One of the top desires of misled professionals in government

Under the heading 'Roxon anti-prejudice laws to curb freedom, trigger complaints' is news on liberties which, placed alongside earlier government attempts, provides matter for no superficial thought!

The NSW Attorney-General, Greg Smith, has expressed considerable caution in terms of these non-libertarian aspirations of the Commonwealth Government, as well he might. See also the submission, some years ago to the State Government^*1 on a closely related issue. Let us therefore examine some of the underlying issues in various measures of press control, blog control, expression control, authoritative demeaning of liberty for purposes of cultural preference, by an ad hoc body of this or that kind, with power to act. The power for this vacillates in and out, as it is stopped or forwarded; but the desire for it does not vacillate, but rather continues in ever higher realms of control.

One of the top desires of misled professionals in government, is to establish guilt. It may be in an opposing party, allegedly the harbour of rough-necks, red-necks, manipulators (for the rich or the poor, for the wealthy or for the unions, these sometimes mutual aggressors). It may be in an opposing principle (such as truth in preference to mischievous shiftiness, a capitalising crust which knows nothing but self-will), or even in an opposing religion (as in the case of atheism or agnosticism, the knowledgeable certainty with no base, or the parallel in terms of finding the truth that there is none, or none can be found, versus at least self-consistent other options). But it is there.

The Party, or the 'Leader' (we seem to be losing the humility of someone chairing a cabinet in preference for a leader who lays down the law, preferably a lawyer, to do it with more knowledge), is summonable (if private it could have been summonsable) before public opinion. How guilty, before the provocateur, stands the centre of publicly exposed shame. When both sides do, each denigrating raspily the other, it may be a special case of the atomic idea of 'MAD'. This can be paralleled with approximately equal acrimony, irrelevance and avoidance of the bases of the issues, it can become a type of caterwauling, which is both unproductive in the thing called, still, government, and expose more and more a vaunting base in its chutzpah.

This we have begun to consider. However there is another pet plaything (not that the thing itself is any matter of play, only the mess made of it), for politicians, indeed, for all people in, with, adjacent to or loving power. It is the suppression of free speech. In that way, whoever gets in first, may say all that is going to be permitted; or whoever gets the standard cultural presuppositions or predilections, the pets of the day, may be able to have the opposite viewed with disdain by autonomous judges, erected as a facade for power, authority and suppression of alternatives.

This can be done by simply NOT SEEING what is culturally not the norm at the moment, or viewing what is the norm, as in some way certain, assured truth. This enables THE AUTHORITY to dismiss all argument IN EFFECT, at the outset, or with a culturally approved facade instead of reason. This becomes a conservation of a preferred cultural mind-set, an obfuscation mechanism invented instead of justice, and is most useful in take-overs, coups, cultural violence, ideational manipulation, the destruction of liberty and the institution of someone's pet ideas. These may be exposed as if set in stone, though they themselves usually lack all foundation in the permeating world of political philosophy. Confounded because inadequately founded, human philosophy almost always ends up in adversatives, and argument, which is quite natural when you leave out the word of God, just as it would not help in mathematics if you left out numbers.

What appears to be the direction of thought flow in our current Government in this matter. It is to be hoped it rapidly changes its tilt, but the present appears thus.

Freedom now, to speak! Obviously, for cultural reasons, that must go. You can deem what someone says about SOMETHING, something said about SOMEONE, by just a little lapse in logic, and you can pretend that you are protecting people by so doing, though in fact you are defiling freedom of information, argumentation and the distinction between people and ideas to the uttermost. While fussing about people incapable, apparently, of taking a knock to their ideas of themselves, which include unwillingness to have anything they hold criticised, especially if some other forcible people hold it too, a Government can readily invent what become cultural sacred cows or icons, and simply suppress all nationally undesired argument.

How is it known that it is so categorised ? What makes it nationally undesired ? Why, the autonomous, or perhaps culturally bound, body can be set up by those who will know the call, and become THE AUTHORITY to repress or rebuke, forbid or sanction, exclude or include. It is easy then to become professionally blind, as indeed appears almosty normal in revolutions, where things left out and those kicked out become almost a sport for the more vehement.

In this so civilised age, when in the past 100 years, perhaps less than a hundred million people have been slaughtered for some kind of political control-hungry idea or other, it can become better just to fine people who do not conform, to the tutt-tutt, and caution, perhaps in prison. This appears our direction of flow.

Indeed, you must not say that culture i wrong, or at least very wrong, but using its own morals, you simply invent which tutt-tutt will be where, and which no-no there, and of course not bothering with any logical foundation, you have a pay-day for the power-hungry, the social adventists and the control-addicts. After all, the poor will be blighted by these more minor methods, and the rich, if they should become particularly obnoxious (for not bowing to primitive authoritarianism dressed up as cultural conditioning, re-education as the Chinese Communists call it), can simply be put in prison.Moreover, then they could be called criminals, which would tend to destroy their cause, take the wind out of their sails, give them pause to lick their wounds, especially in the case that any of them should ever want to get into politics directly.

If nothing like this comes to pass, then they may say that this shows this was not their way. It is better however to prevent its coming to pass, since if it does, the old nation of Australia, famed for independence of style, thought and drive, can be peeled like a potato, and then mashed by the least of its servants.

In fact, the position now is this. IF someone, some government, some body invested with cultural, social and thought control (indirectly in the case of the last, but still actually), decides that something is not in the national interest, then two authoritarian murder concepts, death to life forms, are out in the open. First, the national interest now becomes LORD. The assumed welfare of the nation becomes more important than many things, such as truth, or morality, or God, for example. This at once disenfranchises those who believe that God is the most important. Secondly, what the national interest is SAID to be in any given case, becomes the prophet of this new LORD, and just as in Revelation 13, the beast - that is the military, political, social, self-religionised and financial power - has an aid, the second beast, the religious one, so here we have this religious travesty in tow. It can be SAID that because of this or that, the other cannot be. The feel of national interest can vary anywhere, and so can the totalitarian substitute for Australia, if it is to be fooled into this.

Take multiculturalism. This started in terms of toleration of differences, kindness to newcomers, awareness of polite sensitivities not to make things too hard for the immigrant, watchful non-hurtfulness and a good measure of patience, with what does not appeal, and so forth. In much, it could be conceived of as an offshoot of Christianity, Christian culture instead of shooting.

It developed. It now becomes a matter of rights, and in the USA someone could be called before strong judicial penalty, if found guilty of destroying a religious document misused to convey material helping the use of force in the area of religion. Instead of logic, of seeing what is MEANT, and in what circumstances, you choose to see only what is FELT, and how it is TAKEN, as if ANYTHING can be fined or judged if there is enough chiding chutzpah to back it. After all, you do not want people to bomb you, as some seem inclined to do. Thus there is now virtually assumed to be NO character for Australia, but it becomes like a series of simultaneous equations, a matter of constant adjustment on a common basis.

Thus, if a nation had a Christian beginning, in some formal way, this is diluted without limit, as more options are poured in. NOTHING REMAINS, except what it is felt would be a good plan to retain, with 'good' DEFINED by current inclination. If, as is now the case, this is to reduce all specifically Christian CHARACTER or characteristics from the nation, and make it a leaf in the wind, not attached to ANY tree by any means, then too bad. But this precisely is a religion, making anything in expression at will, defunct or defiled with judgment or exclusion; and no religion may be established by the Commonwealth.

In this new form of State religion, in prospect, and nearly engaged before in other forms, it is urged that anything is wrong if it is used as an absolute basis for conduct, views and their expression, when this annoys or negatively impacts on people who want to use government bodies or power or ideologies or any of the above, to stop it. What is stopped ? The believing AND saying FREELY what some object to. Thus an AUTHORITY is countermanded. With what however is it countermanded ? It is of course by another authority. The basis of the first authority may be argued, even successfully; but this is not the point. It is about how people feel, and how some party given authority, CHOOSES to regard authorities other than itself. It is not bound to reason.

Thus the new situation would become this. The Government or a body appointed by its authority, takes over authority for determining what is authoritative. To do this, it needs to be above all authority, the dispenser, ultimately of authority, and hence authoritarian. It is meta-authority, the acme of religion, and it is in view to be established without a referendum to cancel this liberty of religion part, relative to Commonwealth direction, to alter the Constitution at this point. If Australia were to fall for that, it would not in this or that soldier's death, but as one whole in form and formula, format and function, be itself as a nation, among the fallen.

It is simply the case that a question has to be asked FIRST of this idea of sitting on expression with power of authority. On what basis is this found ? Is it on a referendum to give it such power to establish a religion ? or does a Government just apotheose ?

Certainly, for what has power to silence what people are ordered by God to say, in a book for example of millenia of power and position, is above God. Whether you believe in God, in this case the God of the Bible, for example, is entirely irrelevant to this issue as it has been portrayed. It appears simply a matter of comparative power, that of the God appealed to by the speaker to be arraigned (if so be, someone feels a need for this, because of a sensitive soul or whatever other ground), and the Government. Since the latter would then be able to order rules to control the speech about and establishing or applying the directions of the God of the former, such politics is entering into the moral-social-financial-ideational area where men bow, give priority, take their place as directed, and receive their allowance of freedom. It becomes a replacement God.

Every religious notion must, if indicated by the culturally organised social body, bow to it. There may be no way out or on, except in the end to prison or fine, and criminal status. We descend effectually to the arena of communism, where the State allows or disallows, weaves or abbreviates, gives orders as in Daniel in the case of Nebuchadnezzar, to all religionists to bow to its ideas, here represented in power by a Board, whatever these directive, corrective or standardising thoughts may be. This is by definition the founding of a religion; and without dishonesty, you would have to change the Constitution in another way, that the racist one^*2often discussed, to do this.

If any such control emanates for the net, in any respect, in terms of such matters, then this becomes a political, cultural, and academic field of domination. Of course, those seeking these powers, whether in USSR or Germany, in times past, do not always come out and point out the depraved condition awaiting people if they so allow government ONCE ONLY to take over such controls. Remove liberty of speech, and the critics can be imprisoned, and if they speak even there, if not arbitrarily beheaded, then they can be dead-headed, even called socially divisive or assertive persons - the usual works of deceit - and shut-up or shut-down, whichever seems better.

While such considerations would normally be mocked by those seeking such social or political or personal or academic mastery, history has more to teach us than marshmallowish and unrealistic words.

The distinction must be made once and for all, between ideas and people. People are NOT ideas, and hurt ideas are NOT hurt people. If you confuse those two - a matter in which the author has had a profound involvement - then mayhem happens. Einstein once made a fundamental error in mathematics at a high and influential level. He was corrected and this altered things. If Einstein can be wrong in an idea, min his exalted concepts, how is it that acutely sensitive people MUST NOT have their ideas, which of course can change in a day, criticised, or exploded, even this merely precede in many cases, their implosion ? In the world of ideas, there is room for every type of exposure, with all the human vocabulary and ideational furniture available. To crimp this, is to kill the means of truth, and as in Isaiah 59, leave it fallen in the street.

Truth is ONE of the elements of religion, final truth, and this once more, becomes simply subordinated to convenience, founded on ideas, purposes which make society a god, man its servitor: and it is a god which demands obedience.

Ideas, beliefs may be exposed and dealt with trenchantly, as in the Bible and debate, because it matters so much that the entire scope of man's functions need to be activatable, and no special help given to parties threatening, whether litigation or invasion, whether directly or not. The world of ideas must be as free as empirical science, to inspect material things. It can make horrific mistakes, but it continues; and the same applies to man here also. If however, in empirical science or in rational exercise of the human mind and its procedure to its basis in information and direction, there be a cessation of freedom, then the due kudos is gone. It is mere effrontery and force, then, as in some areas in our schools already^*3.

IF the Australian people through referendum gave the Government such power, and the Constitution were changed, some things purged, some added, till the Government in the way (indirectly but actually) in view, had all donatable power, then that would be the will of the people, without circumventing what had GIVEN THIS NATION some of its past character. It would choose to dump the limits and law of the past, perhaps even the reference to its coming together in the first place, in reliance on almighty God. Then there would be folly, but not dishonesty.

The past is not wrong simply because it is past; and the present is not right, because it dreams of a future, based in its new religion and applied with social power, oblivious of logic in its primary form, one without restriction by any designable cultural inhibitions, turned into primacy of power about what you can say. It can rule and rule what is by definition right. Power of appeal ? Not very visible. To whom and why ?

It is admitted that swearing in the profane sense, has an offensive odium. After all, it tends very often to amount to this: that when someone is speaking about one topic, in which both are interested, there is a cost to communication from one side. He or she may wish to evoke imagery concerning sexual reproduction, its use or abuse, or proclivities, or undesirable, even imaginary features in the party being addressed, or in a group of which that person is part. This would often be admittedly extraneous, like a tic in the cheek of a speaker. This may not be a mutual desire, so that it is an intrusion into a topic. There is no question of liberty to think, belief, speak one's preference, position, argumentation; but it is merely an unspoken call to subjecting the other party to such obscenity as a necessary condition of interchange of thought!

While it is best not to be ineptly authoritarian in tone, and it is good to be able to appeal to considerations which are not swept in and out with the wind, at some cultural level, and thus to make idols of the day amid its current occupiers, yet some self-control of the extraneous is apt when it binds the mind to intrusive features irrelevant to the topic. Thus while in the matter of swearing of this kind, total exclusion is normally not required, and a degree of toleration is in view, yet the principle of self-control is assuredly applicable when in a public place there is a freedom to infest or invest the interchanges with what is verbal pollution. In the case of public schools, it is a shameful insistence that students in order to learn for their life's work, must learn muck by formalised permissiveness in the Class.

That said, however, in terms of irrelevance to topics and imposition where the mode is not principial but psychological, the use of the State as the ultimate authority on what may be said or printed or published, let alone with authoritarian, mandated indirectness, does involve a religion.

If it be said, that while the Government were not elected to found a religion, or to maintain a new cultural one, or to minimise others (provided always that these 'others' do not objectively and undeniably seek to overthrow the authority of the State to keep order and implement what it has been authorised to do in an election) yet they can authoritatively do what amounts to this, so long as they do not say so: then this is mere hypocrisy come to light from the darkness. What has power over religions and their expression, characterising them adversely by social and contemporary cultural standards, prohibiting or strait-jacketing their expression is the new GOD! It does not have to proceed immediately to apotheose. It may even wait a while before reaching the finale of such follies as exhibited prophetically in II Thessalonians 2, when some poor fellow starts imagining he is God, and does not seem to notice his capacity for abbreviation in death.

It is to be noted that sort of regime with its prospective regimen, has no basis but preference, no ground but desire, and its philosophy is a part of that religion, be it some defined or undefined 'multi-culturalism' or any other means of compromising truth and its free expression. It is not relevant whether this be the desire of the authority-cherishing body, or not. If this is the result, and the character of the things instituted by the governmental use of the power provided for other purposes, then this is what needs to be seen, realised and evaluated. The government evaluation is not to the point: merely the resultant authority and its parameters and powers: this is to the point. Thus we have possible principle six.

Good is here undefined, because as soon as you begin to define it, you have to show what you really have in mind in your ethics or religion, or religious-substitute, whether it be I AM WHO I AM, or anything else. There is your ultimate and you may wish to make it the operative ultimate for all, or you may wish this for your Party; but once you show what is back of your 'good', then the religious ultimacy becomes apparent and it is unfeasible except by emotional red-herrings, to hide it any more. You are thus all the more obviously founding a religion, or becoming a religious operative in charge. If this is done, as is most common, then the Constitution must first be consulted, as it prohibits it. If this is not desired, then lack of definition becomes an important cover-up.

In view of such strivings for power, to institute a people or culture or approach or political view as the FINAL court of appeal, at least nationally, it is wonderful to reflect by contrast with these movements, already not a little at work in parts of Australia in one form or another, that there is a most welcome consequence.

of what can stand without authoritarian controls, exemptions and non-exemptions, cultural impositions, revolutionary constraints from a part demanding obedience from the whole,

and something of the treasure in substantial, untruncated freedom of speech. To be sure, ideal liberty has not always been shown by those in power and using the name of Christ; but then neither have many other things in the Bible been noticeable, in some of those using the name of Christ, but not following His directives. . We have had, in this land, for a very long time, a degree of liberty concerning freedom of thought and speech, so long as it does not seek by violence to overthrow the power of the Government to do what it is elected to do within the limits constitutionally formulated; and this has resulted not a little from a Christian background. Force has not been seen as the basis of belief, or an apt mode of forwarding it, but as ludicrously irrelevant to it. The Constitution reflects such a position; for it is obvious that such force can equally come from within a nation, or outside it!

While perfection has sometimes been distanced, yet substantial movement to this has been most considerable, and not even voices for Communism (which has power ambitions) have been driven to this point, underground in this nation at this time, nor have some other positions close in approach to forcible take-over.

The effort not to spare feelings, as if facts were in vain, but rather to keep the solemn track of truth, and allow controversy its place, individuality its work, challenge its value and differentials their domain, has helped us to be both creative and stable. It has been in no small part because those who are Christians following the Bible, are shown that force in religion is excluded, as with Peter and the sword, and Christ before Pilate. IF HE WISHED, then and there, He could have called on the power of God to protect Him. This was not the way. In fact, as often stated beforehand, over more than a millenium, He came to open to death, the way of truth, and then show its truth in the resurrection, not in killing people, or fining them, or seeking to shut their mouths by closing their wallets, or liberty to walk with liberty to speak, through the ministry of prisons.

It would be not only unconstitutional (though culture ideas may wish to deem otherwise, based on psychological theories or anything else to hand), but highly unwise, confusedly authoritarian and a gross abuse of power for any Government, therefore, to institute such freedom of speech limits as appear actively to be in mind, a sort of wand allowing all sorts of things, to be defined as occasion arises here or there, while disallowing others. It would implicitly grant to its mind, or a body which its mind had in mind, a certain ultimate character. It may even be unchangeable, as if to prove that it is a God substitute, but one lacking His ability.

Any people who submit to this, and allow their Government such abuse of power, and any parliamentarian, whether or not by intention, by result would appear prone to the charge of being treacherous to the country, to its past, its Constitution, its limits, its character: and party to instituting a new character, far from independence, a social substitute for God at the operative level, one crucial and disjunctive, in view.

When Christ declared, I AM ... THE TRUTH, it is clear that anything else that says it is, in practice, is challenging Him. To authorise a Government so to challenge, and penalise those following not its whim, but the God of the Bible, for example, is only part of an establishment of a religion, in confrontation at the outset. When the results of this arrest of His people, first of their speech where and as desired by authority, begin to expand - need we wait for it - then would there be, once more, the tatters of the tatterdemalion for the beauty of truth. If the people want that, well, it still would not make it right or well-founded. But it would be best to ASK them by referendum if they wish not only to make aborigines what amounts to another sort of race, with a different set of laws^*2, but ALL Australians a changed race, with a different religious ambit for their laws. Restricted areas would become verboten! Extensive would be the grass which you would be obliged to keep off, in order to qualify for residual liberty.

With Christianity there is an exception among religions: it is more interested in the force of truth, than in the truth of force. Likewise, and with this, it is not so keen on surviving as reviving, on strength tests, as in guilt mitigation, in self-glorying and absorption, as in God glorifying by things charitable, gracious, judicious, peaceable and God-given, in comradeship in co-operation with the living God at any cost, more than co-operation with man with any loss, in obedience to Him rather than submission servilely to the godlike presumption of contesting man. It puts a cross above a kosh, sacrifice above conquest, and while the power is in the end with God, as in the beginning, yet no man gets into heaven by having victories in human warfare, or self-proposed efforts. God gives entry on stated conditions, His own. Christ could have taken the globe by the power of God, but preferred to shake the globe by the wisdom of God (I Corinthians 1-2), if by any means, without force, through surrender to truth and the finding of reconciliation with God, man might come home, and cease to be estranged with his carnal measures of triumph, self-will and slaughter.

There will be slaughter (Revelation 19, Ezekiel 39), but this comes when all opportunities lost, all covenantal appeals foregone, every grace shown, and all pardon rejected, all peace despised, and the residue of man upon this earth become like an incendiary bomb, ready to inflame, to explode with whatever results, in the very face of God. This being so, they are burnt, for our God is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29).

But the POINT is not power; that is merely the final resource. The issue is truth, the motivation is love, the method is mercy, the means are sacrifice, and the victim is God Himself in human form, arousing life from death because it is He who controls death, giving its maw what is left after all godly means at all cost have been utilised first. It is not death which controls the Maker of life, any more than a garbage tin controls a household, rather than receiving what is not taken. Hosea 13:14 remains a great, simply expressed and profoundly distinctive concerning the wise, unique ways of God. It is not a principle but a performance, duly foretold, told, wrought and realised (Galatians 6:14, Philippians 2).

It is then glory, not mere greatness, which distinguishes God: that infinite wisdom, love, mercy, truth, that singularity above and before all things, and after many things, so that what is left is His in love, not seduction or seizure, and truth dwells with limpid eye amid the pleasant streams of unmolested beauty and impelling magnificence, not for mere glamour, but in goodness that gives, in the infinite capacity of His wonder, in the scene of the personal God for persons made, not impersonal fabrications, confabulations or inventions. He satisfies because having made man, He knows what is his good, and provides it amply, aptly and contradistinctively.

gives some excellent synonyms for chutzpah (supreme self-confidence), many of which apply with startling aptitude, to this subject matter which we are studying. Some appear below.

Synonyms: audaciousness, audacity, brashness, brass, brassiness, brazenness, cheek, cheekiness, effrontery (also chutzpa or hutzpah or hutzpa), crust, face, gall, nerve, pertness, presumption, presumptuousness, sauce, sauciness, temerity.

Much of this applies to the chutzpah of man toward man, in national or even global governing spasms of attention or desire. When however it is even the chutzpah of man towards God, and His disciples and discipline, His word in the Bible and His workings in prophecy, constantly being fulfilled before our very eyes (cf. SMR Chs. 8 - 9), there is a grand eloquence in the areas evoked by these terms, cited above.

See Ch. 10 of Tedious Torturers ... , for example. See also Redemption or Revolt Ch. 6.

	1) The State, your State, is one State and you will heed your State.
	2) It is here, not just to influence your wishes for the common good, but to interpret the common good in any way it sees fit, and require it in your speech, in terms of lack of it at any point, arena or area.
	3) Therefore you are not free to speak, argue, contest, contend, or even express things relating to your ideology, God, perspective, which may offend someone or other, who does not agree and finds your expression upsetting.
	4) The State, your State, has said this, and it is for your own good, believe us, that this is being done.
	5) It is not really authoritarian, because you elected us.