"With Christians, of course, it is another matter altogether; they are fair game, as they don’t fight back; they seem to have minimal political clout; they have allowed themselves to be theologically confused; they have absorbed the ‘guilt trip’ imposed by critics and the media; and – with few exceptions – they seem to have poor and ineffective leadership, generally pre-occupied with aligning the church with fashionable causes”.
(Dr Mervyn Bendle, ex-academic from James Cook University)
This post contains the full article written by Mervyn Bendle on 16 May 2024 and posted on Quadrant Online.
Anybody who supports the Christian faith should read the article as it concerns the Australian Law Reform Commission’s proposals, supported by federal Labor Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, to curtail religious freedoms and restrict the ability of (especially) Christian schools to propagate and employ staff committed to the Christian ethos.
If you are not a Christian, you should also read it. If you are not a Christian and think it doesn't concern you, you are terribly wrong. History has a habit of repeating itself, and Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous words might come back to bite you hard, as who will the Marxists come for next?
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller was initially silent in the face of evil to the Nazis, like the majority of the pastors in Germany who foolishly attempted to appease Hitler, believing they could compromise in such ways and still coexist with Nazi ideologies.
In numerous Friday Raves, I have written articles to awaken people, deceived by global Marxism and cultural Marxism, to the truth. The Friday Raves have attempted to challenge those who are awake to stand up and stop being apathetic and/or spineless and start speaking up against the evils attacking Christianity and threatening our nation.
Here are five selected Raves I encourage you to read and share with others:
11 April 2024 FRIDAY RAVE 65 - Are you a “useful idiot” on the issue of man-made climate change catastrophe?
29 February 2024 Friday Rave-62 She lost her life at age 21. You don't have to risk your life to stand up - Yet
12 Jan 2023 FRIDAY RAVE 19 - Are you awake to EVIL?????
If you have been deceived, apathetic or silent to the various Marxist movements such as radical LGBTQIA+, Critical Race Theory and Climate Change Catastrophe, you should initially drop your head down in shame after reading the below article by Dr Mervyn Bendle. Your silence and/or deception have been complicit in supporting an evil attack on Christianity in Australia, which will have severe outcomes for the welfare of ALL Australians.
If this has been you, I encourage you not to be offended by my comments so that you take your bat ball and go home. My words were deliberately strong, and if you feel guilty for being complicit in supporting evil, it's time to make amends and start standing up, just as Pastor Martin Niemöller did when he recognised the error of his ways.
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The Left’s Relentless War on Faith https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/religion/2024/05/labors-war-on-religion/
By Mervyn Bendle, 16th May 2024
A very powerful cabal within the Australian Left aims to strictly control and eventually eliminate religious faith, and it appears the time is coming when Christians and others will be called upon to resist the onslaught. As Chris Uhlmann points out: “A religious civil war is raging … at stake is whether the ascendant state morality will drive deeper into the ancient institutions of faith and force believers to submit to its temporal commandments.” Working under the direction of federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, the Australian Law Reform Commission is proposing a system of laws that will dictate what people may believe and how they may express those beliefs in interaction with others through faith-based institutions, especially schools and places of worship.
This objective is made perfectly clear in the ALRC’s Final Report, misleadingly titled (in true Orwellian fashion): ‘Maximising the Realisation of Human Rights: Religious Educational Institutions and Anti-Discrimination Laws”. It would be far more accurately titled ‘How to Use the Trojan Horse of Anti-Discrimination Law to Invade Religious Traditions and their Institutions in Order to Colonise them with the Socialist Principles of Militant Secularism and Achieve their Destruction’. The reference here to ‘socialism’ is quite deliberate, as the same type of ideologically-driven suppression of religion was implemented under National Socialism in Nazi Germany and under Communism in the Soviet Union.
In case there’s any doubt about what this anti-religious cabal is intending, the ALRC Report itself emphasizes that its key recommendations will quite deliberately limit “the freedom to manifest religion or belief in community with others, and the associated parental liberty to ensure the religious and moral education of one’s children in conformity with one’s own convictions.” That is, the Report stresses that its key objective is to curtail a person’s liberty to give expression to their religious beliefs or to educate their children in these beliefs, under the threat of criminal penalty.
The clear intention of these militant secularists is eventually to eradicate humanity’s great religious traditions, and it is doing so under the aegis of a radical Socialist Left ALP government that came to power on the basis of 33 per cent of the primary vote (coincidentally the same proportion that got Hitler into power in Germany). In particular, their target is Christianity, the basis of Western Civilization and of all the institutions upon which our society is based, including the legal system that so privileges the self-selecting gang of elite lawyers and judges behind this Report (by an inquiry free of any significant scholarly expertise on the nature and role of religion). Conveniently, their names and qualifications and places of education are all detailed in the Report, so their elite status and background can easily be ascertained (see pages 7 and 8 here).
To the naïve observer, the draconian implications of this Report might appear to be directed against all religions; however, it is quite obviously directed primarily at Christianity, the religious tradition upon whose values and system of beliefs this society has depended during its historical evolution over the past 236 years, capitalising in turn upon the achievements of Christendom in its
various streams reaching back 2000 years. It is patently not intended that the system of repression detailed in the Report will be directed at other great religious traditions, e.g., Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc., that have made their home here, at least not in the first stage of repression. Above all, Islam will be left alone. As we have seen, it is extremely unlikely that any ALP government at federal or state level or any agency under their control (e.g., the AHRC, AFP, etc.) would try to enforce this new system of law on people of the Islamic faith. Specifically, they would not send inspectors into Muslim mosques or schools; they would not charge Muslim clergy or officials with offences under the new laws, and they would certainly not take them to court. Indeed, in the unlikely event that the government did try to do anything of the sort, then the inspectors, investigators, police officers, and the courts themselves would simply be too afraid to act. Most would probably report in sick!
With Christians, of course, it is another matter altogether; they are fair game, as they don’t fight back; they seem to have minimal political clout; they have allowed themselves to be theologically confused; they have absorbed the ‘guilt trip’ imposed by critics and the media; and – with few exceptions – they seem to have poor and ineffective leadership, generally pre-occupied with aligning the church with fashionable causes.
Perhaps such a dire outcome seems unlikely. Perhaps Christians and those who understand the vital role played by humanity’s religious traditions can all hope for the best. Such optimism and hopefulness would be misplaced however, as Dreyfus and the forces behind him are clearly quite determined to have their way. This is a single-minded cabal of militant secularists working on a long-term agenda. Probably, they intend to implement the new laws selectively, in order to test public reaction. For example, the cabal could continue to move against the currently weakened Catholic Church, as they did so successfully with the persecution of Cardinal George Pell, and as the Greens-ALP government in the ACT did when it confiscated Calvary Hospital and proceeded to add it to the ACT’s already disastrous health system, an act designed to ensure the comprehensive implementation of unrestrained euthanasia. This seizure generated no particular backlash, and so our militant secularists have been further emboldened.
Their probable first move will involve a carefully contrived ‘test case’ where some superficially appealing and media-friendly person will come forward with claims that they have been discriminated against in employment in a Catholic school on the basis of their sexuality or gender
identity, which will be sufficiently exotic to make it impossible for the targeted school not to act. The cabal would then swing into action with a media blitz and, as such alleged discrimination would be a criminal offence, the Australian Federal Police would be mobilized to conduct the investigation and bring charges. (This would be readily overseen by Dreyfus as Attorney-General, because one of his first acts upon appointment to the federal ministry was to seize control of the AFP.) A very high-profile court case would then ensue, probably in either Victoria or the ACT, where the judiciary have been comprehensively compromised and can be expected to do what is required of them, as we saw with the Pell case.
But these are early days in this latest iteration of secular socialism’s relentless and long-term campaign against religious faith, and so perhaps it’s worthwhile reflecting on the history of similar attacks. These go back to the massive dechristianization campaign implemented during the French Revolution. Inspired by the materialist philosophies of the Enlightenment, this involved the destruction of all forms of Christian symbolism and iconography, including all crosses, images, statuary, bells, etc., and the death sentence for active priests and those harboring them. It also involved the introduction of militant secularist cults, including the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being, and symbolizing it all was the Festival of Reason, held in the desacralized Notre Dame Cathedral in November 1793. Driving this onslaught were the methods of the Great Terror, which used the mass execution of tens of thousands of people to achieve the primary aim of the new regime, i.e., to make people think, feel, and believe what it wanted them to think, feel and believe. Sadly, it is difficult to believe that the Socialist Left in Australia doesn’t have the same aim Or that it would restrain itself if it had the power to impose its will? After all, this is the party faction that produced the Andrews regime in Victoria and effectively controls both the police and the courts, as the Pell case so vividly revealed.
This type of proto-totalitarian anti-Christian campaign reached its murderous climax under the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union. Once in power, and in a manner to which the Left aspires in Australia, they didn’t hesitate to use the State as a lethal instrument to suppress all opposition and achieve their goals. Indeed, in December 1917, Lenin established the Cheka, the state security apparatus that by 1921 had over 200,000 operatives and innumerable informers, and that quickly came to completely terrorize the population. In just the first two months, 10,000-15,000 people were summarily executed, while the long-term death toll was well over a million people.
This doesn’t include the innumerable religious victims; these were a special category targeted because their faith competed with the Bolshevik version of secular socialism . First to be targeted were the Jews, an easy mark in a country with a deplorable history of anti-Semitism and pogroms. Some 115,000 were murdered in the Ukraine in 1919 alone.
The real target, however, was Russian Orthodox Christianity, a faith that had provided the cultural foundations of Russian civilisation for a millennium. For the Russian people, as Richard Pipes noted in Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime 1919-1924
…culture meant religion – religious belief, but especially religious rituals and festivals … Their lives revolved around the ceremonies of the religious calendar, because these not only glorified their hard and humdrum existences but gave even the humblest of them a sense of dignity in the eyes of God.
For the Bolsheviks, this would not do. As committed Marxists, they knew that Communist ideology and the Christian religion could not co-exist, as they both made the same psychological demands for belief and commitment. Consequently, the Russian Christian was to be replaced by ‘the New Soviet Man’: “a rational, disciplined and collective being who lived only for the interests of the greater good, like a cell in a living organism,” or like a worker bee in a hive. (Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1998) As Lenin explained, “if the Revolution was fully to liquidate the Old Regime it had to settle accounts with the Church [and] undermine the foundations on which the Russian world had hitherto reposed”, i.e., Christianity.
In a series of decrees, the Bolsheviks instituted a campaign of religious persecution on a scale not seen since the early centuries of the Roman Empire. They severed all links between the Church and the State, eliminated the Church’s status as a legal entity, ended all financial support, denied it any right to acquire or own any property, denounced all miracles, shut down all religious festivals, and prohibited the teaching of religion in all schools or any youth group. Party members and the public were encouraged to openly ridicule, harass and beat up priests, and many were actually murdered. Churches, monasteries, and synagogues were despoiled and converted to secular use, while senior clergy and priests were deprived of all civil rights, arrested, put through show trials and imprisoned or executed. In schools and elsewhere, all religion was to be replaced with a specially designed ‘Scientific Atheism’, and the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment was established, along with the All-Russian Union of Teachers-Internationalists. These were tasked with eliminating every last shred of religious material from the school curricula and replacing it with the new secular creed. This evolved into ‘Dialectical Materialism’, which purported to provide a complete materialist cosmology that served as a secular substitute religion. (In Australia, it appears the plan for our ‘post-Christian’ future is to make us subject to an ersatz form of primitive nature religion characterised by fire ceremonies and ancestor worship.)
The death toll of this anti-religion terror campaign is difficult to estimate, but, e.g., in one campaign between June 1918 and January 1919, official church figures for the Moscow region record that one metropolitan (archbishop), 18 bishops, 102 priests, 154 deacons, and 94 monks and nuns were killed. More broadly, 579 monasteries and convents were liquidated, accompanied by the mass execution of many more monks and nuns, who were, of course, also subjected to systematic rape. In the longer term, at least 106,000 Russian clergymen were executed during the Great Purge in the 1930s, and the total number of Christians killed under the Soviet regime is estimated at some 12-20 million.
These figures are not cited to imply that we face such a murderous campaign in Australia (yet!). Rather, they are provided to indicate the brutal fanaticism driving militant secularists and socialists once they have their hands on the levers of State power. The difference between the Soviet Union and our future is one of scale not intention.
The dechristianisation of Nazi Germany proceeded differently. This was because a significant element of the Church succumbed easily to political and economic enticements and fervent nationalism and shamefully retreated from its proper allegiance to the Gospel, allowing Jesus to be ‘de-Judaicised’ and to be re-born as ‘the Aryan Christ’. Meanwhile, much of the general public gravitated to the ‘New Heathenism’ based on Wotanism and sun worship, Wagnerian mythologies, Völkisch notions of a noble racial past, Teutonic tribal glories, and primeval customs
and rituals, including nature worship and nudism(!) As historians have shown, much of this proved to be an ideological harbinger of the Greens.
Within the Church there emerged the pro-Nazi German Christian movement, which proclaimed the unity of National Socialism and Christianity, and adopted the swastika alongside the Cross. It championed such demands as the dismissal of all pastors unsympathetic to National Socialism; the implementation of the ‘Aryan Paragraph’, which restricted Church membership to those of ‘pure Aryan birth’ and expelled all those of full or partial Jewish descent; the removal of the Old Testament from the Bible and all ‘non-German’ elements from religious services; and the ‘re-imagining’ of Jesus as a blond Nordic warrior battling against the depraved Jewish influences that were allegedly corrupting the Church and society.
Ultimately, even this religious decadence didn’t approach what Hitler had in mind for the new Nazi religion he intended to impose on the citizens of ‘the Thousand Year Reich’, once Christianity had been eradicated. As he declared: “to the Christian doctrine of the infinite significance of the individual human soul … I oppose with icy clarity the saving doctrine of the nothingness and insignificance of the individual human being, and of their continued existence [only] in the immortality of the German nation.” “The individual was nothing, but the racial collective would endure through the ages.” (Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich, 2000)
Predictably, Christians who didn’t betray their faith fell victim to the Gestapo and the SS. These included the White Rose, a group of young idealists in the universities who dared to denounce the criminality of the Nazi regime and called for non-violent resistance to it. They also openly denounced the persecution and mass murder of the Jews. After about eight months of clandestine campaigning they were uncovered, arrested, tried, and summarily executed in early 1943. A more famous opponent of the Nazis was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brilliant Lutheran pastor and theologian who was a key founding member of the Confessing Church opposing the German Christians. His resistance to the Nazi regime and to such policies as its compulsory euthanasia program and persecution of the Jews led to his arrest in April 1943 and imprisonment, ultimately in a concentration camp. In 1944 he was implicated in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler and was tried along with other alleged plotters and hanged on April 9, 1945, just as the Nazi regime was finally disintegrating. Bonhoeffer’s book, The Cost of Discipleship (1937) and his theological and prison writings have become Christian classics.
All of this happened during the century past and while the present historical and political circumstances are obviously quite different, it would be foolish to assume that some such concerted and fanatical attack on Christianity will not occur; after all, who could possibly have anticipated the anti-Semitism that has erupted all around us? It would appear to be much more realistic to assume, not only that the antireligious onslaught could occur, but that it has in fact begun, as the ALRC Report and the legislation proposed by the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, makes clear.
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