Letters: Andrew Bolt – Christian too!

Subject: Andrew Bolt – Christians too!

Dear Letters Editor,

Religion is the problem, Andrew Bolt, not merely your ‘moderate’ Muslims (The Advertiser, yesterday).

Well may they be “the sea in which jihadists swim” but religious ‘moderates’ of every faith — all with ‘superior’ beliefs in the supernatural — provide an environment for their own fundamentalists to flourish.

After centuries of smiting their spiritual adversaries through crusades and inquisitions, Christian jihadists finally learned to influence cultures by stealth — to become an integral cog in a nation’s economy.

In Australia today, entrepreneurial Christianity operates multi-billion dollar businesses in health and education. Research by the Secular Party in 2012 showed that Churches enjoyed tax breaks on their operations to the tune of $31 billion annually.

Today, 40 percent of all children are taught in private Christian schools. They attract government funding to a point where public schooling has become impoverished through lack of resources, money, and teachers. And it’s made worse by the federal government dumping the Gonski reforms to ‘equalise’ funding with religious schools.

‘Moderate’ Christians stand back in this environment and allow a new wave of evangelists to enter schools to “Christianise” the kids — organisations like Access Ministries in Victoria and the Schools Ministry Group in South Australia. Fundamentalists have become integrated in politics and commerce, and they dominate the social policy agenda.

It’s Andrew Bolt’s tranquil sea of Christian ‘moderates’ who exacerbate these excesses. We claim to be a ‘secular’ nation, but until we see religion as a mega-business to be fairly taxed, and stop child proselytising, then that egalitarian concept will remain an illusion.

 

Plain Reason: promoting science, reason and critical thinking