Rod Bower is the priest at the Gosford Anglican Church, which is famous for the thought-provoking statements posted on the noticeboard out the front of the church. Some of them are: ‘Dear Christians, some people are gay. Get over it, love God’; ‘When will they love their kids more than their guns’; ‘Our kids climate future sold for 30 pieces of silver’; ‘Jesus had 2 dads and he turned out OK’. He was one of the examples I used to illustrate the dichotomy in Christianity in Australia today1. This dichotomy is between those who adhere to the supposed teachings of Jesus, and those who do not. This dichotomy is epitomised by something that has happened very recently. However, to explain it, the reader needs to understand something about Twitter.
Twitter is a social networking service which allows users to send out (‘post’), interact and comment upon ‘tweets’ which have a maximum size of 280 characters. You can follow people who have something interesting to say, especially when they have the knowledge to back it up. If you have anything interesting to say, then people may follow you. If you do not like the attentions of some people, you can ‘block’ them. This stops you seeing any of their tweets and them seeing any of your tweets.
Rod Bower is active on Twitter and a couple of his tweets have so impressed me that they have made it onto the quotes section of this blog2,3. Now it has come to pass that this decent Anglican priest from Gosford has been ‘blocked’ by Brian Houston, the stupendously wealthy ‘pastor’ from the Pentecostal Hillsong Church, and mentor to Prime Minister Scott Morrison. While many people are blocked by Houston, and being blocked by him is looked upon as being a badge of honour, this blocking of the Rod Bower says much about Houston and Morrison. As I said above, this epitomises the dichotomy between the decent Christians and the power-crazed, money-grubbing types that pervade the religion these days.
Sources
I reckon Jesus would be blocked by Brian Houston and Scott Morrison if he was around today. Possibly arrested by the latter. At the very least he would not be regarded as a quiet Australian (or Israelite). In fact his big mouth got him in a lot of trouble.
Mark,
And he was brown, and spouted so much socialist stuff like treat others as you would have them treat you, love thy neighbour, do not bear false witness, do not kill.
The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modem times with “communism” or “socialism.” Jesus always spoke about an individual charity. According to Jesus, you, personally, are responsible for Charity. Forced charity is not what Jesus was talking about. — I used to be an Anglican. I’ll be praying for Rod Bower.
Sarah,
Yep. He is a decent man. So few of them among modern christians.
Firstly no-one actually knows what Jesus said about anything. All we know is what some people said he said, and some of those people were not there. Secondly it is wrong and offensive to equate atheism with totalitarianism and to somehow imply that socialism and communism are something that a person who lived 1850 years before they existed would have rejected. The established institutions of the various churches have obviously always been worried about ideologies that start to impinge on their control of human lives. The churches, all of them, are responsible for so much that is wrong with our world. Nasty brainwashing entities that take children and turn them into mindless zombies parroting and believing in idiocies and then passing them on to subsequent generations. In an enlightened society they would not exist. Marx was right. Unfortunately we may never have the chance to become enlightened because the nutters who do not accept reality have so affected the way that we are responding to the greatest challenge that the world of life has ever experienced. Religion is a large part of the problem.
Mark,
Yep. It was Voltaire who said ‘Those that can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’. The worst atrocity is denying climate science and that could lead to the deaths of millions.