Christian democrat MP Fred Nile today claimed that the secular humanist philosophy on which he believes ethics classes in schools are based led to the worst Nazi atrocities of the second world war.
It’s unclear whether or not the Reverend Nile knows what secular humanism is, and it’s also worrying that he seems to equate Nazism with communism.
I find it difficult to see anything the least bit ethical in Nile’s attempts to blackmail the NSW government into dropping ethics classes from schools. But what is most puzzling is the Christian furore over these classes in the first place, and the insecurity that gives rise to it. This insecurity must be considerable if they resort first to Godwin’s Law.
Apparently Christianity is on such shaky ground in NSW that its proponents feel they must destroy anything they perceive to be the least bit competitive. Non-Christians are under attack. We have the school chaplaincy program trying to get converts, and telling our troubled young that Jesus loves them, and Fred Nile trying to quelch (is that a word? Did I just make it up? A neologism?) any alternative to Christian values. Actually, there are no alternatives, according to Fred. You can’t have ethics without Christianity. Where this leaves all the rest of the world’s religions, who knows.
I’m over these Christian types who try to impose their will on the rest of us. They have some nerve. I’ve met a few over the years and one thing that has always seemed incongruous about them is their reluctance to die. Yes. Faced with serious illness they do not want to go to God. They take as many evasive measures as those of us who think we’re looking at annihilation. I do not understand this. If you’ve lived your life in anticipation of the much better time you’re going to have after you’re dead, why put it off?
The linking of secular humanist philosophy with Nazi atrocities signals a new low in Fred’s fight. He’s always been an irritant, like something you get in your eye on a windy day. Elevated to his current position of power, he’s a menace. In NSW we are in the hands of gun-mongering lunatics who want every school child to learn how to shoot, and god- mongering lunatics who will break things if they don’t get their way. Guns and God. Now that combination should scare the bejesus out of any right-minded person.
Related articles
- Godless ethics led to Nazism: Nile (news.theage.com.au)
- Unions urge Nile to kill NSW IR bill (news.theage.com.au)
- NSW govt to consider Nile legislation (news.theage.com.au)
No Place For Sheep 
You must love the US T-baggers then. Not just one doddery Fred Nile, but a million of them, madder than cut snakes and crazy like foxes, as if on steroids and black ice at once.
Fred’d be funny, if he wasn’t so dilapidated and so redundant; even Paisley’s gone, but not this reprehensible fantasist.
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Fred can always be relied upon for some colourful input. The methodology he uses to arrive at some of his conclusions is rather ..er.. questionable.
However to call anyone who wants every kid to learn to shoot either a “gun-mongerer” or a “lunatic” is at least equally as … colourful as is Fred, though perhaps somewhat less informed than he.
I learned to shoot at school, (well not really, we could all shoot before then). Some kids had guns in the dormitory. I kept ammunition amongst my clothes, & used only school guns.
When my father went to school pupils used to carry a .303 on the train in Sydney.
The purported harm from these practices evades me.
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STAP, I don’t understand why anybody except those who live on farms and need guns should have learn to shoot.
This isn’t the US, we don’t have a constitution that gives us the right to bear arms, and why would anyone think it’s a good thing for citizens to walk round armed?
If adults want to go to gun clubs to learn and compete I don’t see anything wrong with that. But children?
It must be a bloke thing, because we certainly didn’t have guns in our dormitory when I was at school. No bullets in our undies.
I’m heaps more colourful than Fred , BTW. I have far more vast zones of irrationality.
Why did kids carry .303s on the train to school?
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There are plenty of reasons for “non-farmers” to have guns. Nobody “needs” a gun, just as nobody “needs” a uni degree, or a car, or to go overseas.
Guns come in quite handy. Useful for urban dwellers to control feral animal populations (they have fun hunting, the countryside has camels/brumbies/pigs removed, ideal all around)
Anyone who reads the news is well aware of the amount of armed robbery we face. Those of us who are exposed to armed robbery are VERY aware of it.
And we are the people the government has disarmed. Robbers have acute risk analysis skills. If they stand a chance of being shot dead on a job, they cry off.
Pre-1996 gun laws, there was a chance that a pub had a shotgun under the counter. There was a stronger chance that some of the customers had a rifle in their Toyota. (Indeed, one of the staff was once saved by exactly that).
Now that Australia has universal strict gun laws, under which legal ownership of a gun isn’t easy, and any publican caught with a firearm would be risking his licence to operate. Robbers know this. Not being restricted by the law, they are free to own all the firearms they wish.
Armed robberies at pubs are now a semi-regular feature in the news.
Yes, I’d like to have my guns legally. Yes I wish personal ill, including physical agony, onto every politician who voted for gun control. Yes I give the hardest possible time to any ingenue who speaks up in my presence as if gun control is a benefit to society.
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That was John Howard after the Port Arthur massacre wasn’t it?
I can see that in your trade you’d want to be one step ahead of potential armed robbers. I don’t see why that should to be extrapolated to kids travelling on trains and the general population.
I also don’t take to the idea of injured animals being left to die painful deaths because someone has shot them but hasn’t killed them. I don’t think the populations of camels, brumbies and feral pigs have exploded because Howard cracked down on gun ownership. I don’t think individual hunters have ever been responsible for controlling those populations.
As for having fun killing – well, I’m all for re-directing that impulse.
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Yep, that was John Howard. I’ll not go off topic into how he should be boiled in oil.
Without going too deep into the days when schoolkids carried their .303 around with them, it didn’t do any harm at the time, why would it be a bad thing now?
Animals dying slowly after being improperly shot is something I have had to deal with. I need not point out the near impossibility & frustration of not being able to carry this out because one’s guns have been seized.
You don’t think feral animals are exploding now that their hunters have lost their guns? May I point out that “I think” is a most unreliable research method. Even anecdotal evidence comes in ahead of “I think”. tsk tsk.
You don’t “think” individual hunters have been responsible for controlling feral animal populations? er… how much time have you spent in the bush? That is the ONLY thing that has controlled feral animals. Without individual hunters, (either professional or recreational) there’d be much much more damage to the landscape from hard hooves, feral overgrazing, wallowing, etc etc etc.
Having fun killing can be redirected? Perhaps, but it is still fun. I used to shoot pigs on crops after school. Every afternoon I’d get at least one, sometimes dozens. Great fun. Melancholy when confronted with the dead pig itself (life extinct etc etc). For perspective, one takes a very different view, a most non-melancholy one, when in channels & breakaways covered by lignum, & there is a wounded pig nearby.
Now that kids don’t shoot pigs, the same farms put out poison, which kills everything, goannas especially, & also lots of birds.
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You’re right, “I think” is not a research method and neither is you telling me stuff without referencing it, which is actually just the same as “I think” without using the words.
Having got that out of the way, there’s still plenty of blokes round where I live shooting pigs in the bush.
I can’t believe we agree on something, even if it is that John Howard should be boiled in oil, albeit for very different reasons I suspect, and maybe that is the measure of the man: there are one thousand and one different reasons to boil him in oil.
I could not have let my boys carry guns around. What’s wrong with it is the mindset that says “I’m always in life threatening danger and I have to be armed to be one step ahead of the bastard who’ll kill me if he thinks he can.” I didn’t want to teach my boys paranoia, just caution. I didn’t mind them learning self defense.
Apart from anything else, research does show that children are at more risk of assault and injury in the home from people they know, not strangers.
And what about those poor bloody horses left for dead by National Parks culling from helicopters with guns?
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“Those poor bloody horses?” Because it was organised by public servants (National Parks) “National Parks” can’t even maintain their own land, never mind do anything as simple as cull feral animals.
Joho should be boiled in oil for gun control. It was the first thing he did, I didn’t pay much attention to him after that. Though I did make a few good placards for people who were protesting against the Wik decision. Joho was as popular as a “floater” in a swimming pool in the bush. Deservedly so.
Carrying a gun around can be done for more reasons than self-defence. At least self-defence from humans. There are plenty of nasties out there, & I’m a lot more comfortable in croc country if armed.
Anyone who doesn’t want to carry a gun doesn’t have to, but they can go to hell if they think that controlling my ability to legally possess firearms will achieve anything (except inconvenience for me) Every time one reads the newspaper there is gun crime. How can there be?
Research can show what it like about people being at risk in their own home. Anyone who wants to enter my home & tell me how to run my life would be well advised to come loaded for bear. SOME people may run their home & their life in a manner that places their family at risk from them (itself) This says more about them & their parenting skills.
It says nothing about mine.
I grew up in a house with at least 28 firearms in it, so did every kid I knew. The only things at risk were kangaroos (if the dogs were hungry) or feral animals.
There is, and won’t be, any harm in that. Shooting is a useful skill and not a heavy weight to carry around, even if one never gets to use a firearm again.
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Well said. I think the word is “Squelch”, Jen, but “gunmongerers” is just right. This meme about Hitler and Stalin being “atheists” is an old one (in the internet sense of old), Fred is just adapting it to his particular purpose. I used to argue with people who brought it up, rather in the way I used to argue with Mormons who door-knocked, but you give up after a while.
With this stuff, and Westboro church going off to Norway (?), saying that Breibik’s actions were god’s punishment for gay marriage in Norway, I wonder how bat shit crazy religious people have to be before they are given compulsory psychiatric help? They do and say things that for the ordinary person would be certifiable, but religion seems to be a get-out-of-asylum-free card.
I finally managed to make myself confront the events in Norway here http://davidhortonsblog.com/2011/08/05/all-norwegians-now/.
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Here’s a link to the Westboro story: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/04/westboro-baptists-church-norway_n_917388.html
Is Westboro the legitimized Ku Klux Klan?
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The big change is the quality and efficency of the weaponry, from single shot rifles, to weapons that make armalites look bland, cluster bombs and drones come to mind also. Even the strange people identified with mass killings over thelast fifteen years say, have been able use this deadly newer firepower particularly in confined or awkward to get to spaces.
As for DH’s Norway remark, I see it through a glass darkly and too opaque in the actual sense.
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Bespoke household furniture can be chosen for making cot,
wardrobe and other necessary things for the bedroom. Each door slides over the other to give
you access to a shelf, a sweater storage bag can be filled and
placed in the middle which had been given over to shelving wardrobes and cupboards and drawers.
These wardrobes should have a storage space or
drawers where you can fit in some other stuff like DVD and VCD.
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