grey lining

I could be accused of monomania given the pit-bull and rabbit focus on Access Ministries. But in my defense, I have no recent memory of such a corrosive and noxious issue apart from Conroy and his censorship scheme – and it’s an issue for Christian and non-Christian alike.

The efforts by Access Ministries to hijack the education system and turn it into a baby Christian Taliban factory, all paid for by you, is not something that can be under-exaggerated. All religions¹, especially the dust religions, are fascist by nature and any drive towards theocracy, no matter how subtle, has to be resisted by any means available. There is no precedent anywhere, any time, of a theocratic state being of any benefit to anyone other than the priest classes – who are essentially Mafioso running a “spiritual protection” racket. Access Ministries, in the face of all their denials and deceptions, are very much in the theocracy business and this attempted coup d’état in our schools is designed to build a vanguard for their Dominionist / Reconstructionist fantasies.

Access Ministries, despite the charades, do not even represent mainstream christianity. Not by a longshot. A quick perusal of the churches that support them, which has been sanitised, nevertheless shows exactly the kind of creature we’re looking at –

• Australian Christian Churches (Assemblies of God in Australia), re-branded in Australia a few years ago. Overseas, boasts such luminaries as Sarah Palin, John Ashcroft and Jim and Tammy Bakker. This is probably the largest international Pentacostal organisation on the planet and very much of the speaking in tongues and faith healing variety. This “healing” extends to curing homosexuality, though member churches are very careful to expunge any association to this from their public literature and statements. Exodus International is largely an AoG baby and its current head, Alan Chambers is an AoG alumni. Though they will deny it to the last gasp, it is mostly members of AoG that are currently encouraging the government of Uganda in its grand plan to eradicate homosexuals. Ask your local affiliate church why they send so many missions to Uganda – because if you peruse their newsletters and websites, they all do.

• Christian Brethren Fellowships in Victoria, sneakily they too have rebranded themselves as the less ominous Christian Community Churches of Australia to disguise links to the Open Brethren and their loopier, overtly Dominionist cousins, the Exclusive Brethren – both descended from Plymouth Brethren. These are the original Dispensationalists – with John Nelson Derby picking up the threads from Cotton Mather’s eschatalogical derangement of The Rapture and molding it into the backbone of modern christian fundamentalism. Of course they hate homos. Why do you ask?

• Christian Reformed Churches of Australia / CRC Churches International. Of course there have to be Calvinists in the mix. Their great gift to the world is the Five Points of Calvinism, or the doctrine of TULIP – the drilling of the mantra that all humanity is cursed, depraved and absolutely corrupt and the only path to redemption is to live as miserably as possible. As far as life hating, self-annihilating, afterlife fetishism goes, Calvinists can give even Wahhabists a run for their money. Of all of the religiously crushed, utterly destroyed, shells of human beings I have ever met, those that have been damaged the worst were those poor children raised in Calvinist households – many irreparably so. “Total Depravity” is about right. This is the nihilism of which Nietzsche ranted in regards to christianity – this is a black pit of despair, its mission is to crush hope and spirit, its carrot-on-a-stick is some afterlife that supposedly justifies it. This is raw horror – and they support Access.

• Churches of Christ in Australia, christian Restorationists – seeking to revert us all to pre-denominational, “original” christianity to “reproduce in contemporary times the church originally established on Pentecost, A.D. 30.“ – they’re really into people getting “stoned”, just without dope. And other fun stuff, mostly fatal and mostly for “lifestyle choices”. You get the picture. No, it’s not in the brochures.

And these are just the folks Access Ministries haven’t distanced themselves from. Other enthusiastic supporters Access don’t particularly want to publicise their association with include –

• The Church of the Nazarene – who’s is raison d’être is “to respond to the Great Commission of Christ to ‘go and make disciples of all nations’ (Matthew 28:19)”. Of course they want to get into the schools. Rev. Steven Kasambalis of Mt Waverley Nazarene was one of the prime spammers involved in stacking The Age’s religious education poll.
• Pastor Danny Nalliah and Catch The Fire Ministries – who famously blamed the Victorian bushfires on abortion law reforms and, more recently, the Queensland floods on Kevin Rudd criticising Israel.
• Former Liberal candidate for Lalor, Pastor Peter Curtis.
• The Salt Shakers and their complaint letter sweatshops, responsible for probably 90% of the christian lobby nonsense that floods complaint departments Australia wide. Probably all still slapping away at the same Age poll. Thankfully, at least some people are starting to wake up to this unrepresentative swill.

And so it goes. It’s hardly a comprehensive list, but it is an enlightening one.

If this is all news to you and you’re sitting and saying “wtf?”, then good. Because this is what ordinary parents need to realise – the flavour of Access Ministries Christianity that is being force fed to our children has no relation to the quiet suburban churches most of us grew up with. These are not representative of the 60% of the folks that checked their census forms. It’s hard to believe they even belong to the same faith.

This is not a humble, meek and loving Christianity. This is a crusading, proselytising and conquering christianity that is rigid and exclusive and has no tolerance for the beliefs of others. They are not educators, they are soldiers, and lack of numbers and resources leads them to fight a dirty guerrilla war – a war that starts with the minds of your children – and as has consistently been displayed, it is a war that has absolute contempt for law, social convention and, most important of all, contempt for the parents of the children entrapped by the current system into Access CRE and chaplaincy.

As I have repeated in previous posts, the complaints of the secularists here are far outweighed by the concerns that Australia’s majority Christians should be feeling. For secularists, this is a mere issue of social liberties and rights. For Australian Christians, the issue is their faith itself – being hijacked by an unrepresentative and corrupted perversion that has designs far grander than just the minds of the children. They want to subvert the entire of the faith and the whole of society with it.

This is what should really concern all of you.

¹ – That includes you buddhists. Don’t forget Kamikaze pilots either. And my favourite, Aum Shinrikyo who were Dalai Lama devotees.