We vote for people to represent us - not to represent the Lord

Howard was just being Howard, but Kevin Rudd got up on the stage of the CityLife congregation in Melbourne. He claims that he has mixed feelings about the Pentecostal approach. So why was he there at all? He admitted it to Tony Jones on the ABC - he wanted the Pentecostals to think nice things about Labor.

The Family First Party may score a low primary vote, but picks up many preferences from voters who are unaware of its strong Pentecostal connection.

In Sydney there is the state seat of Greenway and the federal seat of Mitchell. Both sitting Liberal members are prominent members of the Hillsong congregation.

The closest we came to institutionalising baseless propaganda

Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen (of Fitzgerald Inquiry fame) who thought aboriginal mythology to be laughable (but very unlaughable if it got in the way of a bulldozer) and who had concluded that Nobel Lauriat Archbishop Tutu was a witchdoctor, had a crack at making creation science available in the Queensland public education system.

This was no joke. The proposal came out of a state premier’s mouth. This was a threat to the core of our free-thinking society. Once baseless propaganda is sanctified by the state, then penalties for heresy handed down by the courts will eventually follow. Many who heard Joh's proposal were struck with the same cold fear their parents must have felt when Darwin was bombed.

There is not one plank in the creation scientist's platform which cannot be demolished by genuine science. There could hardly be a more dangerous move than to have rubbish publicly funded as a serious scientific study. Fortunately, Joh's dream got no further than his support for a weird cure for cancer.

Evidence shaped to support scripture at taxpayer’s expense

Faith-based schools which must teach science subjects to prepare their students for state exams are verbally passing on a message to their biology students which is not in the approved texts.

In an effort to salvage the concept of the soul which is fundamental to all religions, the verbal message is that the evolution of the species is one explanation and special creation of the species is another. The student is left to choose. The implication here is that there is a 50-50 chance that the evolution concept could be wrong.

The chance that the principle of the evolution concept could be wrong is so vanishingly small as to be, for all practical purposes, zero. At our expense, the students are being manipulated to accept fiction as fact.

The only reason that religions have such an investment in schools is that the church elders desire to manipulate young unquestioning minds. Howard and Rudd see nothing wrong with this.