Posted on 05/22/2005 10:17:50 PM PDT by Aussie Dasher
If deputy Prime Minister John Anderson wants to identify himself with the congregation of the Catch the Fire Ministry - hands lifted high in the air, eyes closed in self-hypnotised rapture - that is his business, though it may not go down well with the majority of Australians who, if they have any religion, tend to wear it lightly.
He has no business, however, urging the rest of us to "find a new relationship with God". What many of those imbued with religious certainty fail to understand is that a significant proportion of the population do not share their basic belief that God exists, leave alone wanting to get into arguments about what God wants or doesn't want. For something like 30 per cent of Australians it is irrelevant to bring God into public debate.
Yet increasingly this is what is happening. Many members of the Howard Government are devout Christians. Some months ago Treasurer Peter Costello urged Australians to follow the Ten Commandments. Health Minister Tony Abbott has tried to get a new argument about abortion going, has intervened in debates about stem cell research, and more recently has criticised a recommendation by the Victorian Law Reform Commission to extend access to reproductive technology to lesbians and single mothers.
(Five years ago the Federal Government invoked an obscure power to allow the Catholic Church to proceed with a High Court challenge to a Federal Court ruling allowing single and lesbian women access to IVF. The High Court ruled that the church did not have a right to appeal in the case because it was not party to the initial litigation - in other words, it was none of its business.)
Prime Minister John Howard is not overtly religious, but the messages of the religious right speak to his social conservatism and his economic agenda, especially, as The Economist pointed out in its survey of Australia recently, the "prosperity Christianity" preached at Sydney's Hillsong Church, which says that religion and material wealth go together (Hillsong's founder, Brian Houston, is the author of a book titled You Need More Money). In 2002, Howard opened Hillsong's new church complex and Costello has spoken at its annual meeting.
While Anderson was preaching at Catch the Fire's national day of prayer and thanksgiving at the Southland Christian Centre recently, Labor's Kevin Rudd was addressing a similar service at the Church of Christ in Clayton. Rudd, who is also deeply religious, recently told the ABC's Compass program that progressive Christians needed to wrest Christianity back from the conservatives.
Should we be worried? This is not yet America, where opinion polls show no one who was not openly and traditionally religious could be elected president. Where pharmacists refuse to dispense prescriptions for the pill because they don't agree with contraception on "moral" grounds. And where far-right Christian fundamentalism is embedded in government, even to the extent of dictating overseas aid - banning funding to organisations that might include abortion in their health services and instead preaching abstinence to women in developing countries who too often have no say about whether they will have sex at all.
For the religious right, all moral and ethical issues appear to revolve around sex. But they believe only their idea of morality is valid; whereas many people might think denying condoms to people in countries ravaged by AIDS, or condemning millions of women to unsafe abortions, is highly immoral. Religious conservatives speak less often about the immorality of the vast gulf between rich and poor countries.
Rudd is right to want to take Christianity back from the right. But a large number of people are not Christian, or indeed any other religion. It is the idea that there is a correlation between religion and morality, in which the media are generally complicit, that needs to be challenged. The frequently quoted Catholic ethicist Nicholas Tonti-Filipini is not more ethical that the atheist (and world-famous) philosopher Peter Singer. Since the existence of God cannot be proved, it is no more moral to believe than not to believe.
One doesn't, in fact, need to be religious to have concerns about such things as late abortion or how far access to IVF treatment should extend. (To 60-year-old women, to save discriminating on the grounds of age?) While I am relaxed about two women bringing up a child together - as long as the child knows who her father is and has at least a friendly relationship with him - I can't honestly say I view the prospect of it becoming common for two men to have a child together with the same equanimity. A baby needs a woman's soft breast, not a man's hairy chest.
These issues are complex and difficult and surrounded by many shades of grey. They do need to be debated, but politicians are wrong to bring their own religious beliefs into public discourse.
The separation of church and state needs to be jealously guarded, and the Government should be very careful not to be seen to impose church teachings on the rest of the country. Apart from any other consideration, it is poor politics to risk alienating a third of the electorate.
Pamela Bone is an associate editor.
We've seen what this argument has done in the United States. We certainly don't need it here.
I'm sure there was a "BARF ALERT" attached to this thread...
welcome to the wonderful world of State-Sponsored Dogmatic Atheism.
as a committed agnostic, I consider these militantly atheist bastards a thoroughgoing pain in the a$$ and threat to cultural cohesion, just as bad a toxin to a republic as a more conventional theocracy would be.
That would be the same Peter Singer who believes that infanticide is ethical...
That's the one. He also believes a healthy dog has more claim on life than a baby with a disability. He is a modern-day Nazi!
Pamela you say that " Since the existence of God cannot be proved, it is no more moral to believe than not to believe". You need to open your blind eyes and look around you, His proof is there, it is in His very creation.
There are none so blind as those who will not see...
...reading.
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