Nancy Campbell, ‘From our Home to Yours’ (editorial), Above Rubies, Nov. 2006 (distributed Feb. 2007), 4:

Most Christians limit their families to one or two children, which is a belief-system rooted in humanism and feminism. It doesn’t come from the Bible.

['Belief-systems' seem to be breeding like rabbits in evangelical literature. Family planning is apparently a discrete 'belief-system' now. What about having sex, Nancy, is that a 'belief-system' too?]

Louise Shaw, ‘Dress to Please’ (part of a longer piece titled ‘Husbands Need Encouragement’), ibid., 6:

Recently I have begun to honour my husband by dressing more femininely and lovely to look upon. I wear far more skirts than before.

[Three at once, do you mean?]

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Filed in: Their Own Mouths

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

Jim Wallace’s Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) likes to portray itself as moderate, reasonable, and generally a cut above the other groups comprising Australia’s Religious Right. But slice through the holier-than-thou attitude and all you really have left is a bunch of 1950s-style wowsers.

Let’s have a look at ACL’s recent media release entitled ‘Access to Sex Videos in Prison Highlights Wider Social Problems‘. Wallace is at his most po-faced:

People [What people? How many people?] are rightly concerned that sex offenders in Ararat [Vic.] Prison have been repeatedly watching films that could feed into their problems and encourage deviant behaviour.

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Filed in: Censorship, Sexuality

Melbourne City Council is considering the introduction of a same-sex ‘Relationships Declaration Register‘, a move that has shocked and appalled the egregious Salt Shakers ‘Christian ethics’ group. Leaders Peter and Jenny Stokes turned up at a recent council meeting at which this idea was discussed. No other Salt Shaker bothered to do so, thus setting the scene for one of Peter’s legendary dummy-spits:

Who cares that I can’t sleep?

Who cares that Jenny and I were OUTNUMBERED 12, maybe 15 to 1 tonight at the Melbourne City Council meeting? And it was not pleasant!!!

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Filed in: Politics, Sexuality

I’ve always had a special interest in evangelical pastors who claim to be able to raise the dead. I’ve written one article on this topic and I was starting to organise the material for a second piece when I came across this story in Pastor Danny Nalliah’s autobiography Worship Under the Sword (5th ed. 2005). Nalliah, who was born in Sri Lanka, heads a Melbourne Pentecostal group called Catch the Fire Ministries (CTFM) and the following was one of his early experiences:

I was informed of a girl in our factory that had fallen seriously ill. The next thing I knew, I was in this girl’s house … She was lying on a bed, there was no movement at all, her eyes were open, but the black portion of the eyeball had gone in … Then the village doctor came in and pronounced her deceased … Then the Holy Ghost told me, ‘Command this girl to come back to life, in the name of Jesus’ … at once, I commanded the demon of death to come out in the name of Jesus, and the people [assembled in the room] looked at me in amazement. As I finished the girl gave out a scream, ‘Hoooo, hoooo’, she said, as she shook her head left to right. Her hair started blowing up, just as if she had a fan behind her head. All the people sitting and crying around her jumped up with fear. I ordered them all out of the place. Not all of them knew Jesus and I knew that the demon would go into one of them if they stayed … I continued commanding the demon of death to come out, in the name of Jesus. The girl continued to hoot and struggle, but after about four or five minutes I shouted, ‘Get out and get up in the name of Jesus’. The girl got up and sat down … That day the whole crowd bowed down to Jesus. (pp.25-6)

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Filed in: Evangelicals, Pentecostalism

Bill Muehlenberg is becoming more and more disenchanted with the state of the ‘Christian West’:

… [M]ost Westerners have for too long now been strung out on the narcotic of social welfarism and cradle-to-grave statism that they have nothing left to live for or die for … All we seem to want is our internet porn and 30-hour work week …[We are] bloated, blind and balding …

Muslims really do not need to terrorise their way into hegemony, they are already achieving it by enjoying sex. We on the other hand are aborting ourselves into extinction.

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Filed in: Islam, People, Secularism

Sorry, but I just don’t have enough faith to be an atheist. They have to come up with such weird and exotic theorising, which any Joe Six-pack can see is patent nonsense.
- Bill Muehlenberg, What About Those Who Have Not Heard? (Discussion, 28 Jan. 2007, 5pm)

Bill is an evangelical Protestant of the Baptist persuasion. This means that he has enough faith to believe the following sensible and self-evident propositions:

In the time of the ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no biological father being involved.

The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus, who had been dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life.

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Filed in: Atheism, Evangelicals

Margaret Tighe’s Right to Life Australia (RTLA) is still practising ‘punishment politics’. Aspiring politicians can have conservative views on just about every topic under the sun, but if they’re a shade wobbly on ‘life’ issues, there’s a good chance that RTLA will mount a campaign against them.

Here’s an example of their work, taken from the November 2006 Victorian state election:

In Kilsyth the local Member was Dymphna Beard from the [Australian Labor Party]. Dymphna’s membership on [pro-choice] Emily’s List and her vote in favour of destructive embryo research made it important for us to defeat her candidacy. She is no longer a Member of Parliament.

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Filed in: Abortion, Christian Right, Politics

Damien Spillane,
What About Those Who Have Not Heard, CultureWatch discussion, 24 Jan. 2007, 10pm:

I can’t help but think that God knows each one of us intimately and thus knows how much light would be suitable to draw us to the kingdom. Too much light for those that do not want God can be a bad thing as well. It makes them so much more accountable for their evil that they will be given extra punishment at judgement.

[Quick, anyone seen my shades?]

Babette Francis, ‘Seduced by Lies’, Endeavour Forum Newsletter, Feb. 2007, 1:

The unlovely cabal of feminist Senators who have instigated recent anti-life legislation in Federal Parliament … have been seduced by the lies of egotistical scientists into believing that embryonic stem cells will provide cures for diseases.

[Good old Babette, always gracious in defeat.]

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Filed in: Their Own Mouths

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