To The Australian (07/07/2018) While it is important for Australia to protect religious freedom and get the balance right between competing idealisms, it is more important for our long-term national welfare for religious-minded citizens to live and speak in such ways as are likely to increase respect for the holy and the sacred in future generations. This means a willingness to concede that significant aspects of so-called orthodox theology (whether Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant) are not in fact true teaching and need to be gradually dispensed with. Old-fashioned belief, as Dan Tehan notes ("Let's protect belief", 6-7/7), is losing ground and is likely to continue to do so. Protecting it is palliative only.
Christian and Muslim leaders, in particular, need to encourage openness to the non-verbal, non-authoritarian approaches of Eastern sacred traditions such as Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism, to say nothing of their own mystical heritages such as Sufism and mediaeval contemplation as taught by Eckhart and Boehme. They also need to invoke more often modern writers such as Jung, Campbell and Guenon, who have penetrated deeply into the mysterious conjunctions of the divine and the human.
Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic