The Attempted Eradication of Christianity

The secular jihadists have declared war against Christianity, and are working overtime to ensure that it is eradicated in the Western world. This site has documented many dozens of examples of this, and each new week provides further case studies in this.

The secular crusaders think all would be sweetness and light in this world if we could only get rid of those pesky Christians and their awful religion. They somehow expect us to believe that utopia will arrive on planet earth when Christianity is gone and secularism reigns supreme.

Yeah right. More people were killed last century in the name of secular humanism than all the world’s religious conflicts put together. The bloody side of secularism is unfortunately a historical reality. And the overwhelming good which Christianity has done for the world is also a matter of historical fact, as I discuss elsewhere: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2005/09/07/a-review-of-how-christianity-changed-the-world-by-alvin-schmidt/

Unfortunately Australia is also keen to join in this secularist demolition derby. Not surprising really, considering we have two atheists running the country at the moment. Here are two of the most recent examples of this move to banish Christianity – at least from the public arena.

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In Western Australia some of our enlightened legal eagles have declared war on Christianity, and want to see it taken out of public discourse. Here is how one news report covers this story: “Mateship, the Anzac spirit and Christianity should be excluded from planned changes to the preamble of Australia’s Constitution, the Law Society of WA says.

“In a paper discussing a national bipartisan plan to update the constitution via a referendum, the Law Society supported changes that would formally recognise Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders and guarantee racial equality while allowing laws and policies that specifically benefit indigenous people.

“The paper, submitted to the Law Council of Australia, said while preambles often described a nation’s history and values, the Law Society had ‘mixed views on whether the proposed preamble should be broader than just about recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’.

“The society said while such a move could foster ‘popular ownership’ and garner support for the proposed changes, it could also complicate the matter and risk a lack of bipartisan support. It recommended against referring to ‘God, Christianity, mateship and the Anzac spirit’.”

This is incredible for all sorts of reasons. It is simply blatant anti-Christian bigotry, disguised in the garb of legal mumbo-jumbo. But even more bizarre is the utter ignorance of our indigenous brothers and sisters. The simple truth is, there is probably a far greater recognition of God and Christianity in the Aboriginal communities than in Australia at large.

Indeed, I have shared in many meetings with some of these brothers, and there is a strong Christian conviction amongst many of them. They would be far more concerned about faith matters than these secular legal folks are. Yet this handful of secular activists wants to impose its narrow and ugly anti-theism on the rest of society.

The other recent Australian example of this is the move by the new national history curriculum to effectively eradicate Jesus from both history and our school system. Here is how the story has been covered: “A decision to use politically correct terms – which do not mention Jesus Christ – for dates BC and AD in the new national history curriculum was an act of Christian cleansing, church leaders said yesterday. BCE (Before Common Era), BP (Before Present) and CE (Common Era) are the new neutral terms to replace the historical terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini).”

Given that the clear majority of Australians are Christians, how dare the government make such insensitive and unnecessary changes? Unfortunately, they don’t seem to even give a rip: “A spokesman for Education Minister Adrian Piccoli said yesterday the minister was not concerned about the changes, adding that BCE and CE were commonly used terms.”

But others have rightly expressed their outrage. Archbishop of Sydney Peter Jensen said this was an “intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history. It is absurd because the coming of Christ remains the centre point of dating and because the phrase ‘common era’ is meaningless and misleading.”

Liberal education spokesman Christopher Pyne agrees: “Australia is what it is today because of the foundations of our nation in the Judeo-Christian heritage that we inherited from Western civilisation. Kowtowing to political correctness by the embarrassing removal of AD and BC in our national curriculum is of a piece with the fundamental flaw of trying to deny who we are as a people.”

And Fred Nile of the CDP said the deletion was “an absolute disgrace … the direction of the national curriculum is towards almost a Christian cleansing to remove from our history any references to the role Christianity had in the formation of Australia and still has today.”

There are two important biblical responses to all this. On the one hand, Christians must wake from their slumber and start getting involved in these battles over religious liberty. There is an unholy war which has been declared against religion in general and Christianity in particular, and we must all get involved in this.

We must stand up for the right of the public proclamation of Christianity. We must not remain silent about this. If we do lose all our freedoms here, it will largely be our own fault, because of being so apathetic and uninvolved in all this. But there is a second response.

That is the good news that at the end of the day, all the secularists’ attempts to eradicate Christianity will come to nothing. God is still on the throne, and he will build his church. And as Jesus reminded us, “the gates of hell will not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/breaking/10185283/lawyers-request-godless-preamble/ http://www.news.com.au/national/for-christs-sake-ad-and-bc-ruled-out-of-date-for-national-curriculum/story-e6frfkvr-1226127965607
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/the-pc-brigade-kills-off-jesus-christ/story-e6freuzi-1226127656036

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25 Replies to “The Attempted Eradication of Christianity”

  1. Okay so the secularists want to remove Christianity from Australian public life. I bet they like their Easter and Christmas breaks, which shows their hypocrisy.
    There perhaps needs to be a concerted backlash. Perhaps as a start we could start using the Ecclesiastical calendar – which one though – instead of referring to the seasons as Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring. We should have:
    ADVENT
    LENT
    EASTER
    PENTECOST
    SEASON AFTER PENTECOST
    This way we would reinforce the dating of the calendar from Christ’s birth.

    Wayne Pelling

  2. I wonder if they would be happy to lose all the Judeo/Christian centric public holidays. Australia day would have to go, Easter to, May day, the Queens birthday long weekend is gone, Fathers day, Mothers day, did I miss anything.

    So the only day we can have is New Years Day, but ok which one, the Christian one? oops nope will have to get rid of that one, how about Chinese new year, nope thats based on a religion, how about the muslim new year, nope can’t have that as that’s religious too.

    But then again we know from scripture that the anti-christ is going to try and encircle us for destruction so this is really no surprise. I wonder what the jail sentence will be if we refuse to use the crappy acronyms they tell us to and instead insist on using B.C (Before Christ) and A.D (Anno Domini). Will it be classified as “hate speech”? Time will tell.

    Neil Waldron

  3. Neil you forgot Christmas, Boxing Day, Good Friday.

    I want to know how they’re going to teach this rubbish…

    Child: Miss, what does BCE mean?
    Teacher: It means “Before the Common Era”
    Child: And what does CE mean?
    Teacher: The Common Era
    Child: So, what happened to switch BCE to CE?
    Teacher: Oh, nothing really. An insignificant person, noone special, was born and we switched to CE.
    Child: Oh…is that supposed to make sense? I don’t get it…

    Yvette Hanna

  4. I used to feel that there was a growing “anti-religious” movement going on in our cultures, but lately I’ve realized that’s not it at all. At least here in America, Islam is exempt – as are “indigenous” religions, “New-Age” religions, Wicca, Druidism, and almost all other religions. The only religion that actually gets targeted, in practice, is Christianity.

    This isn’t anti-religious zealotry, IMO – it’s anti-Christian zealotry. But if you point this out to the Liberals, they scoff and say you’re just trying to claim victim status. In their minds, it’s OK to attack Christianity, all the while pretending that Christians are never persecuted here. Meanwhile, they continue to chip away at our Constitutional freedoms. As they’re doing in Australia too, apparently.

    Ronin Akechi, US

  5. If we want to use an Ecclesiastical calendar, we’d better fix the names of the days and months also. And for good measure, rename the planets. (I’m not actually sure how serious I am about this. I need further instruction as to the wisdom of this.)
    Dominic Snowdon

  6. Notice too the attack on the ANZAC tradition. This dovetails with recent academic attacks on ANZAC history. No doubt because it ignites patriotic fervour and is a competitor to the secular, leftist state religion.
    Damien Spillane

  7. Fortunately a change to the constitution or a preamble requires a successful referendum to pass, and referendums in this country almost always fail because the peoples’ conservative instincts tend to get the better of them.
    Jereth Kok

  8. What a disgrace to the previous generations and the coming generations and for the history itself. Put a big shame on these countries which claims the heritage and culture. It is very much clear in the history of the world that what B.C (Before Christ) and A.D (Anno Domini) means and Jesus Christ is the middle of the history. You people are trying to taking Jesus out of history in terms of multi-culturism and fair policy. By these actions who is getting benefitted? Is it fair to the previous generation who struggled to build these nations on their beliefs and Christian values? What values and systems you have to hand over to next generation? You nations have to learn from ancient and modern history. We can’t forget the 9/11 and what happened in Britain recently.When we are going backward from our values, other nations and cultures are building their foundation on strong values.We have lost the discerning power to distinguish what is good and bad due to our materialistic and self-focussed lifestyle.Christians should wake up this time. They should stand firmly for the value systems of their nation. We should be fair for the next generation too.
    Shibu Varughese

  9. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t this current push to rewrite the preamble of the Constitution to “formally recognise Aboriginals” started by former Prime Minister John Howard when he promoted the policy during the 2007 federal election campaign? I said at the time that all it would do was provide an opportunity for the secularists to jettison the existing reference to God.

    Ewan McDonald, Victoria

  10. I sent this to the Aboriginal WA Law Society

    RE: Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

    This submission is in response to the Law Council of Australia’s Discussion paper, “Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australians” released on 29 March 2011.

    I have just read this submission and it is divisive and also against the religious vilification laws.

    How would you like it if all trace or reference to the Aboriginal spirituality was removed from all text books etc.

    Your submission smacks anti Christian bigotry and it does nothing to foster a positive relationship in the community.

    You should be ashamed of yourselves and set a public apology at once. You should know better!

    I am fifth generation Australian and I have a history here too that is just as important as everyones elses.

    Don’t destroy or undermine our existences!

    It serves no one for no good!

    Paul Hotchkin

  11. Yvette, you hit it on the nail with all this BCE/CE nonsense. Love your little student-teacher dialogue!

    Monica Craver

  12. Dear Bill, Thank you for the excellent article warning us again of the attacks on Christianity. It was the out of work lawyers in their attics scribbling away which caused the godless French Revolution and modern day lawyers are just as godless it seems. I wonder what the RSL will have to say about eradicating the ANZAC spirit? The arrogance of these so called intellectuals is mind boggling. They have so little sense of Church history that they actually believe they will succeed in eradicating Christianity
    Patricia Halligan

  13. Thanks Bill – you’re spot on as usual! Yvette Hanna – loved your teacher – pupil dialogue.
    How about we call CE “Christian Era” and BCE could be “Before Christian Era”. We’d then eradicate the word “common” because there doesn’t seem to be much “common sense” around these days anyway! The only “common sense” seems to be that of driving on the left side of the road – in Australia anyway, timing our watches to “Greenwich Mean Time” and tuning our instruments to the “A” of the oboe in the orchestra. Not much else is “Common Sense”!
    Robert Colman

  14. Playing the devil’s advocate here. Maybe the church will have to be stripped of all its rights and freedoms before it wakes up to the fact that it has been stripped of all its rights and freedoms.

    Perhaps it is God’s way of sorting out the sheep from the goats, the true church from the apostate one, the religious from the real.

    Roger Marks

  15. I am afraid you are right Mark. I believe things will likely get much worse before they get better, and we can mainly put that down to a comatose church which shows very few signs of ever waking up and starting to take its job description seriously.

    Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

  16. Maybe despite what “they” do, we should react by being more explicit.

    Replace “B.C.” with “Before Christ.”
    Replace “A.D.” with “Anno Domini” or even “Anno Domini (Year of our Lord)”

    Not difficult with good autocorrect functions in most word processors. At least on page headings and the like, maybe not in general paragraphs.

    Graeme Cumming

  17. Will we change our dating reference point? Re-mint all the worlds coins? All countries use the birth of Jesus at least in official correspondence.
    Ian Clarkson

  18. Yet another reason to home educate. I make a point of always dictating dates as: ‘in the year of our Lord 2011’ or ‘300 years before Christ’ and my children know to abbreviate this as AD or BC.

    Mansel Rogerson

  19. To be fair, “mateship” is very an amorphous positive that means whatever you want it to mean. And while there are certainly some aspects of the ANZACs that we’d want to emulate, “ANZAC spirit” is a similarly imprecise appeal to shared sentiment. Rhetorical terms like the above don’t really have a place in a constitution.

    One could legitimately argue that “God” and “Christianity” also don’t need to feature in the legal foundations of a secular democracy, but my concern about constitutional revision is that it’s driven less by a desire to for legal cleanliness and more a desire to replace historic legal and moral principles – derived from Christian thinking and having mostly stood the test of time – with a modern politically-correct agenda. For example, any effort to enshrine positive discrimination as a constitutional principle must inevitably age poorly, regardless of how justified or well-intentioned the idea behind it.

    Andrew White

  20. Andrew,

    I wonder if we could replace “politically-correct” with something like “pseudo-politically-correct.”

    I am sick of leftists claiming to be “politically-correct” as I think they are incorrect in all (or almost all) situations.

    Graeme Cumming

  21. On a slightly bright note, there has been a resurgence in the recognition of ANZAC day amongst young people, including attendance at Dawn Services and the service at ANZAC Cove.
    David Williams

  22. Neil, don’t forget the 1 1/2 or double time wages for working on Sundays or those pesky “religious” holidays? That would have to be changed too of course.
    Many blessings
    Ursula Bennett

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