Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Book of Daniel has not outlived its usefulness




 by
 

Damien F. Mackey

  

 

Part One:

Communists consider Book of Daniel “dangerous”

 

 


“The Lord heard [Susanna’s] prayer. As she was being led to execution,

God stirred up the holy spirit of a young boy named Daniel, and he cried aloud:

‘I am innocent of this woman’s blood’.”

Daniel 13:44-46

 

 

 

The prophet Daniel’s bold defiance of King Nebuchadnezzar and his corrupt régime finds its modern parallel in the courage and resoluteness of Christians today in communist China.

The communists consider the Book of Daniel to be most dangerous:

 

“In Liushi church a closed circuit television camera hangs from the ceiling, directly in front of the lectern.

"They want the pastor to preach in a Communist way. They want to train people to practice in a Communist way," said the house-church preacher, who said state churches often shunned potentially subversive sections of the Bible. The Old Testament book in which the exiled Daniel refuses to obey orders to worship the king rather than his own god is seen as "very dangerous", the preacher added”.


 

According to this same article:

 

China on course to become 'world's most Christian nation' within 15 years


 


The number of Christians in Communist China is growing so steadily that it by 2030 it could have more churchgoers than America


 


....

By Tom Phillips, Liushi, Zhejiang province

2:00PM BST 19 Apr 2014

 

It is said to be China's biggest church and on Easter Sunday thousands of worshippers will flock to this Asian mega-temple to pledge their allegiance – not to the Communist Party, but to the Cross.

The 5,000-capacity Liushi church, which boasts more than twice as many seats as Westminster Abbey and a 206ft crucifix that can be seen for miles around, opened last year with one theologian declaring it a "miracle that such a small town was able to build such a grand church".

 

The £8 million building is also one of the most visible symbols of Communist China's breakneck conversion as it evolves into one of the largest Christian congregations on earth.

 

"It is a wonderful thing to be a follower of Jesus Christ. It gives us great confidence," beamed Jin Hongxin, a 40-year-old visitor who was admiring the golden cross above Liushi's altar in the lead up to Holy Week.

 

"If everyone in China believed in Jesus then we would have no more need for police stations. There would be no more bad people and therefore no more crime," she added.

 

....

Officially, the People's Republic of China is an atheist country but that is changing fast as many of its 1.3 billion citizens seek meaning and spiritual comfort that neither communism nor capitalism seem to have supplied.

 

Christian congregations in particular have skyrocketed since churches began reopening when Chairman Mao's death in 1976 signalled the end of the Cultural Revolution.

 

Less than four decades later, some believe China is now poised to become not just the world's number one economy but also its most numerous Christian nation.

 

"By my calculations China is destined to become the largest Christian country in the world very soon," said Fenggang Yang, a professor of sociology at Purdue University and author of Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule.

 

"It is going to be less than a generation. Not many people are prepared for this dramatic change."

 

China's Protestant community, which had just one million members in 1949, has already overtaken those of countries more commonly associated with an evangelical boom. In 2010 there were more than 58 million Protestants in China compared to 40 million in Brazil and 36 million in South Africa, according to the Pew Research Centre's Forum on Religion and Public Life.

 

Prof Yang, a leading expert on religion in China, believes that number will swell to around 160 million by 2025.

That would likely put China ahead even of the United States, which had around 159 million Protestants in 2010 but whose congregations are in decline.

 

By 2030, China's total Christian population, including Catholics, would exceed 247 million, placing it above Mexico, Brazil and the United States as the largest Christian congregation in the world, he predicted.

 

"Mao thought he could eliminate religion. He thought he had accomplished this," Prof Yang said. "It's ironic – they didn't. They actually failed completely."

 

Like many Chinese churches, the church in the town of Liushi, 200 miles south of Shanghai in Zhejiang province, has had a turbulent history.

 

It was founded in 1886 after William Edward Soothill, a Yorkshire-born missionary and future Oxford University professor, began evangelising local communities.

 

But by the late 1950s, as the region was engulfed by Mao's violent anti-Christian campaigns, it was forced to close.

 

Liushi remained shut throughout the decade of the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, as places of worship were destroyed across the country.

 

Since it reopened in 1978 its congregation has gone from strength to strength as part of China's officially sanctioned Christian church – along with thousands of others that have accepted Communist Party oversight in return for being allowed to worship.

Today it has 2,600 regular churchgoers and holds up to 70 baptisms each year, according to Shi Xiaoli, its 27-year-old preacher. The parish's revival reached a crescendo last year with the opening of its new 1,500ft mega-church, reputedly the biggest in mainland China.

 

"Our old church was small and hard to find," said Ms Shi. "There wasn't room in the old building for all the followers, especially at Christmas and at Easter. The new one is big and eye-catching."

 

The Liushi church is not alone. From Yunnan province in China's balmy southwest to Liaoning in its industrial northeast, congregations are booming and more Chinese are thought to attend Sunday services each week than do Christians across the whole of Europe.

 

A recent study found that online searches for the words "Christian Congregation" and "Jesus" far outnumbered those for "The Communist Party" and "Xi Jinping", China's president.

 

Among China's Protestants are also many millions who worship at illegal underground "house churches", which hold unsupervised services – often in people's homes – in an attempt to evade the prying eyes of the Communist Party.

 

Such churches are mostly behind China's embryonic missionary movement – a reversal of roles after the country was for centuries the target of foreign missionaries. Now it is starting to send its own missionaries abroad, notably into North Korea, in search of souls.

 

"We want to help and it is easier for us than for British, South Korean or American missionaries," said one underground church leader in north China who asked not to be named.

 

The new spread of Christianity has the Communist Party scratching its head.

"The child suddenly grew up and the parents don't know how to deal with the adult," the preacher, who is from China's illegal house-church movement, said.

 

Some officials argue that religious groups can provide social services the government cannot, while simultaneously helping reverse a growing moral crisis in a land where cash, not Communism, has now become king.

 

They appear to agree with David Cameron, the British prime minister, who said last week that Christianity could help boost Britain's "spiritual, physical and moral" state.

 

Ms Shi, Liushi's preacher, who is careful to describe her church as "patriotic", said: "We have two motivations: one is our gospel mission and the other is serving society. Christianity can also play a role in maintaining peace and stability in society. Without God, people can do as they please."

 

Yet others within China's leadership worry about how the religious landscape might shape its political future, and its possible impact on the Communist Party's grip on power, despite the clause in the country's 1982 constitution that guarantees citizens the right to engage in "normal religious activities".

 

As a result, a close watch is still kept on churchgoers, and preachers are routinely monitored to ensure their sermons do not diverge from what the Party considers acceptable.

....

Such fears may not be entirely unwarranted. Christians' growing power was on show earlier this month when thousands flocked to defend a church in Wenzhou, a city known as the "Jerusalem of the East", after government threats to demolish it. Faced with the congregation's very public show of resistance, officials appear to have backed away from their plans, negotiating a compromise with church leaders.

"They do not trust the church, but they have to tolerate or accept it because the growth is there," said the church leader. "The number of Christians is growing – they cannot fight it. They do not want the 70 million Christians to be their enemy."

 

The underground leader church leader said many government officials viewed religion as "a sickness" that needed curing, and Prof Yang agreed there was a potential threat.

The Communist Party was "still not sure if Christianity would become an opposition political force" and feared it could be used by "Western forces to overthrow the Communist political system", he said.

 

Churches were likely to face an increasingly "intense" struggle over coming decade as the Communist Party sought to stifle Christianity's rise, he predicted.

"There are people in the government who are trying to control the church. I think they are making the last attempt to do that." ....

 

 

Part Two:

Andrew Bolt’s defence of Cardinal Pell is Daniel-like

 

 


“Not one witness, nothing.” Bolt said the judge listed “an astonishing number of reasons to doubt Pell’s accuser” including assault dates changing from 1997 to 1996 and the two boys drinking stolen bottles of “a sweet red” wine when Pell actually “used white wine for

health reasons” that had been locked away.

 

 

 

 

Last night (21st August 2019) I watched on Sky News TV Andrew Bolt’s seismic reaction to the Melbourne Supreme Court’s rejection of George Cardinal Pell’s appeal of his guilty sentence to child sex offences, and then read about it again this morning (22nd August) in Bolt’s article, “‘Absurdly high hurdle’ was set for Pell”, in Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph.

Bolt’s recounting of certain discrepancies in the details of the case, most notably those concerning year dates and the colour of the wine that the choir boys drank, reminded me of young Daniel’s pointing to glaring contradictions in the case of the convicted Susanna.

 


Daniel’s methodology was to have the pair of accusing elders separated in order to show up the contradictions (vv. 51-62):

 

.... ‘Separate these two far from one another, and I will examine them’.

After they were separated from each other, he called one of them and said: ‘How you have grown evil with age! Now have your past sins come to term: passing unjust sentences, condemning the innocent, and freeing the guilty, although the Lord says, ‘The innocent and the just you shall not put to death.’ Now, then, if you were a witness, tell me under what tree you saw them together’. ‘Under a mastic tree’, he answered. ‘Your fine lie has cost you your head’, said Daniel; ‘for the angel of God has already received the sentence from God and shall split you in two’. Putting him to one side, he ordered the other one to be brought. ‘Offspring of Canaan, not of Judah’, Daniel said to him, ‘beauty has seduced you, lust has perverted your heart. This is how you acted with the daughters of Israel, and in their fear they yielded to you; but a daughter of Judah did not tolerate your lawlessness. Now, then, tell me under what tree you surprised them together’. ‘Under an oak’, he said. ‘Your fine lie has cost you also your head’, said Daniel; ‘for the angel of God waits with a sword to cut you in two so as to destroy you both’.

The whole assembly cried aloud, blessing God who saves those who hope in him. They rose up against the two old men, for by their own words Daniel had convicted them of bearing false witness. They condemned them to the fate they had planned for their neighbor: in accordance with the law of Moses they put them to death. Thus was innocent blood spared that day. ....

 


 

 ‘He looks grim’: Andrew Bolt says the ‘outvoted’ judge in George Pell’s appeal ‘focused on evidence’

 

Columnist Andrew Bolt has again aired his shock that George Pell has returned to jail based on child abuse claims with “not one witness”.

 

Sarah McPhee

news.com.auAugust 21, 20198:47pm

 

'Absurdly high hurdle' was set for Pell: Andrew Bolt

 

Sky News host Andrew Bolt notes 'there were no tears for Pell' after he lost his appeal against his conviction for abusing two 13-year-old choir boys two decades ago. On Wednesday the Victorian Court of Appeal upheld George Pell's conviction of child sex offences. ....

 

Andrew Bolt is ‘shocked, just shocked’ that George Pell will remain behind bars after his convictions were upheld by a 2-1 majority judgment in Victoria’s Court of Appeal.....

 

Controversial columnist Andrew Bolt said he was shocked and astonished that George Pell will remain behind bars “on someone’s unsupported word”.

 

Opening Wednesday night’s episode of The Bolt Report, the Sky News broadcaster delivered an impassioned response to the earlier day’s events.

 

Victoria’s Court of Appeal upheld Pell’s convictions for child sexual abuse by a 2-1 majority.

 

Bolt asked viewers to turn their eyes to Justice Mark Weinberg, who was captured on a live stream from the courtroom as the disgraced cardinal’s appeal was dismissed.

 

“Take a look at the judge on the right, sitting there looking grim,” Bolt said.

“If you think he looks grim, maybe that’s because he was outvoted.

“He does think Pell was jailed unfairly.”

 

Pell was convicted in December and later jailed for five charges relating to the rape of a 13-year-old choirboy and sexual assault of another boy at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in 1996.

 

One of Pell’s victims died in 2014 but the other gave evidence at trial.

 

“Having reviewed the whole of the evidence, two of the judges of the Court of Appeal — Justice (Chris) Maxwell, President of the Court of Appeal and I — have decided that it was open to the jury to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Cardinal Pell was guilty of the offences charged,” Chief Justice Ann Ferguson said, reading from a summary of the judgment.

“Justice Maxwell and I accepted the prosecution submission that the complainant was a very compelling witness, was clearly not a liar, was not a fantasist and was a witness of truth.”

 

Justice Weinberg’s dissenting judgment, however, comprised more than 200 of the 325 pages.

Bolt said the judge “instead focused on the evidence” and listed “improbabilities” within the victim’s testimony at length.

“One thing that struck Justice Weinberg very strongly is, he said, that this is a case that depends entirely on the claim of Pell’s accuser being accepted beyond reasonable doubt,” Bolt said.

“Even though this is without there being any independent support for it. Not one witness, nothing.”

 

Bolt said the judge listed “an astonishing number of reasons to doubt Pell’s accuser” including assault dates changing from 1997 to 1996 and the two boys drinking stolen bottles of “a sweet red” wine when Pell actually “used white wine for health reasons” that had been locked away.

“(Justice) Weinberg repeated there was no independent support for the complainant’s account,” Bolt said. “So, how could you convict a man of that? How?” ....

 




Whilst George Cardinal Pell is who he is, Susanna and her husband, Joakim, may have biblical alter egos. See e.g. my series:

 


“And Mordecai the Jew was next in rank to King Ahasuerus. He was a man held in respect among the Jews, esteemed by thousands of his brothers, a man who sought the good of his people and cared for the welfare of his entire race”. Esther... more






Commentators have picked up some striking likenesses between the story of Susanna (in the Book of Daniel) and the drama surrounding Queen Esther.




Susanna, living as she did during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews, would seem to have been far too early for her - according to conventional estimations - to be identifiable as Queen Esther, supposedly living deeply into Persian... more



My conclusion in this series has been that the Susanna in Daniel became Queen Esther. But this conclusion now presents us with three names: Susanna, Hadassah and Esther, since, as we are informed (Esther 2:7): “… Hadassah … was also... more


 



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Sunday, August 18, 2019

Pope at Angelus: Fire of God’s love burns in charity











came_to_bring_fire_to_earth

At the Angelus prayer on Sunday, Pope Francis reminds us that Jesus brought the fire of God’s love upon earth, to overcome apathy and open our hearts to the needs of others.


By Devin Watkins




Pope Francis reflected on the day’s Gospel (Lk 12:49-33), in which Jesus tells his disciples that the time has come to make a decisive choice in favor of the Gospel.
This choice, said the Pope, cannot be postponed, as Jesus’ image of the fire shows.
“I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” Jesus tells his disciples.
“These words are intended to help the disciples abandon every attitude of laziness, apathy, indifference, and closure so as to welcome the fire of God's love,” the Holy Father said.
That fire kindles life and saves humanity. By spreading God’s limitless love throughout the world, he said, we are recognized as Jesus’ true disciples.

Fire overcomes divisions

Pope Francis said the Christian witness to the Gospel is like a beneficial fire, “overcoming every division among individuals, social categories, peoples, and nations.”
“It burns all forms of particularism and keeps charity open to all,” he said, adding that it has “a single preference: that for the poorest and the excluded.”
The fire of God’s love “envelops our entire existence and requires a willingness to serve our neighbor.”
Listen to our report

Fire burns away selfishness

The Holy Father recalled the many young people who volunteer their free time to serve the sick, the poor, and people with disabilities.
He said living according to the Gospel requires Christians to meet ever-changing needs with new charitable initiatives.
“Thus, the Gospel truly manifests itself as the fire that saves,” he said, adding that it “changes the world starting from the change that takes place in each person’s heart.”

Fire breaks illusions

Pope Francis said this saving fire is the key to understanding Jesus’ difficult statement that he has come to establish division and not peace on earth.
“He came to ‘separate with fire’ good from evil, the just from the unjust,” he said. “In this sense he came to ‘divide’, to stir up ‘crisis’ - but in a healthy way – in the lives of his disciples”.
The Pope said this purifying crisis breaks the facile illusion that we can combine the Christian life with all types of compromises, religious practices, and hateful attitudes.


Fire of God’s love purifies our love

“It is a question of not living hypocritically,” he noted, “but of being willing to pay the price of choices consistent with the Gospel.”
Though we call ourselves Christians, said Pope Francis, we must “be Christians in concrete situations, witnessing to the Gospel, which is essentially love for God and for our brothers and sisters.”
Pope Francis concluded his Angelus address with a prayer to Mary, asking that we “allow ourselves to be purified of the fire brought by Jesus, in order to spread it through our lives and through decisive, courageous choices.”








https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-08/pope-francis-angelus-gods-love-enflames-earth.html
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Sunday, August 11, 2019

Yale Uni. professor Doctor David Gelernter renounces Darwinism


darwin-pigeon
 

 
"My argument is with people who dismiss intelligent design without considering, it seems to me — it's widely dismissed in my world of academia as some sort of theological put up job — it's an absolutely serious scientific argument…. In fact it's the first and most obvious and intuitive one that comes to mind. It's got to be dealt with intellectually".
Dr. David Gelernter
  
 
 
 
 
Renowned Yale Professor
Quits Darwin
 
by Stephen Wynne  •  ChurchMilitant.com  •  August 8, 2019                                                      
 
Dr. David Gelernter: Darwinism can't explain origin of species
 
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (ChurchMilitant.com) - Famed Yale University computer science professor Dr. David Gelernter has renounced Darwinism.
In a column for the spring edition of the Claremont Review of Books, Gelernter announced that he is no longer a disciple of Darwin, saying the English naturalist's theory has been disproven.

"Darwinian evolution is a brilliant and beautiful scientific theory," he wrote. "Once it was a daring guess. Today it is basic to the credo that defines the modern worldview."
"Accepting the theory as settled truth ... certifies that you are devoutly orthodox in your scientific views; which in turn is an essential first step towards being taken seriously in any part of modern intellectual life," he added. "But what if Darwin was wrong?"In his seminal work The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin proposed that all life forms have descended from a common ancestor, suggesting that over time, random variation coupled with natural selection gives rise to entirely new species.
But, Gelernter wrote, "The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain."
"Darwin successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances: changes to fur density or wing style or beak shape," he noted. "Yet there are many reasons to doubt whether he can answer the hard questions and explain the big picture — not the fine-tuning of existing species but the emergence of new ones."
Dr. Stephen Meyer A key problem for Darwinism, Gelernter said, is the Cambrian explosion. The fossil record reveals that "a striking variety of new organisms — including the first-ever animals — pop up suddenly in the fossil record over a mere 70-odd million years," which contradicts Darwin's assumption that "new life forms evolve gradually from old ones in a constantly branching, spreading tree of life."
Chief among the flaws undermining Darwinism, he wrote, is molecular biology, which in recent decades has demonstrated that random mutation plus natural selection cannot give rise to new, more complex species.
Gelernter credited three books for his shift in understanding: Dr. Stephen Meyer's Darwin's Doubt (2013), Dr. David Berlinski's The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays (2009) and David Klinghoffer's Debating Darwin's Doubt (2015).
"These three form a fateful battle group that most people would rather ignore," he wrote.
Gelernter singled out Meyer's work as especially praiseworthy: "Meyer ... disassembles the theory of evolution piece by piece. Darwin's Doubt is one of the most important books in a generation. Few open-minded people will finish it with their faith in Darwin intact."
 
Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but the basis of a worldview, and an emergency replacement religion for the many troubled souls who need one. ….
 
Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at Seattle-based think tank the Discovery Institute, is an advocate of a replacement theory, intelligent design (ID).

Biological life, ID proponents argue, is not the result of blind, undirected evolutionary processes, but the product of design by an intelligent entity.

Many adherents are religious. But, as Gelernter observed, "Intelligent design as Meyer explains it never uses religious arguments, draws religious conclusions, or refers to religion in any way."

Still, as ID has grown as a theoretical alternative to Darwinism, it has been savaged as a pseudo-scientific appeal to religion by committed Darwinists within the scientific establishment. This, Gelernter pointed out, is because Darwinism serves as their de facto faith:
 
The religion is all on the other side. Meyer and other proponents of I.D. are the dispassionate intellectuals making orderly scientific arguments. Some I.D.-haters have shown themselves willing to use any argument — fair or not, true or not, ad hominem or not — to keep this dangerous idea locked in a box forever. They remind us of the extent to which Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but the basis of a worldview, and an emergency replacement religion for the many troubled souls who need one.
Critics have long argued that Darwinism is atheistic philosophy disguised as science. Since Darwin's day, they note, it has been used to reject Christian orthodoxy and advance materialism, the view that human beings are merely the accidental results of unguided natural processes (as opposed to being purposefully created by God), and that the human mind is the only — and therefore, the supreme — consciousness that exists.
I am attacking their religion and I don't blame them for being all head up, it is a big issue for them. ….
 
In a 1997 article for The New York Review of Books, leading evolutionist and atheist Dr. Richard C. Lewontin testified to the fact that materialists are committed to Darwinism, in spite of its myriad inconsistencies and flaws, because they are committed to the denial of God.
 
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori [pre-existing] adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
 
Gelernter worries that materialists' philosophical/religious commitment to Darwinism is precluding genuine scientific inquiry. In an interview with Stanford University's Hoover Institution last month, he expounded on this concern.

"My argument is with people who dismiss intelligent design without considering, it seems to me — it's widely dismissed in my world of academia as some sort of theological put up job — it's an absolutely serious scientific argument," he said. "In fact it's the first and most obvious and intuitive one that comes to mind. It's got to be dealt with intellectually." ….
 
 



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Gemma Tognini: Law needs to recognise that a dead child is not ‘just a foetus’




Illustration: Getty Images


I’ve got a question, two actually, and I’m happy to be judged on their merits because I think the issue is important.
Who gets to decide when an unborn baby matters? Furthermore, who gets to say what worth is placed on the life of an unborn child when that life is ended either intentionally or recklessly by a criminal act?
This question had never crossed my mind until a couple of weeks ago, when a 23-year-old Sydney woman named Katherine Hoang was killed when an unlicensed driver ploughed into the car in which she was a passenger. In case you missed the story, Katherine was pregnant with twin boys, and she was about a week away from giving birth.
Because they were not born, their lives aren’t acknowledged as more than a biological extension of their mother. The law in NSW does not look at what happened to Katherine and see three lives lost.
No, the law in NSW — and in WA — sees the death of an unborn child as one of the mother’s injuries. The law says a baby must show independent life outside a mother’s body to be deemed a living person, and therefore a victim of crime.
The law, as they say, is an ass.
Who got to decide this, and when? Why is there such resistance to reforming this part of the Criminal Code?
Those unborn twin boys were mourned in their own right. Relatives told media “these babies were already part of the family”. They were mourned to some degree by each one of us who read the story and wept a little on the inside.
Like most of us, I know couples who’ve gone through the trauma of late-term miscarriage or stillbirth. Maybe you’re one of them.
You can’t tell me the babies you lost were nothing more than a bunch of cells attached to a life source. They were your children.
Disagree? OK, let’s have some real talk, some adult talk if you’re up for it.
How many of you have ever been invited to a foetus shower? Didn’t think so. We hold baby showers to celebrate the pending arrival of a unique life, brimming with promise. An expecting couple doesn’t get asked, what sex is your foetus or, have you chosen a name for your foetus? I could go on, but best I don’t.
Try telling parents who’ve lost a baby, or a woman who has delivered a stillborn child, that that baby is ‘just a foetus’ and doesn’t deserve to be recognised.
We call them babies when they’re born and foetus when we try to justify everything else. The language we use sanitises truth for the sake of our comfort, softens the blow when the blow is worthy of being felt.
A spokesman for Attorney-General John Quigley said the State Government had no plans to review WA’s legislation.
I want to know why not.
In NSW, the reform agenda is known as Zoe’s law. In 2009, Zoe Donegan was stillborn at 32 weeks after her mother’s car was hit by a mini-van. Behind the wheel, a drug-addled driver. You should google the story. It will break your heart. Zoe’s law seeks to amend NSW law to make it a crime to harm or destroy a child in utero. The Bill is yet to be passed and remains in limbo.
A lot of the pushback on this kind of legislative change has come from pro-choice campaigners who fret that adjusting the law could affect legislation around late-term abortion.
To me, the two issues are separate.
To conflate them is at best mischievous, at worst a terrible insult to the women who chose to keep their babies, but were robbed of their choice and their children by a crime.
What we’re talking about here is an appropriate penalty for criminal acts, and about recognising that life is precious, at every stage. If the law is drafted correctly, not reactively or in haste, there’s no need for concern.
Murdoch University lecturer Lorraine Finlay is a former State prosecutor, a former associate to Justice Dyson Heydon in the High Court (among many other things) and has written extensively on the topic.
She says while the concerns of pro-choice campaigners are important, the issues are not automatically interlinked. She wrote recently that the law can be drafted so that it has no broader implication for either abortion or the legal rights of pregnant women.
As a society, we acknowledge that life, at every stage, matters.
If it didn’t, we wouldn’t have such stringent, well-debated and carefully drafted abortion laws in Australia.
The taking of life, either medically or via a reckless or intentional criminal act, is a monumental thing and as a society we recognise that.
We don’t need to have further conversations around existing abortion laws. It’s about looking at current holes in the Criminal Code and plugging them. It’s about recognising that most of the difficult and complex social issues we face are worth the subsequent awkward and uncomfortable conversations.
Try telling parents who’ve lost a baby, or a woman who has delivered a stillborn child, that that baby is “just a foetus” and doesn’t deserve to be recognised. You just wouldn’t.
I mean, at the very least, stop and ask yourself, how would I feel if it were me, would current laws be enough?
This conversation is about as fun as walking barefoot through a paddock full of doublegees.
But here’s the thing — two ideas can and should be able to coexist in tension. This is no different — probably more emotive, but at the heart of it, no different.
Zoe’s life counted. The lives of Katherine Hoang’s unborn twin sons, counted. The law needs to reflect that.

Gemma Tognini is managing director of GT Media


https://thewest.com.au/opinion/gemma-tognini/law-is-wrong-when-unborn-lives-are-lost-ng-b88999761z


 
 
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Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Pro-life protestors picket NSW parliament over abortion bill



Christian leaders and human rights advocates have slammed as “deeply troubling” and “barbaric” a bill radically decriminalising abortion in NSW which will be introduced to parliament this week.
Coalition MPs will be given a conscience vote on the bill while NSW Premier Glady Berejiklian said she will support it. If passed, the bill announced on 28 July by Independent MP for Sydney, Alex Greenwich, would be among the world’s most extreme.
It would allow for abortion on request for women up to 22 weeks gestation. After 22 weeks, the opinions of two doctors are required that the abortion should be performed, upon consideration of “all medical circumstances” and “current and future” physical, psychological and social circumstances.
There is no requirement for a cooling-off period or counselling, and health practitioners with a conscientious objection would need to refer the person or transfer their care to someone who will perform the termination. The bill was developed by a working group including the Nationals’ Trevor Khan and Labor’s Penny Sharpe and Jo Haylen, with the support of the state’s health minister Brad Hazzard.
“New attempts to make abortion even more widely available in NSW are deeply troubling,” said Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP.
“The measure of a society is how it protects its most vulnerable, be they unborn children, their mothers who are too often pressured emotionally, financially and even physically to choose against the life of their child, or the sick and frail elderly.”
Rather than pursuing laws that will lead to more abortions, there should be investment in ways to support pregnant women who feel they have no other choice, he said.
Archbishop Fisher urged all Catholics to rally against the proposed law, “and, at the same time, recommit ourselves to reaching out with prayer and practical support for women in crisis”.
He encouraged Catholics to contact their local state MP, given the bill is to be tabled this week, urging them to vote against it.
CEO of NSW Right to Life Dr Rachel Carling said that in Victoria where similar legislation has been in place for about a decade, the ‘safeguard’ of two medical opinions was easily circumvented.
“Sometimes the required sign-off is from two doctors in the same abortion clinic,” she said.
It was concerning that the bill has no mention of a woman’s consent, she added, as women facing an unplanned pregnancy are often vulnerable to coercion from others, from subtle to extreme forms, to abort their child.
“Make no mistake, this is an abortion-to-birth bill and in practice this legislation will be abortion on demand.”
“We don’t believe in criminalising women but this legislation will add to a culture of devaluing motherhood and increases the risk of women being taking advantage of when they are at their most vulnerable,” Dr Carling said.
The NSW branch of the Australian Medical Association has given its support to the bill, saying it believes the proposed law will ensure access to appropriate care.
NSW director of the Australian Christian Lobby Kieran Jackson said that it was unfortunate that safeguards and support options for women such as cooling off periods and counselling are not being considered in the bill.
In allowing abortion up until birth the bill is both “barbaric and extreme” he said in a statement.
“There are significant numbers of doctors and nurses across the state who want nothing to do with abortion because they know what is involved,” he said in a statement.

Crowds expected at rally

The Australian bishops’ spokesperson for life Bishop Richard Umbers said that there is no issue more important in our society today than the sanctity of every human life.
He encouraged Sydneysiders to attend a rally for life outside Parliament House on Thursday 1 August from 9.30am.
“This is a critical moment for our country and I encourage every man and woman to take this opportunity to attend the rally at Parliament House in Sydney this Thursday,” he said.
“These politicians are claiming to advocate for modernising the law, but this proposed legislation is out of step with the science that supports the humanity of the unborn.”
ACL’s spokesperson for women and children, Wendy Francis, said that women experiencing an unexpected or unwanted pregnancy should be treated with “great respect and sensitivity”.
“[They should be] given true choices that promote the best interests of mother and child,” she said.
“Choosing abortion in the absence of other support is not a free choice.”
Steven Buhagiar: Three things we can do to fight the NSW abortion bill right now

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Friday, July 26, 2019

Those Confounding Confucius Institutes




Sydney University’s descent into a very dark ignorance
 

Part Two:
Those Confounding Confucius Institutes
 
 

 
“Over 400 Chinese government-backed Confucius Institutes are making an insidious attempt to restrict academic freedom by silencing debate on human rights and other sensitive issues, and whitewash its atrocious human rights records in Tibet and China”.
 
 
 
The University of Sydney’s wilful abandonment of all past wisdom, love and truth, etc., in its grand project of utter folly, ‘Unlearn’, was the subject matter of Part One:
https://www.academia.edu/34776797/Sydney_University_s_descent_into_a_very_dark_ignorance That University has, as do many others, a Confucius Institute. It is not ‘Turning Japanese’, as the song goes, but Turning Chinese – and being dictated to by a crazy, authoritarian Beijing.
This is all quite fitting, of course, as part of its reckless descent into a dark, slavish ignorance.
 
 
Confucius Institute threatens academic freedom and free speech. It is controlled by the Chinese Government, and a central part of its soft power plan to improve the global view of China’s authoritarian system. Confucius Institutes aim to censor and silence discussions on important political and human rights issues like Tibet, East Turkestan, Taiwan, Falun Gong and Tiananmen Square.
What are Confucius Institutes?
Confucius Institutes are educational programs backed by China’s Ministry of Education partnerships in educational institutions outside China. Their stated aim is to promote Chinese language and culture in our schools and universities.
 
What is the threat of the Confucius Institutes?
Chinese government censorship and propaganda on topics such as Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen are reaching our students in high schools and universities all over the world.
 
The truth about the Confucius Institutes is that they are China’s soft power push inside our schools.
Over 400 Chinese government-backed Confucius Institutes are making an insidious attempt to restrict academic freedom by silencing debate on human rights and other sensitive issues, and whitewash its atrocious human rights records in Tibet and China.
 
What can I do?
Students, academics, parents, politicians and people of conscience around the around the world have already spoken up. Join them and take action: Say No to China’s Confucius Institutes! ….
 
 

And Alexander Dukalskis has written tellingly on the Confucius Institutes:
 
 
In recent years, China has fostered academic links with Western universities by funding Confucius Institutes and sending its students to study abroad.
As the recent uproar over the decision of Cambridge University Press to censor a list of journal articles for the Chinese market has highlighted, it also exerts growing influence in academic publishing. Alexander Dukalskis (University College Dublin) argues that the so-called ‘1% argument’ for censorship is disingenuous, and Confucius Institute activity should be strictly restricted to language instruction. Students and academics must be able to scrutinise China freely.
….
 
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) real and potential influence over higher education outside its borders came to the public’s attention last month when The Economist featured CCP “sharp power” influence – including in higher education – on its cover. Its briefing article drew its terminology from a report by the US-based National Endowment for Democracy. The Woodrow Wilson Center published a detailed report about the CCP’s effort to curry political influence abroad, including in academia. Observers are increasingly paying attention to CCP influence in areas of publishing, student exchange, classroom instruction, and research.
I have a special interest in these topics as the author of a book and academic articles about how authoritarian governments control public discourse domestically. The CCP’s export of some of these practices is concerning. I purposely use the descriptor “CCP” because in China the state is subordinate to the party. So when we talk about the Chinese state or Chinese government, what we are really talking about is the CCP.
In August, Cambridge University Press (CUP) acceded to a request by China’s import agency to censor a list of articles from its journal China Quarterly. CUP initially complied until an open letter by the editor of the journal caught the attention of academics and journalists, who then led an outcry on social media. CUP eventually agreed to not pre-emptively censor its articles, but many were startled by how quickly and easily such a prestigious press agreed to censor on behalf of an authoritarian government.
The rationale, of course, is that CUP and other presses like it wish to protect access to the Chinese market. They argue that if they censor a small portion of their offerings, then the vast majority can be accessed in China, thereby salvaging links between foreign and Chinese academics. This is the 1% argument: only 1% is censored but 99% can be accessed, so really this is not such a big problem.
This is disingenuous, for two reasons. First, it ignores that censorship is even more insidious and powerful when people do not know they are subject to it. By selectively pruning offerings for the Chinese market, presses lead readers to believe that the post-censorship catalogue represents the full picture of foreign perspectives on China.  Editing out so-called “sensitive” topics like the Tiananmen Square repression of 1989, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and studies of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan gives the false impression that the CCP view on these issues is the only legitimate one and that foreign academia agrees.
Second, the 1% argument obscures the likely financial motives behind such censorship decisions.  In CUP’s case the CCP threatened to halt the press’ best-selling English language curriculum.  SpringerNature now not only censors some of its offerings in the journals International Politics and the Journal of Chinese Political Science but has also signed a letter of intent with the People’s Publishing House apparently to publish propagandistic works by CCP leader Xi Jinping.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that financial motives play a major role in these sorts of decisions.
Of course publishing is not the only higher education target of the CCP. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students study abroad each year, which is a source of funds for universities in the West. In my admittedly anecdotal and limited experience, these students are most often a joy to work with because they are smart, curious and have interesting perspectives.
However, they are also subject to surveillance and mobilisation by the officially-sponsored Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA). Western universities have been mostly silent about the CSSA, which is understandable. The CSSA presents itself as a means of helping Chinese students settle in abroad, so university leaders may feel there is little they can do.  However, some troubling examples suggest that it also plays a more assertive role in policing public discourse. This includes instances of policing what lecturers say in the classroom.
Indeed, one function of the CCP’s strategy to control public discourse about China in foreign universities is precisely to influence classroom instruction. Hundreds of Confucius Institutes teach Chinese language and culture at Western universities and schools.
Confucius Institutes present themselves as politically innocuous, but it does not take long for instruction in Chinese “culture” to morph into China “studies”, with all the off-limits topics that this implies for the CCP. It is worth remembering that the parent institution of Confucius Institutes is Hanban, which is a department of the Chinese Ministry of Education, itself ultimately under the purview of the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department. Indeed, high-level CCP officials have often been quite blunt about the Confucius Institutes being a part of the party’s foreign propaganda effort.
Here again, part of the motivation for welcoming Confucius Institutes on campus in the first place is financial. Typically Confucius Institutes come with financial subsidies from Hanban (and thus ultimately the CCP). Additionally, university administrators may see the prospect of tighter links with the CCP as facilitating the recruitment of fee-paying Chinese students.  The upshot is that universities outsource their Chinese language instruction while Confucius Institute officials sometimes get a seat at the table in discussions about the curriculum in which those language or culture offerings are embedded.
The CCP also attempts to sway the tenor of research about China. Projects like the Institute for China-America Studies or the CCP-linked endowed professorship in China Studies at Johns Hopkins University are prominent examples. The overall aim is to influence the way that China is researched, discussed, and presented.
Ultimately, what is to be done? First, leaders of universities and publishing houses need to firmly and publicly stand up for academic freedom. They should say early, often and publicly that the university places free inquiry at the centre of its engagement with China. If this offends CCP partners, then so be it.
Second, universities should re-evaluate their relationships with Confucius Institutes, particularly given the CCP’s more aggressive turn under Xi Jinping. Confucius Institute contracts sometimes have clauses that call for re-evaluation every so often and universities should take advantage of these opportunities. Ideally, universities would use such clauses to terminate their relationships with CIs and CI-affiliated “research” institutes. 
Short of that, they could press for terms relating to academic freedom to be included and for the activities of CIs to be strictly restricted to language instruction.
Third, individual academics should consider boycotting peer review and submission for presses that censor their catalogues for the Chinese market. Publishing houses rely on the mostly free labour of academics to generate their products. Scholars therefore have some leverage to influence the situation. In a petition that is still open, more than 1,000 have already signed up to boycott reviewing for publications that censor their content for the CCP.
It is incumbent on university leaders, publishing houses, individual academics, and the general public to preserve free inquiry when it comes to China. This is of pressing importance because as a rising economic and military power, China will only play a more important role in the world. It is up to all of us to ensure that this role can be scrutinised freely and fairly. ….
 

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