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CHAPTER 11

LACERATING LIBERTY AND

PUTTING TRUTH ON TRIAL:

A TALE of TWO NATIONS and

MANY PEOPLES

Matthew 12:38-45

It started early. It was hard to try to replace Jesus Christ before He came, but they did not wait too long, seeking a means of DESTROYING HIM (Mark 3:6), after His Messianic ministry began. Whatever put this idea into their heads at that early stage ?

It was this. Christ had miraculously healed on the spot, a withered hand. Now withering is a time-consuming process, and restoration could take years if it were possible humanly, but Christ, God incarnate, did it not only in a simple action of command, but this in the face of condemnation based on misplaced ritualistic considerations, concerning when you could show mercy and how. Imagine the situation in such a stress of lordly survey and acrimony, if Christ instead of showing mercy even on the Sabbath, had failed to achieve the desired result, if the man had NOT been healed!

But that kind of thing never happening (cf. the high drama of the case in Mark 2!); there was never any nice ground for debunking Him. His words and works fitted like mathematical equations, bound to engineering works by a wave situation; but He needed no such apparatus. Just as in the creation, He simply said and it was done. So, being balked with power, met with truth, overwhelmed with His popularity and meeting like a tsunami, His irrepressible miraculous power, which came as naturally as translations of English to French or vice versa by many in France or England, His roused enemies sought not just to quieten Him, not to warn Him, not to harass or embarrass Him merely (they did try that too), but to DESTROY HIM.

That was the first of the endeavours to make a new christ - in their aspiration a dead one, but this One would not even stay dead, having made the venture not least to show that if your heart is set on yourself, your inflamed views, surrogates self-chosen, you still face the Truth; and even if it be smitten, it has not the least intention of staying dead, but rather to show immortality in its meaningful measure beating mortality, and incorruption overpowering corruption, and judgment ploughing the fields that will not yield.

It seemed good to them to kill the greatest worker of good even seen on this earth. They had their ideas about life. He was not one of them, and He had legs as well, and could walk. So they worked it, the leaders in the mêlée, and manipulated the people. He would go and they should stay. It worked out that opposite way around. 40 years and their cleverness led to a ruinous insurgency in history, their city smashed, their temple gone stone from stone.

It is interesting how this came about. In fact, Australia has a menace situation in which certain Islamic modules set themselves up to deal death on a large scale, often in a particularly hideous fashion, or in a suddenly vicious sweeping manner, into a city or a people. They also seek to enlist illicitly through appeal to brutal instincts and unformed, immature opinion, the young, even to brutalise children with their vastly murderous instincts, passions or impure purposes.

First, read the above verses.

SIGNS, FIRES AND CLOSED EYES

Now consider. As wars break out like a grossly infectious skin rash, one underlying base leading to the breach of every barrier in its spread, so that it is almost like a surging sport, so though it is a result that is intensely macabre and even murderous, the thought comes. Is this not precisely what Christ foretold! Sin has this as one of its group manifestations, and international characteristics. Moreover it is not limited to one period, but grows cyclotronically over time, till the world makes its own darkness. And how great is that darkness! as the present news continually annotates, nation against nation and principality against another, till even what were once States within a Nation, parts or elements, can squabble as if the world had no limits to its bounty, and the heart of man no end to its endurance.

You hear of States, doubly stricken, ravaged by this or that pest or disease after long wars within, and many abused beyond all mercy, by those possessed by new murder lusts often expressive of the pollutions of the Age, and sometimes perhaps, of reaction to it.

But there is background to all of this, not only in sin, but in noxious nostrums, codifications of sins desired, as in the work of Nietzsche, Mein Kampf, The Origin of Species, and other specious appeals to the worst in man, based on dissembling, disregard of all things by the one preoccupying the writer, and that distorted (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., TMR Ch. 1). It is indeed as in the hearts of those who act as if they cannot cease invasions, like President Putin, or as in disregard of the state of the world entirely, as appears with Kim of North Korea, a reportedly somewhat starving people with a very low national income, tiny compared with the South, but with a leader mixing the thrust of war threats with the exploitation of resources for some far above the rest, some who rule.

It is found alike in distortions of the Bible, sects and popularity contests in some preachers, who change the Bible as if it were a base for some game of exploration and have the dishonesty and daring to associate their playground of ideas with Jesus Christ!

As Christ also predicted for the time when His return regally comes near, iniquity, lawlessness will abound (Matthew 24:12). Evil will become like a sort of mist of acid gas, spread by winds.

But just, as in Matthew 13, Jesus told even that generation that as to truth, they closed their eyes; so now they shut them more tightly lest they should see, and spread trash instead of truth, ideas instead of evidence, many more and more laughing at violence and those who seek to avoid it, and instigating it as if it were the only path in the mêlée.

What then ? Will the unnatural disciples of naturalism merely tighten the eye muscles and grimace as they close their eyes grimly ? Will they tell us where to observe nature making itself before it is there to do it ? or as Professor Dawkins is reported to have said in answer to challenge: We HAVE observed it. It is just that we were not there when it happened. Imagine that sort of treatment, at a murder trial!

Will they pout as volcanoes, grimace at the formalisation of what biblically is simply sexual perversion, acclaim the biblically predicted climate of false doctrine in many churches (II Peter 2), often breeders of a farcical, self-centredness with newly recreated christs ,custom built, while retaining the name of Jesus, christs of their fancy, who have other laws and other ways, as they make them up. Not least of these has been Islam, their leader ignoring history to make up a new Jesus Christ, another person, with other works, and other wisdom, ignoring and deleting the salvation which God foretold and then, at the stated time, laboured to perform! God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself as II Cor. 5 tells us.

That was a thrilling sacrifice and a willing one, though men exacted it lest goodness and power should prevail against self-interest and hard-headed ruthlessness. Alas, they paid, as precisely such people went on to apply the same rules to them in their shame, when their own time came.

But there are many of many races who do likewise to the extent they may. Ignoring reality and seeking fiction to function, making new christs or criteria, dreams in the offing, and seeking a passport for them to come into reality, and never succeeding. Some even imagining better than doing, think of themselves as their own christs, their own saviours, and seek to sway spiritually seduced dupes to follow them. Indeed, such people are not always forwarding their mutative views with the scimitar and armies, or nails, but often with the pen and psychological confusion, as they create christs, criteria or concepts of their pleasure (as foretold in Matthew 24:24 and II Timothy 3).

Thus you can even get the dolls of dogma, made for cuddling in the mind, to embrace whatever it is you want. You can have robotic or even exotic or despotic, indeed erotic idols and distil them out of the psyche for thrusting into the disordered psyche of obedient masses. Many follow them to their sorrow, confusion and ruin. If such are not trusting in themselves, they thus may come to trust in their own creations, or those which they themselves select from those available!

Some insist on their fresh new dolls of dogma, call it culture, and then try to have them forcibly required of all. Even a manipulated democracy can have this ideological Ebola.

Similarly, amid the evils and false teachings, there is pressure on freedom of speech, to remove it, as in many dictatorships already, and some of the recent past. If you do insist on subversion by dream, then it may be deemed to help if by such action, others are preventing from criticising you. If you are in this sort of milieu, reason is one of the last things you want. It comes to many to seem almost unconditionally necessary to get rid of it too, where ruling ideas are concerned, for misrule is their name, and in this, they are all the same. Defence of mischief is always hard; and silence helps...

Even in Australia, freedom of speech in non-violent religion is in danger of sale; and even analytically true speech can be made a law-breaking feat, speakers of such able to be hunted as by head-hunters of old, though the loss here is less! To this, we return shortly. Yet many Moslem-named slaughterous works hunt men down, the killers losing their heads in wild acts, so that others might lose theirs, in gore or with the axe. Physically, freedom of speech is lesser loss than going with gore, but when the soul is sold, the cost is expansive, profound and dehumanising. Freedom's loss is itself an ultimate! Truth MUST be spoken and man must ally himself with it, unashamedly, cost what it may. Living a lie is merely a code name for seeking execution by truth, when reality is fulfilled. In fact, failure for the would-be Christian here, amidst all this irrational psychic activity, bowing to these oddities, is not in the long term, an option! (Luke 9:26).

So suppress them! that is the option of ruthlessness. Those who speak it may even yet in Australia, be accused of virtual violence, even when avoidance of damage and loss for others, is their aim. To such Molochs, the culture of the day moves, like a fungus quickly spreading in bread.

SIGN ?

It is not that there was never anything so soullessly wicked before. It is just that there are so many of these lures now, as if endless anglers were so seeking, each to outdo the other in some cunning fishing competition, that it becomes a preoccupation of mankind and a prelude to dominion by the most compelling. In what way ? not logically, not even with any visible means of support, but with the lure for the wild spirits of would-be oppressors, sick of life and willing to slice it, silencing reason with threat, protest with legal assault. You can do it in the Middle East, in Korea-land, in Russian hinterlands, in racial assault to fulfil a grab. It can become an art form.

Let us look back then to the day of Jesus Christ, and see it there, in the ultimate case, all in rapid action. He had become notable where others were notorious, for where they sought their own thing, power or position, He left His eternal position in heaven to bring its values, virtues and validity to man, with correlative power to heal, and pardon even for enemies, should they repent and realise their sinfulness, and be founded on Him (Luke 23:34). Thus He had to be obstructed, lest as it was put once, the whole world should go after Him! A few lies, a few nails, people hustled into murderous hysterics, it was almost as if they were following the script as foretold by the prophets (cf. Micah 5, Isaiah 49-55, Psalm 16, 22, 40).

On the way, before they became really organised (cf. John 11:49ff.), they sought to challenge Him (Matthew 12:38ff.). Had He just done a great work of sovereign healing power ? Very well. Ignore this and press on by tempting Him to revel in regality. Let's ask Him for a sign!

All that was now needed, in TYPE, was the demonstration of His power to break death as foretold (cf. Hosea 13:14, Psalm 16), which in turn would expose their own sin and rebuke the murder which by divine wisdom would come to figure as the necessary sacrifice whereby justice's clamour would be met by mercy's provision, in a life for life provision, infinite in dimension, particular in dealing, available to all, effective on reception. Instant pardon would thus become available even for those who, through requiring slow murder in crucifixion, had vented their vice and expressed their own folly. Here was atonement available for one as for all, the remedy realised in the resurrection of the very body ruined to meet their desire. In His being defaced and dealt death, there would and did come into being, the focus for removal of defilement, of sin's guilt unburdened on the Victim, who in victory, moved on to the irruption of life (I Corinthians 15) and its grant and gift to those who took it at His hand (cf. Isaiah 53:1, 10).

That, then, in the confrontation noted in Matthew 12 was the background already clear in the scriptures of the Old Testament (such as Hosea 13:14, Isaiah 52-55). NO SIGN, then, Christ cried in response to their request - none but ONE! And that ? it was that of the prophet Jonah. Christ exploded the point in this way into their very midst. JUST AS Jonah had been in the midst of a mammalian sea creature, for days before eruptive deliverance, so He, the Christ, would be in the bowels of death, and the third day would rise from the dead with no man as a helper. THERE is your sign! He indicated, and no other will you be given.

As Christ made clear with His meeting with Herod, He was not a performer (Luke 23:6-9), but a man of function, the God of truth, and where the shallow, the sallow cynicism of wanderings of a sedately self-satisfied spirit were concerned, NO GO! He did not come to perform, to parade, but to provide. Silence greeted a merely roving interest.

So the people asked for a sign, but Christ made of their very request, a signal!

A sign, they asked of Christ, in a declining period of faith and morals in their nation. Oh no, don't go, but give us a sign!

Yet to ask for this after His spectacular addition to healings already made, such as in the case of a devil tormented, and multiply afflicted person, was like asking for a testimony of power after Hiroshima. It was so, then, in the day of the Christ amid Israel, as now in the Gentiles, notably that they would not see what was there already. Were not the multiple miracles, summed up in Matthew 11:4-6, sufficient ? Was anything like this ever heard or seen before ? (cf. John 7:46 and Matthew 12:23)!

Was it not the plenary divine power of the predicted Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9, 35), which He had shown already. In quantity and quality and for that matter, timing as in Daniel 9 (cf. Christ the Citadel Ch. 2). They had been already given not just a testimony but a torrent of truth, not only in deed, but in word (cf. Matthew 5-7).

This being so, Christ did not assent to their request for a "sign". Instead He provided a previous partial parallel in Jonah. In fact, He would draw the fangs even of gross sin, embedding them in His own flesh, to dismiss their power and remove the reason for it, in bearing the guilt which made death, Himself the testimony of guilt's horror and weight in being borne, vicariously available for those who thus could live amid justice as well as mercy; for God omits nothing (cf. Romans 5).

The "bars of hell", we find in Jonah 2, were what the swirling life in the interior of that mammalian creature felt like to the guilty, temporarily absconding prophet; but Christ descended into hell (I Peter 3:19 cf. Aspects of the Glory of the God of All Grace Ch. 5), making captivity captive by His death and justice, no more to be a horror, in the death of the saved, but a help; for in bearing it in Himself, He so allowing free course to divine mercy (I Peter 3:18ff.). So what Jonah felt, Christ met, thus leading to His predicted cry (as in Psalm 22), "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me!"

The reason had already been given, but when hell is busy trying to gobble up the Saviour, who met the guilt of many in His sacrifice, then the graphic reality is intolerable, and the experience intractable, before the triumph follows the horror of it all. It was not spectacle, but sacrifice without surrogate. Abandonment had to have its expression!

THE GREATER CONDEMNATION Matthew 12:41-45

Having evocatively rebuked the sign-seekers and the crafty, Christ proceeded to expose the extent of their wickedness, as seen from verse 41 (cf. Matthew 12:45). The men of Nineveh were a famous case, and to this He compared the present generation. Nineveh! look at the prophet Nahum! What did he say of it from the Lord ? In fact, at the end of his exposure and condemnation he declared this, in the form of a question:

"There is no healing of your bruise, your wound is grievous;
all who hear the report of you will clap the hands over you;
for on whom hat not your wickedness passed continually ?"

Yet Nineveh, that marked and ancient capital, imperial in cruelty, had received from Jonah such a report and one delivered in such circumstances and such manifest evidence of the power of God, that it repented when challenged in the name of the Lord. If then at the preaching of Jonah, they repented, and the people of Jesus' generation did NOT at His preaching and works, can they not rise up and condemn such insensitivity on the part of Jerusalem, in an imaginary depiction of judgment, saying something like this ? WE repented for a little testimony; but YOU did not repent for the most massive one possible, even that of the Messiah, Himself. Such is the imaginary scenario, with a very realistic impact.

To the authorities and those who followed them in unbelief, then, the message was this, from the lips of those of Nineveh who repented: How great then is your evil in this, that vast as was our own, we did repent, but in the hardness of your hearts, you who were so religious and had been exposed to such much by so many for so long, that you failed to respond to the acme and prince and Lord Himself! That, it is escalation!

Such is the sense of it. It was a massive rebuke, like having the rubble of a mountain fall on you, and indeed this is the sort of realisation which is to come on the peoples of the earth who still will not face the truth of God's loving power and drastic provisions for pardon in peace: for in Isaiah
2:19, 21, we read that in the day of release of judgment to the earth, they will be keen "to go into the clefts of the rocks, and to the tops of the ragged rocks, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of His majesty, when He arises to shake terribly the earth." The text proceeds with an injunction: "Cease from man, whose breath is in his nostrils, for of what account is he!" In Revelation 6:15-16, you see the same theme. Man, desolate under just judgment, scurries in the end, because he has foregone deliverance and despised pardon.

It is not from himself that relief comes, just as it was not from himself (cf. Psalm 100), that his so brilliantly made life came; and it is not from merely and solely natural events that judgment comes. It can come from reducing the restraint on designated forces, astronomical, molecular or other, inducing force where desired, as well as by the normal outcome of colossal folly, in an increasingly ravaged race (cf. Isaiah 59, Amos 4).

Again, in adverse comparison, the Lord relates His own generation to the time of the Queen of Sheba. She came from far to ponder the wisdom of Solomon, being duly impressed, but Christ's own generation, which has Him and His works near, it remained nationally askew and averse. Therefore she whoresponded even at the derivative wisdom of King Solomon, being duly impacted, how will she not rise in judgment on those of Jesus' generation, slithering away from the most manifest testimony that could be given, and that as forecast!

THE POINTED PARABLE

Indeed, they were to become wild enough to plot His murder, and why, He challenged, do you seek to kill a man who told you the truth! (John 8:40). Though helped by the prophets to see the precise configuration of power and word in the Christ when He came, yet with a vast and grand Temple and a sense of stability, though occupied by Rome, they did not fail to hunt Him; but only as gold, to sell! What a monstrosity it was: To plot the death of the greatest doer of good this world has ever seen, and this, not in intent only, but in power, not in deed only but in word, not in fluctuating failure, but with never an exposure in word or deed of what was less than apt for His divine mission, commission and irruption into this earth from the heavenly eternity which was His as the living Word of God.

Here were they, ready for and exposed to the direct voice of Him who came to cleanse, save, pardon and propel, give meaning to life and complete significance to spirit, comfort to mind and perspective to the wanderers, to help any individual receiving Him as Saviour and Lord: and YET they did not hear. Some did, but the official generality, it did not! It is they who ACTED to rid themselves of such a Person!

In this context, Christ gave the parable of the seven worse devils (Matthew 12:43-45). He depicts a man infested with a devil who is driven out. Now the house, that is the life of the man, becomes orderly, cleansed, even garnished, and what an abode his new life shows - just as Israel was once so blessed in the Lord (cf. Deuteronomy 4:5-10). What people had had even those preliminary outpourings! And now it is the Lord Himself...

Thus in the parable, the beautifully new house is SO very attractive that the removed devil, seeing it undefended to the point, as thing grew slack, desired it. Not satisfied with his own return, he took 7 devils worse than himself (like a Mafia man with plenty of contacts), and they ALL entered in, to make the man's first state relatively good compared with the upheaval at the end!

Many indeed, to move to our own times, are the evils which come when as in this country and the USA to an increasingly vast extent, there is a turning from a prelude of substantial input from the Lord Jesus Christ in institutions and principles, till it cuts the rope that binds and moving freely on the high seas, finds pirates of all sorts amid the storms. The nation had kept some reverence for the Lord, but with its unscrupulously growing dismissal, even as if it had never been there, by those who founded themselves on themselves (as in II Corinthians 10:12), being unwise and airy in atmosphere, came a new lack of basis. It became what ?

It became more like a foundling, though it had known security, fondled by folly and impelled by desire. Design is dismissed, direction is ignored and rampancy has merely to be named to be desired, like sweets by undisciplined children, in large amounts! The old Latin saying, Easy is the descent to hell! has point. The way to it, as Christ declared in the Sermon on the Mount is easy. It is also broad. It is very tolerant of itself, though not of the disciplines of righteousness.

Like a cascade of sand from a higher cliff, it falls easily and takes much with it, having no foundation.

One of these evil and aggressive evils takes the form of the freedom conquerors, whose aim appears to have Parliament excessively free to condemn anything marked to go, whether in moral flames or in law, and people's responses increasingly to be buried in blame. This makes it easy, as many a dictator has found, to have unreasonable things presented as law, reasonable responses crushed as illegal, and conscientious critics nailed as law-breakers. It preserves from any need to reason before the superficial, any understanding of the scope and nature of the human spirit, and replaces faith with force, rationality with thrust and openness and requirement to meet criticism, with social spooking, with punitive conferences and with duress. It even begins to have some little resemblance to the Communist method of admitting guilt publicly, and being chastened by higher power, and thrust to move towards what are often lower deeds.

This sort of prevarication and provocation is seen for example in the famed 18C section of the Racial Discrimination Act (cf. Department of Bible ... Vol. 8, Ch. 4, and Vol. 9, Ch. 8).

But what if the harassment principle involved, when in the name of racial care at the verbal level, there is verbal repression at the truth level, and at the religious level in particular, when offence being intolerable under this law, there is a surpassing of reason and explanation, motivation and a new doctrine of ethical relativity made absolute ? What if feeling overmasters truth, and the psychic becomes an enforcible principle in its own right, subjective or abusable though it be ? It is as the Australian Commissioner for Human Rights^*1 pointed out, not good enough! You do not write the law with imprecision, if wise, and to this misuse of freedom-control should be made an adjustment of vast significance; for whatever is the intention of such a law, and with whatever restraint it might in practice be used (or otherwise) at any one time, at another time there may be attention simply to do what IT SAYS, the very cancer of truth. So the Commissioner soundly presented.

Is it to be deemed offensive if any present to others, evidence of a disease, seeking to display or prescribe ways of abundant life, rather than misery, for those who want it and would take it and the advice with it ?

If a vast evil is discerned, is it evil or violent speech to say how threatening it is to show how vulnerable many are, to describe its evils, and to appeal to avoid them ? Is it violent speech to match the vigour of denunciations made in Parliament of something with alternative annunciations on the other side, and with no less vigorous replies, rather than being seduced into mere submission to offensive dictates. Is surrender to error a virtue, or is exposition of a peril subversive ? Is a failure to use reason to resolve obvious oddities! to be commended, and is this the nation desired ? But by whom!

If there is effort to reach a generation while there is time, as Churchill before the last war was inclined to do, is this lèse-majesté, and worthy of legal action! Can a law make it feasible to fail the more readily, oppressed into silly silence in many cases, by confusing issues ?

Such governmental behaviour moves to leave open only one door for directional speech, founded on a ruling cult, or an aspirant one now held popular, feisty with a governmental culture/moral or religious/ethical wish. In the relatively recent past, how many of these certain insights, based on air and evanescent hopes, neither on revelation or reason, have failed notoriously, as the self-assured mentors exalt their charm, deliver their doll-doctrines and surge in scorn of speech, on all else, or anything likely to confront them!

If however in government, you assume your morals, enforce your new norms, do (legal) violence to those who do not support your perspectives, they having better attested things to do (cf. LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST, WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS), then what ?

Then it is you who in government are guilty of being repressive and suppressive, not merely in terms of fines or condemnation, but in the end of a type of legal terrorism readily able to face and confront those with unchanged morals, for example, providing for them the tag of law-breaker, with consequences reinforced by winds of ethical desire blazing in the national forests, this moving to the resultant compromise at the professional career level, very readily.

Such things, in the educational field, have already been at the prescriptive and enforceable level, law apart, in the school curriculum of nature myth for decades, this required without room for rational debate or educational objectivity, as a condition of being educated for example, in South Australia. The present extension merely moves on to the injunction on parents level, not in one sense, undeserved since the children have suffered from this uninhibited indoctrination for so long, and with such results in motivation, morals, unrestraint and confusion, leading to such outlets as fit the myth, as on such a basis, readily to terrorism with extreme readiness. It is time to get back from the myth of nature creating itself before it is there, and nothing making nature, which runs down and no up, in its own laws at the core of science (cf. Scientific Method ..., TMR Ch. 1).

In all these things, there is contravention of the biblical injunction: "Buy the truth and do not sell it!" (Proverbs 23:23). If it is rational, what you want, then leave it open; if it is a divided field, then open it to review, and if many diverge in their specialty, then enable both sides to be presented at the core level. We do not need the parallel to Hitler youth camps, even if the indoctrination is less specialised. Yet it is in much no less degrading, for many who are not willing to learn one thing and do another! Taught vile violence, they may imagine it does good things, rather than being a sentence on sin (Romans 8:17ff.), and taught that cunning creates, they may surge into concepts of doing the same to deceive and direct, master others and machinate noxiously. Misdirect them, with myths, and find your come-uppance in due course.

It is from another angle, amusing to see that the parliament has been littered in recent years with explosive vocality, searing speeches often with no more than a psychic basis, finding ourselves confronted by directors of morals as if by magic, crypto-religious parades, while yet the movement continues to suppress what is to be said in various fields, in criticism, in review, in appeal, in exposure, made by some so that the nation be not made into a logical ruin, a despotic dynamic moving like mice amid the grain. There has been a considerable and Constitutional stability in the past, and this is being swept away, both by oversight (in both sense) and uninhibited unruliness with the truth, directive demands replacing its conditions.

Indeed, the point has been made that this gives no justification - for the pressure is now beginning once more to impinge on the newspapers - for prying, for seeking to invade privacy without ground, for example in matters of war security. You are not authorised to steal what belongs to others, but to present findings you rightly possess. You deal with truth as legitimately obtained, not stolen! That is not even an issue.

NOTE

Tim Wilson in an article entitled "The Government should fix two free-speech obstacles together: 35P and 18C", has a warning to give, and some of it is contained in the following. He refers to section 35P in the national security legislation and section 18C in the Racial Discrimination Act, as "festering sores." They need treatment, says the Commissioner. There are things to watch and seek, and things to preserve and keep, and precision is needed rather than the sacrifice of areas possibly unintentionally and certainly wrongly covered.

The introduction of 18C was preceded by three independent federal inquiries into racism and violence: the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody; the Australian Law Reform Commission’s inquiry into multiculturalism and the law; and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s inquiry into racist violence.

All recommended law reforms to tackle racial harassment and discrimination. None recommended making offensive or insulting speech unlawful. But the wording of amendments to the act did not match the intent of the inquiries or legislators.

It took nearly 20 years, but the Andrew Bolt case is a warning of what happens when the intention and codification of a law are not in alignment. It’s a particularly salient lesson for those on the Right who dismiss the importance of amending 35P. The risk is that a future government uses it for reasons beyond its original intention, especially in the future when media is more decentralised.

This is found as reported on the Web, in The Australian, November 7, 2014

18C is the Section of the Racial Discrimination Act which puts the finding of insult or offence as direct and primary claims against the one said to cause such reaction or responses. This was to be corrected by Liberal Party promise during an election. That correction was foregone. The case however remains. Broken promises do not remove factual premises.

Truth is necessary for righteousness, and justice for equity. You do not need to banish truth, or assault those who present it, even disallowing the question of motivation and grounds for what is said to appear relevant, in order to protect people. That is like removing a watch dog because it is noisy. To be sure, it is well to give protection from the savage and irrational hostilities which may be directed at a given person in a given race, on racial grounds, as if his or her individuality did not exist. It is when one cannot change a factor in one's composition, such as race, that it becomes odious to focus on it degradingly, and rather ridiculous to generalise, even if many so act, as if this means that all do, and so any one may be excoriated for belonging to a given race. True that there may be need there; but truth seeks to protect against this; it should not be inhibited in the effort to gain it!

As you relax on the domineering lordship corroding freedom, then, watch out that seven worse devils do not enter national life, as truth lies in the street, righteousness headless, and peace afar off. Social engineering can readily become an exquisite form of torture, presumption, arrogance and dereliction of duty.