Nothing supernatural about the western suburbs of Melbourne

[DoktorZ]

Good comments, WLB. It seems to me that sanctimonious churches that ask us to thank them for reaching deep into our tax coffers quickly forget that those funds are collected by the state, which has a monopoly over the legal use of violence. This means that they are still using knights to squeeze the peasants.

One thing the Aussies do have in their favor, as opposed to the Brits, is that they have a constitutional mandate for separation of church and state. Unfortunately, it appears to have been diluted in the 1980s by court rulings in favor of faith-based initiatives. Churches then lined up to the trough to feed at the taxpayer's expense, just as they did in the USA. Britain's situation, with a state church, sovereign monarch, and peerage through which the C of E exercises non-democratic power, is a right mess when it comes to secularism. Untangling that web would be a truly daunting task.

What has really been burning the Christian nationalists in Britain, though, are the Islamic schools that use the same legal framework the C of E does to teach "Islamic science" to British pupils--and get Christians' tax money to do so. Apparently, there's more than one standard where other believers are concerned.