Bob Brown speaks of this Federal Election as a Greenslide, with the first Green member of the lower house elected, more Green Senators elected than the Australian Democrats ever garnered, and the largest ever number of votes cast for the Greens in Australian history. Alas, it will not end here. It would not surprise me if the left side of politics sees a shift from Labor to Green just as a hundred years ago the old Liberals in England gave way to Labor.
At the outset, I have no illusions that either Labor on the left or the Coalition parties on the right are simon-pure or very much morally better than the other. Politics in Australia are hardly Christian, despite the leaven in the lump, to put it very hopefully, that more-or-less Christian politicans are. However, I do wish to argue against a most dangerous delusion: the illusion that there is one party of light and of progress (beware that word!): the Greens.
As the Apostle said to the Galatians (i, 6-12):
I wonder that you are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ, unto another gospel. Which is not another, only there are some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema. As we said before, so now I say again: If any one preach to you a gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema. For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. For I give you to understand, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For neither did I receive it of man, nor did I learn it; but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Christianity is the true religion, not made up by men but revealed by God through His Incarnate Son. Yes, if even an angel from heaven preach to you a different Gospel, one earthbound and other than true - then let him be anathema. For even Satan can appear as an angel of light (II Cor. xi, 14).
The Greens, I would argue, are that lying angel. They preach an earthly, not a heavenly paradise, and by their contempt for heaven and assent to moral turpitude reveal themselves as carnal men, apt sons of their infernal father.
Their insufferable sanctimoniousness, and unblushing assumption of the moral high ground, is particularly offensive. Brown had the nerve to claim that he and his Greens are better Christians than Pell and the hierarchy, more in tune (perhaps true, sad to say) with the notions of average believers - more fool them, I say. He reduces Our Divine Lord to a forerunner of social justice and the new morality. He certainly does not bow the knee to Christ as God.
Now, I would not wish here to uncritically echo a certain former bishop of Sale, who used to say, back in the days of the Split, that of course the Church ought not and does not tell people how to vote - but that of course it would be a mortal sin to vote Labor!
Yet, I do believe that, whatever many people of good will sincerely believe who vote for the Greens, the underlying philosophy of the Greens is inimical and antithetical to the true philosophy, and to Christianity.
Consider, for example, what made me turn - be ready for a shock, gentle reader! - from my own youthful support for the Greens (for I campaigned and scrutineered for them at the 1989 state election): the sad fact that their party platform unabashedly supports abortion on demand. As even a lukewarm believer I had to turn aside from them as soon as I read that; my eyes were opened, and I conscience I could no longer keep fellowship with such persons.
Similarly, the Greens support what is most euphemistically called euthanasia (a death not really so good), or slightly more realistically "mercy killing" (though it is not so much a matter of mercy as of expedience), and they also loudly trumpet the need to "end the discrimination" and "bring Australia into the 21st century" by legislating for so-called gay marriage (which is neither truly happy nor truly marriage). One may as well declare the sky to be mauve not blue.
Since I wish to warn against embracing the Greens on account of their unacceptable moral position, I forbear from mounting much criticism of their economic policies, anti-rationalist and highly damaging though they would be if implemented. The economic devastation wrought by Hugo Chavez may indicate where their unreal policies would lead the country, to give a necessarily imperfect analogy.
As Cardinal Pell has justly observed, many of the hard-left Greens in particular are in fact watermelons - green on the outside, red on the inside. In one of the new Senators-elect, we have the scion of a family of dedicated Communists, unrepentantly so, now gone Green in an instance of the Soviet doctrine of the Popular Front. No doubt her combination of new morals and new economics is designed to foster the development of a postmodern version of New Soviet Man.
But what of climate change? - which is the principal reason for the popularity of voting Green. If climate change is indeed a dire threat, then I do not believe that the strange economic suggestions of the Greens will save the earth. Indeed, properly harnessing the invisible hand of economics, as Adam Smith would have us do, is a better idea: I fear that Big Government would not so much save us as apply cures worse than the disease.
What the world needs now is nuclear energy and geoëngineering, I claim half in jest, if the threat of dangerous climate change be really potent. If technology got us into this mess; technology will get us out - that seems a good argument to me. Naïve nonsense about a no-growth economy, a curtailing of breeding and a return to hippiedom fueled by windfarms ain't gonna save nobody. (My own plan, should nature go crazy, is to emigrate to the South Island of New Zealand - Kiwis and Aussies have free access to each other's countries, after all.)
Even if climate change strike with alarming rapidity, the Green panacea is not the answer. You don't need to enforce new morals, intolerant of the old ones, in any case.
The Greens frighten me because they articulate a post-Christian, anti-Christian militant secularism, even substituting a pseuo-spiritual cult of humanity in place of Chrst, of the Earth Mother in place of God the Father, of the transient fashions of our age for the Holy Spirit. Their dogma is more infallible than that of any Pope! Gaia, it seems, is best offered the sacrifice of sterile sexuality, in polymorphous perversity, not excluding the oblation of slaughtered infants.
Here beginneth a lesson from the Apocalypse.
The philosophical basis of the Greens lies with philosophers of frightening ideas, such as Peter Singer, who takes utilitarianism to hideous lengths, advocating infanticide as well as sins too terrible to name. Not only do they view man as but an animal, they view our own species as a plague on the enviroment, a plague best culled.
How long will it be that the Greens tolerate Government funding of Church schools, as we have had for many years in Australia? How long before the right of Christians and the churches to speak out against the Zeitgeist (the Spirit of the Age, being exactly opposed to the true Spirit Who is Holy) be taken away? How long before the right of Christians to bring up their children as Christians and teach them Church teachings is restricted? - Dawkins calls this the worst form of abuse, to indoctrinate the young!
Too many, too many cafeteria Christians, particularly ill-formed Catholics of the social-justice-yes, pro-life-no type (you know, the millions who haven't been to confession since 1968), the ones who see doctrine as alien and the Vatican as the home of twisted old men, are the willing dupes of the Green agenda. I predict that none of them will suffer any secular persecution even in the most Orwellian future, since they are hardly different to worldlings anyway.
Beware the Green slippery slide down into the abyss.
Yet the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church; as a friend observed to me in Melbourne, the Church would be more fervent here if they were burning priests on Bourke Street (outside Parliament House). We Australian Christians are so compromised with the world, serving God not so much as Mammon, trying to league together Christ and Belial without pleasing either, that we merit the terrible rebuke of Our Lord: As thou art lukewarm, I will spew thee out of My mouth (Apoc. iii, 16). We slumber and sleep as the foolish virgins, or as the disciples when His enemies came to arrest Christ. Sleepers, awake!
In the world you will have distress, Our Lord predicted, but fear not - for I have overcome the world (cf. St John xvi, 33).
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