Respecting someone’s religious beliefs is something I though was basic etiquette. But apparently not so, according to NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione and Police and Emergency Services Minister Michael Gallacher.

I have no idea who the women in the photo are. I cannot identify them. But I know that if I wanted to identify them, asking them to remove their burqas would cause offence.

If I needed to identify them, I know that in 2011 there are methods other than demanding they show their faces. They’re Muslim women, so I’m fairly sure that I could arrange for another Muslim woman to view their faces in private, without men present.

But this is how those aforementioned gentlemen’s views were explained in a NSW Police media release headed Police Commissioner meets Minister to close Burqa loophole earlier this evening:

Mr Scipione made the meeting a priority today, declaring the Carnita Matthews Appeal decision [my linkage] raised “real concerns” for police officers.

“The Minister and I are in total agreement that we need to take action to close this potential loophole and strengthen police powers to demand identification where necessary,” Mr Scipione said.

“We are working together to fix this issue and legislative change may be the answer,” the Commissioner added.

As I said on Twitter, I thought it might have been nice if the Commissioner and Minister had even just hinted that respect for people’s religious beliefs might enter into their thinking.

But apparently someone’s sincerely-held religious beliefs are a “real concern” and a “loophole”. We must change the laws so the police can ignore them. At least that’s what it sounds like.

I would like to think that this is simply a poorly-worded media release. After all, I respect the NSW Police for doing a difficult job that I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole and, looking at the world scale, I know they’re mostly on my side. Unlike some countries we could all name.

I would like to think that the police minister, being an experienced politician, knew how to balance the different factors at play in the community.

But this is the same police minister who reckons we shouldn’t worry that people are illegally arrested because police computer information is out of date. This doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

[Photo: Afghan women wearing their traditional burqas when going outside in northern Afghanistan, by Steve Evans. This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.]

On Sundays, as often as not, we put on our Sunday best clothes, slicked down our hair with Brylcreem and were driven in our white Holden Special HR station wagon to church. And here’s a picture [embiggen].

This photo was taken some time in 1969, again when I was around nine years old. That’s me on the right, my brother on the left, and a cattle dog called Duke in front. The farmhouse is in the background, the dog house on the right. Here’s another picture.

My mother, descended from some of South Australia’s original German immigrants who arrived in the 1840s, was of course brought up Lutheran. But my father was of English Protestant stock, Methodist to be precise, and a wife must take on her husband’s religion. So our regular church was the Nangkita Methodist Church, a sparse white-painted rectangle with a rust-free corrugated iron roof about a mile east of Mount Compass.

I’ve marked the building on the map below, though it doesn’t seem to be a church any more.

Back in the 1960s Nangkita Road was just a graded strip of gravel and yellow clay. In summer it was rough and dusty, in winter slippery with mud. When we hit some of the bigger potholes, the car would lurch and my mother would swear under her breath, “Shit and tomatoes!”

She also swore if my hair got messed up. She was obsessed with making sure it looked exactly right. If she noticed a few strands out of place she’d spit on a clean handkerchief and wipe them back into place. I’d push her away. “Hold still,” she’d say.

I really didn’t get the point of church, and especially the dressing-up. If God is everywhere and can hear us pray, well, why couldn’t we just pray at home and save the drive? If God knew everything we did, surely He would know that we didn’t dress in our best clothes every day. I mean, some days we’d even end up covered in hay and mud and cow-shit. It was a farm! And the minister told us that God loved us no matter what.

Secretly, I thought we only dressed up in our best clothes to prove to the other farming families that we weren’t poor, and they did the same. I told mum that once. She didn’t answer.

The church music was uninspiring. Thirty or forty farmers droned their tuneless way through a narrow range of hymns, like this one, accompanied by a very slow harmonium. But I did like the Harvest Festival service each year when the church was decorated with so many flowers, and the altar was covered in fresh fruit and vegetables which I was told eventually went to the poor rather than God. Some people, I guess they lived in town, just put canned pineapple on the altar. I always thought that was cheating.

Duke never went to church.

I’ve just had the most amazing conversation about the man in the photograph. C Scott Young was, according to Mark Pesce, “the very, very first VRML designer. What he did — with no tools and for (literally) no money — changed the world.” And Mark should know, because he invented VRML.

Alas, Scott died a few days ago after a long, long battle with diabetes-related illnesses. He doesn’t have his own Wikipedia entry yet, but you can get hints of his life in Mark’s personal blog post and the memorial site.

Tonight’s conversation was remarkable because it led me to re-read a somewhat influential Wired article from 1995, Technopagans: May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace. When that article hit the streets I’d just moved to Sydney in the first dot.com boom. Mark Pesce was a minor superstar in the Internet firmament for inventing leading-edge virtual reality technology — he was, almost literally, creating the world of William Gibson‘s Neuromancer.

That article combined what I knew of Mark’s technical work with religious and spiritual ideas which were at least somewhat related to my own. I remember thinking, “I’d very much like to meet this man one day.” That’s why I was so well pleased when I finally did meet him last December.

Mark, I am truly sad that you’ve lost a good friend — especially since there was so much complex news for you this week. As you say, “Remembering is the only gift we living can give those gone before us.”

Meanwhile, the process of selecting the 1000 “best and brightest” (minus the politically-handy pre-selections) started yesterday. There’s “more than 10,000 applications” to deal with — though previously the figure was 7000+ so who knows who to believe.

[Summit vice-chairman] Professor [Glyn] Davis met Mr Rudd on Tuesday to review progress for the huge gathering. A team, including Victorian public servants and some of Professor Davis’ staff, is working on the agenda, while a Queensland bureaucrat is helping with background material for the summiteers.

Mind you:

The committee also has lists of possible summiteers sent in by the public and CVs that are not accompanied by formal applications.

I’d have thought that being unable to follow the published nomination process would automatically exclude you from being Australia’s “best and brightest”.

It’s sounding like we’ll know the list of 1000 early next week.

I’m still chuckling at the seriousness with which some people treat getting onto Techmeme. It’s true, I keep stopping typing to giggle. It’s embarrassing.

I’d never visited Techmeme until this weekend. Even then it was only because someone told me I’d blipped up there. It’s just another feed of what someone thinks is “important” in infotech, yeah? Who cares. It’s not as if it’s Reuters or BBC News.

It’s just more geeks telling geeks what geeks think other geeks should think about stuff that geeks think about.

But Jason Calacanis cares.

Jason Calacanis must care very deeply because he “joked” about it on this website, and over at TechCrunch he “joked” about getting pageviews. His fan club speculates that Duncan Riley and me and others are only attacking him to generate our own web traffic. Well, I can’t speak for Duncan, but no, I couldn’t care less about website traffic — especially the low-grade drive-by flamers that usually wash up here after being mentioned on high-traffic fan sites. That’s not why I’m here.

I’m attacking Calacanis because I reckon the business style he describes, the one championed by his defenders, is rotten to the very core.

But first, let’s talk about religion…

The Cult of the Internet Start-up

Attracting attention and scoring pageviews is very, very important to these guys — and for good reason. They’re fully indoctrinated into the Cult of the Internet Start-up. They must generate The Buzz.

Let us now read from their gospel…

… 19 Soon, our Labours will have produced The Beta. We shall ready ourselves to supplicate Our Great Saviour the Venture Capitalist. 20 He shall ask, “Doth thy Beta have The Buzz?” 21 If it does have The Buzz, He will see that It is Good, and He shall writeth The Cheque. 22 And there shall be much rejoicing.

23 And then cometh the Second Phase wherein — praise be to The Great Saviour! — we shall write the IPO. 24 If we still have The Buzz, the Shares shall Rise, and the land will overfloweth with milk and honey. 25 And there shall be much rejoicing…

Internet Start-upers are fundamentalists. Anyone who doesn’t follow their pathway of monomaniacal self-sacrifice (read: high-risk workaholism) in pursuit of the Nirvana of the successful IPO is branded a Slacker, even by The Prophet.

The Cultists truly believe that the faster-faster-VC-to-IPO chase to these glorious riches is the right and proper thing to do — and like all zealots, they think the ends justify the means.

Note also Bill Moore’s comment. “A few million (or 10s of millions, max) dollars a year” and being “very comfortable” isn’t enough for him. He talks a bit about “industry changing”, but soon gets back to the money, complaining if he’d get “only” 15% of $100M.

That’s 15 million dollars, Bill!

There’s a word to describe that.

Greed.

If you’re on an average US, Australian or European wage, you’re already richer than 99% of the planet. But forget the top 1%. Even being in the top 0.01% isn’t enough, it seems. And anyone who isn’t this filthy greedy, anyone who isn’t prepared to treat people as disposable, exploitable objects along the way, is a “wimp” or a “wannabe”.

“There’s a Pig Loose in the Mosque! Sooooooooooooeeeeee!”

This discussion is heated because we’re not talking about subtly different ways of doing business here. We’re challenging the Cult’s core tenets. That greed is good. That the ideal is to grow fast and cash out, not build something of lasting value. That it’s just fine to burn people out along the way — collateral damage, I guess. That it doesn’t matter if your life is totally out of balance now because it’ll all sort itself out later.

Magically.

Somehow.

A few years ago I was discussing a couple of Internet start-up concepts with a well-respected VC-savvy adviser who paused and said:

You do realise you’ll be doing business with evil people? They don’t care about anything other than the return on their investment. As long as you deliver that, it’s fine. Just remember, though, they are evil.

The Cult of the Internet Start-up is evil. It’s selfish. It’s inhuman It’s amoral. Using the term “work ethic” to describe driving (or seducing) people into appallingly long work hours to the neglect of family and community and even self is disgusting.

This “grow now, worry about the consequences later” attitude is precisely the greedy, short-term thinking which has driven the world to the edge of an environmental disaster. But who cares, eh? You got your $100M — all of it! Leave someone else to clear up that mess, and plough on to the next “world-changing idea”.

Assuming you don’t die of a heart attack first.

Assuming you have a heart.

Calacanis’ original post exhibited the language of exploitation. Petty bean-counting to suck every last productive hour out of the meat-assets. He changed that wording quick smart, eh? But did he change his attitude?

TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington did a beautifully-written follow-up — though really the message was standard advice for any business: (1) hire the right people, and (2) don’t waste money, but avoid being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Some of Calacanis’ points were probably written in haste, like his statement “Fire people who are not workaholics” (he later changed it to “Fire people who don’t love their work”). Others were not controversial, like his advice to “Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs.” Overall, I get the impression that if he had spent just a few minutes editing his post, he would have had a 100% different reaction from readers.

Agreed. The reaction wouldn’t have been as sharp. But changing the surface PR spin is just spraying perfume to cover the underlying stench.

Arrington exhibits the same exploitative signs in a later comment.

“And I totally agree with you that for x duration you can work someone to death but the person needs to understand what happens once x duration is completed. There has to be downtime.”

No, they don’t need to understand that. Think of them as a goldfish. Goldfish will eat everything you give them until their little stomachs explode (or so I hear). The key isn’t to find a goldfish that knows when to stop eating. They key is to know when to stop feeding the goldfish, for their own good.

Once again, it’s about treating your staff as objects to be manipulated at your whim. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

“If you’re not like us, you’re a loser”

This is not the only way of starting a new business. It’s just one specific model — about fast growth and high risk. Without a doubt, it can sometimes produce astounding results. It can also crash spectacularly, leaving no survivors.

You can also build a business calmly, rationally, with solid foundations — and with respect for the people and world around you. A business which can weather the storms because the captain has a clear view from the bridge, accurate maps and a firm hand on the wheel — as well as a dedicated crew, of course.

Calacanis has been more measured since he encountered the criticism of his original post, but he’s still condescending when comparing the fundamentalist Cult approach to the truly enlightened 37signals.

You haven’t raised tons of money and you’re building a “lifestyle” business from what I gather (correct?) You’re not trying to displace Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. You’re not trying to build a service that gets to 100M monthly users, and you’re not on some aggressive timeline. You’re trying to build something that you enjoy working on and that helps people… correct?

When you take VC money and try to compete in a really aggressive space like search/research you’re faced with folks like Google, Wikipedia, about.com, Yahoo, eHow, DMOZ , etc. These are big companies with lots of resources… the way you beat them is to zig where they zag and/or out hustle them. So, if you want to compete in that space you’re gonna need to really work hard — you’re not going to do it working a four hour work week that’s for sure!

I’ll gloss over the fact that one of his differentiators is that 37signals is trying to build something “that helps people”, compared to his megalomaniacal goal of “displace Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc”. 37signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson quite rightly takes exception to all this.

[W]e’re not building a “lifestyle” business. We’re just building a business. To take the sound bytes [sic] from the recent Wired article, a multimillion dollar one that doubled in revenues last year…

So please don’t make the choices we’ve made about treating our employees one of a “lifestyle” (aka “small timer”, “toy”) vs “real” business. That somehow only those happy hippies who are not going for the gold can afford to hire whole people with a life outside of work. That’s bullcrap.

I very much do believe, though, that taking VC money with loads of strings attached will put hard pressures and increased stress on the decision making. And that in turn can lead to a culture where long hours and no walking outside for coffee can be seen as good, patriotic practices.

What I take the most offence to, though, is the dichotomist split between the workaholic go-getters who gets the quick cash and the lame waiting-in-line nine-to-fivers who get a gold watch after 30 years. What a crock.

We launched Basecamp four years ago. We built it off a 10 hour/week technical time budget. It’s very possible to build a “real”, multimillion dollar business that has high growth without resorting to the workaholic path.

Mr Calacanis, failing to comprehend that there are paths other than your own is fundamentalism. Even when you pretend to accept that there are alternatives — but still wrap your words in condescension.

Cult Myth #1: “It’s OK, I choose to work this way”

No it’s not OK. If you’re immersed in one specific highly-focussed environment for almost your entire waking life, then your decisions will not be made with a sense of perspective. You are not what DHH calls “a whole person”.

Vast slabs of the social fabric which informs good long-term, ethical decisions simply won’t be on your radar.

And then there’s the guys who say, “Well, I can work 16 hours a day for 7 days a week and it doesn’t do me any harm.” Well bully for you. I bet your dick’s bigger than mine too, eh? This isn’t a contest to see who’s the biggest martyr. It’s about who can achieve the most, not suffer the most.

Remember, Patty Hearst was there “voluntarily” too.

Cult Myth #2: “This is what makes America great”

This is the most toxic myth of all — wrapping your obsession in the flag.

No, this attitude is what makes America look like it’s populated by arseholes. Ignorant, arrogant, self-righteous, self-centred arseholes who consume everything in sight and dump their crap on the rest of the world under the delusion that their way is the best and only way. A nation that only now is starting to realise the mess it’s in.

What actually made America great — past tense — was the visionary foresight of its founders, the political geniuses who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. At the time they knew they were creating some special — not just for the moment, but for all time.

God Bless America.

She’d better, because a clear-headed America will be needed to help face the challenges of the future — the very near future. And an America retreating into medievalism and stubborn arrogance is not what the world needs.

Fighting the Good Fight

So, this is why I refer to Jason Calacanis as a prick. His ill-thought-out wording in an essay intended to convey good advice — and some of it is good advice, let’s not forget! — exposed this smelly underlying attitude of winner-take-all exploitation and devil take the hindmost.

I strongly believe this to be a dangerous, toxic, anti-human attitude and it’s infecting others. It must be fought vigorously and with passion.

Calacanis and his defenders reckon that workaholic exploitation is the only way to “change the world”. It’s not. There’s also clarity of vision, a really good idea, and well-planned execution. It’s the difference between beating one’s opponent with serried ranks of massed foot-soldiers, or using snipers.

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/religion/john_calacanis_evil_cult/feed/ 22 http://stilgherrian.com/religion/thursday_reading_20080306/ http://stilgherrian.com/religion/thursday_reading_20080306/#comments Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:18:47 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/religion/thursday_reading_20080306/ Three quickies for you: The 40 Most Inappropriate Children’s Book Covers (I like Sharing is for Losers: an Ayn Rand Primer and Pop! Goes The Hamster And Other Fun Microwave Games). A nice rant about Sydney’s Fireworks Display Exhaustion Syndrome. And the story of the Bluetooth Burqa (hat-tip to 3 Quarks Daily).

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/religion/thursday_reading_20080306/feed/ 0 http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/heath_ledger_was_an_actor/ http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/heath_ledger_was_an_actor/#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:09:26 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/heath_ledger_was_an_actor/ “Heath Ledger is notable for being two things at the moment. They are: 1. Not gay. 2. Dead,” notes Eric TF Bat. “This hasn’t stopped our good friends at the Westboro Baptist ‘Church’ announcing plans to picket his memorial because he played a gay cowboy in some movie a while back.” Eric’s rant says what needs to be said.

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/heath_ledger_was_an_actor/feed/ 1 http://stilgherrian.com/politics/mixing_business_and_politics/ http://stilgherrian.com/politics/mixing_business_and_politics/#comments Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:00:24 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/politics/mixing_business_and_politics/ So last week Apple announced new products. Yawn. The Cult of Apple worshipped their God, and millions of words were written praising His Wisdom. However the most interesting comment I’ve read so far was about the political content of Steve Jobs’ presentation.

Alastair Rankine writes that the Macworld Keynote has moved from slick-but-reality-distorted marketing into the realms of straight-out entertainment, and then criticises Randy Newman’s performance. Not because it was crap (which, being Randy Newman, is inevitable), but because it was political.

Criticism of the Bush administration is something I obviously have a lot of time for. But is it suitable for a consumer product launch? …

Mix politics with business and you take a risk with a relatively small upside but a big downside. If your politics match mine, we are no more likely to do business together than before we knew each other’s positions. But if our politics disagree, this difference becomes a barrier that we each have to overcome in order to do business together.

I’m not arguing for censorship or anything. I’m just saying that the separation of politics and business is crucial for the success of both.

I disagree.

Business is about making money, yes, but sometimes I think it’s wrong to “leave politics at the door”. In fact, is it even possible?

Here’s how I responded on Alastair’s website:

Deciding to continue doing business with someone even though you disagree with their political aims is a political decision: a decision to wimp out and fail to pursue your own political goals. A decision to support your political enemy because money is more important to you than your principles.

Mind you, I fail to live up to my own high-sounding rhetoric.

I faced an ethical dilemma. I discovered that one of my clients is run by members of Hillsong Church — an organisation which worries me. Did I stop working for them? No. Or at least I haven’t yet. However I have turned down a project which would have been working directly with the Church’s own business interests.

On the other hand, can I be accused of religious discrimination? Perhaps. How would it have sounded if I said “I don’t work for Jews”?

It’s presumably OK to say “I don’t work for the baby-sacrificing Turnip Cult”, though, so where does one draw the line?

Was Apple wrong to include political commentary in a product launch? (Did that happen because Al Gore is an Apple board member?) Where does one draw the line between business and politics (and religion)?

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/politics/mixing_business_and_politics/feed/ 14 http://stilgherrian.com/politics/petitions_drove_filtering_policy/ http://stilgherrian.com/politics/petitions_drove_filtering_policy/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2008 22:38:37 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/politics/petitions_drove_filtering_policy/

Here’s a nice twist linking this week’s discussion threads. It turns out that Labor’s Internet filtering policy was largely driven by petitions to parliament — the very petitions which Chairman Rudd plans to make more effective.

Irene Graham (pictured), who commented here as “rene”, has been following censorship issues for years at libertus.net. In a post to Link she reminds us that back in October 2006, Senator Stephen Conroy was presenting a petition to parliament:

In March, Kim Beazley announced that a Labor Government would require all Internet Service Providers to offer a ‘clean feed’ internet service to all households, schools and public libraries that would block access to websites identified as containing child pornography, acts of extreme violence and x-rated material.

In the Senate today, I tabled a petition signed by more than 20,000 Australians endorsing Labor’s policy… [which] clearly shows that this view is widely shared in the Australian community.

However those 20,646 signatures were gathered through churches, hardly “representative”.

Ms Graham writes:

Since Nov 2004, there have been at least 35 petitions tabled calling for mandatory ISP-level filtering (APH parlinfo site seach). 24 of them are a petition form published by the Australian Family Association (which is actually a religious right organisation), a copy of which can be found [in the Internet Archive].

Those petitions also want ISPs to be subject to “liability for harm caused to children by inadequate efforts to protect minors from exposure.”

The other 11 are copies of the ‘clean feed’ petition, as tabled by Conroy. While Conroy’s had 20K signatures, the others about ‘clean feed’ had from 18 to 145.

If Labor believes 20k signatures collected through churches justifies their policy, I’d be very worried about them paying even more attention to petitions than they already do.

The new petition regime will be overseen by a parliamentary committee including six government members and four non-government members.

I for one hope that committee, in deciding whether or not to treat a petition with Great Seriousness, will analyse the source so that petitions which obviously represent a narrow slice of the Australian demographic are given less weight than those which have garnered signatures from a broad cross-section.

How do you do that, though, if you don’t have a demographic database of voters to look up? And how do you interpret the actual content of the petition in the context of how it might have been sold to the signers?

I can imagine a petition being written in a dozen paragraphs of parliamentary legal jargon. The signature-collectors are encouraged with a cry of “Fight crime on our streets, sign the petition!” And yet buried in the text is a proposal which, when translated out of that jargon, is about rounding up immigrants and jailing them without charge.

As always, the devil will be in the details. And in the personal attitudes and skills of the committee members.

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/politics/petitions_drove_filtering_policy/feed/ 6 http://stilgherrian.com/politics/merry_christmas_george_w_bush/ http://stilgherrian.com/politics/merry_christmas_george_w_bush/#comments Tue, 25 Dec 2007 01:41:16 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/politics/merry_christmas_george_w_bush/ A Christmas message in song from George W Bush, Leader of the Free World.

Hat tip to Peter Black.

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/politics/merry_christmas_george_w_bush/feed/ 0 http://stilgherrian.com/politics/st-_kevin_religion_politics/ http://stilgherrian.com/politics/st-_kevin_religion_politics/#comments Sat, 22 Dec 2007 01:01:34 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/politics/st-_kevin_religion_politics/ Lots of Australian politicians claim to be Christians, but somehow the “What would Jesus do?” bit gets lost in the everyday business of arresting Indian doctors and sending refugees to concentration camps. Our new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says he’s a Christian too. What sort?

Two years ago, Chairman Rudd gave a lecture at the University of NSW’s New College on Religion, The State and Politics. Written in the days of WorkChoices and well before Rudd became ALP leader, it begins with the observation that “Christianity began its life as an oppressed minority,” and argues that one of the church’s important roles is to speak out against injustice.

Rudd also describes the five models of political behaviour he sees being adopted by Christian politicians.

Model Number One is what I call the “Vote for Me Because I’m a Christian” model. This is the model I find to be most repugnant. It’s the model that simply says on the basis of my external profession of Christian faith, that those of similar persuasion should vote for me.

This is about as persuasive as saying that because I’m a Sydney Swans supporter (which I am not, and never will be, for reasons which you could well understand), that because I’m a Sydney Swans supporter that all other Sydney Swans supporters should vote for me as well, because we ostensibly adhere to the same belief system.

Unfortunately, this model is alive and well in the politics of contemporary America. Thankfully, it is much less alive and well here in Australia, although there are some dangerous signs that for certain Christian constituencies within our country, this represents an increasingly appealing message. It is a model for which I can find no underpinning scriptural, doctrinal, or theological justification or authority.

I won’t go through the other four, but he’s equally dismissive of them.

What’s interesting for people who might worry about how Rudd’s conservative social views might affect policy, he says this:

Sometimes you [...] encounter in the broader Christian community the view that a Christian view should always prevail, no matter what. My response to that is that’s terrific, but we don’t live in a theocracy, we live in a democracy, which is secular.

If you look at the census data, the number of people who profess an active belief in God has gone down over time, the most recent census data saying that about 69% of Australians have such a belief. So the secularity of the views reflected in the political process in my argument, directly express what’s happening in mainstream society, and therein lies the challenge for the church.

But whereas a Christian perspective on contemporary policy debates may not therefore prevail, it should be considered by those in authority, and it must be heard by those in authority. It cannot be rejected contemptuously by those in authority, particularly by secular politicians who simply belief that any view from a Christian or broader religious perspective or theological perspective is inherently invalid.

Such a proposition in my argument, is wrong.

And it’s rather nice to see him quoting the Pope in support of the role of trade unions. Tony Abbott would have been rolling in his grave. Oh, hang on, he’s not dead yet. Ah well.

The whole speech is well worth a read. You can get the full text as a PDF, or listen to an MP3. Thanks to Crispin Harris for the pointer.

[Update: Fairfax journo Andrew West has explored Kevin Rudd's religion in today's article More than just a light on the hill.]

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/politics/st-_kevin_religion_politics/feed/ 0 kevin rudd, religion, unsw St Kevin's thoughts on religion in politics Lots of Australian politicians claim to be Christians, but somehow the "What would Jesus do?" bit gets lost in the everyday business of arresting Indian doctors and sending refugees to concentration camps. Our new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says he's a Christian too. What sort? Two years ago, Chairman Rudd gave a lecture at the University of NSW's New College on Religion, The State and Politics. Written in the days of WorkChoices and well before Rudd became ALP leader, it begins with the observation that "Christianity began its life as an oppressed minority," and argues that one of the church's important roles is to speak out against injustice. Stilgherrian no 1:30:30