issuevoter
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Australian Politics
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The Great State of Mind
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Only the dimmest intellect would not recognise that Religion is one of the greatest threats to world peace today, alongside oil, and unemployment.
In the Western world of pluralistic democracies Australia is unique for several reasons. Britain had adopted pluralism after centuries of bloody religious atrocities. Gradually a parliamentary system evolved and tolerance became a fait accompli, but remained under the umbrella of Protestantism until quite recently.
In the New World almost all the new nations were either established as havens for those persecuted in Europe like the Huguenots of South Africa or the Protestants of Massachusetts. With as much greed and avarice, other nations were the result of proselytising the existing state religion as in the case of the Portuguese Brazil and the Spanish Americas.
One thing all these societies had in common was the respectability religion imparted to every tier. Whether you believed or not, you had to appear to do so if you expected to make any financial of social progress. Or even to be just left alone.
Being a prison colony, New South Wales and its subsidiaries were never intended as havens for religious conviction; not even as an outpost for the delivery of Protestant beliefs to the natives. The colony was simply a dumping ground for overflowing British prisons. In the early days very few brought any skill or strong religious conviction with them. And the harsh and often horrifying treatment and condition under which they served were not about to engender a love of a merciful heavenly father. In places like Macquarie Harbour and Norfolk Island it must have been quite the opposite. It must have been particularly corrupting of the children among them.
Such conditions could never have been imagined to be the foundation stones of an independent country in the Southern Hemisphere, but as horrible as they were, something unique grew out of it all; something I believe is or was quintessentially Australian; National secularism.
Even though the churches came in when it was convenient for them, the population already had a very large percentage of people who were sceptical of religion. This was a reality until quite recently, and it was encouraged by the thinkers and writers who were the founders of the international labour movement. This is one of the biggest differences between Austalia and the USA where even those held in slavery adopted the religion of brutal masters.
I fully support a cosmopolitan society in Australia based on tolerance and inclusiveness. At the same time I do not remember the White Australia Policy quite as villainous as it is portrayed in the popular media today. It was not as bad as the Indian cast system or the Alabama of the KKK. But it was bad enough that it had to go. The multiculturalism envisaged at the time was made against an international background where religious fanaticism was far more isolated and whole lot less violent.
Please forgive my longwinded preamble. But bearing our history of religious scientism in mind, my point is this:
In a far more interconnected world our old religious sceptism and secular idea of society has come under the pressure of a world weigh down with religion, superstition, imported sectarianism, and just plain air-headedness. The effect is that a second generation of Australians is about to grow up where our own tolerance gives equal credence to new age spiritualism, fundamentalist Christian, Muslim and Jewish dogma, Taoists, Gold Buddha ritualists and any other of many crackpot interpretations of reality. Our own tolerance cannot hold these types of so called faiths in the same reverence as the secularism that allows them to be part of a multicultural society. They must only be permitted under the overall umbrella of secular tolerance. Our secularism was paid for in the misery of Australia’s early years and fostered by the struggle for decent working conditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But leftist today seem to have forgotten what the opiate of the people is. It is time that secularism stood up recognised its duty to regain its central position in the Australian psyche, it should be recognised and codified, otherwise we are destined to become just another country fractured along the same sectarian lines we see throughout the world where religion is their social foundation.
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