Australia Is NOT A Godless Society… Really?
Many – perhaps most, if not all – people witnessing Alan Jones’ admiration for Bishop Anthony Fisher, will be impressed with both Alan and Bishop Foster. Many – probably most, if not all – won’t see the religious indifference which permeates the interview and reminds me of President Eisenhower, the first US President to be baptised (into Presbyterianism) while in office. Eisenhower’s sense of faith being at the root of free government was one that he took very seriously. This didn’t necessarily need to be Christianity. He famously said: “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”
This concept, of Faith divorced from revealed truth based on divine authority, has taken root in the Catholic Church of all places. It is, after all a central claim of the Church that Christ bequeathed His own authority to His Church, which is charged with the task of defending and proclaiming the religious and moral truths necessary for our salvation. Bishop Foster, it seems to me, rejects this tenet of the Faith to embrace the grave error of religious indifferentism: essentially, “As long as you believe something, you’ll be fine…” Wrong.
More and more I hear Catholics opine that none of this chaos and confusion will go away until after the Consecration of Russia – what do you think… Can nothing be done, in the meantime, to correct such key theological errors?
Comments (12)
Right off the bat, this Archbishop reveals that he is clueless. Alan Jones cites 3 statistics to show the rapid decline in religious belief over 3 Aussie census periods, from 78% to 67%. Question: is that telling us anything? Response: most Australians believe in God!
Say what?? Oh, it’s all OK, we’re all still part of the family!
Which family is that, Your Excellency? The family of reprobates? Heretics? Pagans? Police state enforcers and enablers? Fifth columnists on the NWO payroll? Christian-haters?
It would appear that this prelate has been reading this book:
https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348146688i/134353._UY630_SR1200,630_.jpg
As for Editor’s question, only the traditionalist societies and groups in the Church can correct this error, until the Church overthrows the revolution and consecrates Russia. Are they doing that? I don’t know. Even if they are, do the mainstream clergy pay any attention? Doubtful.
RCA Victor,
They forget that even the Devil believes in God – so that’s no big deal.
I share your dubious confidence in the “traditionalist societies and groups within the Church” – that said, I will leave your dubious confidence unremarked… if you get my drift!
RCA Victor,
Love the book title! LOL!
RCAVictor,
Look at his cross without a corpus. Says it all really! Yes, everyone is part of the family.
Warydoom,
Ah! Now I know how to get you on here more often – publish a thread about Australia!
I wish Alan Jones had thought to ask if Archbishop Fisher thought this new “interfaith family” might be the very definition of a dysfunctional family, at least in God’s eyes.
And what a pity that this Archbishop Fisher is the very opposite of the Bishop Fisher who gave his life at the time of the Reformation rather than deny the Church’s spiritual authority. Tragic.
I’m one of those who think things won’t be put right until Russia is consecrated. Until then, all any of us can do is what we are already doing, resist the errors of modernism and Pope Francis and pray for that consecration.
I’m afraid that bishop is just typical of the majority, these post-Vatican II days. Any one of the Scottish bishops would have been saying the same thing. The ecumenical/inter-faith movement was a very clever way of dissing the faith, banking on “out of sight out of mind”.
Lily,
I’m afraid you’re right about the Scottish Bishops being of the same mindset as the Australian Archbishop Fisher. Religious indifferentism writ large from the highlands and lowlands of Scotland to the beaches of Australia fair. Quite poetic that, if you think about it 😀
Lily,
I definitely agree that things won’t be put right until the consecration of Russia. Anyone who know the story of Fatima and has watched its prophecies coming true in the last few years, especially this past 16 months, must admit that.
The current Bolt Report, is titled ‘No Religion’ Push for National Census. Really, Anti-Christian push in Census – Heats Up. Andrew Bolt interviews Dr Michael Stead, who is Anglican – ‘No religion’ census campaign is quite ‘frankly bizarre’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4htJN8NdOc
Religious indifferentism abounds within the Catholic Church. I echo Lily in praying hard for the consecration of Russia.
Theresa Rose,
Dr Stead is right – but again, like Archbishop Fisher, he is a bit weak. They’re all afraid to speak the truth about the uniqueness of Christ.
It’s a disgrace, for example, that there is no condemnation of Satanism. How can a nation be “religious” if its religious leaders do not denounce the worship of Satan?
I don’t know anyone in Australia but my guess is that it’s no more “religious” than any other modern country. In fact, the only things I ever see on TV about Australia are showing how much “fun” life is “down under” with their outdoor lifestyle/beaches/surfing etc. The only time the Church hit the news was when Cardinal Pell was put on trial and that was such an obvious injustice that the Anglicans were outspoken in defending him, God bless them.
I agree that “believing in God” is not the sign of a religious society. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people saying they don’t want anything to do with “institutional religion” but they believe in God. They forget it was God who gave us the institutional religion!
This is from today’s Daily Sceptic, headlined: Is This a Dystopian Satire? No, it’s Daily Life Down Under
Steve Waterson, the Commercial Editor of the Australian, has kindly given us permission to reprint his latest column. It’s another jeremiad against Australia’s staggeringly incompetent ruling class, as they frantically try and spin their mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis as a mature, statesmanlike response. Meanwhile, the regulations that ordinary Australians have to copy with grow ever more ridiculous. Sit down to drink, but stand up near a park bench; exercise, but don’t rest; go shopping but don’t browse; under no circumstances talk to anyone you know, despite the masks that afford magic protection from nanometre Covid dust… “The list is a never-ending carousel of hilarity,” says Waterson.
Well, that was worth waiting for. Finally a tiny glimpse of the modelling that has underpinned government decision-making on our Covid response, and very convincing it is too. And unbelievably, literally unbelievably, precise.
Let’s not go through the various conditional predictions of the virus’s impact, especially the “worst-case” scenario, which happily generates a number far short of “everybody dies”, which I would regard as the worst case.
Instead here’s what the Doherty Institute says could happen if we suffered a six-month uncontrolled outbreak with only 60% of the population vaccinated: there would be 737,971 infections and 5,294 deaths. Note the super-scientific accuracy: not 737,970 or 737,972 infections; why, that would just be sloppy guesswork.
I’m teasing, of course (it’s one of the few pleasures not yet forbidden in these joyless times), and have no doubt the statisticians are doing their very best with the data; so let’s assume they’re correct that almost three-quarters of a million would be infected, of whom 5,000 would die.
Many of us in the anti-lockdown corner are asked how many lives we would sacrifice to see the country open up again, our accusers triumphantly certain there is no decent answer because, as the NSW Premier told us in May, “no death is acceptable”.
She and her interstate counterparts would rather smash our lives and livelihoods in pursuit of their ridiculous, hubristic ambition.
If a foreign power were causing damage on this scale we would regard it as an act of war, when deaths in defence of the country would become acceptable again.
Perhaps we should bite the bullet and say 5,000 predominantly old people taken prematurely is a sad but tolerable price to pay for the restoration of our freedoms and the repair of our society – as long as it’s not my precious grandparents. Oh wait, mine have already died of old age, like all my ancestors since humans first wandered out of the African Rift Valley. It happens a lot, I understand. And by the way, those 5,000 projected deaths assume we could find no other way of protecting the vulnerable, which is hard to believe.
The Prime Minister’s proud boast is that our closed borders and hyper vigilance have “saved 30,000 lives” since the start of the epidemic last year. More unverifiable modelling; but again, let’s assume he’s right. I wonder how many of the saved have succumbed to other ailments in that time; or will next week’s census reveal a Cocoon-like bubble of healthy nonagenarians, 30,000 strong, laughing at Covid and death in all its other guises?
At best, we’ve dragged their lives out for a few more lonely months sequestered from their families, just as we’ve kicked the whole pandemic a little way down the road, at an almost inconceivable cost. As our leaders and their worker bees finesse their incarceration strategy, in the background the cries of misery grow louder.
The politicians look on, stern-faced and witless, bleating their platitudes about feeling our pain, and urging us to get vaccinated as the only way to escape the shackles on our lives, as though they had nothing to do with the sinister emergency powers they have granted themselves and aimed against us. “A surge in cases has closed restaurants”; “the latest outbreak means tradesmen can’t go to work”; “thanks to some selfish cab driver we must stay at home for the next month”.
No, ladies and gentlemen, the virus hasn’t done this to us; you have, cosy in your luxurious offices with your index-linked financial cushions, surrounded by sycophants and shoving people around like demented puppetmasters.
It may come as a shock to those snorting and gobbling at the trough of public money, but not everyone makes their living by opening a spreadsheet on a laptop, reaching out to a stakeholder and unmuting themselves on a Zoom call.
There are people who pay taxes (rather than recycle them) by travelling every day to places where they make actual things with their hands, who build home offices rather than work from them.
Some then have the audacity to consider their manual or menial work essential, as though they are under some obligation to put food on the table for their families.
And these ungrateful wretches, instead of praising the wisdom of their superiors who imprison them in their unfashionable suburbs, have the nerve to march in the streets in complaint, thousands of people engaged in reckless superspreader events that have led to a massive zero new infections.
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” wails Shakespeare’s King Lear. Echoing him, our politicians and bureaucrats, parents to their infantilised population, are “disgusted” (NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian) with these “filthy” (NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Gary Worboys) “boofheads” (NSW Police Minister David Elliot), “wankers” (NT Chief Minister Michael Gunner) and “hooligans, dropkicks” (WA Premier Mark McGowan). Treasure the eloquent, statesmanlike rhetoric of these latter-day Ciceros; that’s the way to bring the people along with you in difficult times.
Instead they govern by regulations that grow daily more ridiculous. Sit down to drink, but stand up near a park bench; exercise, but don’t rest; go shopping but don’t browse, even though the sadists at Coles have moved everything you wanted into different aisles; under no circumstances talk to anyone you know, despite the masks that afford magic protection from nanometre Covid dust; the list is a never-ending carousel of hilarity.
The latest inanity from the future governor of Queensland (remember her, the one who did more than anyone else to dissuade people from receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine?) is to warn against online shopping.
“Do you need those people out in the community delivering packages and things?” she asks. No, your excellency, of course not, let them park their vans and bikes and get a well-paid, non-executive board position like your pals do.
What begins as absurdity soon turns dark. In NSW you must carry evidence of your address at all times when outside your home, and produce it to a police officer – “Papers please!” – on demand. You must carry a mask on your person, even to walk the dog around the block. Cold War Berlin-style police checkpoints have appeared on our streets to confirm cars are within 10km of their homes, and their occupants not intending to protest against their rulers. The army is on patrol in areas whose citizens are often refugees from regimes where camouflage battle-dress is rarely a welcome sight.
Do Western concepts of freedom no longer matter in Australia? Is it a trivial matter that we are commanded not to leave our homes? Does it seriously not bother anyone in office that we are being compared – accurately – to North Korea in our legislated refusal to allow our citizens to leave the country, or overseas Australians to return? This is very bad company we find ourselves in.
The politicians say they’re faced with tough decisions, but they’re not making decisions at all. They defend their abdication of responsibility by loftily declaring they are acting on the health advice they receive. They don’t evaluate that advice, mind, they simply follow it.
And it leads always to the same destination: lockdown. It’s “horrible”, Berejiklian said this week, “but we know we have no option”. In Victoria, Premier Daniel Andrews parrots her: “There are no alternatives to lockdown,” he said on Thursday. Unless of course you don’t order a lockdown, which I think does qualify as an option, and a much more appealing one.
Lockdowns certainly work in the crudest sense, in that by isolating people you limit viral transmission, but that’s not the point.
It’s the cost-benefit analysis that’s missing, absent from the moment our governments panicked and abandoned our sensible national pandemic plan to follow the brutes of Communist China into a policy of dystopian oppression, to “keep us safe”.
Let’s turn the acceptable casualty question around and direct it to our leaders: how many fruitful young lives are you happy to waste to keep those Covid numbers low?
How many small businesses are you ready to see disappear? How many suicides will you tolerate? How many bankruptcies? How many children should forgo their formative primary education and socialisation? How many deaths from other untreated illness are acceptable to you?
How much sorrow are you willing to impose on your subjects? How many grief-stricken families must bury parents and children without ceremony, like backyard pets? How many tears will soften your stony, self-righteous hearts?
Whether born of stupidity or callousness, the effect of our current aimless course is the same. State against state, city against country, suburb against suburb, office worker against tradesman, old against young, vaccinated against unvaccinated: it is a heartless, divisive and dehumanising policy. And worse, it doesn’t work.
The very people we elect to safeguard our freedoms are shredding them, causing fractures in society that may never be healed.
Surely there are politicians in every party who are silently appalled by this mounting despair and devastation. If their leaders cannot find a path out of this madness, perhaps those others should speak up and think about taking the reins, before the electorate’s frustration turns to fury. Ends.
If that’s not all evidence of Godlessness in Australia, I’d like to see the dictionary definition!
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