Government documents, press releases, and news reports, sometimes contain allusions to pantheism, and associations to things mystical.
Government buildings are being adorned with spiritualistic images (including of ancient gods and even taniwha) and incantations to past gods and ancestors are commonplace.
A fifty-meter-high statue was proposed at the entrance to the Waitemata Harbour in honour of the Maori Earth Mother.
Even the treaty is considered to be a mystical, spiritualistic, and evolving document ... something other-worldly.
There has been unrelenting pressure in recent decades to expunge Christian prayers, and allusions, from public life, and from the various agencies of state, most particularly schools. A clear message has been delivered by prominent parliamentarians, that Christianity should be a private and not a public matter. Christians can share their beliefs within, but not beyond, those of similar mind. Even the Speaker of the House was successful in having all references to Jesus removed from the official parliamentary prayer. The Prime Minister was happy to have the Muslim call to prayer broadcast nationally after the Mosque attacks, while her antipathy to Christianity remains palpable. And yet all of these voices have appeared conspicuously silent when it comes to karakia. How might we explain these paradoxes? What is really going on? Should we be concerned?
For almost three hundred years liberal democracies have been sensitive to the implications of a church and state union. The actions of the medieval papacy testify amply to the dangers when religious systems have the ear of the state, or when the state is used to enforce matters of religion. The history of Islam is no different. The emerging republican and constitutional governments of the eighteenth-century were acutely aware of these tensions, and of the risks of church-state union. Their founding constitutional documents often explicitly safeguarded freedom of religious association and the separation of church and state.
The founders of the United States were explicit. The first amendment reads as follows "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...". Many of those migrating to the new world were escaping religious persecution in their homelands. They knew just how bad things could get. While numbers are contested, it does seem that several tens of millions of lives were lost in Europe through the crusades, the inquisition, and the religious wars during and post the reformation period. This is not to say that motivations were always, or entirely, religious, it was more complex than that, but it does suggest that when church and state combine things can get ugly.
Interestingly, those nations and movements that railed most vehemently against state-church union, often did not move far from these in actuality. The arbiters of the French Revolution raged vehemently against the Roman Catholic Church, only to replace it with an ideology that equaled or exceeded the former in its brutality. Marx is well known for his criticism of Christianity, but the record of almost all Marxist countries testifies to a state promulgated ideology that has many of the hallmarks of religious dogma, in both its implementation and its ultimate results. It is generally accepted that Marxist countries murdered in excess of a hundred million of their own citizens, in what looks remarkably similar to the religious persecutions of earlier ages. It seems that religious, or religious type, belief systems meet a need present in all societies. This makes people vulnerable to manipulation. We have religious 0rientations without realizing it. We naturally seek answers beyond the known and demonstrable facts of life, if not in religion, in something that looks remarkably similar. Even Freud, Jung and Frankl, the heavyweights of psychotherapy, saw an inherent yearning for the religious in all people. Interestingly, Carl Jung noted in "The Undiscovered Self" the tendencies of twentieth-century man to worship the state in ways that earlier people had worshipped the religions of old.
I believe that we should be very concerned about the creep of pantheistic religion into public life. Increasingly, references to things spiritual have been used to silence debate, or to fill the gaps when logic, reason, and facts are lacking. Not infrequent assertions that the Treaty is a spiritual taonga, vested with mystical power, in and of itself, is a clear effort to make the arguments of its most animated adherents uncontestable. When you move into the realm of the mystical, reason no longer applies, and familiar democratic safeguards can be progressively dismantled.
Our government has a duty to safeguard the rights of people to worship as conscience dictates, but equally to ensure that the worlds of the mystical and the real do not merge. The merging of state and religion always, ultimately, ignites the basest of emotions, leads to the suppression of free speech, and gives license to those who are inclined to persecute and marginalize those with whom they disagree.
One world government will ultimately produce a one-world religion, of sorts. History forewarns us of how this will end up.
Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal. This article was originally published HERE, 27 May 2022
A fifty-meter-high statue was proposed at the entrance to the Waitemata Harbour in honour of the Maori Earth Mother.
Even the treaty is considered to be a mystical, spiritualistic, and evolving document ... something other-worldly.
There has been unrelenting pressure in recent decades to expunge Christian prayers, and allusions, from public life, and from the various agencies of state, most particularly schools. A clear message has been delivered by prominent parliamentarians, that Christianity should be a private and not a public matter. Christians can share their beliefs within, but not beyond, those of similar mind. Even the Speaker of the House was successful in having all references to Jesus removed from the official parliamentary prayer. The Prime Minister was happy to have the Muslim call to prayer broadcast nationally after the Mosque attacks, while her antipathy to Christianity remains palpable. And yet all of these voices have appeared conspicuously silent when it comes to karakia. How might we explain these paradoxes? What is really going on? Should we be concerned?
For almost three hundred years liberal democracies have been sensitive to the implications of a church and state union. The actions of the medieval papacy testify amply to the dangers when religious systems have the ear of the state, or when the state is used to enforce matters of religion. The history of Islam is no different. The emerging republican and constitutional governments of the eighteenth-century were acutely aware of these tensions, and of the risks of church-state union. Their founding constitutional documents often explicitly safeguarded freedom of religious association and the separation of church and state.
The founders of the United States were explicit. The first amendment reads as follows "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...". Many of those migrating to the new world were escaping religious persecution in their homelands. They knew just how bad things could get. While numbers are contested, it does seem that several tens of millions of lives were lost in Europe through the crusades, the inquisition, and the religious wars during and post the reformation period. This is not to say that motivations were always, or entirely, religious, it was more complex than that, but it does suggest that when church and state combine things can get ugly.
Interestingly, those nations and movements that railed most vehemently against state-church union, often did not move far from these in actuality. The arbiters of the French Revolution raged vehemently against the Roman Catholic Church, only to replace it with an ideology that equaled or exceeded the former in its brutality. Marx is well known for his criticism of Christianity, but the record of almost all Marxist countries testifies to a state promulgated ideology that has many of the hallmarks of religious dogma, in both its implementation and its ultimate results. It is generally accepted that Marxist countries murdered in excess of a hundred million of their own citizens, in what looks remarkably similar to the religious persecutions of earlier ages. It seems that religious, or religious type, belief systems meet a need present in all societies. This makes people vulnerable to manipulation. We have religious 0rientations without realizing it. We naturally seek answers beyond the known and demonstrable facts of life, if not in religion, in something that looks remarkably similar. Even Freud, Jung and Frankl, the heavyweights of psychotherapy, saw an inherent yearning for the religious in all people. Interestingly, Carl Jung noted in "The Undiscovered Self" the tendencies of twentieth-century man to worship the state in ways that earlier people had worshipped the religions of old.
I believe that we should be very concerned about the creep of pantheistic religion into public life. Increasingly, references to things spiritual have been used to silence debate, or to fill the gaps when logic, reason, and facts are lacking. Not infrequent assertions that the Treaty is a spiritual taonga, vested with mystical power, in and of itself, is a clear effort to make the arguments of its most animated adherents uncontestable. When you move into the realm of the mystical, reason no longer applies, and familiar democratic safeguards can be progressively dismantled.
Our government has a duty to safeguard the rights of people to worship as conscience dictates, but equally to ensure that the worlds of the mystical and the real do not merge. The merging of state and religion always, ultimately, ignites the basest of emotions, leads to the suppression of free speech, and gives license to those who are inclined to persecute and marginalize those with whom they disagree.
One world government will ultimately produce a one-world religion, of sorts. History forewarns us of how this will end up.
Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal. This article was originally published HERE, 27 May 2022
3 comments:
Maori spiritualism is a smoke-screen used by the far-Left and the Maori elite to get their ethno-nationalist way.
Wrap up a lot lot of mumbo-jumbo then infiltrate it through all aspects of public life, including education, health and justice.
That's just what our current racist government has done.
Falling back on superstition is a sign that you can't defend your own position. As we all know, apartheid is indefensible.
I think this is the correct frame. The culture war is best understood as a war of religion.
Those of us that champion secularism would do well to reflect on the Christian inheritance of our moral values. E.g., there is no scientific proof of human rights upon which liberal democracy is founded. Talk of natural rights was made explicit in 11th century canon law and presupposes that we are all created (i.e., born) equal.
In that respect, the warrior culture of traditional Māori society is a more natural expression of the Darwinian laws of “survival of the fittest”. This resulted in a male dominated hierarchical society optimised for tribal warfare. Cultural practices like sex-selective infanticide or cannibalism were only abandoned under the influence of Christian missionaries.
The resentment that fuels ethnonationalism is premised on the Christian assumption that there is status in victimhood, but this platform is being used to promote paganism in our public institutions. This is deeply ironic: sociocultural inequality is being used to promote a belief system for which concerns about equality were entirely foreign.
The impact John Dewey has had on the western world cannot be underestimated.
His aim was to transform traditional liberal education into progressive education which made education an agent for producing a humanist collectivist society. Dewey proclaimed his secular humanism was a new religion. A US judge, recently has also stated this was a religion.
"Change must come gradually to avoid force being used which could produce violence," Dewey said which explains why it has taken many decades to destroy our education in NZ. Dewey said reading and writing were to be devalued but collectivism emphasized. Hence our devastating decline in the basics this century but indoctrination in socialism. Whole language was the ultimate destroyer of our literacy. In line with progressivist ideals and based on now disproven evolutionary beliefs it has produced the long tail of underachievement which includes a disproportionate number of Maori who appear to be ethnically disadvantaged but in reality are the victims of a survival of the fittest style education system. Actually it favours white, language endowed girls from higher SES homes.
Progressivism in education having contributed to the cancellation of its arch enemy Christianity which contains traditional western values, teaching methods and includes the dignity of the individual's freedom but is now replaced with compulsory Maori religious beliefs and a government teetering on totalitarianism.
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