New polls this week from Newspoll and Essential Research have moderated the post-coup surge to Labor on the BludgerTrack poll aggregate, on which Labor’s two-party lead has narrowed from 54.9-45.1 to 54.0-46.0. This results in a gain of three seats for the Coalition on the seat projection, with New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland furnishing one seat apiece. We’re approaching the point where I will have enough Morrison-era leadership ratings data to resume tracking those measures again, but for the time being it’s still in limbo. Full results from the link below.
Steve777:
[‘I don’t think that we should be ridicule a fellow poster’s religious beliefs.’]
When someone equates abortion with murder, they deserve everything that comes their way. I can’t think of a worse analogy. Please get real, many women suffering insufferably when back yard abortions were commonplace, the Catholic church having lost nearly all of its moral authority resulting from the recent Royal Commission.
With JWs, if I have the time, I invite them in for bible study but insist we start with Matthew 16:18 (“Thou art Peter” etc – interpreted by Catholics as Simon bar Joseph being named as the first Pope)
They have a special little tract to counter that argument that gets pulled out but they know they are on a hiding to nothing and soon make their excuses
Of all the major religions, Catholicism has the least credibility and the highest degree of authoritarianism, centralisation, and bureaucracy.
They have the prettiest buildings and the most valuable real estate portfolio, I’ll grant them that. But governments should be forcing them to liquidate those assets to finance compensation to the many permanently scarred victims of the church’s criminal behaviour.
“When someone equates abortion with murder, they deserve everything that comes their way. I can’t think of a worse analogy”
Abortion is a very difficult and complex question, as is the question of murder. An Anglican pro-lifer once said well if you are going to define life by reference to it subsisting on its own, by certain mental or physical functions then your logic is going to extend to borne children, and sometimes children older than one, depending on the metric you use to define when life starts and murder is possible. He meant it in a serious discussion sense. So no it is a very important and serious analogy and to write someone off for using it shows a massive intolerance and / or ignorance. It is perhaps the most important ethical issue to discuss.
Having said that, while it should be a very well considered and serious decision, you second point is clearly right and no person should be criminalised or have their life threatened by an unborn child.
WewantPaul
I was not being a smart ass; I want to know; why would anyone worship such a self centered harsh god. My conclusion;religious people don’t actually read the bible.
“With JWs, if I have the time, I invite them in for bible study”
I’ve done very similar and learned from the interaction. It is possible to discuss and explore differences without letting them divide those that discuss them. Obviously it will never happen here.
I recommend Ana Marie Cox’s ‘Friend’s like These’ pod.
frednk @ #1454 Sunday, September 30th, 2018 – 11:00 pm
Because the punishment for not doing so is severe. Like, ridiculously severe.
Though also the fact that most religions have absolutely zero reservations about indoctrinating children probably has more to do with it than anything else.
WWP
I don’t think many of the ones who knock at my door are 7th Day Adv, or perhaps they are not as well brainwashed as those in your experience.
Why do you think their teachers lie to them about the authorship? I would like your opinion.
It is agreed by all those who have actually studied the matter that none of the ‘gospels’ were authored by the ‘gospel according to’ nominees, and nobody has the faintest idea who authored the early books in the old testament. Not even jewish scholars claim to know that. Perhaps it was Noah, in his 900’s after he and his sons had started repopulating the earth from scratch after the great flood. I hope there was no naughty ‘keeping it all in the family’ stuff going on.
I wonder if the SDA’s know how the koalas made it back to Australia. The anglicans don’t.
Isn’t faith a wonderful thing! You can believe anything at all. After all, your opinion is as good as the next man’s. Unless he is a priest of course. Then he has god on his side. It’s all in the Bible, you know.
Nicholas at 10:29pm
I agree with your analysis. Chasing a surplus is a stupid way to run our economy.
It is certainly not what the LNP hero, Menzies, would have done.
This Conversation article from 2014 is instructive
https://theconversation.com/menzies-a-failure-by-todays-rules-ran-a-budget-to-build-the-nation-30823
Nicholas:
[‘…governments should be forcing them to liquidate those assets to finance compensation to the many permanently scarred victims of the church’s criminal behaviour.’]
No one save for the rusted-on Catholics would disagree. The harm that priests have caused to so many innocents is incalculable – drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide being the results of their unforgivable behaviour. But do they accept responsibility? No! They appeal when found guilty, making their shocking actions all the more reprehensible, witness, for instance, the former Archbishop of Adelaide.
“religious people don’t actually read the bible.”
That is a terrible conclusion and absolutely 100% wrong in my experience. There are a vast range of vastly different conclusions from those who do study it, but to suggest they don’t read, and play silly gotcha’s isn’t honest, it isn’t intelligent and it doesn’t help you or them.
From personal experience I remember a lecture series on Biblical Interpretation or Exegesis, the first and golden rule was : it is important to read extensively before you read intensively.
For example given your superior knowledge can you summerise the character of god as explained and illustrated through a study of every book of the old testament, and then compare and contrast that to a similar characterisation of the character and nature of god from an exhaustive study of every book of the new testament. Then can you explain why the two, the god of the old covenant and the god of the new covenant, can, or cannot be reconciled, depending on your view of that reconciliation of those two characterisations drawn from extensive study.
I’m not even a practising Christian, people are a lot smarter and a lot better read than you give them credit for. Doesn’t make them right but certainly makes them better qualified for the discussion than those without it.
Yabba
I was thinking of adding genocide to the list of things now frowned on, but the same religious group is involved. And while it was acceptable in the bible; the recent act is still raw and not well accepted at all.
WeWantPaul @ #1453 Sunday, September 30th, 2018 – 10:59 pm
Depends on context. If what you’re trying to have is a serious debate about where personhood begins in the legal sense, and someone’s contribution to that is “it’s so obvious that personhood starts at conception that I’m going to ignore the debate and call everyone who disagrees with me a baby-murderer!”…well, what can you do other than write them off?
They’ve presupposed the outcome, and instead of trying to explain or justify why they think personhood should start at conception are merely making a (particularly vile) rhetorical attack on the character of everyone who thinks differently.
wewantpaul
perhaps problem should be restated – an awful lots of people misread bible when they do read it
possibly a majority of churchgoers
a strange state of affairs I know
and they are usually closed about other readings than their own
WeWantPaul
You only have to reconcile the two very different gods; the porn; the appalling behavior of the god in the first testament if you want to believe a bunch of stories written over several thousands of years are anything more than a bunch of stories written over several thousand years.
Judged against modern moral codes the bible is a disgrace.
“Why do you think their teachers lie to them about the authorship? I would like your opinion.”
I’m not sure they do. Lets pick one, the Pentateuch, which I think you nearly referred.
My opinion is that the scholarship on the matter is not at all settled. Just dusted off my NIV to see what is taught, and the NIV summerises it thus:
“During the last two centuries some scholars have claimed to find in the Pentateuch four underlying sources. … the Pentateuch is thus depicted as a patchwork of stories, poems and laws. However, this view is not supported by conclusive evidence, and intensive archaeological work and literary research has undercut many of the arguments used to challenge Mosaic authorship.”
Personally it never mattered to me whether the Pentateuch had 4 authors, 25 or 1. Personally, if it was one my conclusion would be that 1 clearly was pulling together various source material. If it was 4 meh.
You will find in Adventism and other protestant evangelical theologies out of the US, that a lot of this stuff was ‘locked’ down by leaders and prophets in the 1800’s. For many Seventh-day Adventists, if their prophet Ellen White wrote of the Pentateuch being written by Moses, they will hold to that view, and they will have a mountain of work out of Biblical scholars (good and bad) to support it one way or another.
“Judge against modern moral codes the bible is a disgrace.”
I am pretty sure you’ve skipped the study it and come to a considered and intelligent conclusion step. You may well be right but if you are it is not based on intelligent considered study.
WeWantPaul
Enjoy you genocide, slaves and apartheid but don’t expect me to show any respect if your argument is limited to it being supported by the bible.Don’t you think a book which requires a large part to be ignored for it to have any meaning has real issues.
“Judged against modern moral codes the bible is a disgrace.”
Thomas Jefferson proposed this law in 1779;
“Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half diameter at the least.”
It didn’t get up because it was too lenient (capital punishment was the gold standard). It’s very hard to judge moral codes from the past.
WWP,
I have read the Bible, every last word. And the Q’ran. And the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata. And several Buddhist sutras. And the US and Australian Constitutions, and War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov, and The Grapes of Wrath, and Go Down Moses, and Voss, and À la recherche du temps perdu, and many, many others.
The Bible is easily the least attractive of any of these. In my opinion it is a truly nasty book. The Joshua ben Joseph tales are interesting, but ridiculously repetitive, and patently obviously copied from one another, or some other single source, with random additions, and occasional complete nonsenses, like setting off eastwards into the desert in order to get to the coast. The so-called Pauline letters are in many places just appalling in their sexism, racism and plain nastiness. Their authorship is also unknown, with at least three different writing styles and sets of vocabulary. The anti homosexual Timothy 2 stuff was written well into the second century.
The Ramayana is much more believable, as are any of the novels.
“Enjoy you genocide, slaves and apartheid but don’t expect me to show any respect if your argument is limited to it being supported by the bible.Don’t you think a book which requires a large part to be ignored for it to have any meaning has real issues.”
Yeah, my advice would be to stick to things you know. You don’t want to know the Bible, that is cool, it is just a book there are many others of all sorts you could be studying.
For me personally it wasn’t until Biblical study and post modern interpretation, and then the work of Roland Barthes in Mythologies were all brought together to bear on the question of exegesis.
I remember clearly a story, but not its source, of a person stranded on an island finding a bottle with a message in it reading something like “send 100 apples on Tuesday” and deciding that was code and it meant 100 sailors would be sent to rescue him on Tuesday. And that is what he believed.
Whatever text you are looking at always ask yourself how many apples are you turning into Sailors, and so long as you know why you are turning apples into sailors it is fine, problem is most people don’t know when they are turning apples into sailors.
Yabba
Please tell me you haven’t read all of the Mahabharata. It’s three times as long as War and Peace.
frednk
new testament scrubs up and much of old – its possible to see tradition as seminal but to what needs interpretation – is it worth the effort – negatively, to reclaim from skewed orthodoxy – positively, there is dearth of ideology in world
WWP
Yabba said:
“Why do you think their teachers lie to them about the authorship? I would like your opinion.”
You said:
“I’m not sure they do. Lets pick one, the Pentateuch, which I think you nearly referred.”
No, let’s pick the Gospels according to Matthew, Luke, Mark and John.
No (and that means NO) reputable scholar thinks that any of them were written by author(s) with those names, and certainly no-one rational thinks they were written by ‘the disciples’.
Their teachers tell the students that they were. Those teachers are either very badly informed, ignorant, or simply lying.
I am not ignorant, or unintelligent, or uninformed. I read fast, and I am quick on the uptake. I would kindly ask you to refrain from telling me what I do or do not know.
“I have read the Bible, every last word. And the Q’ran. And the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata. And several Buddhist sutras. And the US and Australian Constitutions, and War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov, and The Grapes of Wrath, and Go Down Moses, and Voss, and À la recherche du temps perdu, and many, many others.
The Bible is easily the least attractive of any of these. In my opinion it is a truly nasty book. The Joshua ben Joseph tales are interesting, but ridiculously repetitive, and patently obviously copied from one another, or some other single source, with random additions, and occasional complete nonsenses, like setting off eastwards into the desert in order to get to the coast. The so-called Pauline letters are in many places just appalling in their sexism, racism and plain nastiness. Their authorship is also unknown, with at least three different writing styles and sets of vocabulary. The anti homosexual Timothy 2 stuff was written well into the second century.
The Ramayana is much more believable, as are any of the novels.”
Extraordinarily impressive. Having climbed these great intellectual and historical and ethical and social and fictional works, having read very extensively, and it would seem intensively as well, surely you wouldn’t need to pull in people of any faith that knock on your door to play gotcha with? Why demean yourself or them? I have not studied the Ramayana at all.
Anyway I’ve distracted myself, I wasn’t supposed be giving myself asthma bringing down really dusty volumes from the top shelf, tonight I wanted to write, I have these characters and they are already lovers, although one is taking advantage of the other who has very little freedom, and now I need to paint a series of stories and asides that explain how they start as lovers in a far from acceptable context and then come to fall in love.
That is much better for my mind and soul than a debate on whether Paul wrote Romans and even if he did what role did Tertius play, how much freedom he was given in the composition, or which that the three theories of the role of Tertius is most intellectually attractive to me.
Just catching up on the NRL Grand Final – congratulations to the Sydney Roosters (I wish they hadn’t changed their name from Eastern Suburbs though, like Footscray becoming Western Bulldogs – why hasn’t Arsenal changed to the North London Gunners?)
Anyway I knew a guy at Uni (who was born and bred in South-West Victoria) who wore his Easts jersey around a lot – during that long drought in the 80s and 90s. He’d be happy tonight.
And great to see the inaugural NRL Women’s Grand Final today as well.
banks will get worse in trying to cover tracks and save skins / culture of avoidance – no easy solution
Diogenes, there are lots of versions I expect, but the one I have, which I have just dug out, is translated by Chakravarthi V. Narasimhan. My younger daughter bought it for me for Christma or birthday a few years ago when Dymocks shut down in Tuggerah Westfield. It has 254 pages. Maybe I was short changed. There are 4000+ verses.
WWP
The Ramayana is not in the least believable. Many of the characters can fly. (None can walk on water.) It is , in fact, very funny in parts, and plainly deliberately so, sort of like Shakespeare.
“WWP
The Ramayana is not in the least believable. Many of the characters can fly. (None can walk on water.) It is , in fact, very funny in parts, and plainly deliberately so, sort of like Shakespeare.”
Nor is, at the moment, my characters love for each other, but I am so happy with the scene where having had the inevitable breakup they get back together, so I have to get them there.
The main problem with the banks is that they were permitted to do a lot of non-bank things. There is no good reason for the banks to provide insurance, financial planning, superannuation, to engage in proprietary trading. They should only be permitted to do the two functions of a bank. 1. Facilitate the payments system. 2. Issue loans to credit-worthy borrowers. That’s it. Banking is supposed to be a boring low profit margin business.
The rot really set in when Hawke and Keating unwisely deregulated the banks. Those two characters were swept off their feet by the neoliberal dogma of their time.
Nicholas @ #1483 Sunday, September 30th, 2018 – 9:26 pm
From what Observer was saying earlier, Keating’s policy kept the Banks out of insurance and that this only changed with a further policy change under Costello.
Yabba
The full Mahabharata is about 200,000 lines. I’ve read two abridged versions; Pattanaik and Rajagopalachari and two versions of the Gita. The miniseries by Peter Brook is just brilliant.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/29/elizabeth-warren-presidential-run-2020
Will Warren run? Looks like it.
I appreciate that economic conditions are different now than they were in 2010-13, but I really hope Bowen isn’t going to pull a Wayne Swan and fruitlessly chase a surplus year after year. His repeated promises and failures to deliver on that front did insurmountable damage to the Gillard government’s credibility, in my view. This is one of these areas where under-promising and over-delivering is the wisest political strategy, particularly for a Labor government.
I think Warren (a former Republican) would not be the best candidate for the Democrats. She would be 71 by the time of the election, and I can already see the Republicans painting her as “Hillary-lite”. I really don’t know who would be their best candidate – I think most are keeping their powder dry until after the midterms.
A record quiet night on PB! Maybe everyone’s worn out after Grand Final weekend.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/scott-morrison-the-buck-stops-with-me-on-443m-reef-grant/news-story/07233bbc0d027f1c2adad8920cf1c2d0
Interesting to read (if you can – worked with a work-around for me) – the comments section has turned on Morrison today, most calling him Turnbull Mark 2.
The bottom of the reef story is not going away. Morrison and the LNP believe that the rorting of 444 millions is somehow to remained buried like a long lost treasure. The reef monies, the Murray Darling monies, and any other shonky deals will be found to be unacceptable. The ABC no longer prevented from reporting.
Abbott and Joyce envoys? Snowy Mountains Mk II and which fingers in the pie? How many local governments in the hands of administrators? Stadiums? Privatization?
The Rum Rebellion just never ended.
Nicholas says:
Sunday, September 30, 2018 at 10:55 pm
… should be forcing them to liquidate those assets to finance compensation to the many permanently scarred victims of the church’s criminal behaviour.
—-
It is way past time for enforcing state and organised religion business separation. (And no prayer in public buildings, like parliament, or schools.)
We need freedom from religion, not of religion.
Clusters of abuse organisations and individuals should be handed over for prosecution.
Those convicted should be on sex offender registers, and any working with children approvals revoked.
Then get out proceeds of crime legislation.
It’d do wonders for the housing shortage, urban redevelopment, including getting people off the street.
In the mean time charity should be split from organised religion businesses.
The latter should be taxed like other businesses, plus a pollution of minds levy.
New thread.
Asha Leu @ #1485 Monday, October 1st, 2018 – 5:13 am
I agree, Asha.
Chris Bowen is a much cannier operator than Wayne Swan I believe. Swanny wore his economic heart on his sleeve and thought everyone would understand, especially in the Keynesian sense, that when circumstances change you have to change your mind and your economic projections. However, he was up against Abbott, a master storyteller and hoodwinker.
Also, Labor have assembled a much more formidable economic team since then. Though I do hope that they are tweaking their policies still. I would imagine they are.