imajulianutter, I regard the incident in question as anti-semitic because:

1) The organisers insisted on labelling a group as “Jewish” even though they had already defined themselves as “Israeli”. No other group had an ethnic label imposed on them.
2) The organisers objected to the specific use of “Israel” and “Israeli”, and Israel is a Jewish state.

Pericles, I am indeed suggesting that we are less inclined to whisk children threatened with death to safety. We live in a country where, at least in Victoria, there is no protection for a baby who has survived an abortion or been delivered with the intention of pregnancy termination. In the example that I gave, a 32-week-old baby was “terminated”, i.e. killed, outside of the womb after being delivered by caesarean section. Whether he would have died regardless is irrelevant, because euthanasia is not legal in this country, (but I would also note that the ultrasound technician’s inability to tell him apart from his twin raises grave doubts regarding the diagnosis of a heart defect). Even though babies regularly survive premature birth without major health repercussions as early as 23 weeks, they may be legally terminated up to 40 weeks. That, in my assessment, is a failure on our part to protect our offspring, both inside and outside of the womb.

As for your comments about moral issues vs political challenges, I am not entirely sure I follow you. I did not imply any condemnation of our treatment of refugees – the fact is we do feed and give shelter to refugees – and I think it’s a moral duty in both war and peace to do so. It may be a logistical challenge, especially in war as I have personally experienced, and whether the refugees in question should stay in our country is certainly a political challenge which I’m not going to discuss here, but the basics of food and shelter are, in my humble opinion, a moral duty.

Conscience does NOT promote TOURISM.

We need TOURISM to maintain OUR AAA rating at Moodys.

Therefore Conscience is dispensable.

PERIOD

Barry O'Swan,

Chancellor,

Desert Island Australia

PS its all in the SWEET SPOT of an optimistic Australia - at ANY cost - TO YOU!

Martin Ibn Warriq,
My promotion of ethics classes (discussion of open ended questions) is based on empirical evidence obtained form a sixteen months trial at Clackmannanshire, Scotland, under the control of the University of Dundee.

Compared to about 90 carefully matched students in differebts schools the students in the trial classes showed an average improvement in intelligence measurement of 6.5% and in the these classes bullying almost disappeared. Retesting at aged 12-13, three years after the trial, the test students had more than retained the improvements they had achieved in the trial.

The initial material for the NSW ethics classes was prepared by Associate Professor Philip Cam who has worked with the Clackmannanshire education authority. Recent subjects in the NSW classes have been about graffiti, fairness; stealing, the structure of argument, homelessness, killing animals for food, why should we trust science and treating people equally. Surely discussion of such subjects is better than filling a child's head with dogma.

The Clackmannanshire report has been available on the OLO site for about 18 months at my request;
http://onlineopinion.com.au/documents/articles/Clackmannan.doc

Everyone reading this should read the report. Dogma dumbs people down; ethics classes teaches them to think and justify their thoughts with cogent arguments

Foyle,

I'm still unclear exactly how Christian belief militates against the promotion of those particular goods. I'm not being argumentative when I ask whether you have any acquaintance with the Gospels at all? The religious tradition of our civilisation?

Again you mention dogma, I don't think it means what you think it means. Did you understand the philosophical point about first premises? About ultimate convictions: God or no-God? Do you understand that in the way you're trying to use the word dogma you hide from yourself your own commitment to a secularist dogma: the first article of which has to be taken on faith that "there is no God". From here we can enumerate all the other secularist dogmas that flow from that.

Now I'm not against you having dogmas I just want the people that I live in society with to be aware of the content of the dogmas they cannot help but have. Turnips and trees have no dogmas, humans simply must have them. I don't want my fellow Australians to be walking around unaware of the articles of their own faith - that is a recipe for in your case secularist atheocracy - an utterly unjustified and therefore ungrounded faith in your own creed.

Mishka Góra

You soon, I hope, will see that your concept of War and Peace as events distinct in Time and Place is absurd.

There is only War and discontinuance of War, but never Peace.

Peace is incompatible with Life.

Foyle along with those of similar ehtics always pulls out the thinking card as opposed to dogma when justifying their ethics classes.

Funny enough most pushing ethics classes refuse to think for a moment when it comes to killing the unborn. In this case they refuse logic and invent pseudo science as a justification for such barbarity.