It’s an unusual event for peebs.net to post an article that actually defends the Exclusive Brethren! Let’s get it over and done with, shall we?
Matthew Lindqvist (left) and Andrew Doven from the Exclusive Brethren stand opposite Wagga City Council and the corner they used for street preaching for years. Picture: Les Smith, Daily Advertiser
The Daily Advertiser today describes a battle in Wagga, Australia where the Exclusive Brethren are defending their right to free speech on the streets of their town.
In a nut-shell, Wagga City Council have implemented a ‘street activities policy’ that allows just one complaint to halt any street activity. In the case of the Exclusive Brethren, this affects their requirement for regular street preaching. Of course people are going to object to this and it most certainly would be wrong of any organization to attempt to muzzle another simply because they did not agree with their beliefs or what they said.
What Wagga City Council possibly doesn’t understand is that the Exclusive Brethren have to publicly be seen to preach even if this evangelical zeal doesn’t extend beyond the “bellowing“. Their Meeting Room is doubtlessly tax-exempt as a public place of worship and because they do not allow the public full access to their windowless, padlocked buildings, they have to ensure a little public presence somehow.
And their right to free speech? Absolutely! We perhaps should choose to ignore that they have just spent untold dollars in a four year lawsuit aimed at closing down this website because they didn’t agree with what was being said!
Good old Voltaire may have put it like this:
“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” – Voltaire
The Exclusive Brethren are hardly so generous, but we are happy to stand alongside them in defence of Free Speech.
Perhaps Wagga City Council could rightly remove the tax-exempt status from the very private Exclusive Brethren meeting room and place the tax-payer dollars so saved in the public noise-abatement fund? Earplugs are not that expensive.
And how many disciples have they made in their street-preaching?
Free speech is a citizen’s right, but what they blab about is of interest especially when the brethren do not mix with other people and generally look down on people. Depends what is said.
What a bunch of postering, self righteous, hyprocrites this lot are. Dont the Brethren realise that freedom of speech is a two way street, either you believe in it or you dont. From the cult that has used courts and every dirty trick in the book, to shut down debate of any sort about their activities and beliefs, this defies belief. Why do they street preach anyway? Most people see them for the hyrpcrites that they are, and the few if any that are converted, by their proselyting, are not allowed into their churches, that are locked and bolted like Long Bay Jail.
I am all for telling people about Jesus, but this lot should do the whole of Chrisianity a favour, and stay at home.
The Exclusive Brethren would not need to “preach” on the street if their rates exemption was removed – as it should be! Their street spruiking is part of a facade, a deception of the wider community in order to claim rates exemption for “their” fortress. (Turn up one Sunday and try to gain admission to their so-called PUBLIC place of worship).
This cult is EXCLUSIVE to the extent that their “private club” properties are not open to the public – in fact they are fenced and gated and patrolled by guards to exclude all but their members who are banned from normal community interaction. Within the cult, free speech is suppressed – their members only voice their real opinions if they are prepared to take huge personal risks.
Why do the citizens of Wagga subsidise this Exclusive club?
Wagga City Council is being duped on another level. Do a title search of the Exclusive Brethren meeting room and interview the registered owners to have them swear out a Stat. Dec. that no other party has a vested interest in the property, that it is not encumbered by separate contractual agreement. If you dig hard enough you will discover that one multi-millionaire individual has a controlling interest in ALL Exclusive Brethren meeting rooms around Australia and overseas! There’s a (national) public interest scoop in this for an intrepid reporter/journalist from the Daily Advertiser.
John Kennard is correct freedom of speech is a two way street which all sorts of people will want to use freely including some Atheists.And this planet is full of many self righteous hypocrites who wont like it.The irony of these wise words used here from Voltaire, a man who condemned religious hypocrisy firmly.A man who had been imprisoned repeatedly and finally exiled for his challenges to traditional religion.A great man that preached that all are obliged to tolerate each other.
Yes how strange it seems it is the Exclusive Brethren who now find themselves fighting for freedoms also,when so often they themselves have been the ones who sort to rob many of such freedom and silence them including the people of peebs net.Still, sadly their actions are only an extention of the extremity that first had its origins set in the tyranny of all fundamentalist faiths.As you sow so shall you reap the seeds are the grain of the crop.
Little can be added to these foregoing accurate assessments of the Hales cult of Exclusive Brethren. They “preach” in the street as a sop to their seared consciences developed through failure to comprehend the Gospel which in divine grace invites to come to know God through faith in His Son. Theirs is a doctrine of ISOLATION and assumed sectarian righteousness, a stigma on the meekness and gentleness of Christ. Were anyone to believe their message they would find it morally impossible to gain entry to that sectarian groupwhose obstructive tenets are a blasphemous presentation of the call of God in His word.
To take part in remembering the death of Christ the apostolic directive is for the individual to sit at the Lord’s Table having examined themself to be inthe faith.
In defiance of Christ’s invitation ‘this do for a remembrance of ME’ the cult leaders set themselves up a mediators and they decide if anyone is fit to eat and drink at The Lord’s Table, making it theirs to rule over-a satanic and corrupt practice against the Lord who died for them-They are the blind leaders of the blind, the false teachers who have crept into the Church and misled those weak in the faith. May they and their error be cogently overthrown -Yes Lord be it soon.
Freedom of speech? They tried very hard to deny me and some of my students our right to freedom of speech. I accepted some EB students into my A Level Literature classes. The parents demanded the right to read everything we studied and, if they deemed it ‘not appropriate’, would forbid their children to study the piece in question. I compromised to the extent of providing different poems for critical exercises, and even teaching the group one whole different text from the rest of the class, and taught them in my own time. Yet they continued to denigrate the rest of us for studying texts they deemed inappropriate and I was publicly accused by one parent of teaching ‘filth’. Luckily, a supportive Principal pointed out that I had given myself extra work in teaching them different texts and told them that either they accepted the syllabus or removed their children!
I had respected their views and having had a ‘liberal’ education, was prepared to be tolerant. They showed no respect or tolerance of me or my views and were judgmental of, and sneering towards, me and the rest of the students because of what we read – perfectly acceptable literature on the national syllabus!
They even suggested that they should devise a syllabus acceptable to their sect and we should all follow that! I politely turned down their helpful suggestion.
Are the Brethren in Australia related to the Brethren in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania Brethren don’t preach in public but they are very insular and exclusive. They don’t like to mingle or talk to nonBrethren.
They are extremely self righteous and smug-in-god. The irony is that if they met Jesus and he didn’t tell them who he was, they would turn their nose up at him and refuse to have contact with him because he isn’t one of their little inbred clan.