Disappointing Spin

I shouldn't be surprised. This is what politicians do... they spin anything to suit their own agenda.

Today the Greens party took it upon themselves to re-write the High Court ruling on chaplaincy and make it an issue about the validity of the Chaplaincy program claiming it "a great victory for secular public education" and "The offensive misuse of public money to push religion onto innocent public school children has come to an end"

The particular Greens MP making these misguided statements is John Kaye.  He has used his position to publicly attack Scripture Union saying "By offering an additional pair of helping hands to over-stretched public schools, the National School Chaplaincy Program was a Trojan horse for groups like the Scripture Union" which is very contrary to the opinion of over 98% of school principals (who were overwhelmingly in support of chaplaincy) when surveyed about their school chaplains!

Mr Kaye has called for the funds to be redirected to 'Welfare Workers'... but seems to have missed the point that the ruling was all about the fact that the government was NOT able to directly fund these programs.

In fact, when you look at this ruling - it is actually IN FAVOUR of chaplaincy.   Where did he ever get "chaplains now gone..." from anyway??

So.. just to help you and your colleagues out there Mr Kaye... I'll summarise:
1) The High Court ruled that the case did not impact on the freedom of religion and unanimously dismissed the charge that school chaplains' religious position breached the Constitution.
(This means that Chaplains can stay in schools)

2) The High Court ruled that the way the Federal Government funded the program was unconstitutional (6-1 ruling with numerous and varying reason given)
(this means that the Federal Government needs to find a different way to fund such programs)


Happy to help anytime Mr Kaye
http://johnkaye.org.au/school-chaplains-gone-now-for-qualified-welfare-workers

answers and questions

It's definitely all the rage to be asking lots of questions about life and purpose etc and it seems that a criticism of someone like Rob Bell is that he asks lots of questions but doesnt really provide answers.

I heard this quote the other day:

"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers."
James Thurber


...which is a very good point.
But I think its very hard to know (for sure) really many answers. There are some very solid truths that we can cling too and that are GOOD answers for many things. But I think we need to acknowledge the mystery in life - whilst trying to pursue truth.

Getting over my head now and i'm starting to go cross eye'd
over and out

A thought from my time in Ethiopia

So one of the things that really made us (the 17ppl that traveled as part of the DEEP program) super uneasy was the amount of food we ate while over there. I mean, we ate A LOT of food! It was really laid out of us and sometime we even had silver service in top restaurants! This caused some serious issues because, well, we were in Ethiopia and there were starving people all around us and we didnt really go there to eat heaps of food - in fact many of us were going EXPECTING to eat very little (and loose weight!).

So, I can hear you saying "well... why didnt you just eat less"? And this certainly is what we were thinking too but there was a complication. We were being hosted by VERY hospitable Ethiopians (who were partners with TEAR Aus). Part of the culture in Ethiopia is to really really really look after your guests, and they certainly did. As you can imagine, it would have been extremely rude of us to refuse this food and even to eat less! (yep, thats right. We were often TOLD to keep eating/order more in quite a stong and repetative way!)

One day quite early in the trip we visited a feeding program run by Hope Enterprises in Addis Ababa - they fed over 1000 very poor people every day. It was quite an experience for all of us and we felt totally useless standing there observing.

Aftet seeing this, we walked 3 shops down and had lunch in a nice restaurant - which was the most awful thing I think many of us had ever experienced. We just had to take up a big offering and deliver it up to the feeding program so that we didnt kill ourselves.

But I've been thinking abdout that experience latelty and have really come to realise that this is waht I/we do everyday anyway... its just not right next door! We need to have that same feeling of 'wrongness' every time we exploit how much we have.

Once again - this is waaaay to challenging even for me to handle... hopefully we can learn from this though.

PNG vs JPEG

A Community Service...

America's problems explained

Young Chuck moved to Texas and bought a Donkey from a farmer for $100. The farmer agreed to deliver the Donkey the next day. The next day he drove up and said, 'Sorry son, but I have some bad News, the donkey died.' Chuck replied, 'Well, then just give me my money back.' The farmer said, 'Can't do that. I went and spent it already.' Chuck said, 'Ok, then, just bring me the dead donkey.' The farmer asked, 'What ya gonna do with him? Chuck said, 'I'm going to raffle him off.' The farmer said You can't raffle off a dead donkey!'Chuck said, 'Sure I can Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he's dead.' A month later, the farmer met up with Chuck and asked, 'What happened with that dead donkey?' Chuck said, 'I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars a piece and made a profit of $998.' The farmer said, 'Didn't anyone complain?' Chuck said, 'Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back.' Chuck now works for one of the two remaining US Investment Banks.

Now this is good