Welcome to the monthly digest for September Hi , During September,
Russell Yardley and Ian Robinson outlined the moral case for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, Geoffrey Barker considered whether anything has changed in the "new face of Pentecostalism", and Clare Heath-McIvor took us inside the indoctrinated religious mind. You can support Rationale by
making a donation to the Rationalist Society of Australia. You can gain full access to articles by signing up as a member. If you’d like to submit a Letter to the Editor or an article for publication, contact me via editor@rationalist.com.au. Si Gladman
Editor |
Highlights
from Rationale
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| The moral case for the Indigenous Voice By Russell Yardley and Ian Robinson The question of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in Australia is fundamentally an ethical matter, though opponents often frame it in political or legal terms to avoid facing the moral issue. Australia’s colonial history has resulted in the
disenfranchisement of its original inhabitants – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders – by taking their lands without consent. The ethical solution, since returning the land is impractical, is to compensate and give a voice to the original possessors. Critics who label the Voice as “divisive” miss the point. Australia is already a diverse society that accommodates various needs through different policy frameworks. Refusing the Voice on grounds of divisiveness is not just hypocritical but
avoids the primary ethical obligation towards the original inhabitants. |
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| Pentecostalism: New, old and unchanging By Geoffrey Barker The “new face of Pentecostalism in Australia” was joyfully proclaimed in a recent edition of the Weekend Australian newspaper. “Rock star preacher, social media machine, 40,000 members,” the newspaper shouted. “Move over Hillsong, there’s a new Pentecostal
brand in town,” it declared. A lengthy magazine article by senior writer Greg Sheridan identified the new church as Kingdomcity and named its leader as Mark Varughese, 48, a handsome and charismatic Australian lawyer of Malaysian-Indian background. Sheridan’s enthusiastic introduction of Kingdomcity and Mark Varughese is surprising. Sheridan is an intelligent Christian and impressive thinker who might have been expected to greet Varughese’s pitch with some caution. Not so. |
MBJ's view on current affairs
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| Inside the indoctrinated mind
By Clare Heath-McIvor
People joke about how they were indoctrinated into barracking for a particular football team or undertaking house chores a certain way. It’s true that we do learn the basics of habit, values and
culture from our childhood caregivers. For the vast majority of us, that’s a good thing. To call it indoctrination falls far short of what actually occurs in the context of religious or extremist indoctrination though. I’ve noticed recently a fair bit of chatter in the right-wing Twitterati/politisphere about indoctrination – specifically accusing schools of indoctrinating their students. It’s a big thing to throw around. Unless we do a deep dive, it’s hard to debunk it. Knowledge is power,
kids! So what is indoctrination, really, and how does it occur? |
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| Letters to the Editor: The limits of liberty
By James Faulkner
The idea that liberty is a universal moral seems very modern and very, very Western. As noted in the RSA Daily recently, Asian countries, and indeed any
now Western European or anglophonic cultures, have a different take on liberty as far as society goes. And this is for the purpose of maintaining a solid society. The liberty principle is brought from the French and the American revolutions, and has little to do with the rest of the world. Indeed, if one bothered to observe – which I note few Western-inclined thinkers are willing to do – you would notice the cohesiveness of older, pre-industrialised societies that did not have the stupidity to
throw away all the old ways in a fit of self-indulgence. |
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| Complexity and the patterns of evolution
By Matthew Wills
It’s reassuring to imagine that complex bodies and brains like ours are the inevitable consequence of evolution, as if evolution had a goal. Unfortunately
for human egos, a recent study comparing over a thousand mammals – the group we belong to – painted a less gratifying picture. Evolutionary biologists in the late 18th century, including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, reasoned that life must have an innate tendency to evolve into ever more complex forms, and believed this reflected God’s design. However, by the mid-19th century, Charles Darwin showed that natural selection has no direction, and will sometimes make organisms simpler. Modern biologists
agree that the most complex organisms have become more complex over the last 4 billion years, but they disagree about what sort of process accounts for this. |
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| Familiar words, familiar style
By Geoffrey Barker
Some words are like the yo-yo and the hula hoop – they burst into the world as irresistible crazes and vanish almost as quickly when users tire of
their novelty. Perhaps it’s just over-familiarity breeding contempt for shiny new words with short shelf-lives. While these words are easily dismissed as threadbare jargon, they often seem to loiter in the wings and, like the yo-yo and hula hoop, continue to impose their banalities on spoken and written language. The time has come to challenge these semantic stupidities and to restore some simplicity, elegance and truth to language. |
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