FOR GOD’S SAKE!

Last year, author Richard Dawkins, who wrote the best-selling book The God Delusion, helped fund a campaign in London that paid for a whimsical anti-religion advertisement on London buses. It read: ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’.It briefly made the news and people moved on. But a similar campaign in Australia has caused a censorship row. The Atheist Foundation of Australia (I didn’t know there was one) apparently raised $16,000 to put signs on buses here that read ‘Atheism-celebrate reason’.

Fairly mild stuff. But the advertising companies that handle bus and tram advertising around the country have refused to accept them. APN Outdoor which handles bus ads in most cities refused the ad without explanation. And Metro Tasmania has also turned it down.

APN’s general manager for marketing Paul McBeth says because public buses were owned by the state governments there were agreements banning any advertisement that might offend the community. ‘Atheism-celebrate reason’. How offensive is that?

The atheists have lodged complaints with the Anti-Discrimination Commission in Tasmania and the Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission here in Victoria. And I think they have a good case.

Especially when you see some of the objectionable billboards around town and on State roads.

Also making religious news this week, although it has largely slid under the main media radar, is a video speech that the man who would be Prime Minister, Peter Costello, made to a Catch the Fire prayer rally on Australia Day.

I’ve seen it. Costello makes the Mad Monk Tony Abbott sound like  Doubting Thomas.

Costello is obviously entitled to his religious beliefs but makes no bones about the fact that if you are a non-believer, or even a non-Christian, you are worthless.

He declares his firm belief that the Bible and the Ten Commandments form the foundation of Australian society and its property laws, and that any movement away from those ‘God-given commandments’ will lead to a breakdown of social order.

Then he says earnestly: ‘As we look back over hundreds of years of Australian history, we can still see the benefits of God to us in this country’. I don’t know where that leaves the indigenous inhabitants and the Dreamtime.

Crikey, which features the full Costello pulpit performance on its website, says: ‘Declaring one’s Christian faith is one thing. Arguing that only the maintenance of Christianity preserves order, directly implying that those of other faiths, or its complete atheistic absence, are a threat to that order, is an extraordinary statement from a major political figure in an allegedly secular state.’

I wonder who the former Treasurer blames for the various wars and current economic crisis?  Just Think: Costello, Howard, Bush, Rudd, Obama. All  devout churchgoers. Isn’t their God listening?

Thursday, January 29, 2009

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009