This Saturday the 21st of August 2010 is the Australian Federal Election. On this day Australia votes for who they want to run the country for the next three years. It is similar in a way to the U.S. Presidential election in that we too have only two parties that have any chance of winning the election. They also have similar left and right leanings as in the U.S. In Australia they are called the Labor Party and the Liberal Party. In comparison some might say that the Australian Labor Party is similar to the Democrats in the U.S. while the Liberal Party is similar to the Republicans when it comes to conservative policy. In addition there are some minor parties who align themselves with the major parties and form a sort of coalition for a stronger balance of power.

Ahead of this year’s election the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) has provided an excellent summary of the positions of various parties on issues that may be of significant interest to Christian voters. Some of the questions they pose are not likely to be prominently discussed in the wider election coverage. Issues such as abortion, marriage, classification standards, sexualisation of children, religious freedom and chaplaincy, to name a few.

The results of the ACL’s questionnaire can be found here.

One thing I did note with interest was that the Greens Party regularly declined to answer many of the questions – even on the issue of marriage, despite recent unsuccessful attempts to destroy this institution with a Bill that would modify the Marriage Act. I believe many would agree that the Greens are the most Anti-Christian of the more prominent political parties. So perhaps their reluctance in answering many of these questions is due to their concern over losing the Christian vote?

While we will be electing a party to run the country, we will also in effect be voting for Australia’s leader. Sometimes a persons opinion of the would-be Prime Minister can have a large influence in determining a persons vote, regardless of how they feel about party policy. The religious nature of each candidate could be a factor in this election. We have Julia Gillard (Labor) – who will incidentally become our first officially elected female Prime Minister should Labor be returned to power. She currently holds the office of Prime Minister due to a Party coup where she controversially deposed the previous leader. Oh, she is also a confessed atheist. On the opposite side we have Tony Abbott (Liberal) who is a confessed Catholic.

However it turns out, it will be an interesting election. And one that some will believe provides a glimpse into the general direction Australia is heading from a religious perspective. Are we heading down the path of atheism or theism? Some will no doubt believe – perhaps with good reason – that the answer to that question was clear long before Julia Gillard ever stood for Office.

Mark Lamprecht wrote a curious article over at HereIBlog questioning how Christians should react to the building of an Islamic mosque near Ground Zero. And I deem that article “curious” because it largely escapes me how this calls for an internal reflection by Christians. In the final analysis, the matter is a political issue. While there may be something to be said about us being consistent with our Christian faith when it comes to engaging political issues—how we evaluate some legislation, who we consider voting for in elections, how we conduct ourselves in political office, etc.—I really don’t see how the Ground Zero Mosque poses a challenge for Christians and our biblical convictions. Unless, of course, that is precisely what Lamprecht intended with his question; that as followers of Christ we should be careful that we remain consistent with the gospel and our faith as we engage this controversial political issue.

Lamprecht said that his gut reaction was basically, “No way!” But then he walks that reaction back a little, suggesting that it may not be the best reaction. Okay, but why not? What was wrong about that gut reaction—one that is shared by several million Christians all over the United States and beyond? What issue of faith or doctrine does that reaction conflict with, thereby calling for his restraint and perhaps ours?

He does not cite any. Rather, he invokes the freedom of religious exercise protected by the Constitution, tempering the substance of his attitude by that. I have two problems with this. First, as Christians our orthopraxic ‘gut check’ is not predicated on human laws and legal documents. When it comes to tempering our attitude and behavior, the governing authority is the Word of God. In other words, if there is something not quite right about that reaction, we want to see the case made on Scriptures, we want to see something in the Bible which says that reaction is a bit off. Second, the controversial issue of the Ground Zero Mosque does not have anything to do with freedom of religion at any rate. Nobody is saying, “You cannot build a mosque in New York.” As a matter of fact, New York currently boasts at least 30 mosques. Rather, what people are saying is, “You should not build a mosque there in New York.” I have never heard anyone deny Muslims their right to build a mosque near Ground Zero. They most certainly do have that right. To invoke the vocabulary used by the President on this, the conversation is not about the ‘right’ but rather about the ‘wisdom’. When people (like New York City mayor Michael Boomberg) cite the First Amendment they are obscuring the issue with an irrelevant red herring.

Yes, they can build a mosque near Ground Zero; that is their right. No, they should not build a mosque there; that is not wise. And the reasons for why it is not wise are quite numerous, but I do not wish to explore them right now. When Christians react with a loud and strong “No way!” to the idea, it is neither wrong nor inappropriate; they are not in conflict with biblical orthopraxy, nor are they denying anybody their freedoms under the Constitution, for the argument is that the Ground Zero Mosque shouldn’t be built there, which is very different from arguing that it can’t be built there.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has worked hard to portray himself as a ‘bridge-builder’ in the eyes of the American public and the interfaith community, and the location being so close to Ground Zero “was precisely a key selling point” for him, as reported by Ralph Blumenthal with the New York Times. Abdul Rauf wants a presence that close to the World Trade Center “where a piece of the wreckage fell” because he thinks it will send “the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.” However, I have got a message for Abdul Rauf: when the majority of the American public is opposed to the construction of the Ground Zero Mosque, and you proceed with your construction plans in defiance of them, you are not building any bridges. As Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah from the Muslim Canadian Congress wrote for the Ottawa Citizen, “As Muslims we are dismayed that our co-religionists have such little consideration for their fellow citizens, and wish to rub salt in their wounds and pretend they are applying a balm to soothe the pain.”

Breaking news from the Assyrian International News Agency:

Muslim Cleric Calls for Jihad, Coptic Christians Attacked in Egypt

(AINA) — On August 13 Sheikh Tobah, Imam of the village of Shimi 170 KM south of Giza, called during Muslim Friday prayers for Jihad against Christians living there. As a result the Christian Copts living in the village were assaulted over two consecutive days. Eleven Copts were hospitalized and many Coptic youths were arrested.

The assaults begain a couple of hours after the Sheikhs incitement. An argument between Copt Maher Amin, who was washing his taxi, and Mohamed Ali Almstaui, a Muslim extremist from the village, escalated into violence as Mohamad assaulted Maher. The altercation was stopped by bystanders. However, after the evening break of Ramadan fast, Ahmad, the brother of the perpetrator Mohamad, who is reported to belong to an extremist organization, together with twenty other men, went to Maher’s family home, breaking down the door and assaulting him and his family with batons, including his old mother and his paralyzed sister, injuring them and breaking their furniture.

Security forces came and took away the Christian victims and kept them at the station in spite of their wounds, to pressuree them into accepting “reconciliation” with their attackers. None of the Muslims were arrested.

Saad Gamal, Egyptian MP for Elsaff, phoned from Gaza, where he is on a visit, and gave orders to the police to force reconciliation on the Coptic parties…

Please read the rest of the article here.

It is sad that these things are happening to our brothers and sisters in Christ, but I guess this is inevitable as long as Muslims take seriously Muhammad’s words in surah 9:29-30. May the Lord be with our brethren and deliver them out of the hands of the oppressors.

Now that… is interesting:

Former Time correspondent, David Aikman, interviewed the retiring head of state in Communist China in 2002, Jiang Zemin, and asked what he wished for in regard to China’s future. His response shocked Aikman and much of the world when he replied:

I would like for my country to become a Christian nation.

When asked why, Zemin’s response was an amazing revelation. He explained how a panel of Chinese scholars had spent twenty years studying why China continually lagged behind the West in science, industry, and culture. After considering every possible explanation, they concluded that it was the religious heritage of the West that had allowed it to reach such heights. [...] [As] Jiang Zemin understood, it is not just economic freedom that enabled America and the West to rise to such heights—it was its biblical worldview. There was purpose behind the prosperity. However, in the greatest economy ever developed, this most basic connect is being lost now in the United States. To the expressed shock of the leaders of the two most powerful former communist states—Russia and China—America, the forerunner and premier founder of the most powerful economic force in history, is now abandoning its biblical worldview as the former communist countries are embracing it.

Click here to read the full article.

Extract from Rachael J. Denhollander’s article “If the foundations be destroyed” inVol. 24(1) 2010 of the “Journal of Creation” publication.

The “beginning of the end” for teaching creation science or Intelligent Design (ID) in the public school classroom came in 1947, in Everson vs Board of Education, a case which, interestingly enough, addressed no issue of science at all, and was actually decided in favor of the more “conservative” client. What Everson did do, however, is completely reshape the understanding of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, ultimately providing the framework for banning creation science and ID in the classroom.

The Establishment Clause in the U.S. Constitution simply states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Thus, in every Establishment Clause challenge, the Plaintiff must prove two essential elements: 1) That the government is involved in religion, and 2) that such involvement has the effect of establishing a religion. Currently, there are a myriad of tests the court may apply in determining whether an establishment of religion has taken place, the most popular of which is known as the Lemon Test. The Lemon Test arose from the case Lemon vs Kurtzman, and requires a three-prong analysis which holds that the Establishment Clause has been violated if any of the following are true:

a) There is no valid secular purpose for the government’s action.

b) The primary effect of the action is not secular.

c) The government action fosters excessive entanglement with religion.

While other tests have occasionally been used or suggested, these have generally all been merely “revisions” of Lemon, rather than entirely new tests themselves. It is generally the Lemon test which has been used to rule out ID and creation science as unconstitutional, and it is Lemon which also finds its roots in the Court’s reshaping of history in Everson vs Board of Education.

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When it comes to the freedom of religion, as a blessing of liberty secured by the US Constitution, Americans cannot afford to overlook the subtle changes being suggested by the Obama administration in their shifting focus toward international laws, particularly when it is at the expense of the Constitution they were sworn to uphold and defend. In a speech given on 14 December 2009 by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall, she spoke of the meaning and importance of democracy as it pertains to people enjoying consistent protection of the rights that are naturally theirs, whether they were born in Tallahassee or Tehran. Supporting democracy is one of the cornerstones of their 21st century human rights agenda, she said, because democracy “has proven the best political system for making human rights a human reality over the long term” and the Obama administration will not relinquish the idea of democracy “to those who have used it too narrowly.”

That sounds wonderful. However, buried deep inside this speech by Clinton is a curious phrase, one that threatens the freedom of religion as enshrined in and protected by the Constitution the administration is sworn to preserve, protect and defend:

To fulfill their potential, people must be free to choose laws and leaders; to share and access information, to speak, criticize, and debate. They must be free to worship, associate, and to love in the way that they choose. And they must be free to pursue the dignity that comes with self-improvement and self-reliance, to build their minds and their skills, to bring their goods to the marketplace, and participate in the process of innovation.

If I may beg your pardon, Mrs. Clinton: the freedom to worship might be a protection that international law concerns itself with, but the rule of law that democracy in the United States is predicated upon answers to the Constitution. And what is enshrined and protected in that document is something much broader than freedom to worship. Freedom of religion and freedom to worship are not the same thing, and it’s the former that the Constitution guarantees. As pointed out by George Weigal, Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, in an article about the erosion of religious freedom in America, the freedom of religion cannot be reduced to freedom of worship because real freedom of religion includes the right

to preach and evangelize, to make religiously informed moral arguments in the public square, and to conduct the affairs of one’s religious community without undue interference from the state.

“If religious freedom only involves the freedom to worship,” he notes, well then “there is ‘religious freedom’ in Saudi Arabia”—where non-Muslim evangelism is illegal and the public practice of non-Muslim religions is prohibited, where the right to possess and use non-Muslim religious materials is not provided in law so the government is free to confiscate such materials, where significant restrictions exist for the building of places of worship, where a Muslim who converts to another religion places himself in mortal peril of the death penalty, and where Muslims who do not adhere to the state’s official and strict interpretation of the Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam face significant political, economic, legal, social, and religious discrimination, etc. According to the 2009 Report on International Religious Freedom, Saudi Arabia is a government who, as a matter of policy, “guarantees and protects the right to private worship for all.”

Freedom of religion and freedom to worship are not the same thing. While the former is guaranteed by the Constitution, it is the latter which the Obama administration seems to be leaning towards in its shifting focus toward international human rights laws and a restrictive policy of laïcité (Gk. laikos, Eng. laity) via European influence. However, as observed by Jacques Maritain, philosopher and a prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there is a valuable distinction between models found in France and that of mid-twentieth century America, with the latter being considered more amicable because it had both “sharp distinction and actual cooperation” between church and state and “an historical treasure,” admonishing the United States to keep it carefully and “not let your concept of separation veer round to the European one” (as quoted in D.A. Carson’s Christ and Culture Revisited). As a Canadian I realize that our fight is separate from that of Americans, but I strongly and passionately encourage my brethren to the south who desire to “secure the blessings of liberty” for themselves and their posterity to observe very closely and, by power of elections, hold accountable the officials of government who are leaning away from the very Constitution they were sworn to preserve, protect, and defend. It is because of that document that America is comparatively exceptional in its religious freedoms, the slow erosion of which is less anomalous than symptomatic of European-influenced laïcité.

Do not stand for it. Please. In the upcoming election cycles, show your elected officials, like Hillary Clinton and her talk of freedom to worship, that Americans value their Constitution and hard-fought independence above international laws. In a twist that ought to be more ironic, the Obama administration is one of the best arguments for the principle values of America’s founding fathers. As you commemorate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence this Fourth of July weekend, resolve to fight hard by the power of your vote for the values and freedoms that made your country great.

According to a recent (Dec 13, 2009) WorldNetDaily article following President Obama’s signing of the expanded “hate crimes” law, Canadian law practioner Gerald Chipeur believes that this legislation will have far worse ramifications for America than the mess it has already caused in Canada.

“I would be shocked if you did not have 100 times more problems with this legislation than we are. Your system is set up to encourage lawyers to do this, and you have so many more people, there is more opportunity for people to take offense,” he said.
…
“There are certain people in society who look to the government for everything, including to help them with their hurt feelings. The government was never made for that,” he said.
Regardless, “there are those who want the government to bless their approach to life, whatever it is, because they have this view. They come to the point they want the government to say … you are right.”
…
Then those interests want the “power of the state to punish anyone who disagrees,” he said. The result is, “doing exactly what we did 500 years ago. They will be going on a witch hunt, [repeating] the Spanish Inquisition.”

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=118710

I’m not exactly sure how comparative Australian legislation is on this issue, although I am aware of the trial of two Pastors in Victoria who were charged under the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001 a few years ago simply for teaching their congregation the history of Islam. I’ll stand corrected on the details, but as I understand it no-one was claiming that what they taught was false, simply that they taught it was considered sufficient grounds to arrest them for vilification of another religious group. (Read the preamble on page one of the Act – and the first link below – and you’ll get the gist of it)

Now while the focus of the WorldNetDaily article was more about what certain homosexual activists may do in light of such laws, this is neither here nor there, because as Benjamin Bull alluded to in the WorldNetDaily article, there is nothing tolerant about silencing your opponents point of view, whatever that may be. In the marketplace of ideas, certain views are being censored, and that is exactly what the pseudo-tolerance mongers have in mind.

Religious vilification in Australia
The Intolerance of Tolerance
When Tolerance Is Intolerant

Those of you who think that the issue of gay equality is about fair-mindedness, tolerance and respect for differing views, think again: a Mississippi high school has cancelled its annual student prom shortly after they declined the requests of one of its students – a lesbian – to bring along her girlfriend as her prom date and to wear a tuxedo instead of a dress. The teen, Constance McMillen, has since been encouraged to sue the school. She was also awarded a scholarship check of $30,000 from talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres for her bravery in challenging the School District’s ruling.

But does she have a right to attend her school’s prom on her own terms? And should the school be forced by law to hold the prom in order to cater for McMillen’s requests? Should the school be coerced into making provision for the exception?

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In conjunction with the Global Atheist Conference which concluded yesterday, Australia’s national broadcasting station, the ABC, invited Professor Richard Dawkins onto to it’s program of panelists, Q and A. The topic to be discussed was, none too coincidentally, “God, Science and Sanity”. And given the makeup of the panel on last Monday night (8 March 2010), it comes as no surprise that Prof. Dawkins stole the show.

For those of you unaware – of which I assume this is the vast majority of you – the Q and A program pits pollies, professionals and “pundits” up against each other while passing the questioning over to the audience, whether to a member in the studio or to someone watching at home who participates via the program’s website. The idea is quite simple: grab a hodge-podge of celebrities, specialists and politicians, throw them in the same room, given them a topic and then let the public “have at it”.

And “have at it” was the operative word last Monday; but not against Prof. Dawkins – that was one parrot that wasn’t going to get knocked off his perch. But the other panelists, namely those who identify as theists, sure did get a hammering.

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While the French government unveiled its plan to ban the burqa worn by some Muslim women, the reign in Maine leaves much to explain by proposing to allow transgendered people to use the bathroom of their choice. The contrast between the two stories is quite clear: the French move to protect its public while the Mainers move aside to endanger theirs.

Two burqa-wearers walk into a post office …

The stance taken by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, declaring last year that the burqa was not welcome in France, is one taken in the interests of security and as an act against the debasing of women. The burqa (actually, it is techinically the naqib – a head-to-toe covering that leaves no exposed skin bar slits for the eyes) is seen as something that is incongruent with French society. Yet the ban is not intended to marginalize Muslims or to oppress them in any fashion: the ban would see any form (Muslim or otherwise) of veil or other covering of the face in public become illegal, except at specific festivals and cultural events.

France has approximately six million Muslims within its borders, of which less than 2000 Muslim women wear the burqa. That’s a mere 0.03% of the French Muslim population. Ought there really be such a fuss?

Well, to some extent, the French government have recently been given just cause to make such a fuss: a post office was robbed by two burglars just last week. And the burglars were disguised in – yep, you guessed it – burqas.

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