For the teal deers:

I’m trying to explain (via blogpost) that I will tolerate (and in some cases support) personal faith despite loathing organised religion. Apparently I’ve been alienating people on Facebook (not that I mind really). A bit angry that people can’t see the difference between me alienating Christians on Facebook and Christians Alienating homosexuals IN PARLIAMENT!

By now it should be obvious to all involved that I’m strongly, deeply atheist.

During the last month or two I’ve been stretching my rhetorical legs in this field. My attention to media and policy makes it hard for me to escape the ham-fisted souring  that the religiouso bring to public discourse. I don’t hold back when ontological proclamations appear in my Facebook stream, unless said proclamations have a very specific aspect to them.

That aspect is that they have nothing to do with the life of anyone but the proclaimer.

Unfortunately for the Abrahamics in my life there is so much outward pressuring built into the fabric of their religions that they seldom say something that isn’t bothering someone else. Not just bothering, but inciting a world-view that alienates others in practical ways. Here is where I differ from them.

For starters, the Abrahamic religions are not silent on political leanings, especially not in the US or here in Australia. To say that I am Christian has implications for my political viewpoint, whereas to say that I am atheist does not. Atheism simply means that you do not believe a personal God exists. If a religious person said they were a Deist, then they too would be refraining from political comment in their statement.

Even in situations where a person’s identification as a Christian is followed by a denunciation of the alienating ideologies of that church, the identification is still harmful because they have added themselves to the number of people that supposedly support the ideology. The government will use the argument that, say, 60% of Australians are Christians, Christians don’t like homosexuals, therefore 60% of Australians don’t like homosexuals and will vote for me if I don’t like them either. This is a blunt case, but the mechanism runs deep.

This is not a case of the government getting sloppy with statistics, it’s an acknowledgment that the power doesn’t lie with individual Christians, it lies with the opinion makers in the church. Deny your complicity all you like, you’re not doing anything to stop the resurgence of fundamentalism in this country via the brigades over at Hillsong, AOG and the like.

Before I get on to distinguishing between a personal faith and a communal faith, I’d like to mention secularism.

Atheism isn’t intrinsically political, but secularism is. Secularism is an approach to government that separates the State from the Church so that many churches may exist to cater for as many different faiths as exist. The fashionable way to prove your ignorance these days appears to be claiming that secularism is anti-church. Secularism is about as pro-church as you can get before establishing a theocracy. I want all Christians to hear this: You need a secular state so that another denomination doesn’t gain power and oppress you. You know as well as I do that Christianity is fragmented and inconsistent. Don’t forget your history:

• The English civil war was pretty much Protestants killing Catholics killing Protestants.
• Serbs versus Croats is essentially orthodox Christians versus Catholics.
• Freedom of Religion in the US came out of a law preventing the congregationalists (a Christian sect) harassing Baptists and Presbyterians.
• Calvinists killed a hell of a lot of Catholics after the reformation.
• The puritans fled England because other Christians oppressed them for being daft.

Leaving secularism aside, claiming that Australia is based on Christian values means essentially nothing. If you’re talking about the don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t cheat kind of values then, well, thanks for the input, where the fuck were you when we were sent here for stealing bread (first fleet), murdering aborigines, and disrespecting women by disallowing them the vote? If Australia is based on Christian values in that sense then we can probably add ‘only if it suits us’ as a Christian tenet. Apart from those core values, which honestly, aren’t real hard to figure out, it would appear most of the values still left to implement are homophobia, ignorance and authoritarianism.

Please stay the hell out of politics, you keep ruining everything.

So if we take the public face out of religion, what does a personal faith look like? My temptation here is to say it would look pretty silly because the whole basis of faith is delightfully unhelpful to any meaningful progress in society and does nothing but remove people from the collective intelligence of a nation. I’m going to resist that temptation because as a liberal I think it’s more important to let each individual improve themselves in whatever way they see fit (assuming they don’t do something that stops others from improving themselves likewise). So how can you have faith without having it rammed down people’s throats?

For starters, simple things like not trying to convert people helps, but really doesn’t mean much if you then go and vote for someone that wants to maintain the alienation of queers in society. Having a personal faith is about one central and all important self-injunction:

I will live my life by the rules of my faith but make no action that structurally, legally or socially inhibits somebody else’s ability to completely ignore my beliefs.

That’s why I would never vote for the abolition of Religion, no matter how tempting it may become in the future. Examples of applying the above might include:

• Not supporting a man-woman only definition of marriage
• Not having an abortion but not supporting anti-abortion laws
• Not looking at porn but also not supporting Internet censorship
• Telling an atheist he’s wrong but agreeing that he’s allowed to be
• Fighting for the down-trodden and poor WITHOUT telling them you did it because of your faith

The idea here is not to force religion out of the public sphere, that will never happen and never should happen. The aim of secularism and of maintaining personal faith is to reduce the strain and angst in this country. The strain between the religious and the otherwise, the angst of not measuring up to the standards of some celestial dictator, both of these cause far more trouble than I can pinpoint in my research.

The difference between the straw-man Kieran and the straw-man Christian is that when I mouth off on Facebook, I’m trying to ease the burden on the human spirit, not add more rules, not add more obligations, not add more oversight. Abrahamic religions are at their core authoritarian and I am at my core not. I believe in positive reinforcement not a fear of eternal damnation. I believe in atoning for my sins instead of praying them away.

There are so many differences that conflating my outbursts with those of my religious opposition is mentally lazy and shallow. Beneath my remonstrations is my tacit permissiveness and the acknowledgment that my distaste for religion is less powerful – the current political climate won’t allow for me to activate it in any oppressive sense even if I wanted to.

I have noticed the collective apoplexy being experienced by Australia’s dubiously educated soccer mums and under-employed social academics over Sandilands’ latest trick. I have noticed the vitriolic and panic-stricken cries of the media as they reach for the low hanging fruit of public angst. I have noticed everyone getting off on the chance to once again take a piss into the wind that is Kyle bloody Sandilands.

So while Hetty and friends sharpen their knives and polish their cheque books, Kyle has been apologising and dodging bullets. I’m sure the Labor party is grateful for his ability to distract the ‘feral goldfish’ and take the pressure off them for a few minutes while they sit down with their mates and work out how to deny next month’s installment of Two and a half Factions.

Mother’s Milk

Kyle didn’t pull the plug in time. That is all. He was not trying to verbally molest the poor girl. That was the mother’s job. This woman has to be one of the dumbest human beings I’ve ever seen.

Listen lady, Kyle’s getting a beating over this, so here’s your turn. You are a bad mother. You have failed your daughter. You sold her out for tickets to a concert. You were too fucking stupid to avoid a very obvious and very dangerous subject on national fucking radio. You were asked by the producers if such information existed and you fucking lied.

I’m inclined to believe that you lied deliberately so this situation would arise. That’s abuse on an appalling level.

Kyle’s career as a shock jock is nothing compared to your lack of upbringing. Your daughter was failed by an older man and failed by your lack of maternal ability. Sixty thousand years of evolution has been fucking lost on you.

Moral Decay?

Meanwhile the term ‘moral decay’ has reared it’s ugly head at least once. Moral decay hey? Well, thank God I’m a writer, I’m relevant regardless of how dystopian we get. There’s a word that means, exactly, the application of moral decay to this whole scenario; practice it with me.

Bullshit

It might take you a while to sound it out, especially given contemporary standards of literacy. Moral decay is not the right term here. Let me explain.

Moral decay is a result of moral stagnation. Put simply, morals will only decay if we let them stand still for too long. The world moves and so must our morals. Keeping them set in stone is a wonderful way of sending society backwards. Even Clive Hamilton writes about the need to establish new moral standards. Unfortunately for Clive, his definition of ‘new’ is ‘what he remembers from watching The Brady Bunch‘. Even worse, he’s not alone. Kevin Rudd’s neo-conservative movement has been a rallying cry for the bigots and religious throwbacks of the country.

This leads me to the real point…

This is about stupidity, not manners

Sure manners comes into it, but only on the periphery. Kyle was too stupid to pull the plug on a woman who was too stupid not to sexually abuse her daughter on national radio. The media is too stupid to pick the real culprit and the public is too stupid to realise that the media is shafting them.

Someone shows us a front page and our brains go to shit.

We’re shown to be a nation of dumbasses by the level of entertainment we crave, something goes wrong because of the vapid tits that come up with this shit and then the professional crybabies rush in and, instead of contributing any useful analysis, simply reinforce the notion that we’re collectively brain damaged by being intellectually lazy.

Andrew Bolt, I’m looking squarely at you here. Though I may be hasty, your editor probably dragooned you into that position. It’s not your fault, you were just following orders.

With this in mind, I’ll make my point in simple language so your average mortgage holder can understand.

We’re not getting nastier, we’re getting dumber. This is because you watch shit, read shit, and think shit. The old days were not better. This happened because our moral framework is out of date and nobody puts any thought into it. Kyle Sandilands is not an evil pedo, the girl’s mother is. Stop bitching and send the poor girl some flowers. She’s been hurt, and your focus on Sandilands is just making it worse.

Young lady, I’m so sorry that your mother failed you like this. If you’re one to look for a silver lining, hopefully it will be that your situation makes some parents wake up and do a better job of defending their children instead of hoping somebody else will do it for them.

Update: I just found this article written by the man himself.

I’ve decided to make the World’s greatest shave thing a public event.

Where

At the moment I’m hoping to hold the shave at Val-Ray Jewellers at Brisbane Square in the Brisbane CBD. It’s a small shop but I’m hoping to have the event held out the front or near the front.

When

The event has been slated for Noon on Saturday the 14th of March.

This means I’ll need help from others as I will actually be working at the jeweler that day.

Alternatively I’m looking to have it on Thursday or Friday evening in the same location. I’d appreciate some feedback and will be asking for it over twitter as well.

How

We’ll have clippers and hair colour (spray) set up at the event. We’ll have one or two people attending to people’s hair and a crowd going to reassure everyone that they look awesome.

Why

We’re doing this because it’s a good cause.

At midnight on what has become known as ‘Scorched Saturday’ the ABC is reporting that the bushfire has claimed 84 lives. The BBC is reporting the same and has been following the situation all day.

Emergency crews are locked in a desperate struggle against the bushfires. As I write this, Police have just confirmed that the death toll has risen to 130** dead in the fires.

Chief Commissioner of Victorian Police Christine Nixon has confirmed the bushfire’s death toll includes at least four children.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, when asked his thoughts on the deliberate starting of these fires and the people responsible -

What do you say about them? What can you say about them? Other than it’s mass murder.

Currently there are 50 fires burning with 8* of those fires completely out of control. There have been reports that many of the fires were lit deliberately. Twitter user @lukeshillabeer reports -

I heard a police officer and a fire-fighter talking about having to watch for fires being lit behind their lines… wtf

The bushfires are rapidly burning through the following areas*:

• Beechworth,
• Murrindindi,
• Kinglake,
• Redsdale,
• Dargo,
• Delburn,
• Wilsons Prom
• Bunyip

Many areas sit awake watching numerous rainless electrical storms spark the dry tinder of the Victorian bush.

For those looking to lend a hand, donations can be made at the Red Cross website.

To keep track of events as they occur, tune your radio into ABC Melbourne 774.

Twitter has once again proven itself to be a valuable resource as it tracks the Australian fires across Victoria. Messages and updates are coming at a rate approaching one ever 10 seconds. The Australian bushfires have also drawn mass messages of support and sympathy from overseas. Many in the online global community are using services like twitter to keep track of the situation and updates.

Links to Red Cross Donation drives for the bushfires in Melbourne have been trying desperately to keep pace with the bushfire itself.

The photo service Flickr has also allowed those close to the fires to paint a graphic picture of the situation.

*updated at 13:30 AEST 14:30 AEDST

**updated at 15:02 AEST 16:02 AEDST

The March in March is coming up and so is the World’s Greatest Shave. I’m involved with both, so I’ve come up with a way of supporting both.

100% of the profit made from these shirts will be donated to the Leukeimia foundation.

Two good causes and a shirt that says that you were there and that you fought the man.

I’ve put together some website badges that people can put on their site. The hope is that people will put the badge in a sidebar on their site and use it to link to the donate/join page.

If you’re not hugely tech-savvy, all you need to do is add the following code to your website in a nice visible spot:

<a href=”http://tr.im/dsdr” title=”click here to sponsor the Leukeamia Foundation”><img src=”http://websinthe.org/images/med_simple_gif.gif” alt=”sponsor us” /></a>

Simply change the bold text in the code to match whichever image you wish to use. You can find the appropriate name in the caption of each image.

I’ve started collecting donations in earnest now and will be approaching corporate sponsors in the next few days. Wish me luck. In the meantime, here are PNG and GIf versions of the badges. Don’t ask where the .jpg ones are as the response may offend.

GIF and PNG Badges

I want this to be a big thing. I want to start a shave for a cure team to represent the Australian online community.

A bit of background.

My fiance Naomi received a phone call mid way through last year from her foster mother. Her brother James, just 21 years old, had been diagnosed with Leukaemia and had to undergo emergency chemotherapy within days if he wanted any chance of living. It was a shock to the whole family. James was one of the healthiest young men you would meet. Healthy diet, played sports, didn’t smoke, didn’t binge drink.

Leukaemia is an indiscriminate assailant. Though a quick google can tell you all you need to know about how horrible and deadly it is.

I’ve started a team for this year’s Shave for a cure fundraiser and I intend on raising at least $500 for the cause. I desire, however, to build a team from the Australian blogosphere and raise $5000 for the cause.

So please, whether you’re colouring or shaving, head to the site and join in with the websinthe team. It’s a good cause.

Current Members (order joined)

• Kieran Salsone (c) – Shave and paint (silver)
• Naomi Bicheno – Shave
• Jasmine Marosvary – colour (purple)
• Andrew Glancey
• Tiara Shafiq – colour (purple)
• Andrea Schaul
• Alannah Pye
• Brendan Halliday

Still awaiting packs in the mail, will update when recieved.