Rev Dr Peter Barnes has been a strong advocate of Religious Right causes for many years now. He holds down jobs at the Revesby (NSW) Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Theological Centre and spends some of his spare time supporting Rev Fred Nile’s enterprises such as the Festival of Light and the Family World News (FWN) monthly journal.

Barnes strongly favours the physical punishment of children – ‘part of God’s plan to deliver souls from hell’, according to him (FWN, Mar. 1997, 9) – and is adamant that wives should ’submit’ themselves to their husbands (FWN Mar. 2003, 6).

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Filed in: Creationism, Fundamentalism, People

Whereas most modern researchers try to follow the evidence wherever it leads, conservative Christians (and the conservative adherents of many other religions) pursue lines of evidence only so far as this evidence does not contradict the basic beliefs mandated by their holy texts. In the case of conservative Christians, scientific research, educational research, biblical research – all of these are just fine as long as they don’t clash with the ‘foundational truths of scripture’. The ethical, but otherwise unfettered pursuit of knowledge is no longer the researcher’s point of departure. The Bible is the baseline.

Fundamentalist reasoning about subjects like evolution or biblical criticism is invariably specious at heart because it focuses on an irrelevant factor, namely the biblical baseline. Sometimes this is glaringly obvious, while at other times it’s quite well disguised.

Reading the arguments of the baseliners is quite unlike reading, say, Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer or Carl Sagan who generally attack the opposition head-on and with great rigour. Instead you’ll find enveloping clouds of non sequiturs, ad hominem positions, lots of circular reasoning, inventive insults and regurgitation of long-discredited ‘facts’, together with a final, ringing assertion that yet again, the Bible has been ‘proven true’. Conservative evangelicals’ point of departure doubles as their conclusion.

Read the full analysis of the biblical baseline: The Foolishness of God

Filed in: Biblical criticism, Fundamentalism

You may not have caught up with all the evangelical Christian and/or creationist reviews of Richard Dawkins’ excellent book The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006). Strangely enough, all of these reviewers were less than impressed with what Dawkins had to say, and expressed themselves accordingly.

Let’s start with conservative Presbyterian Barney Zwartz, the Melbourne Age’s religious affairs editor – The God Delusion:

As a former philosophy tutor, I would have hated to have Richard Dawkins in my class. Most tutors have met his sort: the loud, opinionated, supercilious student who shouts down other views without actually listening, who stands in awe of his own cleverness when everyone else can see that it is simply an immature over-confidence.

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Filed in: Atheism, Fundamentalism

As we head for the silly season, I thought you might like this story. Written by Deirdre Moloney and first appearing in Right To Life News of January 1982, I’ve seen its basic idea repeated in several other articles over the years, but Deirdre did it best.

Ask most anti-choice campaigners when human life begins and they will unhesitatingly reply, ‘At conception!’ But not all of them. Over to Deirdre:

There has been much speculation as to when life begins, but as far as I know, no one has publicly used the argument of preconceptual consciousness, that is, of the awareness of personhood on the part of the sperm, even before it meets the ovum.

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Filed in: Abortion, Fundamentalism

There have been many attempts to discover whether praying to the Christian god has any effect. During the last few years, some studies have been conducted in which groups of Christians and others have prayed for certain types of hospital patients. But apart from obvious methodological problems e.g. how do you exclude the effects of prayers by a patient’s family members and others outside the assigned group of supplicants, none of the scientific studies has demonstrated significant effects.

Richard Hole of Tolga in Queensland has a much more far-reaching idea and placed this ad in a recent issue of New Life evangelical magazine (‘Does prayer make a noticeable difference?’, 10 Aug. 2006):

We are seeking people to help us to search for those who are obviously led and helped by God … If we can find divinely led people the benefits would be enormous, as they would be able to help, encourage and pray for us.

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Filed in: Fundamentalism, People

The Australian National Secular Association in association with the Rationalist and Humanist Societies ran a very successful conference in Melbourne last weekend. The topic was ‘Keeping God out of Government’ and among the participants was one Barney Zwartz. Zwartz, a conservative Presbyterian who doubles as religion editor of the Melbourne Age, told us a few ‘home truths’ the most coherent of which seemed to be that, like Christianity and Islam, we had our fair share of ‘fundamentalists’.

I don’t think this is right. A central feature – I think the central feature – of humanism, rationalism and freethinking (I don’t know about ’secularism’, often used as a comprehensive political swear-word by people like Zwartz) is the provisional nature of knowledge, and I mean all knowledge. The only thing I’m pretty sure of is that I’m not sure of anything – and I’m not even quite sure of that. To characterise this as a species of fundamentalism – to class it with Christian and Muslim fundamentalisms – is to deprive the term of meaning.

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Filed in: Fundamentalism, Islam, Morality, Politics, Secularism

As I recall, this headline once appeared on the front page of the Beijing People’s Daily during the reign of Chairman Mao. The idea was that many nations were in political turmoil and that this augured well for the ultimate triumph of world revolution.

Many Christian fundamentalists and Pentecostals seem to view current events in a similar way. The world around us is downright awful and deteriorating rapidly but humanity’s dreadful, sinful and hopeless condition is itself a sure sign of Christ’s imminent return.

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Filed in: Fundamentalism, Pentecostalism

Did you know that the world is positively teeming with demons? They’re all over the place, rebelling against God, performing evil acts and ‘possessing’ human beings – even some Christians. Many, perhaps most, fundamentalists and Pentecostals believe that this is true and a lot of them are doing something about it. The ’something’ is called ’spiritual warfare’.

As Spirithome.com explains:

‘Spiritual warfare’ is the struggle to have life in this material world reflect as much as possible God’s loving governance. God is in charge, but there is an enemy that is in full-scale revolt … As with the unseen God, the forces behind the revolt are unseen, non-physical and supernatural. They lust after power in the world of visible, material beings.

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Filed in: Fundamentalism, Pentecostalism

While Christian fundamentalists and Pentecostals dismiss the beliefs of Muslims and Hindus etc. as ’sheer superstition’, they are in fact extremely superstitious themselves. Supporters of the Religious Right, both Protestant and Catholic, love the idea of ‘miracles’ and are very credulous about supernaturalist stories. This renders many of them easy prey for the cash-extracting stage hypnotists sometimes called ‘televangelists’.

Only Christian miracles are any good, however. Clifford Wilson, a veteran evangelical creationist, urges his readers to reject the ‘greatly exaggerated false stories about the boyhood of Jesus’ recounted in early gospels left out of the Bible:

In one story we read of a child who is supposed to have run against Jesus and fallen down dead. We read of a man who had been changed into a mule being turned back into a man when Jesus was placed on his back. We are told of Jesus making figures of animals and birds of clay and then making them walk, fly, and take food … (‘The Bible comes alive’, New Life, 16 June 2005)

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Filed in: Fundamentalism, Pentecostalism

While some untutored Christian friends have denounced my suggestion that fundamentalists consign unbaptised foetuses to hell (13 May 2005), others have confirmed the accuracy of this position. In discussing the related question of whether those who die as babies go to heaven or hell, Rev. D. R. Niven of St George, Qld. makes the following unassailable point (New Life, 19 Apr. 1990):

We tend to think that babies will go to heaven by a different route than that of adults, when Jesus Himself [has] made it perfectly clear how anyone is to go to heaven. Jesus said: ‘Most assuredly I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God’ (John 3:3).

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Filed in: Fundamentalism