Greens don't have a prayer of replacing God

BEREFT of significant nation-building policies, acting Greens leader Richard di Natale, has launched a crusade to axe the Lord’s Prayer from the formal opening of parliamentary sittings.

In doing so, di Natale, who describes himself as a lapsed Catholic, reveals an his inner-adolescent self, still revelling in teenage rebelliousness as well as a distressing lack of historical and philosophical understanding. Little wonder he has an appeal for the Gaia-worshipping Green voters. Less than two years ago, then Greens leader Bob Brown delivered a hubristic address in which he proclaimed: “Fellow Earthians, “Never before has the Universe unfolded such a flower as our collective human intelligence, so far as we know…” We can only pray that he was not including members of the loopy Greens party in that intelligent collective. Brown mused that it seemed likely that he and his fellow Earthians were “the lone thinkers in this vast, expanding Universe”. But, after pondering the astronomical reality that there are trillions of other planets “circling Sunlike stars”, he wondered why “has no one from elsewhere in the Cosmos contacted us?” “Surely some people-like animals have evolved elsewhere. Surely we are not, in this crowded reality of countless other similar planets, the only thinking beings to have turned up. Most unlikely! So why isn't life out there contacting us? Why aren't the intergalactic phones ringing?” The thought that any half-intelligent alien wouldn’t contemplate calling Earth if there was even an infinitesimal faintest possibility that the phone might be answered by a Green like himself, di Natale, or the ABC’s speed-dial whinger-on demand Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, did not seem to occur to Brown. Di Natale’s insubstantial case for dumping the Lord’s Prayer relies on easily demolished arguments. It is, he says, anachronistic. How so, when Christianity is growing across the Third World, particularly in Africa, and is enjoying a resurgence in Russia and growing support in China. But, di Natale would be better to put aside his own juvenile intolerance of the faith of his forebears and consider the substance and purpose of the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer as the introductory plea before parliamentarians get down to work. The prayer is one of aspiration, it is about hope for guidance, it is an acknowledgement of human frailties and foibles and its placement at the opening of the daily session is in essence a heartfelt plea for MPs to be saved from these traps during the parliamentary deliberations - not that it seems to have had any effect on the performance of the disinterested Greens. Di Natale has apparently been wrestling with the use of the prayer in the Parliament since his first day as a senator in 2011, though one might have thought there were more pressing concerns as the Labor-Green axis of dysfunction continued to send the nation down a rapid trajectory of indebtedness and intellectual decline. Another of his arguments hinges, in effect, on multiculturalism. “Modern” Australia, he told the media, was made up of people who had different ideas about religion. “We are here to represent everybody. We're here to represent people of all faiths. People who don’t have a strong religious faith,” he said. But the prayer was first introduced into the Australian parliamentary tradition by William Knox, the first member for Kooyong, who said in moving the motion for its inclusion that the prayer was “unsectarian in character” and could be accepted even by members of “the Hebrew faith”. The current member for Kooyong, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, Josh Frydenberg, who is by the way Jewish, strongly supports his predecessor’s view. “The aspiration the prayer expresses is an important part of the parliamentary proceeding,” he said. Di Natale, and others who find fault with the human tendency to hope for something better than human intervention, have long attempted to traduce religion, most specifically, the Judaeo-Christian. Curiously, their voices are rarely if ever heard querying the all-too frequent barbaric acts of suicide bombing, beheading, female genital mutilation and denigration of women carried out in the name of Islam. Yale University political philosopher, David Goldman, Yale, quoted in the current Quadrant magazine, touched on their problem when he mused: “It was the supreme folly of the past generation's policy-making to believe that peoples who do not know the God of Covenants might reproduce the American model.” The reference was to the serial failed attempts to manufacture new states out of war zones in which biblical faith did not form part of the cultural base. Some so-called “progressives”, if not di Natale, acknowledge the need for Bible study but think the Bible should be replaced with a newer model but they cannot actually find another canon. Neither Karl Marx’ Das Kapital nor Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf have maintained their currency nor contributed to modern society as strongly and as thoroughly as the Bible, particularly the King James version. Di Natale is attempting to deny a natural human appetite, understood for millennia by people of all religions, to seek spiritual values in arcane mysteries. His narrow view, apart from being boringly pragmatic and profoundly unattractive, does not help us to think well of ourselves and others and nor does it encourage unselfish and humanist values. Little wonder that he finds himself preaching to a very limited congregation when he engages on this predictably oh-so-Green and offensive topic.