Sells, you continue to reassure me in my atheism. Thank you.

"It was always predictable that when the state wrested all power for itself and marginalised the church, that liberalism would lead eventually to a nihilism that has nothing to say"

This sentence is equally valid if you simply scrub out the words "and marginalised the church". The church is irrelevant in this context.

"All we have now is meaningless talk about choice and rights and progress. This is why politics has become so uninteresting to the point that it could be said to have ended."

There is, Sells, heaps of evidence that people are actually vitally interested in "choice and rights and progress", and that they use the election system to express that interest. The talk may be "meaningless" to you. But that is only because you have deliberately chosen not to listen.

"We have aspirations to be excellent, efficient, creative, adventurous, brave, etc, but we have no narrative that would tell us how these would produce a society"

Your fondness for casting red herrings is most blatantly obvious here, Sells.

Nobody but you, I suspect, believes that our personal aspirations are the building blocks with which we "produce a society". Most, in fact, would consider that it is entirely the opposite set of characteristics, where we suppress those instincts of individuality that militate against the formation of a society, and instead formulate a base of community behaviour and practice, through both laws and common decency, by which to live.

None of which needs the involvement of a religion to bring about.

"By contrast, the view of the church encompasses the whole felt experience of the individual."

"The" church, Sells? Which one is "the" church?

The sheer mass of conflicting ethics, obfuscation and blind personal interest that has created the multiplicity of "churches" totally invalidates any claim you may have to there being "the" church.

And if you were to use the indefinite article, the entire edifice of your professed political ennui would come tumbling down, would it not?

Runner,
Read my comment. I did say partners to cover both marriage and other long term relationships yet you chose to interpret my comment as supporting adultery.
I recall your misinterpretations on other issues.
As for backstabbing, any prime minister holds his position only while he has the confidence of his or her party members. That Kevin Rudd had lost that support was evidenced by the fact that he was not prepared to face a vote.
Julia Gillard and her supporters did no more than I would expect and count potential votes for a change. How is that evil?
How does it compare with concealing paedophilia or sentencing many unsupportable newborn to die of starvation?
Those are the truths some church heirarchies support.

What is so bizarre to me is the author's assumption that the church is the only way to achieve "a deep understanding of the human."

This implies that anyone who does not embrace the church (presumably the Christian church) will never achieve this level of understanding. This is such a plainly ridiculous claim that it's hard to believe people like Peter Sellick continue to make it.

It's no different from proclaiming that everyone who isn't Christian will go to hell, given that not having any understanding of the human could well be interpreted as a form of hell.

We should turn to an institution such as the Catholic church, with its ghastly on-going global revelations of the sexual abuse of children in the care of its priests and the vile failure of its authorities to do anything to stop this?

Or the Anglican church, where truly repulsive brawls take place daily about human sexual preferences, and whether or not women are good enough in god's eyes to be priests and bishops?

These are the institutions we should turn to for vision and deep understanding of the human?

There's no doubt politics are up the spout in this country. But I'd really give up if I thought the church offered us the only options.

Peter Sellick, the churches urgently need to clean up their own backyards before any of their representatives have earned the right to preach to any of us about anything.

If I was a member of any church these days I'd be keeping a pretty low profile and focusing my energies on addressing where the churches have so catastrophically failed to deliver the visions they promised, before I started offering advice on anything or anybody else.

.

I wish I never wasted my time reading your garbage (as usual) article Sells.
I'm only thankful to Pericles for going to the time typing a message bebunking you, so I will just make this simple point:
"What does concern me is that her atheism signals that she is closed to the alternative society that the church represents"
It's just well enough that "the church" is as much an 'alternate society' towards the majority of Australians, who are secular.
In short, your hordes of brainwashed politicians who govern based on Church doctrine (which IS what a Theocracy actually is, Sells, something you most likely already know, despite trying to place a positive spin on an unpopular concept), would have no relevance to the Australian people.

I'm sure somebody has asked you a long time ago if it were a sin to lie to people Mr Sells, obviously you have long since ignored them.

Peter, Peter, Peter ... what will we do with you? You paint a picture of an epic divide - between those with the grace of godliness on the one side and the atheistic rabble on the other. All in pursuit of the Great Society (whatever that is), where only the godly can provide the answers we apparently so desperately need. What can I say. To suggest that those without religious faith are somehow inferior to those with places you in the same basket (pun intended) as the great haters of secularism and choice.

You really need to get out more, do some volunteer work, stop pontificating and move on.

What is usually promoted and defended as religion in our age is only the most superficial and factional and dim-minded and perverse expression of ancient power-seeking national and tribal cultism, which by their very nature is intolerant of all other faith traditions and their various cultural expressions.

This is completely obvious in the kind of religion promoted by those on the "right" side of the culture wars divide (wherever they are culturally and geographically). Their blogs and various publications are full on expressions of this power-seeking psychosis.

ALL of the "God" and "Gods" of humankind, whether male or female in their prescriptive gender, are merely the personal and collective tribal myths created by the grossly bound human ego-mind--the self-possessed and therefore infinitely godless dreadfully sane normal human being.

Both exoteric religion and scientific materialism have, for many centuries been actively via coercive propaganda instructing humankind to disbelieve and therefore to dissociate from all modes of association with magical, metaphysical, Spiritual, and, in general, ECSTASY-producing ideas and activities.

This process of negative indoctrination has actually been a magic-paranoid political, social, economic, and cultural effort to enforce a gross "realist", or thoroughly materialist--and, altogether, anti-ecstatic, anti-magical, anti-metaphysical, and anti-Spiritual--model of human life upon ALL individuals and collectives.

This entire 3 millennia long effort has required the universal suppression of the INNATE natural magical, metaphysical, and, ultimately, Spiritual, and, altogether, ECSTATIC potential of the human psycho-physical ego.

But,also,and profoundly MORE IMPORTANTLY, this anti-ecstatic, anti-magical,anti-metaphysical, anti-Spiritual, and altogether, "gross-materialist-realism" enterprise has deprived humankind altogether of its necessary access to Inherently egoless Truth Itself.

As an example everything that Sells has ever written on this forum has been completely within this dismal anti-ecstatic, anti-magical, anti-metaphysical and anti-Spiritual gross "realism" cultural paradigm.