Frank wrote on Aug 3^rd, 2022 at 6:22pm:




IMO,
JUDEO-CHRISTIAN [BIBLICAL] ETHICS BUILT AUSTRALIA,     ...and, 'built' the [FADING!!] social stability of all of the nations of the '1st world'.

The implementation of the Judeo-Christian principles wasn't, hasn't been perfect.

But in many of the nations of the 1st world, we see that the stability and peace which Judeo-Christian [biblical] ethics produced,
also promoted     the principle,     of freedom of the individual, and promoted free thinking, innovation, and social and mercantile prosperity - and peace.


Today, [it seems to some of us, that] every person in the world wants a 'share' [their share!] of the prosperity which Judeo-Christian [biblical] ethics has produced - within the nations of the 1st world.
[....hence we see so many persons seeking to escape their own cultural backgrounds [often producing poverty and oppression], and wanting to emigrate to the nations of the 1st world,
....and yet, we see NOT many, seeking to emigrate to places like North Korea.    Why is that ?
Why don't many people from the 3rd world, want to emigrate into North Korea, or Venezuela, or South Africa, or Zimbabwe ?
Why is that ? ]



BUT, IT IS ALL CHANGING.....
Today, many citizens of the nations of the 1st world are, en-masse, choosing to abandon the Judeo-Christian ethics and Judeo-Christian principles.

Why so ?

For my part, i am of the opinion, that almost every nation of the 1st world, is racing, and trying to morph into a 3rd world nation.  !!

Am i mistaken ?


.


Isaiah 29:13
Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men:
14  Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous work among this people, even a marvellous work and a wonder: for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid.
15  Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the LORD, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us?



Q.
Why are our nations being destroyed, in front of our eyes ?


Isaiah 1:7
Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.


A.
Because we, our nations, have largely abandoned ethics, and integrity, and [truth and] judgement, in our society.

Frank wrote on Aug 6^th, 2022 at 5:51pm:


Nope.  Aboriginal smoking ceremonies have nothing to do with prayer per se.
I's simply acknowledging a welcome to country, a common practice amongst
different Aboriginal mobs for thousands of years.


As an aside, can I ask you, in particular, why you include so many offensive
insults in your responses here?    Rather than diminishing your opponents'
arguments, it just makes your own arguments look a lot weaker.

BTW, the argumentum ad hominem fallacy is the last resort of those lacking
intellectual discourse.

AusGeoff wrote on Aug 7^th, 2022 at 12:10am:

Nonsense.

I do notice- as you obviously do not - that you restrict yourself to a sympathetic  interpretation of a particular Aboriginal religious ritual regardless of its vast and old religious context and edifice of beliefs, rituals and dogmas but when turning to the Lord's prayer you immediately and reflexively denounce the entire religion and its history rather than, evenhandedly, restricting yourself to the particular ritual of the prayer now.  This ireflexive switch is so obvious  (except to you) as to be amusing.


The smoking ceremony IS about communicating with the teeming Aboriginal spirit world and as with every religious ritual, it has its own proper way of performing it, its words and initiates, who can and cannot perform it and the beliefs about how it communicates with spirits and what would happen if the spirits were disrespected.

Do YOU believe in Aboriginal spirits and how they relate to the living and the dead? Do you share the Aboriginal belief in communicating with spirits?

To say that Christianity has no deep spiritual dimensions but is a mererabid, oppresive religion while Aboriginal spirituality is all cuddly, fluffy spirituality and no religion, tradition and ritual is such nonsense that those who insist on such a grotesque evil/good juxtaposition must be either lying knowingly or be amazingly stupid and ignorant. 


Many Aborigines are also Christian's. In fact the 1967 referendum push, like the civil rights movement at the same time in the US, was animated largely by Aboriginal Christian leaders on Christian grounds.
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/religionandethicsreport/spirituality-and-a-voice-for-indigenous-people-in-constitution/13998344

Frank wrote on Aug 6^th, 2022 at 5:51pm:


Another example of an anachronistic pre-literate culture chafing against a 'modern' literate culture.

Urgent need for public education to assist transition  beyond the spiritual/religious manifestations of the past, to a new common spirituality for all human beings.

Starting with the Golden Rule perhaps, to replace article 18 of the UN UDHR (the "religious freedom" clause).

AusGeoff wrote on Aug 7^th, 2022 at 12:26am:

I don't suffer fools gladly.
Anyone who says the above is a tendentious fool talking crap. You just appropriated tens of thousands of years worth of looking at the world and reduced it some glib, ignorant modern day political purpose. You understand absolutely nothing about Aboriginal religions or Christianity beyond what pops up in Wiki. You couldn't be more arrogantly ignorant if you tried.   And you are not alone, God help us.
As for intellectual discourse - don't  kid yourself, Geoff. Pitting what comes up on Wiki, coupled with severe, blinkered antipathy  based on nothing better than mundane daily political irritation (carefully nursed and tended to), is not 'intellectual disourse'. 

So no, I am not here to accommodate arrogant ignorance, others can do that.

for the Old People, making a living and obtaining materials for artefacts were inseparable from their commitment to a spiritual understanding of the origin of species, to conservative values in relation to change and to a cosmology in which economics had to be in conformity to ancestral authority”. They lived, in other words, in what philosopher Charles Taylor has described as a “world brimming with pres­ences”, in which the spiritual and the temporal, the natural and the supernatural, were fused within a cosmic order that was not to be manipulated and transformed — as it was in the West — but revered and maintained.

What we would now call faith was not a distinct sphere of life; it was inseparable from life itself, there forever, from the Dreaming, whose latent powers, including for the cyclical regrowth of plants and animals, were to be preserved through obedience to its demands. And where technologies — such as their Melanesian neighbours’ agricultural and horticultural methods — had not been sanctioned by the Dreaming, they rejected them, not out of ignorance but out of respect for the transcendent foundations of earthly existence.

In contrast, Pascoe’s caricature – which “consistently pushes the evidence of Aboriginal subsistence beyond what it can factually bear and into a European model of economic life … as if the more European the Old People can be made to seem, the better” – robbed that world of its spirituality. That certainly made Dark Emu all the more attractive to the staunchly secular “progressives”, who are its fiercest defenders; but it also made Pascoe incapable of understanding, much less explaining, the Indigenous world’s stability and persistence.

Ultimately, it condemned his book to being little more than “a popularised mythology of history” that “does not respect or do justice to” the societies it purports to admire.

Frank wrote on Aug 6^th, 2022 at 5:51pm:


Wow!  Frank, why don't you open up and tell me what you really think? 

And I'm guessing this means we're never gonna be able to get a room together?    

 

Frank wrote on Aug 3^rd, 2022 at 6:22pm: