don't go changin'...

For reasons that only an imaginary friend would know, the book review of Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition, etc etc got picked up by Crikey. That resulted in a massive boost to VVB's readerdom, which I expect to be a once-off. There's possibly a lesson wrt writing a good intro paragraph so, on that basis: "It was a dark and stormy night."

Some what more interestingly, today's Crikey contains a piece by Charles Richardson on the most recent political activities of Catch the Fire Ministries, which reads:

Some might have thought I was being unduly alarmist a few months ago when I
said that if local councils "can ban pokie venues and brothels, why not mosques
and synagogues?"
Not so. Today comes the news that "Catch the Fire" ministries, a fundamentalist
Christian umbrella group, claims to have done a deal with the Victorian Liberal
Party to ensure its support. Actually, "fundamentalist" doesn't quite do justice
to these people. They're way out on the fringe, somewhere near the Exclusive
Brethren.

Catch the Fire head honcho Danny Nalliah has released a pamphlet,
according to The Australian, calling on his followers to "Spot Satan's
strongholds in the areas you are living (brothels, gambling places, bottle
shops, mosque, temples – Freemasons/Buddhist/Hindu etc ...) bring it to
your church and ask your intercessors, through the pastor, to pull these
strongholds down." In the wise words of Barnaby Joyce, "This is the lunatic
Right, this is crazy, ill-informed stuff". But it's a logical extension of the
puritanism already evident among the Liberals (and even more so the minor
parties) with their campaign against poker machines.

Once you decide that certain preferences are not worthy of
consideration, and that people can't be allowed to make their own choices, then
it's open season on anyone with unpopular tastes. Today gamblers, tomorrow
Muslims. Fear of the grassroots reaction seems to have deterred the Victorian
ALP from doing another preference deal with the Assemblies of God party, Family
First. It's a pity that the Liberal Party doesn't have any comparable fear that
its members might object to getting into bed with religious extremists.

And spare a thought for the absurdity of Victoria's racial and
religious vilification laws, which allow these hate-filled bigots to parade as
defenders of free speech.

Maybe my Pollyanna-ish conclusion about little change in society's broad approaches was off the mark? Not really. Richardson, fairly accurately in my view, characterises Catch the Fire (great name for a garage band, absolute shite for a 'church') as extreme and by their policies, ye shall know them and extreme is how they present themselves. Chateau VVB doesn't believe in having a particular imgainary friend and is quite sceptical about most organised religion, based on a quick 'n dirty analysis that showed most of them to be utterly patriarchal, which seemed to be just too much of a coincidence, and a bit too interested in temporal power.

So our guess is that there's always been the extremists and, like extremes in any field of human endeavour, they never make substantial inroads. You can fool all the people some of the time, and so on.

Immediate update: just visited Catch the Fire Ministries' website when embedding the link. They seem more interested in rendering unto Caesar than most.