While conservative evangelicals sometimes band together for some common purpose, they are really a collection of warring tribes. This is in the nature of Protestantism, which prizes one’s ‘personal relationship with God’ above all else. If your minister or pastor tells you one thing about Christian doctrine, and you have a bit of a pray about it and decide that he (or sometimes she) is wrong - well, congratulations, you win! This is not much of a recipe for unanimity and helps explain why there are tens of thousands of Christian denominations and sects scattered around the place. (For a very funny example of how these and related clashes can work out in practice, have a look at Ken Dempsey’s Conflict and Decline: Ministers and laymen in an Australian country town [1983], available in many libraries.)

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Filed in: Catholicism, Evangelicals, Sexuality

Michael Gilchrist, editor of the National Civic Council’s AD2000, has this to say about two Catholic sex education booklets written by Carol Phillips, Western Australian coordinator for Babette Francis’s ‘Endeavour Forum’:

These booklets [one for boys and one for girls] make the task [of sex education] much easier, while keeping the sensitive subject within the bounds of a child’s latency period …

‘Latency period’? I’ve been very interested in my sexuality since before I can remember. I was having huge crushes on schoolmates when I was seven and so were half my friends. I thought the very idea of a latency period went out with the ark.

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Filed in: Catholicism, Sexuality

David Rivers of Mordialloc in Melbourne is such a spoilsport. Just as I’m about to launch into the Adelaide-based Southern Cross Bioethics Institute (SCBI) and their controversial ’surveys’ into subjects like abortion and therapeutic cloning, David comes up with this excellent letter to the Age. How dare he do all my work for me?

A Catholic organisation, the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute, commissions a survey into attitudes to therapeutic cloning and, hey presto, finds that most Australians (51 per cent) oppose it. But this finding contradicts all previous independent surveys suggesting 80 per cent support it.

Southern Cross previously commissioned a survey into attitudes to abortion, and similarly concluded that most Australians (63 per cent) opposed abortion on demand. Again, this contradicts a number of independent surveys finding up to 80 per cent support for abortion on demand.

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Filed in: Abortion, Catholicism

It seems only yesterday that conservative Christians were telling us all about the ‘ABC’ method that was successfully reducing HIV AIDS infections in the African nation of Uganda. The ‘A’ stood for ‘abstinence’, as in total sexual abstinence for unmarried people. If you were married, however, you were covered by ‘B’, as in ‘be completely faithful’ to your spouse (or, in the picturesque Ugandan phrase, ‘zero grazing’). Now, as a person has to be either married or unmarried, ‘A’ and ‘B’ would seem to cover the field, so what about ‘C’? ‘C’ stood for ‘condom’ - ‘[F]or those who are foolish enough to not abstain or zero graze, then use condoms. But we hasten to say - condoms are NOT 100% safe.‘ (Dr Edward Muhima, African Enterprise Uganda, as quoted in Elizabeth Kendal ‘Christian morality key to Ugandan AIDS success’, New Life, 18 Apr. 2002, 7)

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Filed in: Catholicism, Sexuality

Back in 1994, Andrew Lansdown, then the pastor of Collie Baptist Church, WA, wrote a creationist pamphlet called Evolution? Lansdown later joined Life Ministries and has been the subject of an earlier blog item (13 May 2005).

The first part of Lansdown’s pamphlet was reprinted with minor modifications in the evangelical weekly New Life of 6 Oct. 2005, together with a brief introduction to the notion of ‘Intelligent Design’:

I should note at the outset that, in my view, if there is an intelligent designer, the God of the Bible is the most plausible candidate.

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Filed in: Catholicism, People

In February 2005, Mrs Maria Korp, aged 50, was choked by her husband’s mistress and left for dead in the boot of a car parked near Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance. She never regained consciousness, and on 26 July Victorian Public Advocate Julian Gardner, Mrs Korp’s legal guardian, authorised the cessation of her artificial nutrition. (Korp died on 5 August.)

Gardner made it clear that he had reached his decision after months of consultation with Mrs Korp’s family and two separate teams of doctors, including palliative care specialists. As Korp was a Catholic, he had also sought the advice of her priest and a Catholic expert in ethics. In his public announcement, Gardner repeatedly stated that Korp was ‘dying’ and that tubal nutrition had been ‘prolonging her dying instead of sustaining her life’.

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Filed in: Catholicism, Voluntary Euthanasia

Although the new Pope Benedict XVI will undoubtedly cause many good people much pain, his papacy should advance the cause of secularism in the longer term.

As I suggested in an earlier blog (5 April), another authoritarian pope is required to advance the process of ecclesiastical division set in train by Paul VI and accelerated by John Paul II. It seems unlikely that Benedict will revise his negative positions on contraception, women’s ordination, gay rights etc. Dissent from his various stances will not culminate in a formal schism, but rather bring about a continual erosion in Catholic numbers, first in Europe, North America and Australasia and later throughout the rest of the world.

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Filed in: Catholicism

Working on the principle that the Roman Catholic Church is one of the worst ideas that humanity ever had, what sort of Pope would most rapidly advance the progress of secularisation?

What we are looking for here is a splitter, someone who is going to drive half of the church crazy in the shortest possible space of time.

Our own George Pell certainly looks the goods here, with a marvellous track record over many years. Church attendances plummeting, half the clergy doing the bolt and sundry others sewing mailbags in prisons across the nation - wonderful stuff. Unfortunately George looks a bit dicey at 40/1 so let’s cast an eye over the competition.

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Filed in: Catholicism