Love thy phobia
The youth support group said it wanted to help gay youth tackle homophobia.
The way the Christian Brethren understood it, allowing the promotion of a homosexual lifestyle at a campsite they owned was against the word of God.
Cobaw Community Health Service is seeking compensation from Christian Youth Camps Ltd, claiming its decision to refuse members of its Way Out project to camp at a Phillip Island resort in 2007 discriminated against the young people based on their sexual orientation.
In a case that raises controversial exemptions from the Equal Opportunity Act relating to religious groups, a tribunal heard the trouble began when Way Out project co-ordinator Sue Hackney googled accommodation at Phillip Island for 60 rural youth and 12 support workers.
The Phillip Island Adventure Resort – run by Christian Youth Camps and owned by the Christian Brethren – was top of the list. When Ms Hackney spoke to its manager Mark Rowe, she explained that Way Out intended to speak to gay youth about tackling homophobia and discrimination.
The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal heard that Mr Rowe would claim Ms Hackney told him her group was about promoting a homosexual lifestyle as natural and healthy for young people.
Greg Garde, QC, for Christian Youth Camps, said Mr Rowe disagreed with the nature and purpose of the group’s activities ”in conformity with the doctrines of Christianity he and CYC accept”, and was also concerned about the impact on other groups using the park.
After questioning by Judge Felicity Hampel, Mr Garde denied Mr Rowe’s concern was about the young people’s sexual orientation. Rather, Mr Rowe had a duty of care to all park users and ensuring they ”react to each other favourably and appropriately”.
Debbie Mortimer, SC, for Cobaw, said the Christian group’s reliance on the doctrine of ”plenary inspiration” – the direct word of God in the Bible – was flawed, as it was not necessarily common to all Christians.
Christian Brethren’s Camp Discrimination
A Victorian tribunal will be asked to decide if a Christian group can discriminate against gay people for religious reasons.
The Christian Brethren will face the discrimination complaint today after it stopped a suicide prevention project for gay youths from using its facilities.
While some religious groups have exemptions under the state’s equal opportunity act allowing for sexual discrimination, the group lodging the complaint will argue those exemptions end when it is involved in a commercial operation.
The complaint arose when the Christian Brethren’s campsite on Phillip Island was booked in 2007.
Gay youth support group WayOut had hoped to use the resort to host a group of gay rural Victorians, but they claim the Christian Brethren cancelled their booking ”once it became clear what the nature of the camp was going to be”.
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Gross on faith healing
In March 2008, 11-year-old Kara Neumann lay on a mattress on the floor of her family’s home in Wisconsin while parents and friends around her were praying.
Within minutes she had died from undiagnosed but treatable diabetes. Her parents had not sought medical assistance but had tried to save her through prayer.
Kara was a pulchritudinous girl and a great student. Her despairing aunt had rung the 911 emergency services but by the time the ambulance arrived, Kara’s curable disease had taken her life.
The aunt’s heroic and frantic pleas to intervene in her sister-in-law’s family were answered too late. The parents blamed themselves, not for “not having enough faith” and rather than call in a doctor were desperately calling more people to offer prayer over Kara’s rapidly expiring body.
How can they have been so stupid? Kara had not seen a doctor since the age of three. Her parents belong to an online church Unleavened Bread Ministries whose web page proclaims “Warning: These are America’s Last Days”. The page is in incomprehensible mixture of dire proclamations and uplifting anecdotes of faith healings. I tried to discern the underlying rationale of the faith but it is a diatribe even more opaque and illogical than this blog (amazing but true).
Her mother, Leilani, is quoted as saying, “I thought it was a spiritual attack. We stayed by her side non-stop and we prayed.” Leilani expects that Kara to be resurrected. I wish she was right. I know she isn’t.
The parents were later charged with second-degree reckless homicide and found guilty. The received an innovative six-month prison sentence where both parents are jailed for a different month once a year for six years so that the three remaining kids had the, perhaps dubious, blessing of having a parent at home.
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Ethics [still] vs Scripture
Far from any religion, and especially Christianity, being essential to the development of a sound ethical sense, it is a destructive hindrance from whose influence all children, but especially those in our public schools, should be protected.
Prominent clerics in New South Wales are claiming that ethics which are not based on Christian teaching are somehow not proper. They are labouring under the delusion that ethics and religious belief are interdependent. In fact, religion is to ethics as pseudoscience is to science. In each case, the proselytisers of the former try to establish a right to make significant statements about the latter by presenting the latter as being somehow owned by the former.
In NSW, the anxious clerics are even going to the extent of insisting that they should have a prominent role in evaluating the ethics courses being tried out in ten schools because, as they falsely argue, ethics is a subset of religion.
In fact, far from the churches being allowed some role to play in the design or evaluation of ethics courses in schools, they should be not allowed within a bull’s roar of them.
Ethical and religious teachings are both concerned with how people should behave in particular situations and to this extent have a seeming similarity, but there are at least three ways in which they are starkly different and largely incompatible.
Objective:
Ethics concerns itself with how people should behave so as to secure the greatest possible well being of all human beings in this life. Religion concerns itself with how people should behave so as to secure the greatest possible well being for themselves in the next life. Ethics is about securing benefits for everyone in the one existence we know we all shall have; religion is about securing benefits for yourself in a future existence that many (maybe most) do not even think will happen.
Methodology:
Ethical conclusions are reached from rational analysis of the effects on everybody concerned of all available ways of behaving. Religious conclusions, certainly Christian ones, are handed out by influential human beings who claim that they know the wishes of a god. In making an ethical judgment, people have to work out the course of action that will minimise the total amount of personal discomfort in the world. In making a religious judgment, people have to work out what to do to avoid hell.
To be ethical, you have to open your mind and engage your brain. To be religious, you have to close your mind and open your ears. The hallmarks of ethical behaviour are intellectual engagement with issues and their consequences. The hallmarks of religious behaviour are unquestioning obedience to received articles of faith and to observance of rituals.
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