‘What they did right’
Some things still need to be rememberd.
I remember people I knew well in the 1940s who worked at Ernabella Presbyterian mission. I have relations who have worked at various other places since. A cousin adopted an indigenous boy in the 1960s with the hope he could inherit the family farm, maintaining contact with the family who did not want him. I have been involved in the education of indigenous children and adults. I have seen the difficulties that well-meaning and dedicated people have faced and still face when they try to care for distressed and unhappy children of any nationality. Today there are still indigenous children who are cared for away from their families – some separations are still considered to be necessary in the children’s interests. What will tomorrow say about this?
The Ernabella people I knew encouraged the indigenous folk who camped around the station to maintain their customs, crafts and skills and traditional walkabouts, while they provided sustenance and gave their children education for the modern world too. They taught literacy in the Pitjitjinjarra language and found the people could learn to read the simple spelling in six months – but even the English-speakers found it too hard to learn English spelling. I have wondered what happened to these literacy initiatives.
I like reading first-hand accounts of the past, with their accounts of the good as well as the blind spots on all sides - such as nurse Anne Wells at the Methodist Mission at Milingimbi in the 1920s; Sergeant Brennan’s lively memoirs as a humane NSW policeman in the 19th century, and the Paton memoirs of the New Hebrides.
Even the very blind missionaries endured long privations for ISAGIATT – It seemed a Good Idea at the Time. They did not intend to do evil.
“The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”

Essay topic. “You live in the year 2080. Write a critique of the well-meaning people of the year 2008.” And, for balance, of the ill-meaning people too.

The hopeless bigot and bible-bashing 'Runner' being admonished to shame? No chance!
To feel shame requires some degree of social conscience and intellectual capacity.

As to the article itself, after the untold damage done to indigenous Australians by any number of god-bothering parsons, priests, ministers, elders etc bringing the 'truth' in one hand and a loaded gun in the other i would have thought it best if all the churches, not only the wishy-washy Uniting Church with its cluster of disparate old women and generally 'frightfully nice' congregations, simply hung their collective heads in shame and kept quiet rather than trying to have a bet each way via bland and self-serving articles such as this one.

And of course Gym Fish is proud of the secularist who brought alcohol pornography and drugs to the communities. You really should be the one keeping your mouth shut but nothing like a self righteous secularist who knows best! It is very convenient to blame the violence, child molesting and drugs on the salvation army.

Runner believes we all lived in a near-Paradise until 40 years ago, when 'secularists' undid the very fabric of God's work.

How mean-spirited of them!

Of course, that would have to be part of God's plan anyway, since He knows all, decides all, and has the power to change all, via a rain-dance and some prayers from his dutiful and devoted acolytes.

He has failed miserably where I live, as the drought continues unabated, even while Anna Bligh believes 'the drought is over', and we are all able to water the car and wash the driveways again.

This is only anecdotal Runner, but my children work with hordes of fundies at their workplaces. It seems that it is these people who are rushing into marriage in order to have sex (which produces children Runner) and then in no time at all, so it seems, the marriage is breaking up... leaving Runner's 'fatherless children', although I did wonder if he was talking about Jesus for a moment, since he was a genuine fatherless child, so we are told.

And I did read somewhere in my researches, I'll post it if I can find it, that the first pregnancy advisory centres were created by evangelical Christians in response to burgeoning sex-acts from unmarried devotees keen to release themselves from pregnancy.

As for homosexuality, I am pretty sure the Vatican is a hotbed (pardon the connection) of such activities, and always has been, or at least since Adam was a (motherless and fatherless) boy.

Really Runner, without the different worldview injected from the secular angle, Christians around the globe would still be stoning women, burning witches, engaged in the slave trade, mission-ising with 'native people' and being more of a destructive force than they currently are.

Let's be honest Runner, 'people' can do the wrong thing at the best of times, but when it's done under the cloak of a God covering the backdoor, this allows the intellectually halt, lame and infirm to operate with (seeming) impunity..."I was only following orders", from the priest, from the dictator, it really makes no difference.

Poddy, at last you introduce some rationality. Let us all, except perhaps for Runner, show some honesty in the debate and admit that the stories of the Dreamtime have equal valdity with the stories of Creation as told in the Bible.

Also, let us not be deluded into thinking that the "Bringing them home" report was an unbiased account of the whys and the wherefores of the treatment of aboriginals in the past.

David

The collapse of the Aztec Empire was due to the religious beliefs which made them regard the Spanish invaders as gods. Perhaps the failure of Aboriginal society to stand up with any resilience to our own invasion was at least partly due to its dysfunctional religious beliefs which -- amongst other things -- awarded power on the basis of age and gender rather than competence.

Now these barbaric beliefs have acquired a patina of respectability through their quaintness, and a failing and discredited Western belief seeks to gain credibility by pretending to endorse them. As the number of believers in the West dwindles we can expect to see more and more strange alliances like this. Catholics and Jains? Presbyterians and Animists? Fundamentalists from both sides of the Christian/Moslem divide getting together to harass homosexuals and abuse atheists? It just shows that for Church personnel, hanging on to power is much more important than what you actually profess to believe in.