Has ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’ been dumped?

Murdoch ‘ruperter’ Greg
Sheridan has long been out of touch with reality. He recently published a book
entitled ‘God is good for you: A defence of Christianity in troubled times’. It
almost goes without saying that the only god that Sheridan thinks is good for
you is the one in which he believes. All those other people who believe in one
or more of the myriad of other gods are clearly mistaken. The world he inhabits
is a small self-centred one and that is commensurate with his rampant
conservatism and support for the small-minded Liberal Party.

Now Sheridan has gone
completely off his trolley. In a piece in The Australian, what Newscorp attempt
to portray as a ‘newspaper’, he has whined about having his trip to work impeded
by a protest by ‘vegan militants’ and likened this to ‘Green criminals’
invading the properties of ‘innocent farmers’. Then he coalesces these into a
perceived ‘Green-Left army’ and later in the piece adds a portion of the Labor
Party into a Green/vegan/Labor-Left anti-development coalition. Unfortunately,
or fortunately, depending on your point of view, living in a democracy means
you have to put up with protests on occasion. Sheridan is only upset because it
is something with which he disagrees. This is always the case among the
ultraconservatives. They always pretend to be about free speech, but it is only
ever their speech which should be free.

As befits Sheridan’s
employment by Newscorp, he is a climate change denier, having his article ‘The
great climate fiction’2 put
up on the Lavoisier group’s website under their ‘Articles Conference Papers and
Submissions’ tab. The Lavoisier Group is one of Australia’s most strident
climate change denying organisations (apart from the Liberal-linked Institute
of Public Affairs). It is interesting to note that the most recent posting was
in August 20153. Could it be that the organisation has run out of
lies to propagate? Fittingly, ultraconservative Sheridan complains that if we
do not have coal to sell, how can we earn a living. I get the impression that Sheridan
is the sort of person who would have whined about the demise of whale-oil
street lighting and its replacement by gas or electricity; and by the demise of
the steel rimmed wooden wheels of buggies and their eventual replacement by
those awful inflatable rubber thingies; and by the demise of the asbestos
industry as those do-gooder scientists established its link to mesothelioma. God
knows what he would have thought about the replacement of cables with wifi; he
must have been ropable.

Perhaps in one of the
most outstanding examples of a lack of self-awareness, Sheridan maintains that
these protestors are simply trying to impose their self-righteous diktats on others1.
This is largely what most churches try to do, including Sheridan’s, and which his
has done it for many hundred of years; even to the extent that in the past it
would burn people for not toeing the line. In the past, the churches were quite
happy to abuse children, endorse slavery, and tell animists and other
religionists that if they continued along that path, they would burn for
eternity in the non-existent ‘hell’.

There are several
other misleading statements in Sheridan’s piece. These include “…iron ore, can
only be used with coal”. This is currently mostly true. However, several
countries are in a race to produce steel using a radical new carbon-dioxide
free method which uses hydrogen to replace coal. Their emissions will consist
of water4. Sheridan also states that “Bauxite is no good, as well
because it needs a lot of coal power to turn it into aluminium.” Aluminium
smelters use much electricity, but it is immaterial what the source of that electricity
is. This sort of disingenuousness is symptomatic of Sheridan and his rabid
support for the Coalition. He rails against the sort of progress which is
forced upon us, but is all for the type of ‘progress’ which has put us in the
position we are in at present, where we are in danger of making much of the
planet uninhabitable. These Murdoch ‘ruperters’ are either lacking in
intelligence and relevant knowledge, or they are completely without principles.
Both are equally dangerous.

Sources

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Has ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’ been dumped?