Tetherd Cow Ahead

These are the Scientology offices in Russell St, Melbourne. Whenever I walk past, I look in and often see the inhabitants industriously doing things. Some of these things make sense to me, like putting files in cabinets and drinking out of coffee cups. Other things seem odd and miserable, like the big bunch of sad-but-earnest-looking people listening to a guy talk while he points at a chart with diagrams like something out of a 1950s science fiction film. Or the young and impressionable kids barely out of school, filling in the ludicrous Scientology ‘Personality Tests’.*

Not so long back, Violet Towne, as part of her job†, was taking photographs in this general area, and some of the sad-but-earnest-looking people came out of the building and in a very paranoid manner demanded to know what was going on. One woman kind of just ‘stood’ wherever VT and her colleagues went, saying nothing, gazing blankly ahead of herself and exerting some kind of invisible unpleasantness. It was not what any sane person would consider normal behaviour. This building is in a very public place and VT & Co were well withing their legal rights to be doing what they were doing (which had absolutely nothing to do with Scientology, until the Scientologists appeared).

Quite coincidentally, later on the very same day as I took this photograph (Saturday July 12, 2008), the Melbourne Chapter of the anti-Scientology group Anonymous staged a protest outside the building.

I wonder if they got any pictures exactly like mine?

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*My use of quotes in this case (and in the image if you picked it up), is to indicate sarcasm. Unlike the perpetrators of last post’s efforts, I actually know how punctuation is supposed to work.

†I’ll leave that with you for speculation… suffice to say it’s not something that you or I would find in the least peculiar, offensive or even slightly unusual.

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The quotation marks? Anybody?

A Supreme Being from Srinivas Krishna’s video artwork When The Gods Came Down To Earth casts a sardonic eye over Polish Neocatechumenal Pilgrims in Melbourne’s Federation Square.

There’s a certain level of high class irony in operation here.

One of the great joys of living in a society with a relatively high secularly-inclined population with a penchant for larrikanism, is watching the occasional clashes between the church and the heathens when they occur.

This time it all started when someone (the Catholic Church says it wasn’t them and the Catholic Premier of NSW, Morris Iemma, says it wasn’t him) decided that any form of protest of the upcoming World Youth Day (or as some wag has pointed out: World [Roman Catholic] Youth [if you’re a bishop] Day [more like a week]), is not acceptable. Especially, it seems, if that protest is in the form of a t-shirt that might ‘annoy’ the pilgrims. The Sydney constabulary have duly had special laws created for them, without consultation from the very great proportion of the non-Catholic community, that give them quite surprising leeway to apprehend protesters, pranksters or even completely innocent bystanders on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Of course this kind of stupidity is, thankfully, still treated with the derision it deserves by a goodly number of Australians, to the point that one beloved Sydney entrepreneur, Remo Giuffré, the man behind the Remo General Store, is running a contest to see who can come up with the best t-shirt slogan for the event.

I want about ten of these.

About a quarter of Australia’s population is self-declared as Christian Catholic.* Over the last few decades, the younger part of the population has been demonstrating a slow inclination to drift away from the conventional Christian Church (and indeed, organized religion altogether) but in about 20 days time in Sydney, the Catholic Church will attempt to reddress that trend by exerting its influence over the waning faith of the young people of Australia and holding an event that they are calling (some might say duplicitously) World ‘Youth’ Day.

Tourism New South Wales’s ‘Sydney’ page breathlessly gushes:

New South Wales looks forward to welcoming young people for World Youth Day 2008, the biggest event to be held in Australia, ever.

Poster and radio advertising around Sydney is urging people who are ‘not involved’ with World Youth Day to take a holiday or stay off the roads. The NSW Government is spending a small fortune on the event and the Catholic Church, notably the oleaginous and unpalatable Cardinal George Pell, is of course smirking all over the media.

I’m not entirely sure why, but if it is true that this is ‘the biggest event to be held in Australia, ever’† this makes me incredibly depressed. I intended to make this post a kind of jocular look at a silly phenomenon, in keeping with The Pope’s Cologne and Mother Teresa’s Breath Mist, but you know, I just don’t find it funny that at the beginning of the 21st Century, a two-thousand year old superstitious belief system has enough currency (metaphorically, practically and politically) to bring an entire modern city to a standstill. It’s particularly disheartening that this exercise is nominally aimed at young people – it’s hard not to be cynical about such things.

I often hear the argument, when it comes to religion, that it does no harm, and people should be able to make up their own minds about what they believe. While I disagree strongly that religion does no harm, I certainly approve of the concept that a person should be able to make up their own mind about it – with the caveat that they should also be given the tools to make their decision an informed one. This particularly applies to the young.

The Catholic Church has never been particularly squeamish about converting non-believers so I don’t expect that an event masquerading as Australia’s Biggest Sleepover is going to even register a blip on their moral radar, but in my opinion this is a sneaky, disingenuous ruse to attempt to lever more religious thought into a country that has been until recently making a slow but encouraging trek toward secularism (inherited religions notwithstanding).

I put this thought to you Cardinal Pell and Pope Benedict: if you’re really confident that God will come through with the goods, and you are morally committed to the betterment of young people as you claim, concentrate your efforts on giving them a proper education and the ability to make up their minds based on what we know to be true instead of attempting to indoctrinate them with intangible, absurd mythology while they are still impressionable. Give them the data and the brain tools and let them decide, when they come of age, whether or not to believe in a two-millennium-old fairy tale.

Surely, if you are right, and God really does exist, then you have nothing at all to be afraid of.

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*Statistics from the 2006 Australian census.

†I guess it depends on your definitions of ‘biggest’, ‘event’ and ‘ever’…

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Tonight all sensible Australians cry tears of joy! The Weasel is no more! Begone you horrid little man, and let us attempt to repair the damage you have done.

Americans – take a leaf. You know what you have to do.