing culture’, Salt Shakers Journal, Sept. 2006, 5:

… [The] cubism of Picasso, the surrealism of Dali and the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock (Blue Poles!) all proclaim an incoherent, chaotic or incomprehensible world. Art has come a long way from Mrs Alexander’s famous lines,‘All things bright and beautiful,
‘All creatures great and small,
‘All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.’

[Kind of sweet, isn't it?]

Christian Democratic Party, Say No to Moral Pollution, (Education Leaflet #3), Sept. 2006:

There is no limit to the depths of a depraved mind under the influence of the devil.

[Hold on. How do they know?]

Father Gabriele Amorth, Vatican spokesperson, quoted in Linda Morris ‘Harry Potter “satanic”: Pope’s exorcist’, Melbourne Age, 1 Sept. 2006:

‘Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil’, Father Gabriele Amorth, the Pope’s ‘caster-out of demons’, said. The books contained many positive references to the satanic art, falsely drawing a distinction between black and white magic …

[Thanks for the heads-up, Gabe. Better late than never, I always say.]

Tony Abbott, Health Minister, quoted in Simon Mann ‘Religion critics blind to the light: Abbott’, Age, 29 Aug. 2006:

Mr Abbott said Catholics in politics had been encouraged to promote Catholic social teaching ‘not because it was religious but because it was right’.

[And how does Abbott know that Catholic social teaching is right in the first place? Because the Church told him so. See, it all makes perfect sense.]

Australian Family Association (AFA) (Victorian branch), ‘Cloning, embryonic stem cell challenge in federal coalition’, Newsletter, Aug. 2006, 1:

The danger of a conscience vote on the [therapeutic cloning] issue is of course that we have seen the state of the collective parliamentary conscience earlier this year on the RU486 issue.

[And we all know conservative Catholic consciences outrank all other consciences, as Tony Abbott would doubtless be the first to tell us. Oh, but of course our horrible, shrivelled-up little consciences aren't 'informed', are they? And who should inform them? The Catholic Church, of course. Thanks, AFA. Thanks, Tony.]

Peter Westmore, President, National Civic Council, ‘2006 Fighting Fund launch’, News Weekly, 2 Sept. 2006, 3:

… Western societies are dissolving internally. Rampant individualism has eaten away at the mortar that holds societies together. Christianity, as a system of belief that underpinned social values, is facing an uphill battle against the forces of secularism, which control the commanding heights in the media, the education system and the economy.

[Peter, do you think that's entirely fair and balanced? Whoops, he's off again:]

Australia’s political parties have become captives of corporate money and the feminist and homosexual lobbies. Radicalised feminists in all federal political parties have flexed their anti-Christian muscles on issues like RU486 …

[Sorry, Pete, I tried to imagine a radicalised feminist flexing her anti-Christian muscles but I think I've strained my groin.]

Filed in: Their Own Mouths