It’s only taken The Australian 50 years to catch up. “Is God Dead?” asks the headline on the cover story of its Inquirer section this weekend. In 1966, Time magazine used those same words — “Is God Dead?” — as the cover of its famous April 8 edition.
The difference is that while the Time story was a genuine, fact-based feature that made a thoughtful contribution to the debate about the decline of theism, The Australian’s effort is just overblown wordage — a disjointed, illogical display of melancholia penned by Greg Sheridan. He takes two broadsheet pages to tell us we’re all going to hell in a hand basket because Christianity is in retreat. Take out the odd contemporary reference and it reads much like the long-winded sermon/polemics favoured by The Catholic Weekly in the late 1950s.
Along with his old university buddy, Tony Abbott, Sheridan would have us believe his central thesis that we owe our democracy and all of its assumed moral values to Christianity (he actually means Catholic Christianity, but never has the courage to say it). His problem is that the claims he makes to buttress this argument are either laughably apocalyptic or just plain barmy. Let’s ponder a few:
“The eclipse of Christianity will be like the eclipse of the sun. Darkness will be the result.”
“It is nothing short of the reordering of human nature.”
“A culture without God will create different human beings.”
“When our culture has exiled God, there will be radical change to the human personality and all our social institutions and relations.”
I am not making this up. It isn’t satire. Those are verbatim quotes from “The Gospel According to Sheridan”, as published in the Weekend Oz on Saturday — “For The Informed Australian”. The spooky thing is that it could just as easily be a transcript of David Koresh hectoring his Davidian disciples at Waco in 1993. Come to Jesus, or the world as we know it is chopped liver.
[In defence of Greg Sheridan (really)]
What makes this Christian deity a different, better “god” than the gods of the Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists or any other religion is never explained. This is little more than amateur preaching dressed up as journalism. Parsonical piffle. Sheridan parades his religious prejudices as if they were facts. For example:
“Virtually everything we like in our current society and in our political culture, derives from Christianity.”
And does the News Corp staff Gregorian fear to tread down the difficult philosophical furrows that so troubled Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer before him? Not for a moment!
“Without God, humans beings are no longer unique, universal and special in nature — they are just one more chancy outcrop of the planet and its biosphere.
[Greg Sheridan defends Sri Lankan junket — and glowing coverage]
Then there’s this bizarre zinger that would make even the pious William Wilberforce blush:
“Slaves became souls under the influence of Christianity.”
And so it goes, on and on and on. Opinion with nary a supporting fact in sight. We’ve become accustomed, of late, to Holt Street operating more like an archdiocese than a media hub, but to publish this turgid tripe at such extraordinary length is an offence to the trade.
And of course there is a fundamental, inescapable contradiction that underlies all of this lame theologising.
If, as Cardinal Sheridan believes, it is the all-knowing, all-present and all-powerful Christian god who has given us everything that is good about society, then equally that same god must have also created everything that is bad. Including AIDS, poverty and paedophile priests.
Or maybe those are just “chancy outcrops of the planet and its biosphere”.
Poor Gregorian Chant, life as he and his bestie, Tiny Atrocity know it is ending. Boo hoo!
“Greg Sheridan says God is dead, confusing God with his journalistic integrity”. The big difference, though, is that plenty of people believe in the former.
Actually, I think he’s quite right in some of the quotes extracted here, in particular in the notion that, “[a] culture without God will create different human beings.” That’s a good thing, but.
David thank you for reading it, I zizzed off after one par
Me too. You are a better man than me, Mr Salter.
The Oz is conducting their campaign about “The War On Christianity” so it appears Sheridan has been delegated to produce this screed.
You can say that Christianity has produced many good things in the world, but it has also been used to justify many bad things eg slavery, apartheid, expelling Jews from Spain etc. It is only some comfort to know the Christians opposed to slavery eventually overcame the Christians who supported it.
And what about the way Rupert and his Muppets eclipse the news?
…… Won’t it be funny of St Peter’s wearing a “David Jones” keffiyeh?
One of the greatest benefits of abandoning the Murdoch rags several years ago is that I am spared from the thoughts of one Greg Sheridan. I used to read his purple prose about the then current geopolitical situation and wonder if he was writing as a hostage of Kim Jong-il (yes, I stopped reading the Australian under the father’s rein).
However, every so often I read something about Sheridan’s prose, like this, and I’m reminded of a video footage of a giraffe giving birth. There is something about that final, awkward, messy push at the end that makes me hope that the delivery was a safe one given the tremendous height of the birth canal.