Guan Un / 7th October 2004
...and if you're like me, and are still confused about the many issues involved in being a Christian and what that means for voting, our friends at CASE have plenty to help you think it through. On their site, there's two papers where Christians explain their approach to politics. And on CASE Director Greg Clarke's blog, there's a fantastic table outlining the different parties and their stance on various issues. Better read quickly.
Gordon Cheng / 6th October 2004
UK, US, Europe, the rest of the western world, for sure, but bias against Christians in the Australian media? Surely not! Yet that is exactly what Paul Kelly claims in this opinion piece, written for The Australian on October 6. His article includes choice quotes such as:
Tony Abbott minister, and George Pell cardinal, are two of the hate figures of the Sydney media—and any meeting between the two men is both a big story and a conspiracy. Indeed, it can't be anything else. This is an act of secular faith that transcends time, place and other measures of the temporal world.
Pell is detested because he favours a muscular Christianity, not the limp-wristed social justice variety and Abbott is detested because he wants to inject Christian values into politics and this is ultimate sin for the secular religionists.
and
For the liberal media, bishops aren't supposed to get involved in politics, unlike greenies or film stars, unless of course the bishops are opposing a war or calling John Howard a racist in which case they are moral arbiters.
I always thought the Australian media was neutral! I am going to have to read more carefully in future.
Gordon Cheng / 5th October 2004
Janet Albrechtsen has a bit of a go at pontificating church leaders in an opinion piece written for the Australian—read it here. She says:
Political preachers who evince such uncompromising moral certainty on the battlefields of Caesar and yet are so timid in defending orthodox Christian principles bring to mind what G.K. Chesterton said about a well-meaning cleric of his own times: “There is scarcely a shade of difference left between meaning well and meaning nothing.”
Whether or not we agree or disagree with the political opinion she criticises in her article, there is no doubt that she is right to question the failure of some church leaders to stand up for the basics of what they are supposed to believe.
Tony Payne / 4th October 2004
There is a dangerous pleasure in reading a book that fuels an existing prejudice. It's delicious. Yet the peril is that you'll cheer so loudly as you read that you'll not notice the flaws in the argument, the gaps in logic, and the assertions that are not properly supported.
It is for this reason that CHN readers should take my enthusiastic recommendation of Paul Sheehan's The Electronic Whorehouse with a grain or two of salt. The book may have holes you could drive the Queen Mary through; there may be egregious lapses in taste and judgement—I wouldn't know. I applauded so often that the book kept folding shut on my lap.
The Electronic Whorehouse is an indictment of the mass media, an expose of the lies, distortions, hidden agenda, hypocrisy and double-standards of the gatekeepers of public opinion. In a series of twelve linked essays, touching on subjects as diverse as the ‘stolen generation’, asylum seekers and the personal feud between Phillip Adams and Mike Carleton, Sheehan shows in detail how media practitioners do their work, how they hide relevant facts from the public, unfairly smear reputations, push their own agenda, distort and selectively quote for their own ends, engage in petty feuds with one another, and always refuse to be called to account for their behaviour.
Along the way, his targets include the ABC's Media Watch, and its presenter David Marr, columnists Robert Manne and Gerard Henderson, the ABC program 4-Corners, the PR industry, and others too numerous to mention.
What is so attractive about Sheehan's critique is that his outrage is not a political outrage at being marginalised, or at being prevented from scoring his own ideological points. His anger is that which we all feel when we are lied to, when the facts are deliberately hidden from us. He seems to have no particular political axe to grind: he is as scathing about Robert Manne (a left-leaning opponent of the Howard government) as he is about Gerard Henderson (a right-leaning Liberal party member and Howard supporter). He clearly disapproves of aspects of right-wing America (such as the death penalty), and yet asks quite trenchantly: Why is it in the mainstream media that this group is always referred to as the ‘religious right’ while its ideological opponents are never described as the ‘atheist left’? In fact, why is it that commentators routinely refer to conservative views as ‘right wing’ but never to their own directly opposite views as ‘left wing’?
Interestingly, although Sheehan shows no particular sympathy for biblical Christianity, especially in its American evangelical form, he points out how unfairly evangelical Christianity is portrayed and treated in the mainstream media. He commends the Sydney University newspaper Honi Soit for its moment of editorial honesty:
The biggest taboo in our society isn't to publish an article that proposes that Jesus is gay. It's not to accuse Islam of deluding millions into subservient worship, or slander the EU [Evangelical Union] as a homophobic cult, or print a picture of a Catholic priest having sex with an altar boy. The biggest taboo for Honi Soit today is to publish an article written by a group of Bible-believing Christians.
However, most significant of all in my view is Sheehan's description of the spin campaigns regularly conducted by the media and their bedfellows in the PR industry. He quotes veteran thriller-writer, John le Carre, whose most recent novel is about the corporate world and public relations:
I think we are dealing with an octopus. We have become creatures of these people. Advertising as news. It's very skilfully done. The methods of seducing the media are far sophisticated and the money that's going into it, and the ingenuity of the spin has reached a point where we, as a general public, have never been lied to by such sophisticated means as now. And, of course, this completely confounds the modern notion of transparency and instant communications. It's instant brainwashing.
The Electronic Whorehouse has a simple message. The world of the modern mass media is one where “lies, fabrications, character assassinations, reputational rapes, point scoring, axe grinding, sneering, smearing and generalised weaselling have become standard fare”.
It's something most of us either realise or suspect to be the case. Read this book if you need any further convincing. And if you're already convinced, read it anyway. You'll enjoy it enormously.
Gordon Cheng / 1st October 2004
Athanasius, if he is known, is best known as a 4th century theologian who fought tooth and nail to insist that there was only one God, yet also that Christians know him as Father, Son and Holy Spirit—God in three persons, the Trinity. In fighting for what seems to non-christians (and sadly, some Christians) like an obscure and impractical doctrine, Athanasius found himself defending the very heart of our salvation and explaining why God the Father sent God the Son into this world:
“For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved” (S. John 3:17). All mankind had formerly incurred the sentence of the Law, and were guilty criminals; but the Word of God took upon himself the punishment to be inflicted, and thus justice was satisfied; and, by undergoing punishment in our nature, He applied to our persons the redemption wrought by it. And this was what S. John meant when he exclaimed, “The Law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (S. John 1:17). How much more excellent is grace than the Law, and how far superior is truth to a shadow of it.
(Orations against the Arians, 1.60)
If the doctrine of the Trinity is an invention; if the Son of God turns out not to be God, this wonderful saving truth collapses. Athanasius saw the glory of our salvation and its basis in God's trinitarian nature, and rejoiced in it.
One way of finding out more about the doctrine of the Trinity is to read chapter 3 of Broughton Knox's book, The Everlasting God, available from Matthias Media.
