Woke paradise

This election, Australians have the chance to enact an eco-social utopia. Evil, backward looking conservatives are the only obstacle to this bold vision. These dinosaurs need to get out of the way and let more enlightened, tolerant people run things, because they know best. Conservatives should not be able to hold any public office or any position of influence in society, for that matter.

The apolitical and ceremonial office of Governor General will be replaced with a popularly elected President, with a campaign financed by special interest groups, or internet activist groups with less than transparent financial arrangements. He or she will claim their own mandate to speak on the issues of the day, and influence the political process.

All heavy industry, mining and forestry will gradually be phased out. The electricity industry will rapidly transition to complete reliance on renewable energy. Rooftop solar panels will be compulsory for all home owners, as will electric car ownership. Until such a time as this becomes profitable, all of this will be subsidised through massive increases in personal and corporate taxation. Using the recently announced Green New Deal as a template, the government will finance the retrofitting of every single building in Australia to five star energy ratings.

Setting an example for the rest of the nation, the Federal Parliament, and Parliaments in each state and territory, will have quotas, setting aside a portion of winnable seats for all ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. It will follow from this that all employers in the public and private sectors will be required to hire minorities, and it will be mandatory for these staff to be addressed by their preferred gender pronoun. Since schools have long made radical gender theory a key component of their curriculum, it logically follows that it will also be a key component of moderHn workplace culture. Anyone disagreeing with this will be sent off for state funded sensitivity training. Discriminatory employment practices will be prohibited. If a religious school wants to hire teachers that are adherents of their faith, forget it. A Hindu school will be required to employ a non-Hindu teacher who loves eating Angus beef steaks, and wearing leather jackets.

Australia will be the first designated geographical safe space in the western world. Conservative opinion will be driven from the public square. Conservatives will be prevented from holding public meetings, and not allowed to disseminate their views on all forms of media. Foreign conservatives wishing to visit Australia will be denied entry visas from the Department of Immigration, not because they are a security risk, but because their worldviews are arbitrarily deemed unacceptable. Hate speech laws will prevent any critical evaluation of any minority religious belief or worldview, even in scholarly circles.

Speaking of religion, since statistically speaking, Christianity is the largest religion in Australia, churches and other faith based organisations and agencies will come under closer government scrutiny. Religious training colleges will teach a curriculum removed of any possibly controversial content, or risk losing their accreditation and access to student loan schemes. Churches will only be permitted to teach soft messages. There will be no mention of such notions as sin, repentance, self denial, or accountability to a Creator God. Instead, the teaching will be reduced to pop psychology and motivational talks with some Bible verses thrown in to give it a Christian veneer.

Last of all, any consenting adult who wants to marry will be able to. Again, dissent will not be tolerated. No celebrant or cleric will be able to decline to officiate these marriages, for whatever reason. There will be no exemptions. Gradually, polygamous and polyamorous marriages will be officially recognised by government. The days of monogamous, opposite sex marriage will be a distant memory.

This is a bold vision of the future. We will all marvel at the wondrous society we have created, achieved solely through human effort, without appeal to any religious ideology. There is no limit to the potential of humanity. All it needs is the right leadership and guidance. Think of a clean, green, just society. This indeed is an eco-social utopia. Ah, bliss. I am so inspired by this vision, I am going to join the Australian Labor Party or the Australian Greens, or GetUp. I want to be on the right side of history, and to be able to walk the streets of the inner city with pride.

Guilt by association?

Some of my peers at Simmons College in Boston in the United States have published an "Anti-Oppression Library Guide." This guide is intended to inform, and provoke instruction about power structures that need to be challenged and changed to remove this oppression. A cursory reading of this guide is quite informative. I almost feel guilty by association. By virtue of my being a heterosexual, Caucasian Christian, I am automatically an oppressor.

I learned new terminology I never heard before. For example, Sanism is prejudice against neurodivergent people. Until today, I had no idea that neurodivergency was even a thing. Other phobias, such as Islamophobia, or Queerphobia, are now termed as Islamomisia or Queermisia, respectively.

The authors of this guide have deemed that using the "phobia" suffix is potentially offensive to people suffering from genuine phobias, such as claustrophobia. What will happen if, in a few years' time, the "misia" suffix is also deemed to be offensive? Will theorists need to devise a new suffix?

Whether or not this guide is addressing real or perceived problems is beside the point. I have political views, but I have never used my profession as a platform to impose them upon others. The last time I checked, the key principles of librarianship are to encourage library users to develop critical thinking skills, foster literacy in all its forms, and promote lifelong learning. This does not extend to dictating to them how they should think or behave.

It is concerning to think that some of the ideas in this guide won't stay as abstract notions forever. In years to come, when the current generation of college and university students become business and political leaders, they will become government policy.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/03/05/college-librarians-argue-christians-who-say-god-bless-are-islamophobic.html

Your rates at work

If you have a passing interest in sustainable development issues, The Earth from Above photographic exhibition, featuring the work of French photographer Yann Arthus Bertrand, is well worth checking out. It's on at Federation Square until December 12, 2006. Bertrand's photographs reveal the natural beauty of our world, but also the devastation our poor stewardship of its resources has caused.

Bertrand is a strong advocate of sustainable development. This is a way of achieving economic growth in a more environmentally sensitive way. He believes it would allow us to improve the living conditions of the world's citizens and to satisfy the needs of generations to come. This development would be based on an economic growth respectful of both man and the natural resources of our world, with a conscious effort made to ensure that all people around the world share equally in its benefits and achieve a decent standard of living, which isn't happening at the moment. Since all people are made in the image of God, helping this to come about affirms their human dignity.

Some Christians, myself included, feel a little uncomfortable trying to reconcile our faith with environmental issues. We must be careful that this is done in submission and reference to this Scriptural mandate. In Genesis, God appointed humanity as stewards to manage His creation so that His Name would be honoured. Christian thinkers have argued that Christians have a valid part to play in the environmental movement. They have allowed themselves to be excluded from this movement, and other spiritual ideologies have filled the void. To some extent, environmentalism has become synonymous with earth worship or pantheism. In pantheist thought, everything bears the imprint of God, so creation can be worshipped in the same way as the God who made it. This way of thinking is idolatry and must be rejected.

Under now outmoded economic theories, governments benevolently provided their citizens with what were termed as public goods. These had almost no economic value, but were thought to enhance quality of life in some intangible way. Presumably public artwork falls under this category. In order to improve the visual amenity of the city, Melbourne City Council has invested heavily in public artworks in recent years. I never studied art appreciation when I was in school, or if I did, I wasn't paying attention. Apparently it's supposed to make symbolic statements about contemporary society, the human condition, and other philosophical concerns.
This symbolism is lost on me.

While I don't go out of my way to look at it, when I see public artwork, most of the time, I'm left scratching my head and thinking, "What's all that about?" I've no idea what these two artworks, situated in Birrarung Marr are meant to represent. As you can see, one looks like giant metal rods in a basket, and the other is a symbolic representation of some sort of animal. There was probably some sort of explanatory plaque nearby, but I didn't bother to look at it. Others I see as eyesores. One could mention the giant wooden dog near Fairfield Railway Station, erected at a cost of $5000. Evidently someone thought it was a good idea to install a set of large concrete eggs in a roundabout in Eltham, simulating a bird's nest. Maybe they were inspired by the Rocs, which are mythical bird-like monsters in the Sinbad stories. You may also have encountered an abstract giant green apple peel sculpture on a roundabout in Fitzsimon's Lane, Templestowe. This was to commemorate the apple orchards that once operated in the area until it was urbanised. Until it was explained to me what it was, I thought this piece looked like a thoughtlessly discarded piece of stretched chewing gum.

The Urban Christian

Ray Bakke. The Urban Christian: Effective Ministry in Today’s Urban World. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1987.

Most of my Christian life has been spent in middle class churches in Melbourne. One church was inward looking, meeting the spiritual needs of its small congregation, most of whom came from outside the local area, but having little impact in its local community. The other church was larger, and had the resources to adequately provide programs for most age groups, and to also engage with its surrounding community in different ways. While I reject any suggestion that the gospel message is out of date and irrelevant in this modern age, the fact is that those outside it may see the institutional church as irrelevant. This may be a generalisation, but overall, it seems that the church is failing in our cities. We need to understand why this is so.

Ray Bakke has had extensive experience in ministering to poor and multiracial urban communities. He suggests that the church has often seen the city as a threatening place, but this view is unbiblical. Scripture actually demands that the church have a presence in the city, and actively engage with the people in it. Rather than see cities as impersonal places, he wants us to understand that people and cities are interconnected. Therefore, a Biblical view of the city sees it as an extension of the people who live in it. To Bakke, cities all over the world have common problems. Poverty, social unrest, political corruption, religious and racial divisions can be encountered in cities in most countries, not to mention the presence of different ethnic groups and subcultures. His concern is to construct an urban theology as a framework from which the church can effectively engage with the city and the different group in it.

One of this book’s strengths is that theory is combined with practice. I have recently looked at other materials that ponder the question of how churches can be evangelistic largely from an academic or theoretical perspective, so I found the approach articulated here refreshing because it is also informed by his experience in urban ministry.

We must understand our cities to be effective in ministering to it. To his credit, he has a good grasp of what appears to be occurring in modern cities. This phenomenon is not just confined to the First World. Urbanization, which changes the way people work and live with one another, is affecting families and communities around the world. Interestingly, in some countries the population of cities is declining as people move out to the suburbs. Elsewhere, people may move from outlying areas to the cities looking for better work opportunities.

In Christian circles, we often hear people objecting to the church engaging in social ministry because it is seen as a distraction from its central task of preaching the gospel. Does social ministry have a place in the church’s work? Social ministry accompanies evangelism and mission. This is not done in order to communicate the gospel but as a sign and evidence that the gospel has already been received and acted upon. As such, the two are interrelated. It follows that we cannot do social ministry with people without sharing the gospel with them at the same time.

“The work of the pastor is to equip and enable all Christians to be ministers…I argue for a better-trained clergy with biblical, historical, geographical and sociological competence, to complement laypeople, not to replace them.”

In approaching this text, I expected to be challenged in my thinking concerning how the church can be an effective presence in these areas. As a starting point, I read it as a call to action, so that I can personally equip myself to play my part in meeting this task. The challenge for me is to be more intentional in the ministries I’m currently involved in, and in which I may participate in the future.