Peter Costello reaching out to his future subjects

Our loyal visitors,

Wanting to know how to react to Peter Costello’s decision to disappear up his own arse at long last, may have been waiting with bated breath to hear Sir Roger’s wisdom on the issue.

 Sir Roger’s view?

Who gives a fuck?

I’m at dinner,  Jan!

On the building Iran crisis Values Australia modifies what it said two weeks ago about China and 6/4:

“ [/dropcapif you have to force the people … to obey the dictates of your Glorious Religion, if you have to kill people to force them to agree with you, then you are doing something very wrong, your basic religious premises are seriously fucked and your religion is after all not nearly so glorious as you might want to believe, however desperately.

The same goes for any religion.

Here is what is probably as close as anyone has come to our view of politics, democracy and religion, and from a Christian, no less: C. S. Lewis 

I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments.

 

If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is going wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.

 

And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated.

– Of Other Worlds,