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Shadowself
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1# |
Registered:
01/16/2004
Time spent:
1773 hours
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(Date Posted:05/03/2005 19:37:30)
I'm glad you googled us up! Welcome to our little corner of the web. Hope you continue to post!
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A big revelation in my professional training was that humans can learn skills for living and relating. We don"t have to be desperate for a miracle of God to make us decent.--Marlene Winell
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Drummond
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2# |
Rank:none
Score:0
Posts:1566
Registered:
03/03/2002
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:05/03/2005 20:56:16)
Welcome FNM. I think we have some other Aussies around here. I'm amazed, because I've always heard that Australia is a pretty secular country.
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From American Splendor
Student to Harvey Pekar: "It"s hard enough trying to convince people that socialism is a good thing without basing your argument on some abstract theory of human nature. Plato tried and failed. Fourier tried and failed. Marx tried and failed. Sartre tried and failed."
Harvey Pekar: "Well maybe I c"n learn from their mistakes."
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Faith_no_more
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3# |
Rank:none
Score:0
Posts:6
Registered:
04/30/2005
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:05/04/2005 10:22:52)
Hello all,
Thanks for reading my post. Yes, Oz is comparatively a secular place (<1% attend church & 15% describe themselves as atheists) but our fundamentalist minority is no less vocal & it was my misfortune to be born into such a family. However, as secular as Oz is (when looking at the decline of mainstream Christianity in the past 50yrs) the individual expression of "spirituality" now takes many (including non-Christian) forms. What gives me hope is not the declining church attendance records, but rather the proportion of those actively calling themselves atheists (they could have chosen "other" if they wanted). It is also notable, although disregarded by the government, that so many thousands of Australians gave their religion as Jedi knight or simply "the force" in the 2001 census that one must conclude that many don't take religion (or the census) too seriously. But does that mean that a comparatively "secular" society is any less conservative than a sectarian one?
"The difference between a religion and a cult is that a religion has more members"
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Drummond
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4# |
Rank:none
Score:0
Posts:1566
Registered:
03/03/2002
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:05/11/2005 02:07:11)
But does that mean that a comparatively "secular" society is any less conservative than a sectarian one?
Almost certainly. There are many athiest conservatives, but they are in the minority. Even the conservatives tend to be fiscal conservatives and social liberals. Australia isn't a left wing radical country, but by comparison to the US, it's very liberal.
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From American Splendor
Student to Harvey Pekar: "It"s hard enough trying to convince people that socialism is a good thing without basing your argument on some abstract theory of human nature. Plato tried and failed. Fourier tried and failed. Marx tried and failed. Sartre tried and failed."
Harvey Pekar: "Well maybe I c"n learn from their mistakes."
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Faith_no_more
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5# |
Rank:none
Score:0
Posts:6
Registered:
04/30/2005
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:05/12/2005 04:13:35)
Reply to : Shadowself
I'm glad you googled us up! Welcometo our little corner of the web. Hope you continue to post!
Hello & thanks for those quotes appended to your message.
Weight loss is not going to just fall into your lap. Neither is happiness. You have to grab it for yourself or watch it slip by.--Phoenixgirl
Agreed, now the question becomes how does one attain a lasting happiness (there seem to be as many different diets as there are religions and all claim to be the right one:-)?
Q. If 3 frogs are sitting on a log & one frog decides to jump off, how many frogs are left sitting on the log?
A. Three. Why? A decision is not an action
"I have learned to love the stars too dearly to ever again fear the night"
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RadioOne
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6# |
Registered:
07/18/2004
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:05/12/2005 06:13:33)
Hallo! 
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"You must remember yourself--be acutely aware of yourself being present to yourself in this point in time."
--Dr. Quentin Dinardo, professor
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The Collective
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7# |
Rank:none
Score:0
Posts:270
Registered:
12/23/2001
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:05/12/2005 07:38:20)
Reply to : Drummond
I think we have some other Aussies around here. I'm amazed, because I've always heard that Australia is a pretty secular country.
We used to be classed as a xian country several decades ago. Part of the reason our status changed to a non-xian country was partly the relaxing of social pressure of people having to go to church etc. but a major influence would have been the immigration of so many from other countries, bringing other cultures and religions to the point we are now a true multicultural society.
Unfortunately this had just made the xians all the more fundy and vocal. Hell, Darlene Zschech, a singer from Hillsong church, one of the major 'magachurches' in Sydney, even ended up wining a fucking ARIA the other year (ARIA is the Australian equivilent of a Grammy Award). (The 3rd finalist in the recent X-Factor crap was also from hillsong)
In a country like the US, where those in opposition are in the minority (is that correct?), the fundies can do what they like most of the time. In Australia, where they are just one voice in many it makes them all the more vocal, more manipulative, trying to turn the country around back into a xian country again.
Our society may be 'secular', but the churches and xians are as a result more intense, trying to win over everyone else, infiltrating areas that are supposedly secular, and generally more 'in your face' and annoying than usual. And thats just looking at it from the outside. From the inside Some churches are so fucked up and dangerous it's not funny.
Lahl
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snakechic
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8# |
Rank:none
Score:0
Posts:3524
Registered:
11/02/2004
Time spent:
6158 hours
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(Date Posted:05/12/2005 10:14:21)
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In exchange for obedience, Christianity promises salvation in an afterlife; but in order to elicit obedience through this promise, Christianity must convince people that they need salvation, that there is something to be saved from. Christianity has nothing to offer a happy person living in a natural, intelligible universe. If Christianity is to gain a motivational foothold, it must declare war on earthly pleasure and happiness, and this, historically, has been its precise course of action. In the eyes of Christianity, woman(man) is sinful and helpless in the face of God, and is potential fuel for the flames of hell. Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness before it can introduce salvation.
-- George H Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God
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The Collective
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9# |
Rank:none
Score:0
Posts:270
Registered:
12/23/2001
Time spent:
0 hours
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(Date Posted:05/12/2005 12:32:42)
Reply to : snakechic
Pentecostalism is on the rise in Australia what worries me is that the general population seem to consider this kind of church pretty damn 'normal' or mainstream. Yeah and the media exposure of the success of a couple of them ( ie the Aria and X-factor crap) is adding to it. THe outcome of this exposure of pentecostal type churches...(Aog, Vineyard, Revival fellowships, crusades etc). is a huge growth and appeal to Young people -(link to chart). So its working well for that brand of fundamentalism.
I guess it pisses me off on a personal level in a way, since I used to go to Rhema (or now called Riverview), the sister church to hillsong here on the west coast. We used to swap pastors every so often, I knew people like Darlene Zschech, Geoff Bullock and other people 'famous' in the xian community personally.
I helped with getting xian TV shows running such as "church live" (used to be "Rhema Live" back then), and "Priority One" (produced by a local AOG church), as well as produce graphics for them and was camera operator, technical director and editor a lot of the time. I even produced a music video for a local xian band, Vicky Meyer, which they never really got to air on commercial TV, since Channel 7 had made 2 music videos for them for free, and Vicki hated them both and preferred mine, but this obviously pissed off people at Chan 7 as they refused to show it.
So as well as being triggered by the xian factor (thats what 'X-Factor' stands for lol), it pisses me off that I helped lay a lot of the groundwork to promote xianity and stuff, and was rather well known in the industry back then, and I take it personally when I see people like Dralene Zschech winning an ARIA, and that the TV shows I helped start up and worked on are still on TV almost 10 years later.
So like I said, I take a lot of it personally, feel ashamed that I did my job too well on the wrong thing.
*shrug*.... nevermind.... just me rambling about things
Lahl
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