Welcome to the monthly digest for April Hi , During April, Tama Matheson wrote on the importance of laughter in the face of tyranny, Paul Monk examined Greg Sheridan's uncritical supernaturalism, and Meredith Doig considred differing views on
male circumcision. Si Gladman
Editor |
Highlights from Rationale
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| ‘Holding the line’ on Religious Instruction for the Christian
Right By Alison Courtice Queensland’s education minister Grace Grace faces a decision of either listening to her Labor colleagues and their call to remove Religious Instruction
(RI) from school hours, or “holding the line” for the Christian Right in the Liberal-National opposition. Following the public backlash in response to media reporting on how Christian missionaries view public schools as “mission fields” and kids ripe for “harvesting”, one would think that removing the RI program from class time would be ‘low-hanging fruit’ for the Palaszczuk government. |
| Our duty to laugh in the face of
tyrants By Tama Matheson Autocracies are very serious places. They have to be. Their power is founded on an absurdity – the assertion that one person or ideology is superior to all
others, and that that person or ideology holds the answer to all human questions. Such a claim is, of course, ridiculous. Elements of genius aside, all human beings are endowed with roughly equal judgement. In ordinary circumstances, such a claim would incur a clamour of public derision. But autocracies are not ordinary places. They are reified fantasies in which one person is empedestalled as uniquely gifted and percipient. |
MBJ's view on current affairs
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| Greg Sheridan’s uncritical
supernaturalism By Paul Monk On Easter Saturday, The Australian was to run a 1200-word piece of mine about Mathias
Cormann being a safe pair of hands at the OECD, in a troubled time, or so I thought. It didn’t get onto the page, or even the online version of the paper. But the paper’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, was given some 3000 words to expound his Catholic religious beliefs. I read his piece with disbelief – both in the sense that I do not share his religious beliefs and in the sense that I could not believe that he had been given so much space to preach specifically that, at the end of the world,
all of us would undergo ‘bodily resurrection’ and would live forever on a transformed Earth, which would be the promised ‘Heaven’. This essay is an attempt to express my sense of disbelief to a rationalist audience. |
| In the face of extremism, liberals must snap out of their
complacency
By Jonathan Meddings
Several years ago I found a copy of Mein Kampf in a
second-hand bookstore in country Victoria. Better my bookshelf than a neo-Nazi’s, I figured, so I coughed up the $90 asking price. I confess I thought about burning it, but the irony of doing so would have simply been too much. I didn’t think it was possible to like Hitler any less, but the preface in which he wrote “every great movement on earth owes its growth to great speakers and not to great writers” did the trick. His diatribe now sits alongside other reference texts filled with hateful
nonsense that condone genocide, and which so happen to prove Hitler was wrong about the power of the written word to change the world — the so-called ‘holy books’. |
| Radicalisation and white Christian
nationalism
By Clare Heath-McIvor
Last year, I had a quick conversation with another writer
about the difference between the ‘far right’ and ‘extreme right’ when it came to certain movements in Western countries. To him, the extreme right was neo-Nazis. To me, it was fundamentalist churches. I happily conceded the point and we moved on with our lives. In March, the Venn diagram of far-right and extreme-right ideology overlapped on the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne. I wish I could say I watched in disbelief as Liberal Party MP Moira Deeming took to the microphone beside
anti-trans campaigner Posie Parker while neo-Nazis campaigned behind her. But this one was not hard to see coming. |
| Rationalists and circumcision
By Meredith Doig
Every weekday morning for a decade, I have checked about 100 websites and skimmed over about
700 headlines to choose no more than 10 articles to send to my loyal subscribers before 8 a.m., keeping them informed of news and views of interest to the freethought community. And I add a brief editorial, drawing attention to the more interesting or insightful pieces. One of those pieces shared last week was titled, ‘Circumcision: the human rights violation that no one wants to talk about’. It argued that male circumcision and female genital mutilation (FGM) are both harmful and morally
unacceptable practices, and that human rights bodies are slowly but surely waking up to the inconsistency in the social, political and legal treatment of the two. |
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