In the Senate, Labor asked Sinodinos about his role as NSW finance director during the time that the NSW party is accused by the NSW Electoral Commission of “washing” property industry donations – prohibited at state level – through the federal “associated entity, the Free Enterprise Foundation”.

In evidence before the Icac, and in public statements, Sinodinos has said he did not know about the banned donations.

In the House of Representatives, Labor asked the treasurer, Scott Morrison, about donations possibly made to another fundraising body, the Millennium Forum, during his time as NSW Liberal party director.

Morrison responded furiously, saying there wasn’t “a hole dark enough that the NSW Labor party hasn’t been in it”.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/apr/18/labor-tries-to-set-up-snap-senate-inquiry-into-nsw-liberals-fundraising-scandal

This furious anger shows Scott Mo's guilt like a beacon on a hill.

The Federal Government will today announce a $120 million boost to the corporate regulator to target banking crime and misconduct.

The strengthening of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) follows a string of scandals and Labor proposing a Royal Commission into the sector.

The ABC understands the Government will increase a levy on banks, raising $120 million over four years for the watchdog.

The funding will help replace cuts made under the former Labor government and in the 2014 budget.

A new ASIC commissioner focussing on banking prosecutions will also be appointed.

The moves come after a nine-month review into ASIC and talks between the Treasurer Scott Morrison and the commission over recent days.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-20/government-announces-more-money-for-asic/7340374

---------------------------------

A Royal Commission into the banking system is what is needed.

Increasing the number of blind bats at ASIC is not going to expose the rotten tricks of the banking system.

The "big banks' won't worry about a piddley amount of cash which will come out of consumers anyway, not from CEOs and executives bonuses... 

The nation's first double-dissolution election in almost 30 years may be triggered by the drive to stamp out union corruption but bank scandals, tax evaders and corporate corruption will become a much bigger election battleground before July 2.

The Coalition government has a record of badly misreading the depth of public anger in relation to the banks, and includes poor financial advice, dodgy life insurance, mortgage fraud, bank bill rate rigging as well as broader corporate bribery and corruption.

Dragging its heels on reforms, sitting on recommendations for months and having a revolving door of financial services ministers, has done little to engender public trust.

He [Morrison] thanked the "millions of people … who I know pray earnestly for our political leaders".

"I'm a big believer in prayer, I've seen the impact of it in my own life and I know it works," he said.

But the Treasurer declined to discuss further his own strong Christian beliefs. "My faith is not my politics. My faith is an important part of who I am, as it is of every human being, whatever their faith might be. Judge me on my policies. My faith is my business."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/treasurer-scott-morrison-defends-antigay-commentator-at-australian-christian-lobby-event-20160423-godfb6.html#ixzz46d4bcqLQ 
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook

-------------------------------

I'm sorry Mr Treasurer, but this is populist shit. Your faith is not your business. You faith does influence your policies and our future as a secular society in which say global warming needs to be tackled or allow gay rights. Eric Metaxas views are Nazi. According to your "respect from everybody's opinion", you would end up respecting Hitler's crushing gays and Jews in Germany, though you might disagree with the views... Not good enough. You need to take a cold shower soon. I don't stop anyone getting married because they are heterosexual, do I?

And on global warming, your government under Hunt, Abbott and Turnbull, is hypocritical in fiddling the real figures in a very UNCHRISTIAN way. So go and widen your scope. Stop being a wowser, a zealot and a bigot all at once. I pray for you to become enlightened with greater understanding. So far I can say prayer does not work.

• By Melanie Saward    26 June 2019
• 
  
• When I went to bed on the night of the election — early, to escape the growing fear and despair on my social media — I had a knot in my stomach about what I’d wake up to. For many people, their own knots of anxiety formed as they realised that Peter Dutton would not just hold onto the seat of Dickson, but that there was a swing towards him. My knot had been forming since Easter Sunday, when Scott Morrison invited cameras into his Pentecostal Church.

I knew he was a Pentecostal Christian when he was first elected leader of the LNP, but seeing it made it more real.

The first picture I came across from the series taken at Horizon Church in Sydney was ScoMo with his hand raised, eyes closed, mouth open in prayer. Scrolling through the news article, my palms began to sweat, my mouth went dry, and for the first time in years I had a trauma flashback.

I joined a Brisbane Pentecostal church at the age of twenty-one. I started going because it was one of very few social activities my then boyfriend approved. We both still lived at home: him on the south of Brisbane, me on the north side. If I was going to church on Sunday night, he’d concede the day (and sometimes Saturday) to my side of town. And when my friend came to pick me up for church, he’d go home leaving me without his looming presence for a few hours.

When I first walked in the door at that church, they saw me. I was broken and ripe for recruiting. They built me up and made me feel strong. Even though they helped me get away from my relationship, it wasn’t long until the church became an abusive relationship in itself.

Pentecostal churches like Morrison’s Horizon and my former group here in Brisbane are massive: thousands attend services every week. They are devoted, faithful, and loyal. They worship to pop music and are full of young, attractive and well-off people who desperately want to be good and kind and do the right thing. That’s what terrified me so much when I saw our Prime Minister at worship. Because the right thing to Pentecostals, is not going to be the right thing for most Australians.

There’s something about those images that made me connect the dots with my own experience of sitting in a crowded Sunday service with people who claimed to love everyone. People who love everyone – but also believe homosexuality is against the Bible, that life begins at conception, that sex out of marriage is a sin and that anyone who is not a Christian is worshipping a false God. It made me think of the time I was told my parents, who are good and kind people, would go to hell if they did not come to church. The alternative, for my parents and anyone guilty of any number of grave sins – including the sin of simply not being a Christian – was to get ‘Saved’.

Pentecostal churches are evangelistic. Witnessing to and converting the unchurched is critical to their doctrine. At my church, pastors often preached their hopes that the whole world would be converted. As a small group leader for university-aged youth, part of my role was reporting back to leadership each month as to how many new members had attended my sessions and how many of those newbies had been saved. Those numbers were fed from each of the church’s demographic groups back to senior leadership. If they were good, we’d be praised. If they were bad, we were chastised and sometimes re-assigned to other areas. It was imperative that the church be growing all the time.

Witnessing was done through acts, by receiving prophecy and speaking God’s truth to the unchurched, even in difficult and dangerous situations. I was encouraged to witness to everyone unchurched in my life, and while freedom to practice my religion protected me from potential repercussions from my constant preaching in the workplace, it placed my housing and relationship with my parents at risk. Not to mention the massive toll the constant pressure put on my mental health.

When I went to my leader and said I was struggling, I was told to work harder. Every time someone prophesied over me, I prayed they would see that I hadn’t dealt with the trauma my ex-boyfriend had inflicted on me and give me some magic answer to make it feel better. But the more broken I got, the less they saw me. I was likely no great loss to my church when I left because I wasn’t growing the flock, nor was I prosperous or powerful enough for them. I wasn’t even black enough to contribute to their diversity quota.

Though Scott Morrison professes to ‘love all Australians,’ I believe his love comes with conditions. His abstinence from the 2017 Marriage Equality Survey, his belief that those who ‘have a go will get a go,’ his decision to end his victory speech on election night with the words ‘God bless Australia’ and his willingness to be photographed at worship are all demonstrations of what those conditions are. Those of us who are queer, black, have uteruses, have immigrated, who are not Christian, who aren’t in secure jobs with savings, and who care about the environment, may be loved by the prime minister, but we are not his priority. Our issues and the things we need and care about can’t be his focus while he lives a faith that excludes the people who are struggling the most. I’ve heard the sermons and I know that the Pentecostal doctrine allows little room for separation between ideology and other aspects of your life.

Pentecostals take a literal, miracles-based approach to interpreting the New Testament. This is where speaking in tongues, being ‘slain’ in the spirit (falling to the ground), laying on hands, healing, and other acts which they perceive as invoking the Holy Spirit all come from. Pentecostals preach a prosperity gospel and expect that members will tithe not only ten percent of their wage (that’s before tax, by the way), but also make offerings above that. While they’re making those offerings, they believe that God will reward them for their faith, and for those high in the ranks of the church —in my experience, people who are white, attractive, and valuable to the church in some way — there are rewards. It wasn’t uncommon for people to give testimony about how they’d been struggling financially, but pushed themselves to increase their offering, believing that God would remove whatever financial hurdle they were facing. In these testimonies, God didn’t just meet them their needs, but rewarded them ‘a hundred, sixty, or thirty times what was sown’ (Matthew 13:8).

When I finally left the church, I realised that those giving testimony had usually been rewarded by the church or received gifts by wealthy members of the leadership: jobs, cars, wedding and house deposits were given to those people who would use those gifts in ways that made the church look good. House deposits went to those who would open their shiny, perfect lives up to small groups and Bible studies which were used to recruit new members. Jobs to those who had particular gifts for evangelising. Wedding money to attractive couples being groomed for leadership.

I was an overweight, depressed, white-passing Aboriginal woman with issues at home and at work, and it didn’t matter how much I sewed and believed. (I estimate I sewed at least a house deposit’s worth of offerings.) It didn’t matter how many unpaid roles I took on at the church, or how many groups I led, or how much I witnessed to other people. I was not godly enough to receive even tenfold of God’s promises.

It’s understanding the meaning behind Scott Morrison’s words that make me terrified for minority and marginalised communities in the face of his continuing prime ministership. Our black, uterus-owning, queer, elderly, immigrant, poor people are not the ‘right’ kind of people to receive the blessings that the Liberals are promising. If people don’t have jobs or money, that’s their lot. If they’re LGBTIQA+, that goes against the Bible. And if you go against the Bible you’re not getting into heaven, so what would be the point in trying to understand what you need and want out of this life?

To believe in religious freedom is to believe in it for all people, including those in power. Despite my own experiences, I don’t want to dictate what others believe. But if Scott Morrison’s faith is personal and separate to his leadership, then why invite the cameras into church? Why talk so publicly about your belief in miracles? Why would you ask your god to bless Australia? Scott Morrison is not the first religious prime minister of this country. However, the subtext of his words and the extremely public display of his faith makes the combination of his particular brand of religion with politics deeply unsettling.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that he will lead with grace and compassion that extends beyond the white, rich, and powerful. I hope that he stops asking God to bless Australia and starts listening, learning, and fixing. But until we have someone in power who can genuinely separate church and state – or, better yet, has no connection to any church – I think I’m right to be afraid.

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate.

• Thousands of worshippers gathered for the Hillsong conference in Sydney's north-west on Saturday
• It comes one day after government banned gatherings of more than 500 people to stop spread of COVID-19 
• Prime Minsiter Scott Morrison announced the ban on 'non essential' gatherings will be introduced on Monday 
• There is speculation restrictions were pushed back until after the weekend because of Hillsong conference
• Coronavirus symptoms: what are they and should you see a doctor?

By ZOE ZACZEK FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA

PUBLISHED: 17:17 AEDT, 14 March 2020 | UPDATED: 20:00 AEDT, 14 March 2020

Thousands of worshipers have gathered for the Hillsong conference in Sydney just one day after Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a ban on events with more than 500 people.

Mr Morrison announced on Friday the government would ban 'non essential' public gatherings of more than 500 people from Monday amid increased concerns about the spread of coronavirus.

But the decision has sparked controversy within the community, with some people accusing the evangelical Christian PM of delaying the ban until after the weekend to ensure the Hillsong Colour Conference would go ahead. 

There was also speculation the die-hard Cronulla Sharks fan put off the event restrictions to watch his NRL team take on the South Sydney Rabbitohs on Saturday evening. 

Read more:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8111417/Worshippers-gather-Sydney-Hillsong-conference-Scott-Morrison-introduced-ban-mass-events.html

Read from top.

See also:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-16/health-and-wealth-where-weve-gone-wrong-on-coronavirus/12058254

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31847

Rod Dreher is getting his holy knickers into a knot. His prob is about what another fundamentalist Christian believes… Yes, Eric Metaxas is talking crap, is writing crap and is thinking crap… He has been doing so many years. Meanwhile Rod Dreher is talking crap, is writing crap and is thinking crap… He has been doing so many years, also. Both are middle-aged conservative Christians with views that have been backdated to at last 542 AD. Thus the incongruity of the barney is totally irrelevant to the price of modern fish. It would be pathetic if it was not entertaining like a fight between a pair of clowns about the value of their chief idiot.

Before I get started here, let me say clearly that Eric Metaxas has been a friend for over 20 years. He is a dear man, very kind and sincere, and loves God with all his heart. Nothing I say here should be interpreted as a personal attack upon him. I am criticizing his words and his opinions, which, as a Christian and as a conservative, alarm me greatly. The fact that Eric is not a cynic, that I have every confidence that he 100 percent believes what he says, only intensifies the tragedy. I would prefer not to write about Eric’s views, out of respect for our friendship. But I cannot stand to see what is happening to what is broadly my tribe, without saying something. He is influential, and he speaks not only to a lot of people, but for them as well.

To start, and for readers who haven’t been following me: I am an Orthodox Christian and a political conservative (registered as an Independent). I did not vote for Joe Biden, and have never associated myself with Never Trump. I have praised Trump when he has done things of which I have approved, and I have criticized him when I thought he deserved it. I don’t “hate” Donald Trump, nor do I hate people who voted for him. I dread the Biden presidency, but I believe the man won the race. I think it’s possible that there was election fraud in some places in this big country of ours, but based on Trump’s performance in court since election day, I don’t believe that it is provable, if it existed at all.

In characterizing the election result, it is hard to be more lurid than Eric in this interview. He believes that Donald Trump won the election “by a landslide” (in fact, Biden won 7 million more votes than Trump, and even if Trump had won the Electoral College vote, it would have been close, not anything like a landslide).

“It’s like stealing the heart and soul of America. It’s like holding a rusty knife to the throat of Lady Liberty,” Eric says, of the election.

“You might as well spit on the grave of George Washington,” he says.

“This is evil,” he says. And: “It’s like somebody has been raped or murdered. … This is like that times a thousand.”

This. Is. Hysterical. But there’s more.

“This is trying to kill the American people. This is everything.” And he says to believe otherwise is listening to “the voice of the Devil.”

Think about that. An Evangelical broadcaster is saying that Donald Trump’s election loss is a thousand times worse than rape and murder, equivalent to the murder of a nation. And if you don’t believe it? You are demonized.

And then this:

I was ticked off the other day when he boosted Zmirak’s obnoxious accusation that I (he cites my previous book by name) and other conservatives who don’t endorse Stop The Steal are “servile” equivalent of Nazi collaborators. I tweeted about it, at Eric, asking him if he agreed. He responded thus:

Well, now Eric has said in his own words that anyone — even fellow Christian conservatives like, well, me — are “good Germans” if we don’t share his opinion and his vehemence. How the hell are we supposed to think when we have been likened to the kind of people who went along with a mass murderer who prepared the Holocaust and World War II?

Do you believe that, reader? Do you believe that people who may even have voted for Trump, but who do not think that the election was stolen from him, are no better than Nazi collaborators?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far, Trump is one for 50 in federal courts. Judges have found no evidence for the claims put forward of election fraud. Maybe there has been fraud, but in our system, you have to be able to prove it. Who knows, maybe it really happened somewhere, but no one can demonstrate it at this time. It is metaphysically possible. But we can’t operate on what might have happened somewhere, and what might one day be brought to light. (In their conversation, Kirk and Metaxas say that maybe if we pray hard enough, God will uncover fraud somewhere.) Courts, and our system, have to operate on the best evidence available. It’s just not there. Trump-appointed judges have been among those who have found this. Are they all in on the conspiracy too?

Well, here’s news: Eric Metaxas doesn’t care what the courts have said. In a clip that starts right here, he says,

Evidence, or the lack of it, does not matter. He is declaring as a matter of faith that Donald Trump won the election. How can you argue with that? You can’t. It is a statement of faith.

So, when he talks about doing “anything” he can to fight this thing that is a thousand times worse than rape and murder, what does he mean? Quote:

There is no way around it, and it grieves me to say it: Eric Metaxas is calling for violent bloodshed to defend Donald Trump’s presidency, and he doesn’t care that Trump’s lawyers have not been able to prove in court that Trump had the election stolen from him. He told Charlie Kirk that he is willing to kill or be killed for a political cause for which there is not enough evidence to advance a court case, even among friendly judges.

This is fanaticism. But according to Eric, to disagree with him is to be under the sway of the Devil. Actual quotes:

“This is sacred. … Every American should say I really don’t care what it takes, we will not let this happen in America.”

“The fact that Republicans would shrug, it’s just despicable, it’s very clarifying, and I just believe God is in this, what can I say?”

He knows because … he just knows, is all. God is in it, after all. It’s holy war. He says too:

“Everything’s at stake. America’s at stake.”

If you really believed that, then of course you would be willing to kill and be killed for the cause. My God.

Eric says that America is God’s instrument, one that he has used to spread “liberty” around the globe. The Christians of Iraq could not be reached for comment, most of them dead or displaced as the result of America’s unjustified invasion of that country, but what are facts to a Christian nationalist who just knows things. He says “I believe it is God’s will that we would continue to do that, at an increased level, for a long time… .”  Manifest destiny, I guess.

At this point in the interview, Kirk asks Metaxas — who has, recall, just called for fighting to the death to defend Trump’s sacred case — where he thinks Trump’s legal strategy stands. Know what Eric says?

I’m not kidding. Click on that link to see and hear it for yourself. He says that the courts are irrelevant, that America is in the crucible, that we have a fight to the death on our hands, and that anybody who disagrees is no better than Germans who stood by and let Hitler come to power … but he cannot give even one detail of the actual court cases, and is “thrilled” to be ignorant of the cause for which he is urging people to shed blood and die! 

And more: after all this rhetoric exerting people to regard this conflict as a holy war for the existence of America, and to be prepared to fight to the “last drop of blood” to prevail, he responds to Kirk’s remarks about a future of conflict like this (click here to hear it yourself):

The violence he has just spent the entire freaking interview encouraging from the Right! Do words not mean anything?!

There’s even more. Eric tells Kirk that, “People I know and trust well have heard from God that Trump will have a second term.” Says this doesn’t prove it, but “if these people heard from God, then it has to happen.” Says these people “have a track record.”

So he cannot give a single substantive reason why Trump should prevail, or how he might do that. People he trusts say that God told them so. Eric: “I know that sounds insane to people, but I’m at a point where I don’t care.”

Towards the end, Eric says that “part of the reason God has allowed this” — the election crisis — “is to wake up the church.” For politics? Not to inspire us Christians to repent of anything other than failing to be more politically engaged on behalf of Donald Trump? He goes on:

Because we can earn God’s favor by our deeds? Really?

Maybe God is doing something — just not what Trumpy Evangelicals want Him to do. He is surely exposing intellectual and theological rot: the kind that inspires Christian leaders to declare apocalypse, exhort believers to shed blood and prepare for martyrdom, and to denounce anyone who disagrees as devil-driven collaborators with history’s greatest evil — all for a cause that the leader cannot even begin to explain.

I was talking to my wife about this, and she got pretty upset (and has given me permission to share this story). She was a senior in high school — First Baptist Academy in Dallas — when Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush. She said that the adults in their circles had been encouraging students throughout the campaign to believe that if Bill Clinton was elected, it would be indescribably awful, but not to worry, because God would surely not let that happen. And yet, it happened. She said it’s hard to express the titanic sense of shock that she and other students had that day. This was not supposed to happen! God had failed!

My wife said that when Christian leaders talk like Eric is talking, they set people up to question their entire faith. If Joe Biden is sworn in, does that mean God has failed, or abandoned us? Or, if Christian authorities were wrong about Trump getting a second term, what else are they wrong about? Are they wrong about who Jesus is?

Words mean things!

I say all this as the author of a recent book, Live Not By Lies, that argues a soft form of totalitarianism is descending on American life. It is a bold, some would say alarmist, claim. But it is a claim that I spend four chapters explaining and defending. I could be wrong about it. Maybe my facts are wrong, or my logic is faulty. It is testable; I lay it all out. I would be very, very happy to be proven wrong. I can tell you exactly why I believe that I’m correct, and I make a case for it. I don’t just assert it because God told me so. If I did, you would be justified in rolling your eyes and moving on.

It’s fair to ask: if I really do believe that a form of totalitarianism is emerging in American life, why am I not willing to fight to the death to defend the country from it?

The answer has to do with the answer a pro-lifer would give when asked why, if he really believes that abortion is a form of homicide, he is not blowing up abortion clinics and stopping at nothing to kill abortion doctors?

Before one takes violent action, one has to be reasonably confident of success. Otherwise it could mean shedding blood in vain. It might — might — be justifiable if that violence could stop unambiguously evil acts. But what if the violence not only stood very little chance of succeeding, but also risked causing things to be worse? Regarding soft totalitarianism, as I explain in the book, we are not looking at something that is Stalinism 2.0; rather, this is going to be more like Huxley’s Brave New World combined with Communist China. Is it worth mass killing to prevent a system that requires people to affirm their loyalty to an ideological creed (broadly speaking, wokeness) in order to get into college, to hold many jobs, and to participate fully in the economy? At this point, I would say no — but that does not mean that we will not be facing a form of totalitarianism, a word that refers to any system in which politics conquers every aspect of life.

Second, violence is only justified when all legal, peaceful forms of resistance have been exhausted. That is not remotely the case in the US, with regard either to abortion or soft totalitarianism. The patient activism and witness of the pro-life movement has not overturned Roe yet, but we are much closer than at any point since 1973. And if it is overturned, that only means the issue goes back to each state. It only moves the line of battle. Victory will never be total, because in a democracy, you have to move hearts and minds. The fact that the abortion rate is declining speaks to the success pro-lifers have had in doing just that, despite the fact that abortion remains legal.

Similarly, political conservatives have barely begun to fight against soft totalitarianism. They might not ever do it. Half the Senate is Republican, but do you see Republicans fighting against the radical racialism that is conquering institutions, or the extreme gender ideology that is doing the same? No, they hardly ever do. Do you see them in any number give speeches about the importance of defending religious liberty? Nope. Trump did some good things on these fronts as president, but did he make any of it a priority? No, he did not.

Why not? One major reason is that wealthy elites, as well as middle-class suburban professionals, have embraced wokeness. In his Kirk interview, Metaxas talks as if this is all something imposed on the masses by a tiny number of liberal elites — something that was the standard Evangelical view of the 1980s and 1990s. Well, guess what? Managerial elites and the professional classes have already accepted wokeness. This is their ideology now. It is absurd in 2020 to think that the problem can be solved by electing more Republicans. If that were true, why didn’t having Trump in the White House and the Republicans in charge of Congress for the first two years of the president’s term turn the tide? Aside from the fact that these issues really don’t matter to Republicans — not even to Donald Trump — the cause of this crisis is not primarily political, but cultural.

Far too many conservatives live in a bubble, and fail to see that Big Business is as much if not more of an enemy than Big Government. Conservatives grouse about how wokeness has overtaken university culture, but is this something that can be solved by politics alone? To their credit, Trump’s administration has done good things on that front (e.g., dialing back the Title IX overreach from the Obama years). But even if Trump were much more popular than he ever was, and even if he were a brilliant political tactician (which he isn’t), he would not have been able to make a decisive difference.

It has to do with the nature of the totalitarianism. Multiple people with whom I spoke in the former Soviet bloc, interviewing them for Live Not By Lies, told me that Communism was easier to deal with in one key aspect: it was easy to see the lines between good and evil then. Now, it’s easy for them to sense that something very bad is happening, something that has similarities to what they lived with in their youth, but it’s far less cut and dried than Marxism-Leninism. I talk about all this in the book — how unlike Communism, this is a therapeutic form of totalitarianism, one that is intimately bound up with consumerism.

The soft-totalitarian cultural revolution is not coming to America with the Red Army. You can’t fight it like the Hungarians fought the Soviets in 1956, or the Czechs fought them in 1968. But coming it is, and fight it we must.

Christian nationalists who hold a naive, Reagan-era understanding of the world are part of the problem. In his interview, Metaxas talked about how a Trump-led America is good for the whole world, because it makes us all “freer”. If you talk to the people of the former Soviet bloc, they don’t see America like that (though they used to). Now they regard America — especially our Woke Capitalism — as the source of some of their problems. Gender ideology — it comes from America. In Poland, I talked to Christians who were having to decide between their consciences and their jobs, because the Polish branch of American multinationals for which they worked were forcing them all to celebrate LGBT Pride in the workplace. This is what America means now to a lot of those people who used to regard us as a friend. Nationalist Evangelicals like Metaxas are living in a world that is forty years out of date. The unquestioned radical individualism of contemporary American life is not a simple virtue, but has become our undoing — and many people overseas recognize this.

I regard myself as a nationalist too (as opposed to globalist), but I do not consider America to be an unambiguous force for good in the world. One of the things I liked about Donald Trump was his stated belief that America should stop it with these unnecessary foreign wars. When I hear Evangelicals like Metaxas trotting out that shopworn rhetoric about America being a force for spreading “freedom” around the globe, and how we have to ramp that up again, I hear the voice of George W. Bush in his Second Inaugural Address, and I wonder if they even paid the slightest attention to what Trump has been saying.

Back to the point: if we were going to take radical action against this coming soft totalitarianism, what would we have to do? Blow up people’s Alexas, and seize people’s smartphones and throw them in the lake. That’s because the new totalitarianism is intimately woven into the technology that we have all accepted. How far do you think a presidential candidate would get in this country by promising to ban Alexas and the technology that powers them (also, Siri)? I would vote for him, but I think I would be a tiny minority. The point is that we have become the kind of people who welcome this stuff, not because we aspire to live under totalitarian domination, but because it makes life easier and more fun. The Christians of Russia and the Soviet bloc who stood up to hard totalitarianism all told me, for Live Not By Lies, that the only way Christians in the West are going to be able to mount a resistance to what’s coming is if we are prepared to suffer.

See this man below? His name is Yuri Sipko, and for years he was the leader of Russia’s Baptists. This photo was taken in 2019 on the streets of Moscow:

I had just spent two hours interviewing him in a coffee shop. Here, from my book, is part of what he told me:

“Many of us didn’t even have Bibles. Just to be able to find yourself in a situation where there was a group, and one person was reading the Bible to others, this was the greatest motivation,” Sipko says. “This was our little niche of freedom. Whether you were at work in the factory on the street or anywhere else, everything was godless.”

Today, it is easy to obtain a Bible in Russia, easy to meet for worship services, and easy to find religious teaching on the internet. Yet something among contemporary Christians has been lost, the old pastor says— something that was held dear by those small groups.

Sipko goes on:

Christianity has become a secondary foundation in people’s lives, not the main foundation. Now it’s all about career, material success, and one’s standing in society. In these small groups, when people were meeting back then, the center was Christ, and his word that was being read, and being interpreted as applicable to your own life. What am I supposed to do as a Christian? What am I doing as a Christian? I, together with my brothers, was checking my own Christianity.

Small groups not only provided accountability, he says, but also gave believers a tangible connection to the larger Body of Christ. “This was so wonderful. This was true Christianity”

Here is a man who lived through Stalinism, and suffered greatly — and he’s saying that in a Russia that is much more free, and much wealthier, the young Evangelicals who want to be faithful are having to turn their backs on career, material success, and status. He went on:

Sipko is a Russian, but if he were an American, it is impossible that he would list “the second term of Donald J. Trump” as one of those values. I suppose Metaxas would denounce him as no better than a “good German.”

I suppose that line offends Eric, in a “how dare you” way, but what else is one supposed to conclude by his extremely rash rhetoric slandering everyone who does not share a belief that he is too ignorant — proudly ignorant! — to be able to defend with facts or logic when asked? How many American Christians who have endorsed the “Stop The Steal” campaign, and who find their blood heated by this kind of talk, would be willing to do what the young Russian Baptists are doing, and live like their ancestors did, for the sake of preserving the faith? These are prepared to shoot their neighbors for the sake of Donald Trump, but in real life, they wouldn’t even shoot their television.

All this really upsets me, as you can tell. If, God forbid, we were to have a civil war in America, then it should only be a last resort, after every other bloodless option has been tried, and should be something undertaken only for the gravest reasons. This is not a game. There are real and demonstrable reasons to be concerned, even afraid, about where post-Christian American society is headed — believe me, I’m the last one you have to convince of that! — but the idea that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump is not one of them. It is shameful that a Christian with a wide broadcast audience would stoke the apocalyptic fears of people, and urge them to “fight to the death, to the last drop of blood” — then act like violence is only something that can come from “lunatics” of the Left.

We have seen this year how violent the Left is prepared to be, but mark my words: if radical Christians shoot people or commit some other violent act in defense of Trump, Eric Metaxas and those who talk like him will have blood on their hands.

Finally, in my book, I talk about how Hannah Arendt said that one of the signs of a pre-totalitarian society is one in which people stop believing in the truth, and instead easily accept any claim, however unsubstantiated and preposterous, that satisfies them emotionally. I gave examples of how the woke Left does exactly that. I finished the final manuscript in March. But if I were writing it today, I would mention the way so many of my fellow conservatives have shown themselves lately to be no better than the Left.

In the past on this blog, I have called out Prof. Tommy Curry, a leftist race radical who used to teach at Texas A&M, but whose hysterical broadcast and print rhetoric came very, very close to justifying violence against whites to achieve social justice. When I criticized him in this post and in others, some leftists, including a journalist at the Chronicle of Higher Education, faulted me for having the gall to hold Curry responsible for his words. Well, the same standard has to apply to conservatives. Many on the activist Left are destroying this country, its institutions, and the possibility of communal peace, with their crackpot ideology, deranged lies and slanders. But God help us, so are some on the Right, including the Christian Right.

I’ll leave you with this, from an e-mail that just came in as I was finishing this post. The author identifies himself as an Evangelical “at the tail end of Gen X.” He wrote me about an earlier post about why young people are leaving the faith. He writes:

The number is not that high, but it’s still a four-alarm crisis. If you have been to Europe, which is a religious desert, you have seen the future of America. Where is the concern about that from the churches? We are literally talking about the future not of Donald Trump’s political career or of the United States of America, but of the eternal lives of our children and descendants. Who among Christian conservatives is saying that we should be prepared to struggle to the death to keep our children and grandchildren faithful to Jesus Christ? Politicians come and go, but in the life of the church, it really is true that if we don’t get our young people in the doors, we go over a cliff, and we aren’t coming back.

From a Christian point of view, this really is an existential crisis. It’s more important than election fraud. It’s more important than social justice. It’s more important than anything else. This Christian indifference is trying to kill the church. It’s everything. But far too few Christians act like it. It’s more fun to work ourselves into frenzies about the princes of the earth, and in so doing, accelerate the collapse of the church itself.

QAnon conspiracy theories have burrowed so deeply into American churches that pastors are expressing alarm — and a new poll shows the bogus teachings have become as widespread as some denominations.

Why it matters: The problem with misinformation and disinformation is that people — lots of people — believe it. And they don't believe reality coming from the media and even their ministers.

Read more: https://news.yahoo.com/qanon-conspiracy-theories-infect-american-140528718.html

Hello? anyone there between those two ears? Misinformation and disinformation have been the staple of religions since day dot. They make you believe! So the churches in the USA and throughout the world, especially the evangelical churches can easily become attractors for the loonies of Qanon... Here they come, but one atheist Gus has to ask who are the looniest: Qanon or the evangelicals? Okay:

(OPINION) Having reached the vice president's chair in the U.S. Senate, the self-proclaimed QAnon shaman, UFO expert and metaphysical healer removed his coyote-skin and buffalo horns headdress and announced, with a megaphone, that it was time to pray.

"Thank you, Heavenly Father … for this opportunity to stand up for our God-given inalienable rights," proclaimed Jake "Yellowstone Wolf" Angeli (born Jacob Chansley), his face painted red, white and blue and his torso tattooed with Norse symbols that his critics link to the extreme right.

“Thank you, divine, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent Creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love," he added, in a prayer captured on video by correspondent working for The New Yorker. "Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ. …

"Thank you, divine Creator God for surrounding and filling us with the divine, omnipresent white light of love and protection, of peace and harmony. Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists and the traitors within our government."

Many phrases in this rambling prayer would sound familiar to worshippers in ordinary churches across America, said Joe Carter, an editor with The Gospel Coalition and a pastor with McLean Bible Church near Washington, D.C. But the prayer also included strange twists and turns that betrayed some extreme influences and agendas.

"This is a man who has described himself as pagan, as an ordained minister, in fact," said Carter, reached by telephone. "The alt-right has always included some pagan influences. But now it's obvious that leaders with QAnon and other conspiracy theorists have learned that if they toss in some Christian imagery, then they'll really expand their base and their potential reach 100-fold."

Read more:

https://religionunplugged.com/news/2021/2/8/irj30763blge67kgyej9i67401d51r

You are allowed to laugh... Meanwhile Metaxas (see him at top) admitted he punched an anti-Trump protestor...

So what is this doing here? Ah well, our PM is a believer in the Original Sin...:

Over the course of three hours, senators also grilled Mr Anderson about his decision last week to delay the broadcast of a Four Corners episode addressing the ties between Prime Minister Scott Morrison and a QAnon conspiracy theorist.

He confirmed ABC news director Gaven Morris had received calls from the Prime Minister’s office about the story, but dismissed suggestions the program had been derailed as a result of government pressure. Instead, his decision was based on the view the program required more work.

“I believe there’s been no intervention by anyone of the government or anyone else to suggest that that program should not go to air,” Mr Anderson told the hearing.

He said he had received a written response addressing his concerns from the reporting team, led by Milligan, which he had yet to review.

“I didn’t pull the story. The story is underway. It very well may go to air,” he said.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison publicly criticised Four Corners last week for “poor form” by attempting to explore his connections to QAnon supporter, Tim Stewart, who has been known to the Morrison family for years. Mr Morrison said it was “deeply offensive” to suggest he had any association with the QAnon movement.

The QAnon conspiracy theory centres on discredited claims about an international paedophile ring involving politicians and celebrities.

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/discrepancy-over-abc-settlement-will-christian-porter-be-paid-20210607-p57yw2.html

And let's revisit the original Guardian unveil:

QAnon figure BurnedSpy, whose wife works on the prime minister’s staff, has propagated bizarre theories about Alexander Downer and Julie Bishop...

A significant Australian proponent of the QAnon conspiracy theory is a family friend of Scott Morrison, and his wife is on the prime minister’s staff.

The sprawling, disjointed and incoherent QAnon conspiracy variously claims that Donald Trump is leading a behind-the-scenes fight against a shadowy deep state, that powerful forces are hiding and protecting satanic paedophile rings, and that a secretive individual named Q leaves clues for his followers to decipher on internet forums.

The FBI has previously warned that QAnon could act as a potential motivator for “domestic extremists” and last year Reddit banned one of its main QAnon threads for repeated violations of its content policy, warning it would not tolerate content “that incites violence, disseminates personal information, or harasses” users.

In Australia, one of the more significant QAnon figures tweets under the handle @BurnedSpy34 and has amassed 21,000 Twitter followers in just over a year [at 6 October 2019]. BurnedSpy tweets daily QAnon material, including bizarre theories about Alexander Downer and Julie Bishop.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/05/qanon-conspiracy-theorist-friends-australian-prime-minister-scott-morrison

I am still laughing... And we are told discreetly that @BurnedSpy34's wife may not subscribe to her husband theories... Don't I know about this!

Ahahahahahahahahahahhhhhhh!!!!! Can't wait for the four corners episode...

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