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And It Really Does Send You Blind Or My Conversion On The Road To Damascus…

Ok, for all those heathens reading this, Saul used to persecute Christians… Now, in spite of my support for marriage equality, I’ve never gone out of my way to do that, even though some of them have felt that I was mocking them for their religion. That’s not true. I wasn’t mocking them for their Christianity; I was mocking them for their lack of fashion sense, which I understand will still be all right, even if Scott Morrison’s religious discrimination laws got through unamended.

Anyway, back to Saul. He used to persecute Christians until, one day on the road to Damascus, God struck him blind with the words, “Saul, Saul why dost thou persecute me?”

Now, Saul was a clever sort of a chap for someone who never married because… well, he just didn’t, ok? In these political correct times, I can’t say, but let’s use some sort of innuendo to besmirch the poor man because that’s what we do now that I don’t have the freedom of speech to come out and say that he didn’t like women. Saul straight away that the best way to get away with his past crimes was not to seek forgiveness as Jesus suggested. It was to pretend that he was someone else entirely, so Saul changed his name to Paul and started writing letters that people eventually passed off as gospel.

Similarly, I can see the writing on the wall and I’ve decided to embrace religion so that neither God nor Scott Morrison needs to strike me blind. Why? Well, I could suggest that it’s because God told me directly, but that may be considered blasphemous by some and, believe it or not, blasphemy is still a crime in a number of Australian states.

The difficulty, of course, will be finding a religion that suits me. I want one that has a similar signup clause to the Coalition’s approach to climate change action. I want to sign up and get all the benefits, but I don’t want one that forces me to change my lifestyle in any meaningful way. And by meaningful way, I mean, at all.

This sudden conversion may seem a little insincere but  I have been thinking for some time that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. All the tactics that we’ve tried to create a more just society have just been defeated by wedge politics, so maybe the only way to start pushing people back to some sense of sanity is to jump so far to the ridiculous that you make Pauline look like a bleeding heart leftie! (One could never do that to Peter Dutton; he’ll look like anything other than Voldemort in the Harry Potter films!)

Instead of using reason and evidence, perhaps we should start saying things that will split the Coalition. Here’s a list of ten possible ways to wedge the Liberal Party which you could use for Twitter or a letter to the Editor:

  1. Why hasn’t the Labor Party been declared an illegal organisation and its members all been stripped of their citizenship?
  2. How dare the Federal government allow our schools to teach foreign languages as part of their LOTE programs!
  3. Why don’t the “quiet Australians” get two votes at election time?
  4. Abolish the judicial system and let Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt decide all future cases.
  5. Isn’t it time for removing the dole in Queensland because now that Adani has begun work there are plenty of jobs and anybody who isn’t working must be a protestor?
  6. Let’s introduce six months compulsory National Service for all ten-year-olds where they get taught Australian values and the importance of coal while spending time learning how to survive in the bush.
  7. Why do we drive up the price of newspapers by paying journalists when they just regurgitate the government’s talking points?
  8. Instead of locking up asylum seekers wouldn’t it be a greater deterrent if we were to simply drown them? (Actually, we may already be doing this but we don’t know because it’s an on-water matter)
  9. Shouldn’t aged pensioners have to meet the work test too?
  10. Let’s raise the medicare levy by two percent and give the money to Gina and Rupert so they can create more jobs.

Yes, I do realise that you’d need to be careful because the current mob may take them seriously and start implementing them, and while it could be argued that this would certainly lose them the next election, when I look at the number of stuff-ups in the previous year, I can’t believe that they didn’t lose this one.

Whatever, my religious conversion is only lacking something to convert to, so once I have that, and once the new religious freedoms are in, I’ll be able to say whatever I like because isn’t everything a religious position?

Mm, I’m sure that Angus Taylor said that climate change was the new religion. Does that mean that nobody will be allowed to dispute anything any deeply committed Greenie says because it’ll inhibit their free speech?

Interesting times!

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15 comments

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  1. Perking Bottleneck

    I think it’s absolutely amazing that Saul of Tarsus, along with most other biblical figures, spoke Jacobean English.
    It just goes to show the justification for the US Texan legislator’s response to the suggestion that American churches should provide bibles in Spanish for their Latino flocks; ‘If English was good enough for Jesus then it’s good enough for me.’

  2. Rossleigh

    Well, that’s why it was a miracle!

  3. Bob Ramsden

    Do You have access to the LNPs secret policy documents .It all sounds like LNP approved but yet to be implemented legislation

  4. Aortic

    Blessed are the cheesemakers.

  5. New England Cocky

    Uhm … geez Rossleigh, you are brave to follow Paul because skeptical theologists consider Paul is the first heretic for changing Christianity from an exclusive Jewish religion to allowing any gentiles including Romans. But then Paul must be OK because the RC Inquisition did not persecute him, rather using his strange writings to persecute laity and believers for their own self-serving pecuniary benefit.

    @4. But why only Alan “Anus” Jones and A “Bigoted” Blot for the judiciary? I am advised the watchers of commercial television are now able to watch Kyle “sewage” Sandilands play Judge Judy without obtaining any legal qualifications. There must be no limit to the poor taste of watchers of commercial television.

    @5. Perhaps you missed the announcement that the Australian mining industry is building better remote controlled trucks for their huge mining pits and so will need almost NO WORKERS and so create no new jobs!!!!! Aunty Gina and Uncle Clive will laugh all the way to the foreign banks.

    @6. Perhaps we should follow the RC principle and insert military service and indoctrination into children at age seven (7) so that the fearful self-serving politicians can be assured that when the kiddies grow up they will not question the wisdom of their leaders who obviously are perfect in every way. Something about pederast priests come to mind here, but there may be children reading this fine publication, so …

    @8. At this time (2019) we would need many ground to air missiles to “simply drown” asylum seekers because the people smugglers have adjusted their business plan and now fly about 95,000 refugees into Australia every year. Benito Duddo has not looked up into the sky to see what is happening because the Department of Xenophobia and Immigration is under-staffed so that those airline passengers may be sympathetically “lost” together with their never processed applications for political asylum or permanent citizenship. Do you really want to reduce the profits of QANTAS?

    Thank you for the cover pic. it is an improvement on Scummo but does it mean that you think we AIMN readers are monkeys?

  6. Rossleigh

    @NEC.

    Look, these are not meant to work. They’re meant to be like Coalition policies, just there to give people something to talk about.

  7. David Bruce

    When I saw the pic of Pope Francis kissing Kyrill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, I immediately thought of Saul/Paul.

    Then I wondered, if we could change Sun worship to become the new world religion. After all, without the Sun, we have no climate…

  8. David Bruce

    Source: Reuters

    HAVANA | By Philip Pullella and Daniel Trotta | Sat Feb 13, 2016 8:18am EST

    Pope Francis and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill embraced and kissed on Friday in a historic meeting, uniting to issue a global appeal for the protection of Christians under assault in the Middle East.

    Nearly 1,000 years after the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity split apart, the meeting at an airport terminal in Cuba was the first ever between a Roman Catholic pope and a Russian Orthodox patriarch.

  9. Bob Parker

    @PB Thank you for informing my ignorance about JC. All this time I’ve been thinking he was Italian instead of English. You have also explained why God told the English to burn Joan of Arc at the stake. Up to now, I thought that they did it to give Leonard Cohen something to write a song about 500 years later. Learn something every day.

  10. New England Cocky

    @Rossleigh: What??? These were NOT serious COALition policies??? Rossleigh, you have missed your true vocation!!!

  11. Terence Mills

    The Angus Taylor dodgy documents on the Sydney City Council issue will all be explained shortly – Taylor says it was all down to Labor and he will provide the proof beyond doubt : his department are working on the documentary proof right now.

  12. Josephus

    Thanks for the priceless reminder that Jesus spake Jacobean English. In the same way the old, perfectly normal Passover meal was turned into a mumbo jumbo magical ritual wherein wine turns into blood and unleavened bread into flesh, sort of, msytically. Part of the divinisation by Rome of the reformer of his religion that was Yoshua ben Joseph.

    When told by Christians that women cannot be priests I ponder out loud why priests do not have to be Jews as well. Perhaps they were chosen for their command of English?

    Today I read in a Christian journal that modern medicine goes against god’s will as it keeps people alive who should have died of cancer or epidemics etc. Makes total sense, viz the anti Jenner vaccination argument of the 1700s – divine omniscience versus free will, that old chestnut.

    I do approve the arguments stated above, but add the comment of some man in The Australian last year, viz that all Greens should be shot. Or sent off shore? Also Greta; now, there is a thought.

    In the face of all this lunacy I take refuge in my own faith, aka the all-blessed Spaghetti Monster religion- look it up.

  13. Wat Tyler

    Josephus.
    The truth is actually written in the New Testament. Jesus was Doctor Who, the tomb the original Tardis. How else can you explain away the fact that his mates didn’t recognise him when he caught up with them, strolling around Jerusalem, unconcerned, 3 days after the crucifixion? Foolhardy, I would have thought.
    Not him – his mates.
    Your namesake probably knew the truth but he was a few years after the reconfiguring of the Doctor’s death and reappearance, unrecognisable…
    Josephus does make reference to the cult, but you’d think somebody who worked miracles and came back to life would have better press management. Poor show, really.
    Saul of Tarsus ripped him off, big time.
    Those were the days.

  14. Zathras

    Capitalism, not Climate Change is the new religion.
    Banks are temples and bankers are priests.
    The wealthy are saints, the poor are sinners.
    Wealth is heaven, poverty is hell.
    Commodities are blessings and money is God.

    We even have a Prime Minister who embraces that philosophy as a member of a intermediary money-obsessed cult and his messenger Angus seems to have the same motivation behind his decisions.

    Actually it was Saul/Paul who hijacked Christianity from the Gnostics and reconstructed it in his own way and for his own reasons and it was not until the Spanish Inquisition that the last remaining opposition was finally (literally) killed off.

  15. steve

    The three Hebrew boys refused to bow to this law….to this system created by government that was causing all citizens to accept this gold “idol” worship. Bowing down to the gold (aka money $$$) for any reason is idolatry ….which is WORSHIP of something you esteem higher than God Almighty.

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