This is my first post. I'm rather erratic and slack with blogging, but hopefully I will improve. I am 42, live in Brisbane, Australia, and I am currently working (slowly) on an MA on Oscar Wilde. I thought in my first I'd lay out some broad definitions for the three phrases in my blog name- I should have added something about literature and other art, which I am also passionate about, but I think that would have made the name even more unwieldy. Anyway, here are some rough definitions which will no doubt get refined or expanded over the life of this blog;

Christian: Basic Christianity is a) a personal belief in God as revealed in the old and new testament b) a personal sense of sin, of alienation from God because of that sin and c) a personal belief in Jesus Christ as God made incarnate and perfect, and crucified (by both Jews and Gentiles!) as the sacrifice that makes any who believe this done personally for them acceptable to god.

I refuse to call the right in America the "Christian Right"- "Religious Right" is the only applicable label. Christianity is not a Fundamentalist belief, at least in the sense of the word today (the earliest Fundamentalists had a lot more brains, defending the Bible in terms of Fundamentals, not literalism) and sadly, the term "Evangelical" has also been stolen by the Religious Right to mean much the same thing. I suspect the original Evangelicals would have been appalled to see their beliefs coupled with the state. I can't speak for each individual, but I see the Religious Right today as the Pharisees of Jesus time, especially the so-called "Pro-Lifers" who oppose abortion but "protects ignorance by opposing family planning, sex education, and informed use of contraceptives, tactics that not only increase the likelihood of abortion, but tragedies like AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases." This was written by US historian Garry Wills (Wills: Bush's Fringe Government, NY Book Review, 2006:p56) about Jimmy Carter's new book Our Endangered Values, and he continues"The rigid system of the "pro-life" movement makes poverty harsher as well, with low minimum wages, opposition to maternity leave, and lack of health services and insurance." Carter himself demonstrates that American girls under this system of ignorance are 5 times more likely to have an unplanned pregnancy, 7 times more likely to have an abortion, than French girls, and 70 times more likely to contract std's as girls in Holland. It also seems ironic that "pro-lifers" seem mostly to support the war in Iraq and, increasingly, to attack Iran (at least some because of some delusional fantasy about the restoration of Israel, as promised in the Bible) though at last count the civilian body count in Iraq is somewhere between 74689 and 81394. The Pharisees were moralistic in the extreme, and it is they that Paul said "their feet are swift to shed blood... destruction and misery are in their ways, and they have not known the way of peace". (Romans 3) Some people have accused me in the past of being Anti-Christian, but I take no pleasure in wirting this. Dostoevsky's parable that stated that if Jesus returned to Earth as once did, he would be murdered by the religious leaders again is, sadly, as true today of Western "Christianity" as it was in his day. Jimmy Carter, who incidentally is anti-abortion himself, was the US's only obviously Christian President in living memory (IE who lived, rather than just professed it, to gain votes) and he was slandered and hounded from office by the same people who put Nixon and Bush into power. And it is a sad fact that (both positive and negative) media concentration on the Religious Right equate it in the eyes of non-Christians with "Christianity", although it is far removed from anything resembling New Testament Christianity. Some other things the media and religious types propagate Christianity as being- and it is not- are:


Patriotism God does not love the USA or any country more than another. It is a personal relationship, not a state or political one. The idea that God loves the USA, Australia or any other Western Nation is a Satanic lie that obscures the truth. Ditto for the "God, guns and guts" people, the New Testament in fact elevates self-sacrifice and humility and peace-making over triumphalism, violence and power as the mark of the Christian. Triumphalism and church power in state affairs is the mark of Anti-Christ.

A means to get rich The idea that "God wants you to be rich" is a clear distortion of the Bible, which actually insists that for many Christians, persecution, hardship and worse will be the reality, that peace and prosperity is not necessarily a sign of God's favour (though it may be). The "name it and claim it" "gospel" is, quite frankly, a lie.

Anti-Intellectual Although given the coverage of the Religious Right in the media you would be forgiven for thinking so. Years ago my pastor gave this advice to a non-Christian struggling with creation/evolution debate (which is a huge red herring anyway), "Never trust a church that that asks you to hand your brain in at the door". A belief in Christ is, perhaps, counter-intuitive, but it is as much an awakening of the mind as it is the heart. Christians have their Bible and their brain to lead them, and the best leaders of the Church down the ages- from Paul and Augustine, to Luther and Calvin, right through to Barth and Lewis (to pick a few almost at random!) were intellectuals, knowledgeable in both secular and Christian literature, and, I assume, the Bible in it's original language and context. The Bible itself drew from contemporary sources and literary forms, and it is important, certainly for anyone seeking to be a Christian leader, to be familiar with the original languages and historical context of both the Old and New Testament. And the best Christian colleges, at least in Australia, prefer their students to have degrees from real, state-recognised Universities.

As an introductory blog, this turned into something more complex and perhaps more vehement than I originally intended, so I won't even begin to embark on my definitions of Marxist (which should probably be better defined "leftist", but I can't change the blog name again, and anyway, not sure if ChristianLeftistFortean has the same ring!) and Forteana, a term (broadly speaking, examining anomolous phenomena intelligently from a neutral position, following the evidence objectively rather than allowing it to be interpreted through credulity or outright disbelief) probably not familiar to most people, and seen by categorised wrongly by some who do as new age or fringe science. Of course, all academic disciplines, from history and literary studies to science and anthropolgy should be approached the same way- evidence shaping belief, not belief shaping the interpretation of evidence.

Till next time...