Last week we began a new ten part series ASK at the Cathedral – on Ecclesiastes – God’s Word to Today’s World…
This coming Tuesday we will be looking at Ch. 2 “No Satisfaction!- (Why are wealth, wisdom and sex not enough?)” . Feel free to pray wherever you are in the world, come along if you are able (12:15 on Tuesday – bring your own lunch!), bring a friend…invite others…
This is our promo for this week –
Here are the notes from the talk – the notes are fuller than the actual talk – because of the time limit…And here is the video – apologies for the sound quality – we will be doing live stream next Tuesday…
Philip Yancy – Carl Jung tells us that a third of his cases were suffering from no other neurosis other than the ‘senselessness and emptiness of their lives”.
Despair – Why do people commit suicide? Why do people evince such despair? Walker Percy “ Why do more people commit suicide in San Francisco the most beautiful city in America, than in any other city? In Europe the suicide capital is Salzburg, Austria. Why does a man who has a good house, a good job and enjoys unprecedented cultural and recreational facilities still feels bad without knowing why? Existential despair did not come from Auschwitz but from the cafes of Paris, the coffee shops of Copenhagen. Philip Roth – “In the West everything goes and nothing matters. In the East nothing goes and everything matters.”
Wendell Berry speaks of his comfortable US upbringing “we knew and took for granted: marriage without love; sex without joy; drink without conviviality; birth, celebration and death without adequate ceremony; faith without doubt or trial; belief without deeds; manners without generosity…such humanising emotions as pleasure in small profitless things, joy, wonder, ecstasy were removed as by an operation on the brain.
This is a book written by someone who is called The Teacher. It is mainly written by Solomon – or someone in the Solomonic tradition – ch. 1 v. 1. The book is called Ecclesiastes because it means assembly – it is the word from which we get ‘ecclesiastical’ or church. It is a gathering of people who want to listen to the wisdom of the teacher. That is what we are doing here this morning.
Everything is meaningless – or vanity – The word meaningless appears over 35 times in the book. The rich get richer the poor get poorer. Evil people prosper, tyrants reign, disease spreads, everyone dies and turns to dust, life is unfair, nothing makes sense the whole world is twisted. Eat, drink and be merry. What is the point of working hard/ besides which we all die in the end. What is such a book doing in the Bible?
The Dialogue of Pessimism
There was an ancient school of literature which was known as the Pessimistic school. In the Dialogue of Pessimism (a Babylonian work of the fourteenth century BC) suicide is the only answer to the problem of life. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the god Shamash states bluntly ‘The life you pursue you shall not find’. There is a school of writing today which reflects that – Jean Paul Sartre. Camus. Nietzsche. The hopelessness which is felt when you see nothing that will save you – the people jumping out of the Twin Towers building. The elderly Jewish couple who realise what the smoking chimneys at Auschwitz mean and throw themselves upon the electric fences.
Ecclesiastes belongs to this school – yet it has a very different conclusion and meaning. In fact there is a great deal of joy in this. Not the kind of joy that is brought about by ignorance – just ignore it and it will go away. The scene in Schindler’s list where the women are discussing in their barracks the rumours of gas chambers – no it cannot be. Nor the joy that is brought about by illusion, false hope. This is a book that faces up squarely to the reality of life but does not result in despair. Sometimes it seems as though we are only presented with two choices in life – either face up to life with all its bleakness, horror and meaninglessness, or escape into a world of illusion, false hope etc. Whether that illusion might be.
One other point in terms of style. What is happening here? It could be that the Teacher is having a debate with himself. Torn between what he cannot help seeing and what he still cannot help believing. There is a great deal in this. Who of us has not wrestled with doubts and fears?
Or it could be that the Teacher is challenging us – asking the man of the world to think through his position to the bitter end. It is a challenge to the secularist. The Teacher burns at the injustices and wrongs in life, he mourns the passing of youth and the inevitability of death but he looks for something more. The secularist view – which is the prevailing majority opinion in our society – at least by those in power and with influence has a different take. What the teacher is doing is taking what the secularist thinks and asking them to work it out to its logical conclusion. It is a direct challenge. Can you take it?
So let’s go on to look at this first chapter
1) What goes around comes around – v. 2-11.
Everything is meaningless. It is a quote from Psalm 39 – “You rebuke and discipline men for their sin; you consume their wealth like a moth— each man is but a breath. Selah” (Psalm 39:11) Each man is vanity. Hebel. Used 39 times in this book. In this first chapter we see two evidences of that. This meaninglessness/vanity means brief, insubstantial – perhaps froth. Empty, Unreliable. Frail. Futile. Lack of discernible purpose. Absurd. The word is related to wind and mist and is used for things that do not last, cannot be grasped or are not worthwhile. A breath. That is what human life is like. So much of existensalist literature reflects that – Yancy “flat emotions, a radical indifference to others, the sensation of drifting, numbness to pain, a resigned acceptance of a world gone mad” Donnie Darko – Mad World. Camus’s L’Etranger Meursault says – the outsider. “It makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten, since in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before”
What about work? What do we gain? The toil here is both physical labour and mental anguish. It is hard work. Trouble. Misery. What is the dividend we get at the end of life? None says the Teacher. On our tombstone is the inscription ‘No Profit’. It is a big zero – when we ad dup the plus’s in our lives and the negatives the balance sheet comes out zero or negative. If there is no meaning there is no profit.
Contrast this with ‘nature’ which seems to go on forever. There is an irony in this verse. Jerome “What is more vain that this vanity: that the earth, which was made for humans, stays – but humans themselves, the lords of the earth, suddenly dissolve into the dust?”. The restless circularity of nature. There is actually though no gain for creation in her toil. The wind blows, the streams flow, the sun rises, the sun sets, the ocean is never full. This last idea is indicative of weariness – everything flows but it is never full. All this activity does nothing significant.
V.8 then goes on to express the human experience of this restless weariness. Despite the activity of the creation it is unable to provide us with any lasting satisfaction. Emotional and psychological satisfaction. There is always more to hear and always more to see. We are never there. And we are always exhausted.
Now we go on to the circularity of human history. The generations come and the generations go – and there does not seem to be much purpose to it. There can be nothing new – history is a closed circuit.
v.10 – But what about that which appears to be new? It is an illusion. But what about nuclear power for example? The technological advances may be new but the people who wield them are not. We get really excited about new inventions that are going to change the world but they soon sink down to our former level. In fact the only reasons things seem new to us is that we have forgotten the past.
v.11 – nihilism. Past events are forgotten. Future events will be forgotten. More personally we will be forgotten. Over 50% of Britain’s under 35’s cannot tell you anything about the Holocaust and do not know what Auschwitz was. Secularism will lead to the same again – “He who does not learn from history is destined to repeat it”.
There is no real progress. .
2) Chasing the wind v. 12-18.
When he tries to understand all this – he grows in knowledge but it does not get him anywhere. His first avenue of escape is philosophy.
v.12 – Solomon as the king had all the resources necessary. He had the libraries, the power and the money. He set his heart – he studied hard and this is what he found. His search project leads to frustration rather than enlightenment.
a) There is a heavy burden God has laid on men. Could also be translated ‘grievous evil ’or‘ miserable businesses. We may live as secularists but the problems we face have been ordained by God. Mankind thinks and plans. We have been wired that way. We want to understand. The problem of life is for us all not just a hobby for philosophers. The quest of meaning is a quest for God and it is something that God has placed in our hearts. Acts ch. 17 v. 26-28. “The creator has instilled in every human being the desire to know the answers to life’s ultimate questions. Part of that which distinguishes humans from animals is the desire to know origin, destiny and purpose; to understand the why and how of all things. Even those who have no walk with the Lord feel this compulsion to discover the truth”
b) Humans are frustrated – v.14 – we desire gain, satisfaction and a sense of progress but that keeps eluding us. We end up chasing wind. Ambition for the unattainable.
c) There are twists and gaps in our thinking – v. 15. More than our thinking. In human life and in the environment. Our wisdom may help in many things but it cannot solve the fundamental problem of life.
The end result of all this was that he also looked at other alternatives – folly, pleasure, money etc. But it all still ended up with the same result. “The more you understand, the more you ache” The wise man becomes ever more conscious of the scope of his ignorance and impotence, of the uncontrollable power of nature, of great evils which he is powerless to remedy. To a certain extent, ignorance is bliss (1:18).
Conclusion: Is that it?
Is there no ‘but’? This is all true. This is the position of the secularist. But is that it? No. You will notice the key expression – ‘under the sun’. It is used 29 times in this book. It means without God. That is the old perspective. With a NT perspective we can see things differently. We still groan, the creation still suffers, and yet we know what is happening and why it is happening and we wait for something different.
Go back to the question of the Creation. Without God it is meaningless. The OT sees the creation as being full of God. But take away God and there is only meaninglessness. No God – what is the point? We are left with Tsunamis and natural disasters, with no explanation and no help. The OT loved the idea of admiring the skies, seeing nature sing for joy and the lessons taught by animals, grass, wind and trees. But without God none of it makes any sense. Look at Romans ch. 8 v. 20 – which refers to Ecclesiastes.
Come back to the idea of history. Is it all pointless? Going nowhere? The Israelite believed that God was in control of history – that it really was ‘His Story’. History is traveling to a goal. Without God there is no purpose and no new thing.
Again with God there is remembrance – we develop a longer term perspective. Later we are to be told by the Teacher to remember our Creator. That is all pointless if he does not exist.
And what about that weariness and exhaustion – that burn out of nature. What did Jesus say? Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest!
And what about you. Are you like the people Job describes..”They spend their years in prosperity and go down to the grave in peace. Yet they say to God, ‘Leave us alone! We have no desire to know your ways. Who is the Almighty, that we should serve him? What would we gain by praying to him?” GK Chesterton – “All men matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe.” But it is what Jesus teaches us.
What a horrific thought. Going to the grave deliberately refusing God in one’s life.
― Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul:-“I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”
Best wishes for this outreach, Pastor.
” @theweeflea
David Robertson Retweeted
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
✔
@Ayaan
“The deeply divided society we now live in increasingly reminds me of clan or tribal behaviour in Africa.”
My latest for @unherd:https://unherd.com/2021/05/tribalism-has-come-to-the-west/ …”
This reminds me of something that was mentioned in that long discussion on the uber-woke Tasmanian writer, Philippa Moore. The fact she was actively blocking and unfriending followers on social media simply for having different political views just reinforces echo chambers and tribalism. If she is no longer able to even tolerate having people of different views follow her or engage with her on social media, that really isn’t too far from a ‘civil war’ mindset. Ie, if you no longer tolerate any differing views from your neighbours, it isn’t that far a step from wanting to silence them permanently if a civil war situation were to arise. 🙁
This really shows the liberals at their most intolerant and potentially dangerous.
Yes, that was an interesting thread with all those Tasmanians critiquing Philippa Moore’s incredibly woke and bizarre tweets. I just had a look at her Twitter and that of her husband again. She is just lamenting the fact she is too scared of COVID to jump on a plane to the mainland for a shopping trip:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1390086933389275138
I know a lot of poor, working class Tasmanians who could never afford to fly to Melbourne for something as frivolous as a shopping trip. I am just fortunate I have been able to travel to places like Tassie and Europe a lot for my work – my parents were too poor to travel much when I was young despite years of suffering, sacrifice and hard work.
Anyway, that aside, there is one interesting new Tweet there from her husband which might give some insight into why he is the way he is:
“… during the 90s she [his mum] got into New Age which probably inspired me the most leading into my love of ambient and electronica.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/tomschoon/status/1391511353769140228
I am not sure if Tom Schoon means his mother was into New Age just as a mysical genre or if he means she was into the religion, too. If he meand the latter, it kight explain his ultra-woke position on every subject inder the sun.
Anyway, I thoroughly agree, Jean, that the ceasement of dialogue and increasing poparisation of positions can set the stage for a civil war. Look at France and the USA in recent months. It seems unthinkable in Australia at the moment but that kind of attitude of middle-class and upper middle-class liberals like Philippa Moore no longer listening to working class conservatives is a worrying sign, even if she is an extreme outlier.
PM Morrison is right – social media can be a tool of the devil with the way it is leading to this polarisation and narrowing of views. So ial media has been around long enough now that we can gauge its effects and see the enormous harm it can do to the cohesion of our social fabric.
It is harder to ignore a contrary opinion in face to face conversation in real life. You can’t hit an ignore button on someone in real conversation.
Yes, I am not sure from that tweet if Tom Schoon means his mother was into New Age music, New Age religion or both.
I searched for more information. His mother, Julia Schoon, passed away a few years ago and his father died earlier this year. Please pray for this poor young man that he may come to know Christ, accept Him as Lord of his life and be saved.
I cannot believe Philippa Moore’s tweet though. For all her promotion of environmentalism and caring for the planet, she thinks nothing of jumping on a jet plane and flying to Melbourne for a shopping trip. So it turns out she is just another sanctimonious hypocrite, telling us poor plebs how to live our lives while she jets around. How many times have we heard this from celebs? Shades of Harry and Meghan there. 🙁 I wonder how she justifies it to herself.
It does show the difference in lifestyles between social classes as you say, too. I lived in Tassie for a while. With its high unemployment in the 1990s and lower than average standards of living, I knew many, many working class battlers in Tassie who could not afford to fly to the nainland on a whim, let alone for a shopping trip. For them, it was a once-in-a-decade experience, at best. Airline deregulation made some difference, lowering the cost of fares, but it still wasn’t something most Tasmanians could do on a regular basis.
At any rate, please pray for Philippa too that she may come to know Christ and be saved, along with her husband.
Yes, the polarisation caused by social media is very worrying. Once people of different classes and political outlooks no longer even talk to each other, I worry about recourse to violence to make opinions heard as dialogue breaks down.
The other orryjng thing is that Philiippa Moore is very vocal on social media in support of the Aboriginal cause and, as I documented elsewhere on this site ( https://theweeflea.com/2021/03/08/letter-from-australia-84/ ) , she was recently on an ABC radio prigram with Michael Mansell. Mamsell was, of course, infamously cahoots with Colonel Gadafi.
“In 1987 and 1988, Mansell had gone to Libya seeking funding for his organisation from Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He also sought to join Gaddafi’s Mathaba worldwide group of insurgents…”
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=TAWEB_MRE170_a&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theaustralian.com.au%2Fnational-affairs%2Fopinion%2Fquestioning-credentials-of-an-aboriginal-elite%2Fnews-story%2Fbb46a8c580ea5e77d752f895c5aa0214&memtype=anonymous&mode=premium&nk=7685e3a1435843a1e50565338e1362ff-1620682753
“So, surprisingly, has Michael Mansell, who in 1988 went to Libya to attempt to link his so-called Aboriginal Provisional Government with Colonel Gaddafi’s network of 87 militias and insurgency groups worldwide.”
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=TAWEB_MRE170_a&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theaustralian.com.au%2Fnational-affairs%2Fleft-wingers-change-their-tune-on-gaddafis-regime%2Fnews-story%2F964024ce34efa378c6a4450dbae93a76&memtype=anonymous&mode=premium&nk=7685e3a1435843a1e50565338e1362ff-1620682160&v21suffix=160-b
“In April 1987, at a conference sponsored by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya called “A Conference on Peace and Revolution in the Pacific”, Mansell spoke to a large international audience.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Mansell
“Mr Mansell subsequently claimed Gaddafi’s support for a separate Aboriginal nation.”
https://www.9news.com.au/national/libya-seeking-to-fiddle-in-sth-pacific/a289c433-8976-456b-8710-bc6ae9c7fbe4
“When Michael Mansell visited Libya in the late 1980s to seek aid for his Aboriginal Provisional Government from the Muslim dictator Colonel Gaddafi, the Australian media treated him as a joke. But if Mansell had been an officer of a sovereign Aboriginal state, and if he had gone there at any time in the past decade and a half, it would not have been so amusing.”
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2016/11/break-australia-part/
“… in the 1980s, driven by strongman Muammar Gaddafi’s anti-imperialist world view, Libya sought to parlay oil cash into influence in a range of struggling Pacific Island nations.
Cabinet documents for 1988 and 1989 – released by the National Archives of Australia – show the government was quite concerned that a pariah nation and terrorist supporter was meddling in our part of the globe.”
and
“In Australia, Gaddafi had his supporters on both the far right and far left.
They included Victorian Labor figure Bill Hartley and indigenous activist Michael Mansell who in 1987 attended Gaddafi’s conference on peace and revolution in the Pacific.
Mr Mansell subsequently claimed Gaddafi’s support for a separate Aboriginal nation.”
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/libya-seeking-to-fiddle-in-sth-pacific
I assume Michael Mansell is still on anti-terrorism watchlists. I just hope and pray Philippa Moore never becomes so radicalised she ends up going in this durection. We know from her other tweets and posts she has no problem with violence for a political cause (celebrating the female agent who strangled a man with her bare hands and promotion of WW1 and attack on political pacifism in her blog post). Given Moore’s extreme woke left political views and willingness to go on air with Michael Mansell it is a genuine worry to me. I will continue to pray for her.
Yes, that and Tom Schoon’s cartoon drawing of the decapitated politician and his praise of Antifa add up to… not a good look.
From what I’ve read, I doubt Philippa and Tom would ever become radicalised to the point of violence (at least I certainly hope not) but their extremely woke views, liberal authoritarianism and shutting out of opposing political views show they are *some* way down this path already.
Rest assured, I will continue to pray for them, Jean. Christ will work in their lives and lead them away from this dark path. God bless.
I’ve just been reading through Tom Schoon and Philippa Moore’s Tweets and blog posts. They are very odd people and very much in a ‘woke’ echo chamber as you say.
I can’t see them ever becoming radicalised enough to be terrorists thankfully but cheering on Antifa is bad enough since it could spur someone else to do something. Tom Schoon and Philippa Moore obviously DO support political violence in some circumstances, namely opposing the far right. They ned to be far more responsible with their social media posts, especially Philippa Moore, since she has a sizable number of ‘followers’.
I can see the liberal left in general becoming progressively more violent in general through the echo chamber effect over time as you say. The fact that Philippa Moore would be willing to deliberately drive away ‘followers’ because they have different views is worrying enough, as you rightly point out. It is indeed a kind of ‘civil war’mentality, equivalent to a Croat not wanting to dialogue with Serbs anymore. Social media causing a ‘Balkanization’ of society and leading to a real Balkans-like scenario is a real risk but I wouldn’t read too much into these two eccentric social media gurus in general. They seem fairly harmless by themsrlves, unless they prove to be the canaries in the coalmine and the rest of the liberal left start to head down the same path. Thanks for the heads-up about them though.
I was reading this and the other, long discussion. Yes, very extreme woke-ists.
I did see another little bit of hypocrisy that is worth noting – for all of her discussion of her weight and body image pressure on women, Philippa Moore is quite prepared to turn around and write articles for Cosmopolitan. Do you remember the disgusting, foul-mouthed 1992 novelty song by rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot, “Baby’s Got Back”? Well, for all its crudity and lustful lewdness, he specifically singles out Cosmo magazine as a publication that puts pressure on women to conform to a certain body image ideal and it was one of those publications that was alleged to have helped provoke the anorexia/bulimia epidemic of that time, so for Philippa Moore to then turn around and write for that publication reeks of opportunism and hypocrisy, unfortunately.
Other than that, yes, they are quite extreme people. I will pray for her and her husband as you ask.
A great discussion here and on the other page. Yes, it is easy to poke holes in all of the hypocrisy from this Philippa Moore woke writer – concerned about the environment but flies everywhere, concerned about body image pressures on yiung women but writrs for Cosmo, anti-police violence but pro-military, leftist but an opponent of the pacifists opposing the two most blatantly imperialist wars of the last 100 years, WW1 and the Invasion of Iraq. Add to that airing all of the dirt in public about her marriage with her first husband and shameful divorce and her subsequent sex outside of marriage and you have a very distasteful, unsavoury young woman riddled with contradictions and hypocrisy.
It makes you wonder if these wokesters really believe in any of the causes they advocate or if it all really is just insincere virtue signalling and making a show – a kind of peer pressure on speed to show how hyper-conformist to the new morality they are while not really believing in any of it in their hearts of hearts. It is sad really that they are so insincere and shallow. The insights about her mother Sylvia Moore and sister Liz Graham on the other page give some hints about how she ended up like this but at some point people have to take responsibility for their own actions and have to let go of their childhood. Yes, I will pray for this girl, too. I truly hope she and her family come to Christ.
I should add I feel more sad for this Philippa Moore than anything – appalled by the hypocrisy of course and the authoritarianism of the wokesters but saddened by this writer’s life and its shallowness and emptiness of true morality. Dear Father, please let Jesus reach out to Philippa Moore and her sisters and parents and help them and save them. Please, by Your irresistable grace, may they invite You into their lives. Save them and transform them. Thank you, Lord. Amen
I was going to say Philippa Moore seems to be as woke as Meghan Markle, then it occurred to me she is just like Princess Diana. Maybe I have Di on my mind because of her 60th birthday and the unveiling of her statue but the similarities seem uncanny. Consider:
1. Both had very difficult mothers.
2. Both had unhappy school experiences.
3. Both had bulimia.
4. Both had psychological problems.
5. Both married young and unhappily.
6. Both divorced young.
7. Both then fornicated.
8. Both have aired their dirty laundry in books.
9. Both have courted the media.
10. Both have dabbled in consulting psychics (and in Philippa Moore’s case other weird occult stuff like hypnotherapy and that whole Eats, Loves, Prays phenomena)
11. Both became social justice gurus of a sort – Diana with her Queen of Hearts campaigns and Philippa Moore with her woke social media posts about every topic under the sun.
12. Like Diana, despite all of her glaring flaws, Philippa Moore remains a likeable person, almost in spite of herself.
I’d be interested to know if other woke people are coming from the same kind of background as Philippa Moore. Is this phenomena the result of a generation of young people who had unhappy childhoods? Moore seems very fixated on her past to the point of being unable to let go of the fact teachers told her to be quiet in school or had to weigh her. Are the so-called snowflakes people who lacked resilience from their earliest, formative years? Her book and posts and the discussions here give rise to all kinds of questions like this.
If only Chris t were in the lives of people like her and her generation, to say nothing of Lady Di. She doesn’t realise what she really needs to help her. Like the rest of you, I wish I could reach out.
Yes, she does have some striking similarities with Princess Diana! One can see the resemblance in their mindsets and approaches to the difficulties they have faced in life. As I said in the other thread, there are a lot of similiarities between Philippa and I in terms of our interests and study and career paths. I hope that doesn’t mean I am a Diana-like figure as well! 😛
On a much more serious note, as I mentioned in the other discussion, I met Philippa Moore briefly a few times when she was in some of my lectures at university. What I did not say was that, some years prior to that time, I also knew the mother and the younger sisters from an organisation of which I was a member at that time (Hobart is a small town so everyone tends to know everyone else). As you say, the mother was a very aggressive woman and caused a lot of harm at the organisation through her over-the-top behaviour unfortunately. I was one such victim as a kid as were other people I knew. Later on, I would sometimes see the mother in the street and she would walk past and not even speak to me, which is a weird way for an adult to treat a kid (I was just a teen at the time.) Later on, someone she and I both knew from the organisation passed away and she didn’t bother to go to her friend’s funeral so she was a woman with a heart of stone. A very strange woman.
At any rate, irrespective of the pain and damage Sylvia Moore caused in my own personal life, I can see how Sylvia’s behaviour adversely affected Philippa. Add to that, her mother loving Philippa’s book according to the latter’s tweets despite it being full of immoral behaviour and foul language and you can see how Philippa’s moral compass was badly skewed. 🙁 🙁 🙁
I realise what I have just said is very critical but that isn’t what I wanted to say at all. I really do feel concerned about Philippa Moore as I said in the previous discussion, though I barely knew her.
I am an evangelical Christian myself and self-identify as Calvinist on most doctrinal points. Obviously, I therefore disagree with Philippa’s opinions on most issues, as people documented in the previous discussion on this blog, though I am largely apolitical myself. I am definitely opposed to her promotion of war, fornication and political correctness at any rate.
Despite my opposing opinions, I truly do feel nothing but kindness and compassion in my heart towards Philippa Moore herself. On those few occasions I did meet her, I had no idea she had so much pain in her life and so many troubles haunting her from her past. Heaven knows, at that time I had a lot of serious problems in my young life myself but I definitely would have tried to befriend her and support her in any way I could had I known, no matter how wary I was of her mother. I wish I could have been her friend.
As I said, I was only a teen when I knew the family and in my early 20s when I met Philippa Moore at university. Now, with age and wisdom, I realise I should have taken a different approach to her family and tried to evangelise to them. I am a very quiet and introverted person, so heaven knows God has given me no great gifts in spreading the gospel but I wish I could have tried in that family’s case. I do know Philippa attended a Roman Catholic school, then a Quaker college before starting uni. Before she married her first husband, I am led to believe she attended an Alpha Course in our local evangelical Anglican Church, so she has had three exposures to Christianity, two very imperfect and one that is quite good, so at least she is not totally ignorant of true religion. I am grateful for that and pray she will come back to it later in life at the right time of God’s choosing.
From my limited meetings with her, Philippa Moore did strike me as a genuinely kind and empathetic person despite what she has been through in life. I believe therefore that some of her posts and tweets are probably a result of misguided empathy in to the wrong causes through a naive desire to help, rather than anything truly malicious. When you see things like her critique of the old man’s Christmas funeral notice, or her airing her dirty laundry about her husband in her book or her attacks on pacifists (of whom I identify as one) it can become a little harder to maintain this sympathetic stance towards her but I do believe her political correctness and extreme political views come out of a genuine desire to help rather than out of a sense of maliciousness or desire to bully , tyrannise or harm others.
I therefore feel nothing but deep compassion and empathy towards this young lady and wish I could have befriended her more deeply to help her when she was going through so much emotional and psychological turmoil in her late teens and early twenties. I feel that if she does turn to Christ one day, with her gifts and kind, loving disposition, she has the potential to be a truly great person and do much good in the world. That good person within Philippa is just waiting to come out. Hopefully, her mother and the rest of her family can be saved too.
I just wish Philippa every kindness and blessing in life and hope she is saved. As I said at the outset, I feel nothing but compassion, empathy and friendship towards that girl and I hope she can overcome all the hurt in her life. May the Lord bless her and keep her and may she come to saving faith in Christ and let Him be Lord of her life. May she know she is deeply loved by God and cared for by her friends, even by people who barely know her.
Bah! For a writer/editor, I really didn’texpress myself well yesterday so I will try again now to say what I really wanted to say.
For starters, Old Sylvia was definitely an overbearing bully who caused me a lot of grief. However, what I wanted to say was that is all in the past now as surely we must forgive and forget and that seems to be something Philippa herself has trouble with since she is so haunted by things from her past. At any rate, it is unlikely I will ever see Sylvia again so there is no point in holding onto past grudges, no matter the damage she did. It is better to let go of these things. I am however still genuinely concerned about the damage Sylvia may have done to her daughters through her mixture of pushiness and spoiling them. 🙁
As for Philippa, I truly meant what I said. She definitely struck me as a genuine, empathetic person. That is why I find it hard to reconcile what she was like with all of the PC rubbish she puts out on social media as people documented on various posts in the previous discussion. The fact that she promotes evils like homosexual marriage, abortion, a tyrannical degree of censorship, promotion of sexual immorality/fornication and the Liz Gilbert spiritualist/occultist material is hard to reconcile with the person I met, however briefly. It just goes to show that Calvin’s doctrine of “Total Depravity” is correct: no matter how nice or kind a person is their heart is tainted to some degree by evil and rebellion against God. That of course goes for my own heart as much as anyone else’s.
As was also discussed in the other thread, it is hard to make sense of her politics – she despises Thatcher but she loved the same economic policies when the ALP introduced them in Australia. Furthermore, she is a feminist but she lauds the former Prime Minister Bob Hawke who was a notorious womaniser. As I said yesterday I, myself, am emphatically apolitical and she is of course entitled to her opinions but they do seem like a mass of contradictions to me.
I am very grateful to find kindred spirits on this site who are worried about Philippa Moore and who are praying for her. Whoever you are, whether former school friends or people who know her from Tasmania or London or the regular Scottish and Aussie folks who visit this site, it is lovely of you. I will join you in your prayers.
I don’t think Philippa’s promotion of her social justice hobby horses are attention-seeking or an attempt to play the sympathy card. I believe she is genuine in her beliefs albeit somewhat naive and misguided at times. I definitely don’t think she’d be dangerous but I can see how the extremism of some of her views and her consorting with Michael Mansell can lead some people to think so. I couldn’t imagine her becoming radicalised to the point where she’d use her blog to promote political violence though.
When I met Philippa Moore those few times at uni, she seems a very caring, kind, warmhearted individual and I really wished I could have come to know her better, wary though I was of getting too close from having known her mother. I had no inkling whatsoever she was hurting so much and in so much pain until I read her book relatively recently though. Knowing now what I wish I had known then I definitely wish I could have befriended her and given her the support and friendship she clearly needed and craved at that time. I will always regret that. I also wish I could have shared Christ’s love for her with her.
It grieves me and worries me deeply that she has now gone down this very anti-Christian, “woke” path. I know she has had some exposure to Christianity through the Quaker school, her Anglican minister (a wonderful man) in pre-marriage counselling and, I believe in the Alpha Course. She also attended a Roman Catholic school early on in her life which, I fear, probably did more harm than good but at least she would have received some vaguely Christian education there, however grievously erroneous their doctrines and beliefs.
At any rate, I was going through much pain at that point in my own life too when I met Philippa and I wish I could have shared some of my own burdens with her as such an empathetic and caring girl would, I think, could genuinely have helped me as much as I could have helped her. We could both have supported each other with the deep pain and suffering we were both feeling over various different things.
I therefore remember her as a gentle, kind person. I wish I could have befriended her and shown her support and love (in a brotherly way). I feel nothing but warmth and kindness towards her and wish her every success in life. I hope she comes to know Christ and is saved before this present path of woke/PC, unChristian values and hedonism burns her too badly. I don’t wish to see her suffer any more.
Since she is a clearly a psychologically-fragile person, I would ask that people on her please refrain from posting about her anymore. I know her PC posts are a worry as is the fact she has a sizeable social media following but I don’t think rigorous criticism will be productive in this case since she is a vulnerable, gentle person without much in the way of resilience. Her impact outside of Australia is negligible apart from her occasional HuffPost or Guardian piece anyway.
Please continue to pray for her. I have very confidence she has the potential to be a truly good person if she lets Christ into her life and I have nothing but kindhearted thoughts and warm feelings of compassion and affectionate friendship towards her and eep, genuine concern for her well-being.
God bless.
Beautiful, heartfelt words full of warmth, love and concern, DL.
Yes, I will definitely pray for this poor, dear girl. I hope she is healed of all her pain and sorrow and that she comes to know Christ as her Saviour and Lord and comes to understand His true moral value system.
My heart breaks for poor lost kids like this.
I will pray for her family too. You are obviously full of anxiety and concern for them and their eternal fate, despite the pain the mother caused you.
Dear Lord and Father
Please make yourself known to Philippa and her family. May they be saved. Please may their names be written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. Heal this troubled girl and help her to use her social media following for true good.
In the name of Your Son Jesus Christ,
Amen.
Don’t worry now, DL. Leave it in God’s hands and let Him work in her life and that if her family. Your warmness and love towards Philippa and her family radiates through your posts. You are a true friend to care for Philippa so much – despite your troubled experience with her mum – whether or not she ever realises it. Anyway, these things will ultimately be revealed to her on the Last Day. On that day she will know you are a truly caring brother in Christ to her and her family whether or not they appreciate that now in this life. Make sure you continue to pray for her and her family too. Your hidden kindness to her will reap rewards eventually, whether you ever see it or not.
Those are beautiful and very caring words, DL.
I should add my own thoughts about this. I think the two discussion threads provide an excellent case study on the background of a “woke” person and how they have ended up that way. As you say, DL, Hobart is a small town and everyone onows everyone else so it is good to have captured here points if view from people who know this writer well.
We often speak figuratively on sites like this about the “insanity” of woke beliefs and views. I guess thecone question is whetger this girl really does literally have a mental illness. Hmmm… I’m no psychologist but I really do suspect so in this case, I’m sorry to say about your friend, DL. She has the background of bulimia of course but therr are othrr things like vlinging so tightly to the past she still holds a grudge against teachers for telling her to be quiet in class and runs to SBS or the Guardian to complain about critics of her book and ger trolls. Trolls can be hurtful but this is such an extreme level of sensitivity it comes across as bizarre. On top of that, there is the lack of restraint and compliance with social norms when talking about sexual matters and feminine hygiene products.
She’s an intelligent person but is easily dupedcand used by the Aboriginal industry and con artist like Liz Gilbert and trying out New Age stuff like hypnotherapy and yoga and trying to be both hedonistic and environmentally conscious simultaneously which leads to charges of blatant hypocrisy.
I had a thought: I obviously don’t know these people like the mother but have you considee maybe it was the other way around? Her aggressiveness and bullying behaviiur moght have been in order to protect a daughter who she knew was mentally ill rather than a contributing factor to it? Just a speculative thought.
Also I know a lot of people who went to Catholic schools who were put off religion either by having it constantly pounded into them, the cruelty of the nuns or the bad false unChristians doctrines of tge catjolucs.
Finally, you are a good Christian person, DL, to stand by your friend Philippa when there is still a stigma around mental illlnrss and when you obviously disagree with her anti christian views.
Came here after reading Latte Years and Philippa Moore’s tweets and blog and finding myself doubting my own sanity. The two discussions here are like a breath of fresh air. I agree with what you all are saying – it is hard to tell the difference between social justice warrior lunacy and real life mental health issues these days. Add to that the fact that Philippa Moore’s husband is a marketing guru and I don’t know if she is saying provocative stuff just to gain more social media hits or if she really has a psychological problem but I’m leaning towards the latter.
I agree with everyone else those are beautiful and very kind words DL. You are very caring. I would urge caution to you and the people on the other discussion who were contemplating reaching out towards Philippa Moore though. Here’s why –
https://twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1427804235299573764
From what I can see she claims to have been bullied by classmates, teachers, online trolls, work colleagues, bosses, and her ex-husband and has even lashed out against people who have written negative reviews of her books. She is so sensitive about it she has written an article for the Guardian, appeared on SBS and tried hypnotherapy. Now in this post she’s saying her neighbour bullied her to the extent she had to move house. Some of these instances may well be true but I can’t help thinking she is paranoid and deeply disturbed. No one is bullied that much by that many people so it seems like her perceptions are distorted. Look at that discussion on the other page about how she wrote an entire blog post about how she felt repressed because of her teachings telling her to be quiet at school. That to me reeks of a persecution complex. It may well stem from the overbearing mother people have been talking about – who knows. Given her bulimia and the other probs she mentions in Latte Years though I think it is best not to be involved or to contact her directly. The reason is she might lash out at you and falsely accuse you of bullying her too. Unless you are trained in counselling and know how to deal with someone with these issues you probably can’t handle her. I’ve seen people with paranoia and psych problems turn on those who have genuinely been trying to help them in the past. I don’t know if it gives them a sense of empowerment or control or if they genuinely believe it but they will turn around and make fake claims of bullying or harassment against people who would never dream of doing such a thing and are genuinely trying to help them. Like I said, I defeinitely don’t know if Philippa falls into this category but she obviously has had a history of problems with bulimia, etc, and her posts seem to me to give the impression of a persecution complex and I know this kind of person can be bad news. The difficult mother adds another complication.
Since this is a Christian website, my advice is the same as the pastor’s and the other people’s on the previous page: pray fervently for Philippa and help her in that way but don’t contact her directly.
BTW, some people talked about her sister Liz Graham on the other page. What is she like. Is she okay. Sounds like she had some troubles too but a different kind. I couldn’t understand what people were saying on the other page. Maybe she needs prayers too.
I agree with you all – it is frightening someone like this gains such a big social media cult following. It seems like the more bizarre the opinion the more people listens to it in this day and age.
Thank you for your very kind words, everyone. Yes, I understand what you are saying about persecution complexes/neuroses and how people suffering from them can misunderstand genuinely good intentions. We had a mentally ill person like that at our church once, many years ago. It is dangerous because they can make false claims against people.
I definitely wouldn’t reach out to Philippa since I barely knew her and, as you say, she might take things the wrong way. At any rate, prayer is the most important thing we can do for somebody. I firmly believe that. God has provided enough answered prayers and true miracles in my own sinful life for me to know He is real and the power of prayer.
Yes, I agree that the more outrageous an SJW statement, the followers it is likely to get. We live in a time of strange social media-fueled political cults from Trump on one side to the Wokesters/PC Professional Outrage Industry on the other. I don’t know if Philippa Moore is mentally ill or not; I sincerely hope not but her postings – as people documented on the other page – are truly bizarre at times and very extreme in their SJW stances. I sincerely hope she is okay.
It is extremely gratifying to know that other people on this page and the other one are also praying for her well-being.
Regarding Philippa Moore’s sister, Liz Graham, I don’t want to say too much her because she isn’t a public figure like her journalist/social media blogger sibling, or a radio personality like her father. It wouldn’t be appropriate to talk about a private person too much behind her back. All I will say is this: she was still Elizabeth Moore when I knew her since she was just a teenage kid back then. I knew her only through the organisation with which I was involved. She was a sweet kid and I was fond of her. She was a very extroverted chatterbox but I suspect some of that was nerves. Anyway, I always tried to be kind and supportive of her. She didn’t have much willpower or dedication though and she was a bit lazy but I suspect that was because of the mother who ruined those girls. 🙁 Later, she ran of the rails and became very rude. It was extremely sad and hurtful to see for those who had supported her. She later became pregnant outside of wedlock. I think she was still just a teen. Another teenage girl from the organisation, a vision-impaired girl named Bernadette, became pregnant at exactly the same time so that caused a big double-scandal. Note I was very sick with a serious illness at the time so I am not aware of all the details of what went on. I lost contact with them at that time anyway.
Whether this Graham person Elizabeth Moore is married to now is the father of her first child, I have no idea. I don’t know who he is and in fact I didn’t even know she was married until I read it on the other thread. I did previously hear she had become a kindergarten or prep teacher though.
I do know she didn’t go onto uni. I simply think it is really heartbreaking that a sweet little kid would become so enmeshed in sin, especially sexual sin, later on. That’s all I know about her really.
My heart truly, deeply grieves for her.
According to the discussion on the other page, Elizabeth Moore has now become a devout Roman Catholic. I have really mixed feelings about this. Partly I feel great joy that she is turning I towards God, of course. However, I am more than aware that Roman Catholicism is a highly errant, heterodox religion given its huge doctrinal deviations from Biblical Christianity and the anti-Christ nature of the office of Pope. Add to that the fact that the Roman Catholics savagely persecuted my ancestors – on both sides of my family – and you can see where my feelings lie. The facts that the Roman Church has been prepared to twist God’s word, blasphemously proclaim the Pope to be “Christ’s Vicar on Earth”, suppress the Bible, murder the body and imperil the soul make it the most evil organisation that has ever existed in my opinion. What can compare to those crimes?
More importantly than my personal feelings about Catholicism though is my hope that Elizabeth Moore can come to saving faith in Christ even if it is through this wicked, deviant “Church”. If she can come to faith alone, through Christ alone, despite Rome’s misleading, soul-endangering works-righteousness doctrines and idolatry, I will be extremely grateful. I only want what is best for that poor child. I pray she can learn Christian morality and repent of her sexual misdeeds and come to saving faith in Christ. I wish that dear child nothing but the best in life and wish I could convey my deep love to her. Again, I would not reach out to her or her family though in case it was taken the wrong way and because of what the mother was like.
I want nothing more than for Elizabeth Moore to come to her senses and be saved. I will pray for her too and even for her mother that her heart may be softened so that she may repent and be saved also. That is the best way I know to show genuine, heartfelt love and support for Elizabeth Moore, even though she will never know how I am helping her. That wayward child and prodigal daughter has potential for great good in her, I am sure. I wish I could help her and support her and guide her and show her the deepest, warmest Christian brotherly love and help her save her soul. May Christ have mercy on her and fill her life with His joy and every kind of blessing. I hope she receives all the help and support she needs in life. I wish that girl nothing but the absolute best. I wish she had a sense of how deeply she is cared for and how much former friends still think warmly of her despite all of the pain she and her mother have caused through their attitudes and actions. I wish her only the best and feel nothing but pure love towards her.
Please, please join me in prayer for Elizabeth and Philippa Moore, that Christ may come into their lives, that they may put their faith and trust in Him and make Him Lord of their lives and thereby that they may be saved. That would mean the world to me. Thank you so much. Their salvation is of the utmost importance. Please God, fill Elizabeth with a sense of your great love for her and wash her sins away. Likewise, make yourself known to Philippa too. Please save both these precious girls. In the name of your dear Son, Jesus Christ Our Lord, Amen. May Elizabeth know and understand former friends care for her and feel nothing but the warmest love for her and deepest concern for her welfare and hope for her eternal salvation too.
I trust Christ will work in Elizabeth Moore’s life and save her and fill her with knowledge of His love for her. God bless you all.
Those are beautiful words again, DL. I can tell you really care deeply about Elizabeth Moore. Your prayer for her is really heartfelt.
Yes, I agree we should not gossip about people, especially if they are not public figures. I was just curious about her as Philippa Moore’s sister when people mentioned her out of the blue on the other page and she isn’t really mentioned in the Latte Years at all or on Philippe’s blog.
I agree about the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church too. I was reading a while ago about how they suppressed reading of the Bible, and punished people praying privately at home or singing Psalms. It was shocking. Maybe Roman Catholicism is the path that God has mapped out for Elizabeth for some reason. She might be saved in spite of Rome and move to a better denomination later on. At least it sounds like she is actually attending a church even if it is one that has been so cruel and murderous to people like your ancestors.
I hope Philippa receives professional help too if she needs it. I wonder what editors think of her articles and opinions? I suppose as long as SJW stuff sells they’ll keep printing it. Let’s hope she one day comes to embrace Christian morality too.
I can tell you really care for those two girls so they must have made a big impression on you. Your warmhearted concern and care for Elizabeth Moore really shines through your post. I hope she one day appreciates your Christian love for her and your concern for her soul. God bless. xxx
Heya my name’s Aria. When my friend Hayley showed me your words, DL, I was really deeply touched.
I really, really hope Liz Graham reaches out to you one day and you are reconciled. I pray you two will be friends again.
I understand what it’s like when a young person you feel protective of goes off the rails. It is really sad when a sweet young person rebels and ends up in a sinful lifestyle. The good thing is it sounds like she’s getting her life back in order now and has repented of her sinful lifestyle.
The Roman Catholic Church is rotten to its core, I agree, but at least she will learn about sexual morality from them. Later, when she’s ready, I’m sure God will lead her to a more Christian church. she’ll just have to unlearn some of the erroneous doctrines she’s been taught and learn about faith alone and the Bible in more detail.
Your care for her is incredibly touching and beautiful.
I’ll write more about Philippa Moore and her blog some other time. I have more to say on that and wokeness and the PC agenda in general.
This is a lovely sentiment, DL, and you are extremely kind towards her but I would argue that Liz Graham is a public figure of sorts in her own right now. You probably don’t know this but she’s no longer a kindergarten teacher in the Roman Catholic school system. In fact, she’s now the principal of the Glenora District School. As you are probably aware this is a small bush school out beyond New Norfolk in the Bushy Park area. As a principal she is therefore in a community leadership position.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-07/all-tasmanian-high-schools-extended-to-year-12-but-is-it-working/102675196
She’s not above defending Tasmanian State Labor politicians a bit herself on Facebook and advocating for same-sex marriage. Given her past as outlined in the discussions by those who know her on here, I do wonder about her suitability for the role though I have no links to, or interest in, Glenora District School.
Continued
Irrespective of her past, is Liz Graham a good principal now? The evidence is mixed. Glenora District School performed below average in every area for every age group on the last NAPLAN tests but it is a country school and a lot of the children are probably going to be more interested in vocational education than in academic skills.
Having said that though the teacher to student ratio is thirteen to one. With such small class sizes you’d hope they’d do better. I’m truly sorry to tell you this about your friend, DL, but much much worse still, a CSA offender was active there under her watch. I can not post the link here for some reason but here is the headline of the Mercury newspaper article.
“Three public school employees remain suspended after child s**ual ab*se inquiry
Three current public school employees remain suspended in wake of child s**ual ab*se inquiry.”
The article says there were four incidents at Glenora District School but does not describe their nature. I hope Liz Graham is not in any way culpable but whatever happenedshe was evidently in charge of the school so there is sime degree of accountably. At any rate, she’s still there now so the education dept must have vindicated her. I am sorry but I can’t write any more as the very thought of CSA is so distressing.
I should have added before that I will of course pray for these poor, deluded kids, too. I want to see them saved as much as you do. God bless.
Hey again guys
For whatever it’s worth, these are my thoughts on Philippa Moore’s writings. I’m no psychologist so these are just personal opinions and speculation s based on the impression her writing gives me.
I basically think she’s an attention seeker. Having read the Google Books version of the Latte Years this arvo she talks in it about how she and all her sisters were always desperate for attention. She seems like a very needy person so her blog and the controversy it causes might be meeting that need. Add to that her constant talk about bullying, her need to appear on SBS and do newspaper promos shows she is a very publicity-hungry person.
I think the blog itself and her Tweets might be a bit contrived. According to one of her latest Tweets, she recently turned 40 yet here she is talking about SJW causes, generally an obsession of millennials.
Her writing and opinions come across as naive, even childish at times, but this is an intelligent woman (member of Mensa) who is well-travelled and has worked in the cynical world of journalism for rags like Cosmo. Therefore, I suspect the childish tone of her writing and general silliness of her Tweets might be a deliberate attempt to write for the specific market of teens and people in their early twenties.
Her book is very much written for that market since she is talking about weight loss and bulimia and body image, all issues that affect this age group and again, she adopts that naive style though this time there is more excuse since she is reflecting back on that time in her own life.
Otherwise her thoughts are truly frightening – in her Tweets she calls censorship of non-woke books and films, advocates that men accused of sexual harassment be treated as guilty until proven innocent, promotes sexual licentiousness, wants to push all right wing voters away from her blog, etc, and that is only the tip of the iceberg. All of this is being directed at young people.
Of course, the other option is that she is mentally ill as some of you have speculated which would account for her more irrational and paranoid posts and hysterical tweets. In her book, she certainly talks about her demons from eating disorders through to hypnotherapy to block troubling memories.
She also portrays her mother as a nightmare if a woman in her book, reading her private diary behind her back, snooping through her personal belongings and instilling discipline “by fear”.
As bad as the impression of her mother is, even if it is realistic, surely she is violating the Fifth Commandment to “honour thy father and thy mother” by depicting her mother in this very public way in her autobiography? Shades of Meghan and Harry there.
She appears to be a bit hypocritical on the issue of bullying too since she was quick to gang up in JK Rowling in a recent tweet when the latter was in trouble with the woke crowd because of her views on transgenders. Professional jealousy?
On an issue of much lesser significance, I notice she’s against the Mount Wellington Cable Car. I know this has been a long running issue in Tasmania. My one question about these anti-cable car activists is are they also against the existing television transmission tower on Mount Wellington? Do they want that removed too? You never hear them mention that in the media Does Philippa Moore’s father’s radio station use that tower to broadcast?
There is also all of the hypocrisy mentioned above of Philippa working for Cosmo despite her body image problems and her self-indulgent shopping trip flights to mainland Australia whilst still advocating a green environmental lifestyle for us plebs. How any of her social media followers take her seriously after that I’ll never know.
Her views are more extreme than most people but she just seems to really reflect the upper-middle class, privately educated inner city hypocrite we’ve seen so much of over the last decade. A sensitive snowflake who bullies and berates others but runs to the media at the first moment she herself feels oppressed and seemingly oblivious or uncaring about her blatant hypocrisies.
Ultimately, yeah I don’t know if Philippa Moore’s an attention seeker writing deliberately provocative and shocking social media posts in a cynical attempt to appeal to her presumably-youthful social media following or whether she is a troubled young writer with a mild mental illness who is oblivious to how irrational, extremist and bizarre some of her Tweets and writings are. Neither answer would surprise me If it is the latter, I really hope and pray she receives the professional help she needs. Either way, her extreme views are dangerous and she is a very poor role model for young people. I hope they see through her hypocrisies and realise the dangerous implications of what she is saying very soon. Either way this is a very sad situation.
To end on a brighter note, I wish to reiterate again that I really hope Liz Graham takes the initiative and reaches out to you DL. You need to keep praying for her and support her and guide her in Christ Ian faith if she ever comes to you for help and advice.
I hope Philippa gets help and love too whatever her problem is.
@Aria
I tend to agree with you. I would be very uncomfortable if my teenage daughter was following Philippa Moore on social media both because of her constant promotion of ‘woke’ values and the occasionally sexually-explicit material in her posts that runs counter to Christian sexual ethics. I agree that her book is very much targeted at the teenage and early-twenties market so these are the very audience she is trying to capture.
In terms of the constant claims of bullying, it is hard to know how much truth there is to her claims. I am certain some instances, at least, likely happened but how much they are being blown up due to a persecution complex that is blowing minor slights out of proportion or a cynical attempt to play the victim card, I don’t know. She was dwelling on the issue yet again yesterday though so it seems like an unhealthy fixation with her past and an inability to move on:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1437954953100750850
At any rate, her woke agenda and self-promotion of her own victimhood definitely make it seem like she has learnt a lot of the tricks of the trade from Meghan and Harry. I won’t say any more in case she or her colleagues ever read this and misconstrue my thoughts here as as ‘bullying’. Anyway, I honestly feel more pity for her than anything, even if all her victimhood claims were to turn out to be just cynical self marketing. I honestly mean that. She seems trapped in the anti-Christian worldview she has constructed.
@DL – this is a really tricky situation you have. Here are my thoughts. Firstly, your obviously heartfelt concern and deep affection for Liz Graham (and, by extension, Philippa Moore) is really touching. My advice is the same as that of @Aria and @Hayleybaby – don’t reach out to them. Just pray earnestly for them and wait for Liz Graham to hopefully make the first move and contact you one day. I will pray that she realises what a good friend you were one day and that she reaches out to you.
If she does, always be a good Christian role model to her and lead by example. Also, share the Gospel with her if you can but listen to her pont of view too with empathy about her personal issues, if she feels like sharing things such as the history of her pregnancy. Also, listen to her point of view openly on her hypothetical conversion to Roman Catholicism. Don’t drive any wedges there or spark any animosity. Be supportive of her.
@DL, no matter how badly Liz Graham’s mother treated you, remember that as Christians, many people may be our enemies but we are too be enemies to no one. Do not return evil for evil. Model Christian love and patience to Liz Graham (and her mother if you ever encounter her again). be long-suffering and patient and always turn the other cheek, no matter what hurt Sylvia Moore inflicts on you. Do it for Christ’s sake and also do it as a good Christian witness for your friend, Liz Graham, to show her you live your faith. After all, she of all people, should know what her mother is like. Maybe you will win the mother to Christ too and bring out a more loving, compassion side in her. At any rate, I will pray for the mother too.
On the matter of Roman Catholicism, of course the Roman Church is a twisted, corrupted version of Christianity. Anyone who can read can see that the Office of the Papacy has most – if not all – of the hallmarks of Paul’s “Man of Sin” from 2Thessalonians. Even if the Papacy is not the antichrist, the fact it beats so many attributes condemned by God is a cause for alarm for any thinking Christian, to say nothing of the fact that many of Peter’s own words point holes in the whole idea of a papacy (for instance his declaration we are ALL “little stones” and his rejection of the idea of people genuflecting or bowing towards him, to say nothing of Mariology, idols, Purgatory, and various other unbiblical doctrine, the general corruption around the Vatican Bank and child abuse cover-ups etc, all issues that have been pointed out ad infinitum since the Reformation without Rome ever reforming itself. The greatest weapon against Rome is the Bible. Encourage Liz Graham to read God’s word for herself to see these truths with her own eyes and pray that she will open her her heart to the Lord. Of course, there are good people who are Catholics – usually moderate ones – but whether they can be saved, I don’t know. If they are, it is *in spite* of Rome’s man made rules and obfuscation of Christian doctrine and Biblical teaching. That is the real tragedy. 🙁 🙁 🙁
Since Liz Graham is a teacher, encourage her to read and study God’s word for herself. A teacher, of all people – even if she is “only” teaching kindergarten and prep – should appreciate primary sources and freedom of education and expression and be concerned about how Rome prevented the common man from having access to the Bible for centuries and banned prayer and Psalm singing at home. Most of all, as I stressed before though, guide Liz Graham in gentleness and love, be prepared to listen to her questions or objections and answer everything in total, heartfelt honesty. Share your own thoughts and concerns and what Christ has done in your own life and transformed you and answered your prayers and needs over time and also the hardships, challenges and doubts you have faced as a Christian to give a complete, honest picture. Most of all, share the wonderful news of Christ’s love for her and her need to accept Him into her heart and His ability to forgive her sins through His sacrifice on the cross and wash her as white as snow.
Even if Liz Graham doesn’t reach out to you ever, pray for her every night anyway so that these things will happen in her life anyway and that she will be saved. God knows what is best for her and has predestined her path since before she was even in the womb so He will guide her to reach out to you if that is in her best interests or work in her life in another way if that is what He deems is best for her. Above all, if she does reach out to you, share in God’s love for her through Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross for her sins and always treat her with gentleness, total empathy and true friendship and utter respect, which I can tell you would do anyway from the tone of your posts and your palpable, genuine concern for her wellbeing.
I too will continue to pray for Philippa Moore, Liz Graham and their families in Tasmania. I hope they come to Christ and find salvation and peace of mind and joy in Him.
God bless, @DL.
By the way, @DL, you might enjoy these old PuritanBoard discussions on the notion that the Pope is the antichrist:
https://www.puritanboard.com/threads/papal-antichrist.81149/
https://www.puritanboard.com/threads/do-you-believe-the-papacy-to-be-the-anti-christ.42389/
Personally, I think the office of pope is the Man of Sin of 2 Thess, unless a better candidate comes along one day. It certainly has most of the characteristics of the Man of Sin and titles like “Vicar of Christ” are downright blasphemous.
I’d be cautious about introducing a Roman Catholic like Liz Graham to these issues early though because they might be offended. Don’t aggressively challenge their beliefs unless they prove open-minded and comfortable with robust discussion. Be tactful with people! Remember what the Apostle Paul said about milk and solid foods. Help her with all gentleness and kindness and love, not confrontation and aggression. You are there to help Liz Graham and save the girl’s soul, not win points over her. (I’m sure you wouldn’t do that anyway – you sound like a very kind and caring young man.).
By the way, Hobart is a beautiful town. I hope to visit Tasmania again one day, post-COVID.
Yes, pray for Liz Graham and Philippa Moore, DL. I agree with Alan that, sadly, Moore is not a good role model for teens due to her extremist SJW/woke views and immoral beliefs on sex, etc. Thankfully she is only a minor commentator and her social media following isn’t all that big. Ihope she learns to let go of her past too and does not cling to old slights and feelings of having been bullied.
I pray she comes to Christ and finds real purpose in her life one day.
I also really hope Liz Graham finds Christ and reaches out to you one day and reconciles with you. You must let go of any bad blood or animosity her mother caused too. I will pray for that. And Yes, Hobart/Tassie is beautiful.
Christ be with you.
Regarding Liz Graham and Roman Catholicism, page 69 of this book is as good a summary as you’ll ever find of the issues at stake. It is very concise and covers all the points at issue in a few brief words. This would be a good summary to use to explain to Liz the issues that are at stake for her:
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=8NkDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA69&dq=%22religionists+are+not+trivial+ceremonious+particulars%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjJy_3rupzzAhUeSPUHHT2OCYcQ6AF6BAgDEAM#v=onepage&q=%22religionists%20are%20not%20trivial%20ceremonious%20particulars%22&f=false
” I really hope Liz Graham takes the initiative and reaches out to you DL. You need to keep praying for her and support her and guide her in Christ Ian faith if she ever comes to you for help and advice.”
I promise I will do so, Aria.
@Alan, Thanks. I doubt she will ever reach out to me but a miracle may occur if it is God’s will. I haven’t lived in Tasmania for years. I live on the mainland now and I never had any need to go back.
I do know moderate Roman Catholics, though. There is a big Polish diaspora community in Hobart and most of these Poles are moderate Catholics. I have a number of friends in that community.
Yes, I am well and truly familiar with PuritanBoard. It is a great website. 🙂 There are lots of other really good discussion threads on their about Roman Catholicism too.
Yes, the main thing is to win Liz Moore’s salvation, not win points over her in debates.
@Tanya – yes, the mother caused a lot of animosity and bad blood at the organisation I was involved in sadly.
I will definitely pray for Elizabeth Moore – and Philippa Moore too. Some of you asked if she was genuine. Based on my very brief encounters, my initial impressions are that I think she is the type who would be. I therefore believe her posts are heartfelt and earnest, which doesn’t make them any better of course. Anyway, she is entitled to her opinions. I just pray that – if she does have mental health issues, she is healed of them and comes to know Christ. I also pray she develops resilience and learns to let go of past slights, perceived or real, such as the bullying and resentment against school teachers for telling her to be quiet, etc.
I pray that Liz Moore will reach out to me too and really turn to Christ and make Him Lord of her life if she has not already done so.
@dsmith – great find! That is a really nice summary.
Thanks all for your help. Yes, these were just young girls I knew when they were young but you are right in that they did make a big impression on me. I just want to see them have happy lives full of joy for Christ and to be saved.
God bless.
hope this comment displays correctly. i’m new to this site. i’ve been reading phil’s blog and tweets and yes she is a woke extremist. i’ve seen even worse but she is up there with some of the more extreme wokeists i’ve encountered. when i read the latte years the mother came across as very domineering with the way she read philippa’s diary and used fear to control her children. i wasn’t sure if this was just how phil portrayed her but reading the discussion on the other thread here it seems like she was like that with everyone. i guess that is how you raise a snowflake. you dominate and control your kid and at the same time spoil them and overindulge them. a very sad story. dl it is very good of you to show such concern for phil and liz graham especially after the way the mother treated you and caused problems. you are showing true christian kindness and charity. it is very touching actually. i found a cached version of that old cartoon by schoon people were talking about on the other page. someone should have definitely called the police at the time since it depicted graphic violence inflicted on an elected head of state. apparently schoon was born in high wycombe but lived a long time in north london and his dad was an audio engineer for the bbc so he is your typical middle class inner city north london liberal elitist trying to impose his values on everyone else while decrying old imperialism at the same time. he comes across as a real islington liberal holier than thou stereotype. i hope these snowflakes wake up to themselves. they might get a big shock if some life event makes them come crashing down to earth one day. anyway no animosity towards them. i just hope your prayers for these two and their sister liz graham reap rewards.
@Sophie
Yes, that cartoon by Schoon is arguably a police matter. It is disgusting and a potential incitement.
With Philippa Moore, SJW writers and social media pundits like her quickly fall into self-parody but unfortunately their effects are too damaging to be a laughing matter.
The people who have lost jobs or been hauled before intimidating HR tribunals due to the PC new morality testify to this. This is the kind of dystopia of bullying, intimidation and silencing of dissent that leftist snowflakes like Philippa Moore are creating.
Furthermore, the fact that she criticised that poor old man’s obituary notice as was noted in the other discussion was so disgusting she lost all credibility with me as was her attempt to use the deaths of the police officers in the Kew tragedy to score points in the ‘woke’ gender wars as was her desire to find Geoffrey Rush guilty until proven innocent in his trial. That was a low blow indeed and tells me all I need to know about the new morality. Her opinions are odious and risk encouraging others to carry out her extremist SJW agenda.
Yes, the Mass is blasphemous in two of its aspects. First, if transubstantiation is false and the sacraments do not become Christ’s body and blood, then Roman Catholics are committing idolatry by venerating bread and wine. When we look through all of tge early Christian writings, we see the Agape Feast and then the more ritualized form of communion but nowhere, in any writing, including early extra-canonical texts like the Didache, is there any hint of a doctrine resembling transubstantiation.
It originates later, and comes to Christianity from pagan Greek Platonic philosophical thought about the differences between the “appearance” and “substance” of matter. It is therefore completely unbiblical and foreign to the thought of the early Christians. Furthermore, many writers identify transubstantuation as the great miracle the Man of Sin performs to deceive the masses (for what could be greater than claiming to turn mere bread and wine into God?)
The second false and wicked aspect of the mass is that it is a “resacrifice” of Christ, hence the communion table is explicitly called an “altar” in Roman Catholic terminology. Implicitky, this declares that Christ’s sacrifice upon the cross is not “once and for all” and that the Roman Catholic priest has the power and need, as “mediator” to resacrifice Christ over and over again. Mix in works righteousness and the lack of assurance of salvation in Roman Catholicism and you begin to see just how flawed and anti-Biblical this firm of Christianity is. They deny the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross; they deny the Biblical doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers”, they deny assurance and perseverance of the saints and they deny that salvation is via faith (trust) in Christ alone as a free gift to be accepted and rather believe it must be earnt through good works. Finally, each Roman Catholic altar has a saint’s relic embedded in it, making the veneration of the dead literally central to their worship rites. Their blasphemous re-sacrifice of God occurs over the body of a dead human being whom the Papacy has declared for some reason (ie, their good works) worthy of special recognition, while the Bible tells us ALL believers are in fact saints.
This isn’t nitpickong over doctrine nor is it a game either; as @DL correctly observes, millions of Christians have been killed or persecuted throughout the centuries by the Papacy in the name of this blasphemous, idolatrous system.
I will certainly join you in prayers for Liz Graham and firmly hope her soul will be saved. God bless this precious child.
This thread is a good history lesson from Puritan Board. It traces all of the major theologians down the years who thought the Papacy was the Antichrist. Extensive quotes are provided as evidence:
http://www.puritanboard.com/threads/the-pope-is-antichrist-3812/
I hope this proves a blessing to someone.
Sorry, there was a typo in my link. Here is the correct address.
https://www.puritanboard.com/threads/the-pope-is-antichrist.3812/
The Aborigines wish freedom from Colonialism .
They will achieve it in a couple of decades .
China will liberate them
Great work – is there an audio recording available with less echo?
Not of that one sadly- but the others will be much better!
Philippa Moore is also an advocate for the murder of unborn children.
Here are just a couple of her various tweets on the topic, pertaining to the passing of abortion laws in Ireland:
https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=ireland%20(from%3Aphilippa_moore)&src=typed_query&f=top
😥😥😥😥😥
I am very sad for her. She is another worshipper of Moloch at the end of the day.
I just hope one day God will write His law on her heart.
“For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” Psalm 139:13
“Now the word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.'”- Jeremiah 1:4-5
“The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name.” -Isaiah 49:1b
I thought maybe she was just a bit kooky and too PC at first but then I saw the tweet you linked. This goes right beyond the pale.
<>
She is sick.
@dl like the other people on here I advise you pray earnestly for Philippa Moore and Liz Graham. Don’t contact them unless they contact you and if they do reach out to you treat them as a mission field. Yes Jesus befriended sinners and tax collectors but it was in order to help them and call them to repentance (Lk 5:30-32, Mk 2:17). I would not befriend them beyond that until they turn to Christ. Remember these verses (1 Cor 15:33) <> and (Psalm 1:1) <> Because of these teachings, you should not get too close to these women unless they turn to Christ. I truly hope they do repent and are saved in the end.
(Reposting – quotes did not appear the first time.)
I thought maybe she was just a bit kooky and too PC at first but then I saw the tweet you linked. This goes right beyond the pale.
Philippa Moore
@philippa_moore
·
May 26, 2018
If this is true, this is the best birthday present I could have asked for. Well done Ireland #repealthe8th
Quote Tweet
The Irish Times
@IrishTimes
· May 26, 2018
Ireland has voted by a landslide margin to #repealthe8th, according to an exit poll conducted for The Irish Times by Ipsos/MRBI #8thref https://irishtimes.com/news/politics/irish-times-exit-poll-projects-ireland-has-voted-by-landslide-to-repeal-eighth-amendment-1.3508861
She is sick.
@dl like the other people on here I advise you pray earnestly for Philippa Moore and Liz Graham. Don’t contact them unless they contact you and if they do reach out to you treat them as a mission field. Yes Jesus befriended sinners and tax collectors but it was in order to help them and call them to repentance (Lk 5:30-32, Mk 2:17). I would not befriend them beyond that until they turn to Christ. Remember these verses (1 Cor 15:33) Do not be misled: “Bad company corrupts good character.” and (Psalm 1:1) Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mocker. Because of these teachings, you should not get too close to these women unless they turn to Christ. I truly hope they do repent and turn to Christ and are saved.
Thanks for your thoughts. Yes, Christians should not be too close to non-Christians, I agree. P. Moore’s views are very troubling; a Moloch-worshipper indeed. I grieve for her.
At any rate, thanks for your advice and happy Reformation Day! Luther’s words indeed give comfort when we think of the evil in the world, like abortion and its advocates, and the evil of the Roman Catholicism apostasy which has seduced so many and led to so much suffering:
“And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us”
Philippa reminds me of a young lady of my acquaintance – let’s just call her Suz. Like Philippa, Suz went to a Catholic school but rebelled and is now a woke uber-liberal and militant activist for same sex marriage, abortion rights and so forth. A very rxyroverted girl, she is also like Philippa, in that she is a writer and former journalist. (In Suz’s case, she did a cadetship with Murdoch before throwing it in.) She also had a troubled relationship with a parent. Her mother was dead and her father, with whom she had a rocky relationship, is apparently a very unusual man.
There are differences though. Suz had emo or goth leanings. She is also, quite openly, a recreational drug user. I see no evidence of that in Philippa’s posts even though she self-identifies as a liberal hippie type, to her credit.
Anyway, the reason I mention Suz is that she has turned on people and made false accusations on more than one occasion in the past, so I urge you to tread with caution in the case of Philippa. Part of Suz’s problem is that she sees the world very much in black and white terms, so much so that if you are not with her on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, you must automatically be an “evil conservative stereotype” who must be evil when it comes to every issue.
For instance, she thought Obama was wonderful because he increased abortion rights and therefore could do no wrong. When someone criticised him for making the Iraq and Afghan situations worse by increasing use of drone warfare and “extrajudicial assassinations”, she just couldn’t register that some of his policies could be bad or criticised by a fellow liberal and the critic was written off as a “conservative” (they weren’t). I don’t know if that manichean mindset comes from immaturity or drug use or something else but it is a little frightening, to be honest.
The other reason Suz made false accusations against people she didn’t like was, I believe, in part a cry for help and attention on her part. She wasn’t coping well with life, her job or her relationship with her father so, as an attention seeker, this was part of her desire for people to help her and notice her, especially her dad.
Anyway, that is her story. As you can see, there are a lot of similarities to Philippa and also some striking differences. Based on what I have witnessed, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to tread with caution with regard to Philippa since they seem to be very, very similar personality types and I know how her kind can react under stress and lash out, turning on those who are trying to help them if they perceive such people as “enemies”. It is their way of seeking empowerment. I hope you can help her, though.
I will pray for Philippa if you can all pray for Suz. Thanks.
I’m a Tasmanian and I find some of Philippa Moore’s tweets and posts really offensive which I guess is ironic since she is an SJW snowflake condemning everyone who offends her. Seriously, that Tweet attacking the obituary of the old man who died at Christmas time last year ’cause he had a non-PC nickname was an absolute lowlight that filled me with disgust. Glad to see people on this site speaking out against this social media commentator/author.
Yes, that particular Tweet was disgusting. Anyway, Philippa Moore’s elitism, poliyucal correctness, and her support of the Hawke-Keating Government – which crushed the working class in Australia – shows she is no friend of us proles.
Given her militant extreme leftist views though, I am surprised by her adulation for many early feminists: does she know Miles Franklin was a member of the Australian Nazi party? Does she know many of the suffragettes she heroine-worships ended up as members of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists?
It is interesting though – she writes far left extremist articles and inappropriate sexual material she must know will shock and provoke and as soon as the inevitable backlash comes, she denounces the critics of her pieces as trolls and bullies and thrreby silences them. She seems to have it all figured out.
This is such a sad story. I understand your Christian concern for your friends, DL.
I had a horrible thought. If (like me) you hold to the traditional historicist interpretation of the Book of Revelation (as you seem to do, DL) then as a Catholic kindergarten and prep teacher, your friend Liz Graham is (unwittingly) indoctrinating the children in her care with the teachings of the antichrist. 😢
Even if you are not an historicist, in terms of typology the papacy must be an antichrist if not the antichrist as the office holds so many of the traits contained in the bible it cannot be a coincidence. It must be some kind of forerunner. At any rate, by teaching these young children Popish doctrines, she is obfuscating the Gospel and leading them away from Christian faith. Not maliciously of course and I am sure she loves the children in her care and would never willingly imperil their souls I am sure, but as you are aware that is the deceptive nature of the Roman Catholic system – you can think you are doing godky work while undermining the saving faith found only in the gospel and leading people astray.
For that reason, maybe you shoukd reach out to Luz Graham, DL. Be honest, tell her you are only wanting to help because you care about her and encourage her to read the Bible and see the truth for herself. That way, you are doing both her and the small children in her care a favour that just might help to save their souls. Please consider.
As for Philippa Moore, I have to admit I was quite disturbed by her posts at first. How dare this woman try to Americanize our beautiful island state of Tasmania by introducing their extreme form of liberalism and toxic culture wars there? How dare she?!
Now, I just feel genuine sadness for her, though. Her liberal leftist philosophy is so inconsistent and devoid of any depth I can really tell there is an emptiness and unsatisfued spiritual yearning in her life. I hope she finds the healing and peace of heart she needs and has her eyes opened to Christ’s wondrous plans for her life.
I will pray for both these precious young women. They need Christ. To echo what Skymate says above, I earnestly hope and pray their names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.
I should add that although people like Alan and I focus on eschatology and the traditional historicist interpretation of Revelation with regard to the identity of the antichrist in our comments, even if someone undertakes a futurist interpretation of the book, there is no doubt the papacy is still not just a ‘type’ of the antichrist but actively opposes the Gospel truth, especially with regard to the five solas, and therefore obstructs the salvation of souls. ☹
There is also the hypocrisy. Why just the other day, the ABC reported about the current pope lamenting the refugee crisis in the world which would be very noble of him if the papacy were not itself responsible for some of the worst refugee crises in history when it was at the height of its temporal power as people fled the dragoons in France, the Inquisition in Spain and so on.
Anyway regarding Liz Graham, yes I would reach out to her. Be gentle and tactful and back off if she does not want to discuss these matters. Do not hassle her. If she is open to the Gospel though, encourage her to read the Bible for herself. As Alan also says, be prepared to answer any questions she might have and point out inconsistencies between what Rome teaches and what God’s Word says. Do so in a humble, gentle spirit of helpfulness though, since you are both seekers after Gid’s truth. I realise I am just repeating most of what Alan has already written but I think his answer is right. The main thing to bear in mind though is you are not just helping your friend Liz Graham. Instead you are also helping her to care for the small children in her care and you can potentially lead their young, tender souls to truth and salvation too.
I hope you can make a real difference in Liz Graham’s life. May God act through you to save her. He may have chosen you as the instrument of her salvation.
DL, I couldn’t sleep much last night. I was worried about your friend, Liz Graham. I really want to help her.
I’ve gathered some resources from SermonAudio that might be of use to her, and also your Polish Catholic friends in Hobart.
It really depends though on her level of faith and how much she has grown. If she is only ready for spiritual milk and not solid foods, to quote from the Apostle Paul, these sermons might be too much for her. Only you can assess that, DL. You don’t want to drive her away from faith in God altogether or mire her in sectarian feuds between Catholics and Protestants. You want to help her and ensure she is saved.
Still, if I could speak to Liz Graham personally, the one thing I would ask of her is to take some hours to please, pleae, please listen to these recordings I have selected for her with an open mind.
They are all from Irish men with a good knowledge of the Roman Catholic system:
The testimony of Patrick Doran, former Roman Catholic and school teacher:
https://mp3.sermonaudio.com/download/3290624113/3290624113.mp3
Pastor Stephen Hamilton, providing evidence from the Bible for the traditional view that the Pope is the antichrist:
https://mp3.sermonaudio.com/download/112801223644/112801223644.mp3
https://mp3.sermonaudio.com/download/92715155723/92715155723.mp3
The late Richard Bennett, a former Irish Roman Catholic priest, talks about the falsehoods in the Catholic system and where it is at variance with the Bible and Christ’s teachings:
https://mp3.sermonaudio.com/download/9120616346/9120616346.mp3
https://mp3.sermonaudio.com/download/117071620238/117071620238.mp3
Of course, it is not just about the Pope. As Richard Bennett notes, it is about the blasphemy of the Mass (in which Christ is “re-sacrificed”), Mariology, idolatry, the obfuscation of the doctrine of salvation by faith in Christ alone, etc. I think the hardest thing, though, for Catholics breaking away is leaving their social networks. If they have a lot of friends in the Catholic Church, it can be very hard to leave that church. Of course, it is a matter of doing what is right in obedience and love for Christ. That has to be the first priority, to love Him with all our hearts above all else and dwelling in the truth.
I just hope Liz hears these recordings and they help her. I wish her – and you, DL – nothing but love and best wishes in Christ our Saviour.
I apologise that I took a while to respond. I am caring for some chronically-ill relatives but God, in His great Providence, is looking after us.
@Julie Shand, a big thanks for the sermons. They are very helpful. I found some more of Pastor Stephen’s on the subject of the Papacy on Sermonaudio too that expand on the topic some more. Yes, there are so many ways we can show our Catholic brothers and sisters where they err by citing the Bible: the fact that all the discples were given the keys to the Kingdom, the fact that James was clearly in the leadership position over Peter in the Jerusalem Church, the fact that Paul rebukes Peter, the fact that Peter asks people NOT to pay homage to him, the fact that Peter tells an early church congregation that we are ALL little stones building the church and, most importantly, the fact that the “Vicar of Christ on Earth” is the Holy Spirit, so the Pope is committing an extreme blasphemy by usurping that title 🙁 🙁 🙁 and, finally, that Christ tells us we are to call no man our [spiritual] father and the title of “Holy Father” is used but once in the Bible and used to refer to God. That is before we even think about Mariolatory, prayers to the dead and the historical crimes of the papacy. I hope someone can present these facts to Liz one day, in a tactful but clear way.
I also learned just the other day that the Papacy historically claimed not only to decide who went yoheaven but their rank therein. For instance, to encourage people to go on the Crusades, the Pope claimed they would have a greater rank in heaven than an “average saint”. Hence, he not only claimed to be “Christ’s Vicar on Earth” but “Christ’s Vicar in Heaven” too, all the while living a life at complete variance to that of Christ, crowned with the triple crown while Christ had a crown of thorns, expecting people to kisses his feet while Christ washed the feet of the least of His disciples, living in palatial splendour while Christ had “no place to rest his head” and persecuting those who read the Bible for themselves or prayed or sang Psalms outside of Church.
These are the kind of truths I wish I could, tactfully and sensitively but firmly, present to Liz but there was so much bad blood between her family and mine, it would be counterproductive coming from me, I fear.
Anyway, my best friend is a missionary with quite a lot of overseas experience, so I asked her for her advice. She said, “Prayer is so powerful, so I think that this is one very significant thing you can do for this friend. Possibly you could also pray that God would bring the right person into her life to be able to talk with her. Will pray for Elizabeth.”
I pray for Liz as well, so I am sure God will send someone to tell her Christ’s truth and lead her away from the darkness of Roman Catholicism into Biblical Protestant truth. I hope one day she (and Philippa) realise how much they are cared for and loved in Christ.
@R. Harding, thank you for your warning and praying for Philippa. I really appreciate it. I will pray for Suz, too.
@Doctor Her, thank you for your kind words. I agree this is a respectful site. Yes, hopefully Philippa will come to understand those who don’t share her views. I also hooe she comes to Christ. I am praying for her.
@Doctor Her, feel free to stay around. This is a very helpful website with a lot of thoughtful conversations on wide variety of topics relating to faith and culture. May God bless you.
Your story touched me, DL.
Here are some more sermons that I pray might help your friend, Liz Graham.
Rev John Thackway
https://mp3.sermonaudio.com/download/9909152470/9909152470.mp3
Rev John Greer part 1
https://mp3.sermonaudio.com/download/12150216730/12150216730.mp3
part 2
https://mp3.sermonaudio.com/download/122202123745/122202123745.mp3
Rev Ian Goligher
https://mp3.sermonaudio.com/download/61415203200/61415203200.mp3
If nothing else, she will find these very interesting and thought-provoking, if not hopefully life-changing.
I will pray for her.
Merry Christmas. I hope your ill family members are well enough to enjoy this celebration of Christ’s birth. I will pray for them too.
Have a happy and holy Christmas Day, DL.
Hi everyone. I’ve been following this discussion for a while. I’m a friend of Philippa Moore’s so I feel obliged to finally speak up and defend her on here.
I first met her at a writing course. First of all, she is a lovely, lovely lady in person and is very different from the way she comes across in print.
I think one could say that Phil’s biggest problem is that she sometimes writes on controversial topics from a position of ignorance ie. Aboriginal affairs. When she writes nonsense on such issues, it makes her look far less intelligent than she is. I do not think she is paid by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Lobby or any other leftist groups to spout their propaganda. Rather, it is my firm conviction that her polemics are in earnest, albeit very naive on this issue.
As you also mention, her idealism has sometimes led her to very extreme leftist positions. I do not believe that either she or her husband are in any way dangerous but their radicalism in support of Antifa, Michael Mansell, assumption of guilt for rape accused and censorship and far left causes does give one pause for thought. I do have great faith in her though and I do believe it is all just idealism and not a reflection of anything that would be transformed into radical action. She is just genuinely trying to do what is right to make the world a better place, through the often-unique lens through which she sees things. Her overwhelming idealism means that she sometimes compromises her sense of rationality, though and this comes back to bit her.
It is my belief that her other problem is her lack of understanding of the working class and outer suburbanites. One can see this reflected in her writing, too. She is a middle-class inner city woman, writing for other middle-class inner city women. Her writing, unfortunately, betrays a certain contempt for the “average” Australian or Briton, who is working class, socially conservative and maybe supported Brexit or reads the Daily Mail. This contempt and lack of empathy, comes, I firmly believe, from ignorance. She grew up in a privileged household and went to private schools, so she thinks all other white people are as privileged as her and should see the world in the same way she does. Therefore, she simply doesn’t understand the needs and priorities of outer suburban workers and why they vote the way they do. She feels white guilt and therefore feels outraged “on behalf of” Aborigines, other people of colour and minorities such as homosexual but never on behalf of the “white Aussie battler”.
You can even see this attitude in her article on war in which she writes contemptuously of pacifists. It is the white working class male who has ended up the cannon fodder in the wars of the last two centuries but she utterly fails to understand this is one of the reasons why many working class British and Australians are anti-war and anri-conscription these days.
Likewise, there is her vocal championing of the old Labor left of the 1980s (the Hawke-Keating Government) which initiated an unremitting war on the working class in Australia and ended up crushing them and also introduced political correctness here. She has no understanding of how much that government was despised my the workers in the end or the reasons they had for doing so.
In other words, if you want to help Phil, one should, I believe, challenge her views and the assumptions she holds dear and present her with different perspectives, especially from the point of view of the working class, and of Christians, both of whom she fails to understands. This will help her and broaden her mind. It might just help her with hers too.
Please note, though, if you do challenge her or critique her work, she is an EXTREMELY sensitive person so do so with gentleness. Do not criticise in a derogatory or aggressive way or she will just dismiss you as another troll. Help her with great gentleness and affection and open her mind. You might just make a wonderful friend.
To change the subject, I’ve never asked Phil about her family but yes I did indeed notice the way she talked about her mother in The Latte Years. The snooping through the diary, the pressure to go to ballroom dancing against her will and the ruling through fear do serve to paint a very, very unflattering picture of her mother. If the right opportunity arises, I will endeavour to ask Phil, with appropriate sensitivity, if everything is o. k. in that part of her life. I agree that this relationship with her mother may have been what served to make her especially sensitive to bullying and trolling. In fact, I feel a bit worried about her, the more I think of this. Why did she portray her mother in such a harsh light? I hope she is fine in her personal life and did not have a hard childhood.
I think she suffers from trolls because she is so strident and polemical in her writing and so frequently takes controversial, extreme opinions and openess about sex and “female issues” that she manages to offend many people. Unfortunately, she lacks the thick skin to then deal with the backlash. She does come across as vey self-righteous at times but she is nothing like this in real life. Let me reiterate again, she is a lovely, lovely person in real life and very gentle and not at all like the way she comes across in her writing. If anything, she is perhaps a little lacking in self-awareness at how offensive many people find her opinions. This comes back to the problem I suggested above that she writes for peolle just like her: other “woke” middle-class females who feel a “guilt” over their “white privilege”. She doesn’t think of the fact that woke leftists are in fact a tiny, tiny minority and many other people, chiefly the working class, take umbrage at such totalitarian thinking and being told what to do by their “social superiors”, especially when told there are words they can’t use, things they can’t think and when people like Phil openly call for strident censorship.
Speaking of trolling, I want to sincerely congratulate all of you on this board: you have not launched any personal attacks on Phil and you have confined your criticism to what she has written and you have not criticised her character. In no way can you be accused of trolling. Your Christian ethos shines through.
In fact, it is very touching that you write with such concern about Phil and her sister, Liz Graham, even though her ethos and morals are so at variance with those of Christians. Yes, she supports abortion, woke culture, militant fourth wave feminism, censorship, gay rights and same sex marriage, the “virtues” of divorce, sex outside of marriage and a frankness in discussing sex online, and so forth, so thank you for being so kind in your words about her, even while raising your alarmed concerns about her lifestyle and values. Your concern for her is extremely touching and a great tribute to your Christianity.
Yes, someone had a dig at Philippa Moore the other day on Twitter too about Hawke’s lack of support for low-income earners. She didn’t respond. See this thread:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1468697966919622656
I don’t live in Tasmania and I am not familiar with Philippa Moore’s magazine and newspaper output but it is distressing to see yet another journo supporting abortion. I heard just today in Pastor Ian Brown Christmas sermon that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation allegedly bankrolled a lot of the pro-abortion news propaganda during the recent Northern Ireland debate. LOL – no wonder Philippa Moore is no fan of the DUP eityer according to her Tweets.
I agree it is heartening to see so many people here praying for someone whose values and beliefs are totally opposed to Christ and obviously regard her and her sister Liz Graham with so much heartfelt concrrn and affection. I too will pray that Philippa Moore, her husband Tom, and her sister Liz Graham come to faith in Christ. Merry Christmas.
I haven’t read any of Philippa Moore’s print media articles either but from her social media she reminds me very much of the authoress of this article and the backlash that followed its publication:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-23/labors-election-loss-made-me-question-my-progressive-bubble/11138632
Just when you think she has learnt a big lesson in life about understanding the perspectives of others, she blows it all in the last paragraph (Bangs head against wall.)
This is very arrogant:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1463762189454430211
Even white men have this frustration, so please do not make it about gender, dear, its just about how you play the office politics game, unfortunately. We’ve all faced workplace bullying and incompetent line managers, regardless of gender. Suggesting otherwise is, frankly, deeply offensive. My goodness, could you imagine having a wokist like her as your boss? (Shudders.) I think her bosses might just possibly have kept her down for a good reason. She’d give any white, conservative, non-woke males on her staff hell, I imagine, if she got her claws on some power. I know her type.
Moving on, Prince Harry said exactly the same thing as this the other day! Compare:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1465479345724542981
https://www.the-sun.com/lifestyle/4214924/prince-harry-quitting-job-joy-abandoning-royal-family
“His “out of touch” comments have been bashed by people online – claiming he “really has no idea” about the struggles people face.”
Yep, seems like Philippa Moore is the same.
People have long memories about Hawke and his government. Here are a selection of reader comments on the news today:
“Interesting 68, Sydney, Australia, about 3 hours ago
Bob Hawke the drunken womansing republican, that promised the workers the world if he got elected as PM, then ignored them and his promises to them once elected.lets not forget the donations these hard working people donated towards his election, theres a lot not known in the general public about Hawke”
and
“Bored commuter, Sydney, Australia, 3 hours ago
He was a drunkard!”
and
“Alvelon, Melbourne Australia, Australia, about an hour ago
I BELIEVE HE AND KEATING WERE FULL FOR CHINA NOT AUSTRALIA…I HEARD HAWK SPEAKING AT THE ACTU WHEN HE WAS PRESIDENT AND TO ME ,,,HE MADE CLEAR HE WAS…ALSO FOR A VAT TAX AT 10% … I WAS A UNION SHOP STEWARD …”
and
“Girlie123, Sydney, Australia, 1 hour ago
Hawke was not a good politician at all. In fact, Hawke was not a good man. He was a womanising drunk who treated his first wife, the grand lady Hazel, and his children with appalling indifference.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10394055/Former-Prime-Minister-Bob-Hawke-accused-discourtesy-Queen-trying-sideline-her.html?ico=amp-comments-viewall#comments-10394055
Why would a feminist writer like Philippa Moore vocally support a womaniser who treated his wife so appallingly?
The rules apparently don’t apply to ALP members.
Judging by this backlash tiday, Peter Fitzsimons and his wife are the mainland’s version of Philippa Moore and her husbabd.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10392823/Peter-FitzSimons-leads-new-campaign-make-Australia-republic.html?ico=amp-comments-viewall
I should add that I realise I was very harsh on Philippa Moore just now. I am just sick of the damage being done by these woke liberal elites and their attempts to bring gender into arguments about office politics and meritocracy, where it is unearranted. I am disgusted by her support for abortion too and the fact that she is callous and warped enough to celebrate legislation facilitating the murder of unborn babies on her birthday. 😞
That said, I’d rather she be won to Christ than condemned. I agree with what the rest of you are saying – please pray for her and this sister of hers, Liz Graham. They obviously need pur help rather than our condemnation and our heartfelt kindness rather than harsh words and criticism. I hope someone does reach out to them one day and is able to help them with patience, kindness and a loving, lived Christian example to show them the error of their ways by deeds rather than harsh, judgemental words. I am clearly not the person for the job! That said, I will pray too.
I agree that it is very evident that with values so askew, Philippa desperately needs Christ in her life and so, it seems does Liz Moore. May they let go of worldliness and ambition and come to know Christ’s grace, forgiveness and peace in their hearts and lives and let go of their bitterness and pain.
It turns out she cares more about the lives of octopi than she does about those of unborn children:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1472805111621509128
People like her should watch Michael Caine’s classic film, Alfie: it has the most powerful anti-abortion message I have ever seen onscreen.
Looking through the rest of Philippa’s social media blog and Tweets, there is a lot of focus on how to live a happy, contented life.
It is very sad and depressing because we can clearly see how her values are askew and how she desperately needs Christ in her life to give her real contentment but she seems oblivious to this and her whole life is running counter to Christian morality and ethics. If only she could open her eyes and see what we can see looking in at her from outside and make that u-turn she needs to find real happiness and depth in her life. It is frustrating to see someone searching and groping but unable to grasp the answers. I hope Christ reaches out and takes her by the hand. I will pray for her – and this husband and sister of hers – too. God bless and merry Christmas.
Doctor Her, I read a good discussion about the working class and unis. This is about England but I think it applies to Australia as well.
“One would think social mobility might bridge this psychological gap between the classes, sliding more socially-minded people into positions of influence. Higher education is meant to be one of the engines of social mobility, but people from lower social classes are more likely to report feeling like a fish out of water at university, or to perceive the opportunities available to them as second-rate. Although it ought to be possible to address these anxieties about the unfamiliar, research suggests that the culture of universities may not be designed with the working classes in mind. University deans and administrators asked to list qualities of their culture tended to endorse words more about independence – the natural state of the solipsistic upper-class person, charting their course into the future – than interdependence, which tends to be a particular priority for first-generation university goers, looking to give back to their community. Manstead notes that these same cultural factors are also likely to be present in many workforces and professions.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/digest.bps.org.uk/2018/05/15/class-is-still-written-into-our-psychology-working-class-folk-are-more-empathic-selfless-vigilant-and-fatalistic/amp/
The whole article is well worth a read.
If you lie down with dogs you wake up with fleas.
Here is the latest news on Michael Mansell where he claims Aborigines deserve salvage money for a Sydney to Hobart yacht because it ran aground on Aboriginal land:
https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/palawa-land-council-claims-part-ownership-of-washed-up-yacht/e7cbjo0j4
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/tasmanian-aboriginal-cape-barren-island-owners-say-sydney-to-hobart-yacht-huntress-is-theirs/ar-AA169Vgd
Pure greed.
The Aboriginal journalist Stan Grant sums up the Philippa Moores of this world nicely this morning:
“It is incongruous that a generation who have enjoyed rights and privileges unknown to their grandparents have surrendered hope. Of course, much of this pessimism is just theatre — a performative pessimism. This is the politics of posturing. Juvenile angst.
[snip]
What are we left with? A society obsessed with cartoonish cancel culture, debilitating contests for recognition and poisonous identity wars. All of it like a cancer eating democracy itself.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-19/christmas-christianity-faith-receding-hope-waning-world-poorer/100707034
“… All of it like a cancer eating democracy itself.” For someone who hates Trump, she doesn’t seem to realise she is creating more Trumps.
Like you, I don’t live in Tasmania, so I wasn’t familiar with Philippa Moore’s writings and opinions before this.
Besides showing a lack of concern for the suffering of the working class by lauding the disastrous Hawke Government, and her apparent interest in the occult (Liz Gilbert, yoga, hypnotherapy, clairvoyance) I find Philippa Moore’s apparent lack of concern for the sanctity of life the most disturbing thing in her tweets and posts. For someone who supposedly cares about social justice, her disregard for life is quite astonishing. She celebrates the liberalisation of Northern Ireland’s abortion laws as the best birthday present she could hope for, she criticises the newspaper for publishing the obituary of an elderly man who died at Christmas a year ago because his nickname wasn’t P. C. and she consorts and empathises with the terrorist associate, Michael Mansell. I can readily understand why @Jean had concerns about Philippa’s apparent extremism in the first post on this page. Then, on the older thread we see her husband wishes hunters could be shot and published that cartoon of political violence. Finally, for all her apparent leftism, Philippa Moore’s mask slips and she published that blog post where she denounces pacifism announces she is a supporter of the imperial bloodbaths that were the First World War and the Iraq War in which countless multitudes died, including hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Therefore there is an element of bloodlust and advocacy of political violence in her thinking and in that of her husband which are truly disturbing. I hope she comes to realise the inconsistencies of her philosophy and just how potentially dangerous it is even if she doesn’t intend it this way. I simply hope she turns to Christ and finds in Him a true, lifegiving set of beliefs. I’ll join you all in prayers for her salvation.
Stan Grant’s published another article this morning aimed squarely at the Philippa Moores of this world: –
‘What of Australia? Overall, our democracy is strong. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Democracy Index has placed Australia in the top 10 for the past decade.
We have largely avoided the worst of political extremism and even the most egregious inequality.
But there are worrying signs. And we have imported some of the worst of America — particularly the increasingly toxic influence of social media, fanning the flames of anti-democratic identity politics that erode a shared sense of citizenship.’
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-02/global-fight-for-democracy-will-define-2022/100732710
Since sge apparently has a lot of empathy for Aborigines, I hope she reads his article and takes heed.
Judging from this retweet, Moore also opposes the Commonwealth School Chaplaincy program and government funding of private schools:
https://mobile.twitter.com/jillastark/status/1477783743754645507
The school chaplaincy program has survived a High Cpurt challenge from the Secular Society and is legit.
If private schools didn’t receive government funding, they’d collapse and the government school system wouldn’t be able to cope. It is the private schools taking the burden that allows the government schools to cope. You’d think a journalist would do basic research into these matters before retweeting these emotive, fact-free memes pushing her atheistic agenda.
At least I agree about the submarines but isn’t this the same woman who thinks those who refused to fight for the Empire in WW1 were cowards?
Lots of other anti-ScoMo memes being retweeted on her page. As an experienced journo and Ph. D. history candidate, she doesn’t even attempt to be impartial. Is that really the best quality graduates universities are pushing out these days? She’d fit right in at the ABC or the Beeb given their current culture, I guess.
As I said before and others have reiterated above, all we can do is pray for her and her husband.
Looks like Philippa Moore’s husband isn’t much of a fan of Cromwell either. Fair enough, except that he is lauding the “accurate” tweet by the other bloke to whom he is replying. The other bloke is claiming Cromwell started the English Civil War(!) Sigh. Aren’t these Pommies taught even the most basic facts of the history of their own country in school anymore?!
https://mobile.twitter.com/tomschoon/status/1479579323883425793
Yes, you couldn’t make this stuff up:
“Duncan Jones
@ManMadeMoon
·
11h
Cromwell. Started the English civil war that led to the deaths of 200,000, changed the way government worked & took power out of the hands of Royalty. Went on to murder even more in brutal campaigns to subjugate Scots and Irish.
Statue outside Parliament as a warning to Royals.
Tom Schoon
@tomschoon
Replying to
@ManMadeMoon
I am not sure how to managed to so accurately and astutely summarise this in a tweet, but bravo sir!
10:22 PM · Jan 7, 2022″
What a pair of dills. To think these are the kind of woke people trying to tell people who to vote for and how to live their lives and who rant against Christianity online but don’t know basic facts of history. The Tom Sxhoon/Philippa Moore social media spectacle is descending into pure farce now.
@Tasmanian, yes, true, although I strongly believe we should avoid any kind of namecalling, even when it comes to a mild term like “dills”. We need to be bridge builders and reconcilers. We risk being hurtful with our words.
Your points are correct, though; these people can, at times, lecture others on how they should live, think and vote but facts do not seem to matter in this age. 🙁
I was actually wondering if part of the hostility towards Cromwell came less from his war record and more from the fact he supported parliamentary democracy, in a time when the “woke” left is growing more and more totalitarian – witness the general namecalling to stifle opposition to their agenda, as well as Philippa Moore’s specific calls for censorship and assumption of guilt until proven innocent dor men accused of sexual assault, discussed in the earlier thread. Politically correct guilt for the crimes and imperialism of past generations is anorher possibility as this kind of virtue signalling is prominent among the English Left, though, in fact, the imperial mindset itself actually remains unchanged among them – it just expresses itself in different ways now, as any Australian who has encountered an English person in recent decades will attest. Another possibility is it is due to the current unpopularity of the Puritans, even though, in their own way, the woke are the very embodiment of a “puritanical” mindset (in the misused, popular sense of the word) with their political correctness, censoriousness, the #MeToo movement, and so on.
Also note the lopsidedness of the arguments against Cromwell – there is no mention of his emancipation of the Jews, his refusal to declare himself king or the fact he gave fair chance to surrender and gave genuine clemency to all those who surrendered in Ireland before battle, as at the siege of Dundalk, which is not to excuse any war crimes that happened there.
At any rate, Schoon’s tweet has prompted me to listen to recordings on Cromwell.
Here is the late, lamented Irishman, Doctor Alan Cairns, with his take on him:
https://mp3.sermonaudio.com/download/6205/6205.mp3
Some more Irish views on Cromwell:
Colin Mercer:
https://mp3.sermonaudio.com/download/42807191720/42807191720.mp3
Ian Goligher:
https://mp3.sermonaudio.com/download/103106122151/103106122151.mp3
God bless.
Talk about misreading the room.
Her Wokeness really needs to learn to pull her head in.
That Cromwell quote on Twitter was a bad gaffe by Philippa Moore’s husband but I wonder if it reveals more than it intended about the mindset of the woke left. If Cromwell is in a villain in their eyes, does that mean they’d rather see us under the tyranny of a Charles I and Archbishop Laud than under evangelical rule? Does this reflect theur mindset today with its thought crimes and censorship and desire for conformity? It is all a bit like a form od secular Laudianism isn’t it?
Moore and her husband let us know exactly where they stand on religion now:
https://mobile.twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1478885375716122625
Her husband also retweeted this pantheist, Gaia-type nonsense:
https://mobile.twitter.com/BarbaraHershey8/status/1478082842676510721
Of course, immediately after posting his rant against religion, he also tweeted this, which shows just what kind of mindset he has:
https://mobile.twitter.com/tomschoon/status/1478887032180994050
It is disconcerting to see something so immature from someone in his 40s.
If the sister, Liz Graham, is indeed a practising Roman Catholic as @DL thinks, I wonder what she makes of her sister and her husband attacking her faith? I can’t imagine she’d be too impressed.
I also looked again at that thing he retweeted ages ago:
“Life of this little piggy has much higher value than the lives of all hunters, butchers, poachers & animal farmers combined
Change my Mind.
#wednesdaymorning #WednesdayWisdom #WednesdayMotivation #Bacon #cheese #pork #steak #bbq #Hamburger #pizza #dinner”
https://mobile.twitter.com/CholesTroll/status/1207323364748091392
I am thinking that, ironically, he isn’t that far from the attitude of those in the USA who bring shame and disrepute on us Christians by murdering abortion doctors. This kind of Tweet could easily instigate some fringe nutter in the vegan movement to go out and try to kill a farmer or a butcher. When you tweet or retweet something you don’t know who you is going to potentially read it and it is easy to see a completely irresponsible retweet like this could motivate an extremist to an act of violence. I have to agree with @Jean that this is a completely irresponsible couple who fail to value human life and could easily instigate an act of violence in someone because of their ‘cheerleading’ of extreme left views.
All we can do is pray for Philippa and her husband. It is very distressing to know people like this are out there expressing these kinds of hate-filled, extremist views. I pray they come to know Christ some day and repent of these things. Blessings.
Thanks for posting thoseTweets, @Anonymous. It is extremely sad but I will not give up on praying for Philippa. I will persist in my hopeful expectation that God opens her heart to the scriptures and Christ comes into her life. Please pray with me and for Liz too. God bless.
Those are beautiful words, @DL. It is interesting that they reacted with such hostility to the Pope’s words with that rant. If they are atheists, why would thry care? Protestants are often annoyed by ridiculous things the Pope says but most of us don’t vent like that!
Re: their retweet of Barbara Hershey’s pantheist meme, it is disturbing to see more and more people adopt Gaia-worship and neo-paganism. I know it has long been predicted that the environmental movement would inevitably devolve into pantheism but it is startling to see its realisation. It is not just the responses to Hershey either; I know of other cases of young people, all of whom are on the political left, embracing neo-paganism in recent times. Most of these were firmer atheists and a few came from troubled Catholic backgrounds. I speculate that they are embracing paganism because of tge spiritual void engendered in them by atheistic materialism.
One more ironic thing is that, the last time there was a pagan revival, it led in part to the rise of Nazism and the far right. This time, it is being embraced by those on the radical environmentalist left. I cannot imagine things ending well if this cult ever gains substantial political power. It seems we learn nothing from history.
Yes, I will pray about this and especially about Moore and her husband. I will also pray for Liz Graham. I can tell she is very close to your heart, @DL, and that you care about her, in spite of any past issues. I really hope she is saved as well as her sister and that she reaches out to you one day and reconciles with you when she finds herself on Christ’s path. God grant you peace of mind, heart and soul, in Christ’s name.
I’ve just been looking through this. Here is another tweet showing his atheism, relating to a 1970s debate over the film, “The Life of Brian”:
https://mobile.twitter.com/tomschoon/status/1484646393394262018?cxt=HHwWhMCj9euBw5opAAAA
I am not sure why he thinks the Christians are the bigoted ones when it is Cleese and Palin who are attacking the faith with their film. I suppose I had better go and watch the debate.
Here is some more backlash for Peter Fitzsimmons, too, this time over his proposal to change Australia’s flag:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10416135/Peter-FitzSimons-calls-new-flag-WITHOUT-Union-Jack-pushes-Australia-ditch-Queen.html#comments-10416135
I was reading the other day about the New Far Left’s hatred for Christianity. More and more, people see Woke Absolutism in terms of being a secular political religion with its own dogmas and moral laws, hence it’s abiding hatred of its rival.
If I am understanding what you are all saying about her correctly, I think Philippa Moore would have actually appreciated my Pastor’s sermon this morning.
He spoke about his beauty is relative and how false images of idealised women are promoted by glossy magazines and how we are all beautiful because we are created in God’s image and how no one is a ‘nobody’ in His eyes.
@DL, this is a touching story. My advice is to set a Christian example for Philippa Moore and Liz Graham if you encounter them again. Preach the Gospel not in words but in deeds, by showing every kindness and letting Christ’s light shine in you. Never repay sin with sin, so no matter how badly the Moore mother treated you, turn the other cheek. Set a good example to Philippa and Liz and win them for Christ that way.
If they or their mother do treat you badly, still turn the other cheek. Remember all things are foreordained by God in His sovereign wisdom, so if they do mistreat you or hassle you in anyway, it is a trial sent by the Father. Do not return their evil for evil. Always repay them with genuine love and remember to pray for your enemies. Persevere and I am confident you will win Philippa and Liz to Christ after overcoming any trials you encounter. Blessings.
Thank you, Bob. That is very good Christian advice. I really appreciate it.
DL, I have just had a look at her blog again. She is very much into the New Age. She quotes Eckhart Tolle here:
http://www.philippamoore.net/blog/2022/5/20/this-week
She mentions having a Tarot Card reading here, which she describes as “comforting”:
http://www.philippamoore.net/blog/2022/4/29/this-week-m3dn4-pt7xa
I think all you can do for this girl and her family is pray for her and hope some good Christian influences will come into her life to help her and guide her at some point. It is very sad and I understand your concern for her and for her sister.
There is also another attack on “the patriachy” here, relating to the film, “Bridget Jones’ Diary”:
“… the vile insidiousness of diet culture as a tool of the patriarchy to keep women insecure and under control is, I realise, is one of the points it’s [the film] making.”
Source: http://www.philippamoore.net/blog/2022/5/13/this-week
That is a strange point to me since the diet culture is equally promoted by women’s magazines written by, and edited by, women., so I don’t see a grand conspiracy there to entrap women.
Clearly though, as a social media pundit and sometimes-journalist, her Woke activism isn’t all that influential since Tasmania was the only state that swung towards the Coalition in the recent election.
Thanks @Bob. I am very upset that she dabbles in the occult. I won’t read her blog posts or Tweets anymore; I’d rather not know. Woke politics and feminism are one thing but dabbling in evil like Tarot is another. I will continue to pray for her and put my trust in Christ that He will reach out to her and touch her heart one day.
I think a lot of it has to do with the way she was raised. I am very, very disappointed in the Moore family. I hope Liz does not dabble in the occult, too.
I wasn’t going to show you any more, @DL but this is worth noting. Philippa Moore’s husband defends the homosexual kiss in the new Pixar *children’s* film and uses an obscene and utterly blasphemous acronym at the end of his Tweet:
https://twitter.com/tomschoon/status/1539926762049896448?cxt=HHwWgIDQgebO9d4qAAAA
What I am saying, @DL, is don’t beat yourself up too much over your failings with these people in the past and your lack of Christian outreach when you were younger. At the moment, their hearts are very hardened against Christ and imbued with worldliness, which is a terrible tragedy but there is nothing you could have done. God has plans for their lives and I have every confidence He will reach out and call to them when the time is right and hopefully they will heed Him. Rest assured, I will continue to pray for them and the sister too. Take care.
I read his Tweet. That acronym is utterly disgusting. It is strange that these advocates of cancel culture are quick to take offensive at everything but have no problems about saying things deeply offensive to Christians.
I see his latest Tweets are bewailing the Roe versus Wade ruling in the U. S.
As for his wife, Philippa Moore, the thought crossed my mind that perhaps her journalistic articles and her social media activism are an attempt to build her profile before going into politics. What do you think ? What is her agenda ? She seems to be too thin-skinned for a parliamentary environment though.
I should add that John 15 : 18 comes to mind when I read blasphemous use of the name of Christ like this. 🙁
I also note, on Philippa Moore’s blog, that her latest attack is on the judiciary for not being diverse and representative enough. The woke are therefore seeking to undermine another pillar of democracy. Of course, she is referring to diversity in terms of people of colour, alternative sexualities and transgenders but let’s just think about class for a moment. The legal fraternity is never going to be truly diverse because there will never be working class judges. Once they enter the legal fraternity, anyone from a working class background with the educational opportunities to become a lawyer would cease to be working class. Therefore, the legal fraternity can never be truly diverse and representative of all of society, rendering her arguments invalid.
@DL, just so you are aware, the Hobart radio announcer Bob Cooke passed away.
https://www.themercury.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=TMWEB_WRE170_a&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.themercury.com.au%2Fnews%2Ftasmania%2Fmedia-personality-bob-cooke-remembered-after-death%2Fnews-story%2F7c0a7f9eeb9d56b4ed14872985eb618d&memtype=anonymous&mode=premium
https://radioinfo.com.au/news/vale-bob-cooke/
Am I correct in thinking that the Richard Moore who worked with him on the Cooke and Moore Radio Show is Philippa Moore’s father ? That is what I have understood from the preceding conversations on these discussion threads.
Very sad for her that her father has lost his friend and colleague no matter what we might think about her extreme political or religious views. I hope he accepted Christ into his life before he died.
Any reasonable person would be deeply offended by some of her Tweets on politics and religion.
Her autobiography is much less inflammatory but there does seem to be a double standard as she complains about bullying and derogatory comments but has no problem with mocking the boys with nervous ticks she met at uni.
Like all forms of Woke there seems to be a mass of double standards and contradictions in her work. It all seems to be just about how she feels at any given moment, with no thought of consistency or logic.
Yes, the Woke don’t even try to hide their hypocrisy. That is probably what makes them the most different from prior movements of this kind.
Meanwhile, Moore’s husband is re-circulating an article criticising the Queen’s legacy before her body is even cold in the ground. Deeply offensive. These people have no class.
https://twitter.com/tomschoon/status/1568365839921053697?cxt=HHwWgoDQ5f-a-sMrAAAA
The similarity of Philippa Moore and Tom Schoon to Harry and Meghan is quite startling when you look at the writings of both. Spare and Latte Years/Philippa’s blog share many, many similarities. We have the same phenomena in the writings of both:
the oversharing, the extreme wokeness, the constant use of the victim card, the admission they dabble in spiritualism or occult practices, the bitterness towards their perceived enemies, the persecution complex, the fact that they air their dirty laundry in public, the fact he is a weak, femi husband with an ambitious wife.
It is exactly the same mindset. I am even starting to wonder if Philippa had a childhood trauma similar to Harry’s loss of his mother to account for this.
It is interesting to note that both developed have small, vocal cult followings (obviously Harry’s is much bigger as he is a global figure).
I do blame the media for publishing both Harry and Philippa though. They are making money from these people airing their views.
There is another bit of hypocrisy from that couple here: fretting about sperm counts and a” Children of Men”-style future:
https://twitter.com/tomschoon/status/1593017231306547200
… while deciding not to have children themselves:
https://twitter.com/philippa_moore/status/1324683782452961280
Also, I was reading a thoughtful piece on the Albanese Government’s proposed “Voice to Parliament”. It could effectively become a third house of parliament. If so, it paves the way to a kind of Aboriginal sovereignty or “state within a state” which some elements of the Aboriginal community have been pushing towards for years with the creation of their own flag, etc.
The question was then raised – what if this state within a state formally allies with or receives backing from a hostile power like China?
Is this a far fetched conspiracy theory? No because I thought then that of course we have a precedent for this with Mansell’s overtures to Gaddafi and the Aboriginal passport that Libya recognised. Worrying times.
Mansell has been advocating for Aboriginal sovereignty/a state within a state for years. He even formed a group called the “Aboriginal Provisional Government”. Treason. See here:
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/09/a-nation-for-a-continent/
@DL, I had a thought about all of this. Since this woke activist, Philippa, is interested in both history and prophecy (through her interest in clairvoyance, Tarot, etc), a topic that would probably interest her is Biblical prophecy.
Show her how the verified historical figure, Cyrus, was prophesied and even literally named in Scriptures 150 years before he was born:
https://www.gotquestions.org/Cyrus-Bible.html
Ask her to read Isaiah 53’s prophecy of Jesus and tell her it was written circa the 8th century BC:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+53&version=NIV
Then there is Genesis 3:15 and Genesis 14 18-20 which clearly point to the coming of Jesus – and those examples of prophecy are just for starters!
It may help you to open her eyes to the truth. I just really want you to be able to help this poor lost sheep.
I just found this discussion! Philippa Moore was on our local ABC Hobart Radio the other day, talking about how she had given away social media.
https://www.philippamoore.net/philippa-moore-blog/quitting-social-media-on-abc-radio-hobart
I found she has also written an article about it for the Guardian newspaper in the UK.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/may/18/in-the-year-since-i-quit-social-media-my-screen-time-has-fallen-my-mood-is-up-even-my-resting-heart-rate-is-lower
So, paradoxically, a social media influencer can even try to influence through the media when she has given up social media!
Jokes aside, I used to follow Philippa avidly because her book was helpful to me and I am from Tasmania like her. I didn’t click to formally “follow” her but I would check her updates frequently. It took me a long time to wake up to how extreme some of her woke views were. Some of it was a bit childish too and eventually I guess I just outgrew her.
Even then she wasn’t doing things like celebrating Irish abortion laws on her birthday so it seems that her content has grown even more extreme since I stopped following her. As my mother says some people just like to hear the sound of their own voice.
Looking back something that I think is a warning sign, particularly for readers of a Christian blog like this, is that although her book is a journey of self discovery nowhere does she talk in it about helping others or doing any kond of charity work or philanthropy. It is all about her and her esteem issues so she comes across as a little insular and self-obsessed. Maybe that is unfair but it is something that comes across to me now that I think back over her book and her posts with the benefits of more age and maturity. It makes me sad because now I think perhaps her life is very hollow. I wonder if she still feels an emptiness? I followed her a little blindly on social media in my younger days because I thought she had more wisdom than me but as she became more extreme in her content I slowly came to realise she had feet of clay.
I also just saw that Philippa recently drscribed Greta Gerwig (the director of the new Barbie movie) as her “best friend” in one of her recent blog posts.
https://www.philippamoore.net/philippa-moore-blog/2023/4/catching-up?rq=gerwig
I don’t know if she means this literally or if she means it in the sense of seeing Greta Gerwig as a kind of kindred spirit. Philippa does have a lot of friends in literati and arts circles worldwide though judging from what she used to say in her social media posts in the past so it is posdible that she does personally know Greta Gerwig.
I also didn’t know she was Richard Moore of 7HO’s daughter until I read it here but it makes sense given her easy access to the media and evident connections. I guess that makes her what is called a “Nepo Baby” in the latest internet slang.
Sorry this is such a bleak post. When I followed her woke musings in my younger days it nearly derailed my life in some ways so I want to warn others. I am glad I grew up when I did. I am not angry at Philippa but it is good she is taking a break from social media.
Lucinda
West Hobart
Celebrating the loosening of the Irish abortion laws reminds me of the rejoicing and exchanging of presents that accompanies the deaths of the two witnesses.
Glad to find a community standing up to this woke madness. Philippa Moore is of course advocating for the yes campaigb in the referendum.
https://www.philippamoore.net/philippa-moore-blog/writers-for-the-voice
It’s sad she has such a disproportionate opinion but that’s a consequence of Tassie being such a small place. She’s clearly going to end up being a ‘black armband’ historian as if we didn’t already have enough of those. She’s a bit out of step though because her friend the Aboriginal activist Michael Mansell is opposed to the Voice because he wants a treaty instead and even Aboriginal activist Kerry White is finally admitting the ‘Stolen Generation’ is a myth in a news article.
Philippa Moore is right about history repeating itself but she is wrong about what history. We don’t want the corruption of the welfare industry to continue and we don’t want to repeat the mistakes of South Africa in treating different ethnic groups in different ways.
Moore is one of those left wing liberals who has never spent time in an Aboriginal settlement, argues ‘on behalf of’ the poor without even really liking working class people and certainly not agreeing with their generally conservative views which are at variance with hers. She is just a puffed up social media activist spreading whichever postmodern ‘truth’ suits her agenda (ie a disingenuous propagandist). Heaven help us if the next generation of historians are all as biased as her. What will they do with the inconvenient facts from Kerry White and Jacinda Price that run contrary to their narratuves?
I was going to post on her endorsement of The Voice but you beat me to it, LikeaRollingStone!
Tasmanian here. Sigh, I almost thought Philippa Moore was brave because, at this stage, the Yes case seems to be headed for annihilation but then I remembered that we are the only State in which the Yes vote is still leading and her inner city artsy/literati crowd are also firmly behind the campaign, so perhaps she is just playing up to her own audience.
Yes, history does continue in a cycle dear Philippa – there has been rampant corruption in the Aboriginal lobby my entire life and divisiveness and militant tactics from Aboriginal activists since Mansell’s flirtation with Gaddafi, the Tent Embassy and their decision to create disunity by creating their own flag to say nothing of the money that was poured into ATSIC and other bodies that went missing. Thank goodness for honest Aborigines like Jacinta Price and her mother Bess Price speaking from experience out against the wrongheadedness of The Voice. Of course she is a conservative and a Christian so Philippa would not be predisposed to listen to her lived experience.
DL, in all seriousness I do wonder if Philippa Moore has mild Asperger’s. I do NOT mean this as a slur. Her biases in her articles, her teachers describing her as ‘unique’ when she was young, her hoarding as a child that others have discussed on here, her strange apparent gullibility and childlike tone in her writings despite her wealth of lived experience that one would think would make her a cynical, hardbitten journalist, her promotion of all things woke and total disregard for reality, her gullibility regarding New Age practices and hatred of all societal norms, from blogging about menstruation to celebrating abortion laws on her birthday to taking any criticism with such extreme sensitivity she goes on television about it, the blatant hypocrisy of her views on censorship, her lobbying for causes she doesn’t remotely understand without bothering to inform herself, her supposed solidarity with the poor while cheerleading the former Hawke and Keating governments that waged a savage war on them – they just don’t add up to me. It honestly feels like there is something wrong here – whether she is scarred by some childhood experience (perhaps caused by her mother or school bullying) or she has a mild mental health condition or she has undiagnosed Asperger’s. While her views on abortion and so forth are utterly reprehensible perhaps we should be gentle on her because I honestly feel like something is wrong, judging solely from her writings. All woke activists are in la-la land but there is something about her that I can’t quite put my finger on that concerns me-I am worried that she does have an untreated condition of some kind so I would encourage you all to please go easy on her in spite of the things she writes. I know she has an amazing ability to raise hackles but she seems oblivious to how aggravating her self-righteous, wrongheaded posturing is abd then she is thin skinned when she faces the backlash. This inability to read the room and her willingness to constantly act as a dupe promote the most blatantly charlatan causes just makes me wonder about her mental health. My sincere apologies to her if I have misread her but something just doesn’t seem to fit. She is a bit of an enigma.
Wait just a minute, this is the same woke activist / sjw Philippa Moore who supported BetterTogether in the IndyRef when she was living in London. There was no talk of history and the cyclical oppression of Scots by Westminster from her in those days. Likewise her anti-Brexit stance was all about unity.
Suddenly she no longer prioritises unity. Insteads she wants a Voice that will give one race greater political powers than others and she’s rubbing shoulders with Aboriginal sovereignty and separatist types like Michael Mansell.
She’s also shown she doesn’t really care about the working class in Britain or Australia by celebrating the Hawke and Keating givernments which waged dowbright cruel economic warfare on the poor, opposing Brexit which the working clqss generally supported and supporting the Voice which the working class generally opposed. It is like the old Polish joke – the Communist Party needs to sack this working class and find a new one to represent because this one does not think correctly. These sjws claim to represent us and empathise with us but they don’t even like us or our views and find us “deplorable” as Hillary so revealingly put it. I don’t know about the theory above that she has Aspergers as she doesn’t seem any worse than half the Guardian opinion writers you see in print but I do know she is breathtakingly hypocritical.
Thanks for telling me about tgis discussion @LikeaRollingStone. Like @Moonlight above, I used to follow Philippa on social medua. I am embarassed to say it took me a long time to realise just how exrltremist her views are. In my defence she wasn’t celebrating the liberalisation of abortion laws openly in her posts back then.
Anyway she must be having a bad day – the woke crowd’s cult hero Daniel Andrews is gone, the Voice is heading for a massive defeat if the polls are to be believed and Trump is leading Biden by ten points as the pro-Democrat newspapers turn on their ailing leader, unable to disguise his apparent cognitive decline anymore and RFK jr openly considers leaving the Democrats to run as an independent which could split the Left’s vote.
I just think of Philippa now as a typical virtue signaller, saying one thing but looking away when someone needs help. They say the longer you stay in university the more your mind is filled with nonsense as you live in an ivory tower of theories detached from the real world. No wonder academics are looked down upon these days, especially guven their blatant biases. She clearly has no interest in objective truth especially about Aboriginal history and she is too arrogant to listen to any of her critics. She seems to be trying to dictate how the working people should think and vote too since she claims in one tweet that they don’t realise what is best for them (by voting Liberal instead of Labour). Very arrogant and reminisxent of the communists as someone mentioned by way of that old Polish joke above.
BTW, on the FAQ page of her website, Philippa mocks someone who once contacted her and criticised something she wrote and suggested she needed to turn to Jesus. I don’t know if it was someone from this site but I just thought I’d make you aware. She makes it clear she doesn’t want to engage in debates with people with opposing views though. At the same time she continues to push her agendas and bullies other people and even mocks them and looks down on them at times. Apparently she likes to criticise but she does not want to dialogue or receive criticism herself. Anyway, that is her right I suppose.
Contrary to the opinion above I think she’s more extreme than most other Guardian contributors. She seems to take everything to its absolute limits these days. I definitely wouldn’t like to live in her ideal world. It would be a nightmare of thought crimes and censorship and all traditional morality would be turned on its head. Perhaps it is her guilt at being born into white privilege with a wealthy, well-known father is leading her to project her guilt onto all white people and position herself as someone makong amends by becoming a white saviour of blacks (without actually doing anything for them). Perhaps that is what all virtue signallers are like since they invariably come from the upper-middle class. She definitely has no understanding whatsoever of working class needs or concerns. I don’t think she could even relate to working class people although she claims to empathise with them. That is my perception after having refamiliarised myself with her writings today after a long time away. At any rate I am shocked at how much more extreme she’s become since I left her online cult. It is really noticeable. I do feel sorry for her. Didn’t someone elsewhere in these discussions who knew hee say she was a hoarder when she was young and that she was always smart but eccentric and irrational? I don’t know of that assessment of her is true or not as I don’t know her personally but irrational people unfirtunately do have their own political movement in tye form of the woke cult or identity politics or call it what you will and these people are undermining and destroying the west and all we hold dear and value. They are throwing the baby out with the bathwater for their nightmarish globalist censorious PC vision so please beware of people like this. Even if she is eccentric or unwell she still has many followers though I can no longer see her appeal. She and her like of keyboard warriors are very influential. As someone mentione abover this is magnified in a place like Tasmania where there are fewer loud voices shouting away. Let’s not go down the path of America. Let’s learn from the mistakes they’ve made with identity politics and the woke agenda and tell these digital soap box sjws to pull their heads back in until thry begin talking some common sense and understand real world issues a bit more. To be clear I hope for nothing but peace and best wishes for Philippa herself. It is just her views and opinions that are so toxic. I do not want to criticise the person herself and hope that nothing I’ve said comes across like that.
First of all, regarding the Woke-faction Liberals’ bad day, you forget to mention the Trudeau’s accidental(?) standing ovation for the Waffen S. S. veteran of all people and the declassification of the Bob Hawke file that tells us he was a friendless, back-stabbing political operator who projected an ocker image purely for show.
Speaking of which, why on earth would an outspoken feminist like Philippa Moore openly admire a womaniser like Hawke? It beggars belief.
Re: Biden’s rapid cognitive decline, the Democrats are apparently in a terrible bind now. They can’t remove him because Kamala Harris is apparently even less popular than him. I don’t follow American politics closely so I don’t know why Kamala is so disliked but they either have to hope Biden can ride the year out or risk putting Kamala in as a placeholder before going with someone like Gavin Newsom at the next election. Another, equally bad option would be to put in Newsom as Biden’s running mate and then have Biden resign immediately after the election in the (increasingly unlikely) event that he wins.
I am definitely no fan of Trump either but he is definitely looking like winning in any of these scenarios based on that early polling. It isn’t just Biden’s increasingly apparent signs of Alzheimer’s in his recent speeches but the economic chaos his policies have caused, his exacerbation of the proxy war in Ukraine and Hunter’s alleged wheeling and dealing. What a mess. The other possibility that seems plausible to me at this stage is that we could end up with both Trump and Biden gone leaving us with a Newsom v. DeSantis presidential race.
Now onto Philippa Moore. Disclaimer: my friends don’t know her but some of them do know a few other members of her family. Tassie is a small place.
I’ve just spent ages hunting around her website for the F. A. Q. page before I finally found it. She had it buried it away on there.
My thoughts are as follows regarding the F. A. Q. on the Christian person contacting her. She definitely tried to sound nice and courteous in requesting people who don’t share her opinions to just move on although the footnote after the asterisk came across as possibly sarcastic. If she’s a high profile social media activist who posts a lot of opinions that are bound to upset Christians why is she so shocked and amazed that one reached out to her and challenged her about them? Wouldn’t she have expected some blowback for her controversial and sometimes inflammatory views?
Honestly, if she wants to be an academic and a social justice advocate, I’m not sure how she thinks she’ll cope if she feels so insecure she doesn’t like anyone challenging her opinions. Surely debating against people who hold opposing viewpoints is a big part of both those jobs. For all of her bluster she seems to lack the confidence to argue for her opinions. If nothing else she risks developing confirmation bias if she lives in an echo chamber and only feels comfortable reading opinions that concur with hers.
She already seems a bit that way citing Marcia Langton of all people in her personal Voice statement. I have a friend who knows Langton and, well, any academic should be very, very wary of quoting Langton for numerous reasons. Certain alleged things about Langton’s personal life might surface in the media one day. Let’s just leave it at that.
As for the Asperger’s theory no idea and I don’t think we should speculate. It isn’t fair on Philippa. All I’ll note is that some of her writings may seem to hint that she doesn’t always understand social protocols – like that one where she feels repressed as an extroverted person because the teachers wanted her to be quiet in class when she was a kid. You’d need way more context than she gives in the article though – e. g., was she being told to be quiet because she was talking to friends and distracting them from their work, was she interrupting the teacher, was she trying to answer all of the teacher’s questions and not give other kids a chance to reply or was she dominating group activities and not giving quieter kids a chance to give their input? She doesn’t give that kind of contextual information in her article but it does sound a bit like she didn’t understand these kinds of things would be considered rude and inappropriate even by someone who is naturally inclined to be a free-spirited chatterbox. The fact she is still fixated on an apparently trivial teacher’s comment decades later sounds more like she might have a bit of a P. T. S. D. issue even. Also, in her book she talks about having hypnotherapy to block out a troubling memory from school so that definitely sounds like P. T. S. D. to me. Maybe I’m reading waaaaaaay too much into it though and I’m definitely no psychologist. Interesting though that she was a hoarder too when she was young though according to the claims of those who know her.
Back on to the topic of her F. A. Q. Her woker, S. J. W. opinions are vile but in a way her rejection of Jesus in her F. A. Q. statement is honest in so far as she is basically admitting the views she espouses on abortion, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, pre-marital sex and fornication, tarot and the occult, pagan events like Tassie’s obscene Dark Mofo festival, New Age and so on *are* antichrist. That kind of honesty puts her above so-called liberal Christians who twist the Bible to try to argue things like same-sex marriage, transgenderism and even New Age elements can be harmonised with Christianity. They can’t. Not at all.
Rather, Philippa Moore is honest and free of delusions. Her views are antichrist and she knows it. I just hope her social media and blog followers come to clearly understand this too.
Her opinions are repulsive to me but part of me just feels sorry for her and wants to reach out and hug her. I think she seems to have that affect on everyone here though judging from the comments. I don’t want to underplay the evil of her opinions though. What she advocates is completely contrary to God’s word but I do feel genuine compassion for her.
Just to reiterate, I’ve never met Philippa but I know a few people who’ve met other members of her family (Tassie is a small place). They all say the same thing, that her mother was quite domineering and ruined her children when they were young. You get a little bit of a sense of that in Philippa’s own book, The Latte Years, where she talks about her mum reading through Philippa’s private diary and pressuring her into going to ballroom dancing. That seems to confirm what people say the mum was like and it definitely sounds like Philippa was trying to subtly say so in her book. If so it is very sad. It can’t be easy being the kid of a local celeb radio guy either. I can’t even imagine what that’s like as its so far outside my realm of experience. That’s not to make excuses because she will be accountable to God one day for her own actions but I can at least begin to understand her and empathise with her though I don’t condone her for her views. I hope she finds the peace of mind she seems to be seeking. She just seems a bit damaged and in need of love and not one to get over hurts or slights (real or perceived) very easily, hence my speculation about anxiety or P. T. S. D. above. I wish she could know even her critics here love her.
I ask that everyone respects the request she made on her F. A. Q. page and that you do not bother her. If you don’t like her opinions move on as she isn’t prepared to debate them nor does she feel comfortable being challenged.
If it was someone from this discussion who tried to proselytise to her, that was a noble thing to do but it is better that you desist as she requests. By all means, please keep praying quietly for her though. I hope she comes to realise Christians evidently care for her for who she is in herself in spite of her hostile views and those opinions she espouses which are so contrary to our faith and indeed at times shocking to us. As she grows in maturity and wisdom, pray that she comes to know and accept Christ but do not reach out and contact her or hassle her because she clearly finds it upsetting. Do as she asks and leave her alone. I know it is hard because it is extremely important to challenge views such as hers but she doesn’t want to enter into debate with people at this stage so just leave her be and pray constantly for her wellbeing.
In summary, please *respect* her wishes and leave her alone and do not engage in proselytizing or debating her – but do pray for her salvation and well-being in private.
If any of you in Tassie come across her in person, make sure you show her Christian love and kindness and respect.
God bless you all.
It is interesting that the current crop of woke left actovists like Philippa Moore dabble in the New Age and the occult. I have just been reading reviews of two serious, academic texts on theosophy, ariosophy, the Thule Society, and Nazism and reviewer after reviewer notes how Thule’s beliefs reminds them of current day New Age beliefs. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/12000701
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35238287-hitler-s-monsters
It is therefore ironic that this new breed of New Agers have a visceral hatred of anything remotely right wing when their spiritual forebears were so closely enmeshed with the far right.
I waa just reading this. “Pop philosophy around identity politics… is multiplying, rather than reducing, the tensions and divisions among us. We are so ‘tolerant’ that we can no longer discern good from evil.” A good descrption of radical agitators like Philippa Moore. I think one of the most toxic things the Left has done is to proclaim the personal is political, thereby politicising every aspect of our lives. We can no longer claim to be apolitical or neutral in their eyes. You are either with us or against us they claim as they drive these wedges into society and as they claim to be the tolerant ones while they spread intolerance of anybody who dares to disagree. Every day more and more of this poison soreads.