Subject: (FAQ) aus.religion Frequently Asked Questions List Date: 23 Aug 1997 14:00:03 GMT From: (Andrew Bromage) Reply-To: Organization: Comp Sci, University of Melbourne Newsgroups: aus.religion,aus.religion.christian
Posting-Frequency: Every four weeks Last-modified: 18th August, 1997 aus.religion Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
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Subject: 1. Introduction
This document is the Frequently Asked Questions list (FAQ) for the Usenet newsgroup aus.religion. If you are new to Usenet, I recommend going to news.announce.newusers for information on how to use the Usenet news service, and advice on netiquette.
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Subject: 2. Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. Table of contents
3. About this FAQ
3.1 Where can I get it?
4. What is aus.religion?
5. Posting guidelines
6. Frequently Asked Questions
6.1 Newsgroup admininstration
6.2 Religion in general
6.3 Christianity
7. Other Internet resources
7.1 Usenet groups
7.2 Mailing lists
7.3 World Wide Web
7.4 FTP
8. Acknowledgements
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Subject: 3. About this FAQ
This FAQ is currently being maintained by Andrew Bromage <>. Contributions are encouraged. Mail me, or reply to this posting if you are reading it via news.
3.1 Where can I get it?
It is posted every four weeks to aus.religion. Expiry date is set so that it should always be active on the newsgroup.
On the WWW, it can be found at
—————————— Subject: 4. What is aus.religion? Aus.religion is a non-moderated newsgroup for discussion for religious matters of interest to Australians. Being in the aus.* hierachy, the question naturally arises as to how Australian the content should be. The proposed charter states Despite the aus.* prefix, general discussion (ie with no specific relevance to Australia) on the appropriate topics is welcome … … people from outside Australia are requsted not to post to AR or ARC unless a) they are expatriates or have some connection with Australia or b) they are posting material specific to Australia (such as a query about Aboriginal religion or the status of ordination of women in Australia). (Note: AR = aus.religion, ARC = aus.religion.christian) “General discussion” should not be interpreted to include such topics such as: - Creation vs evolution debates (should use talk.origins) - “MAKE.MONEY.FAST” (should use alt.make.money.fast) - “I am right and you are wrong and you will all go to hell” (should use aus.flame) The aus.religion homepage is maintained by Danny Yee and is accessible at It includes short biographies of the aus.religion regulars, plus an archive of the postings since December 1994. —————————— Subject: 5. Posting guidelines Aus.religion is first and foremost a discussion group. It is home to many people of extremely diverse beliefs. Please respect this. This is not to say that you shouldn’t criticise people’s beliefs — on the contrary, most people enjoy having their beliefs challenged. However resorting to personal abuse is the surest sign that you have lost your argument. If in doubt, always remember: The thing that you believe in most dearly is nonsense to someone else. Oh, and one more thing: Please PLEASE don’t cross-post to other news groups, especially American ones. Aus.religion prides itself on its relatively high signal-to-noise ratio. If you must cross-post (for example, many religious groups hold political beliefs, so a cross-posting to aus.politics is conceivable) please include a Followups-to line in your message so that the resulting discussion is limited to one of the groups. Also mention this for the benefit of anyone who may wish to follow the discussion. As of mid-1996, articles posted to aus.religion.christian which are cross-posted to more than one non-aus.* group are cancelled by an automatic script. See the question below on why this measure was taken. —————————— Subject: 6. Frequently Asked Questions This list is designed to avoid the problem of the same questions coming up over and over again. Many of these are pointers to other information around the net. It is suggested that if you wish to discuss any issues such as these, you should check out 6.1 Newsgroup administration The aus.religion hierachy has a homepage which may or may not answer your questions. Please check it out before asking: 6.1.1 Why is aus.religion.christian moderated? In 1996 is was found that the increasing number of “noise” postings, mostly cross-posts by people (often from overseas) who clearly did not wish to contribute to discussions in the newsgroup had become such a serious problem that a vote was taken to remove a large class of such postings automatically. I must stress that the criterion for cancelling is the level of cross posting only. Under no circumstances will an article be cancelled on the basis of its content. The reason for this is that we do not wish to censor any discussion where the originator of a thread intends to participate in that discussion. Any questions about the moderation policy can be directed to the moderator, Andrew Bromage <>. 6.2 Religion in general You might as well be after info on “people in general”. One WWW site which seems to be pretty fair to all sides is “The World of Religions”, which has links to many places: 6.2.1 How many Australians are religious? This is an extremely hard question to answer, and it goes right to the heart of one of the most popular topics of discussion on any religion newsgroup (namely: what constitutes “Christian” or whatever religion is under discussion). The best objective measures are: self-ascription, membership rolls and attendance statistics. Note that these measure three different things. (Note: What follows is a large number of numbers and percentages. Please treat these statistics with respect. If you are not a statistician or have no or little statistical training, please avoid the temptation to draw conclusions which are not in the figures, or extrapolate, or otherwise manipulate what is there. If in doubt, your local university’s statistics department or the Australian Bureau of Statistics may be able to help you with interpreting the data.) Taking self-ascription as the measure, the best indicator is probably the Australian Census, conducted every five years by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Here is a summary of the last two: Religious Group 1996 Census % 1991 Census % Anglican 3,903,324 21.99 4,018,770 23.85 Baptist 295,178 1.66 279,920 1.66 Brethren 22,063 0.12 24,127 0.14 Catholic 4,798,950 27.03 4,606,644 27.34 Churches of Christ 75,023 0.42 78,039 0.46 JWs 83,414 0.47 74,803 0.44 Latter Day Saints 45,112 0.25 38,298 0.23 Lutherans 249,989 1.41 250,844 1.49 Oriental Christians 31,342 0.18 23,294 0.14 Orthodox 497,015 2.80 474,921 2.82 Pentecostals 174,720 0.98 150,665 0.89 Presbyterians 675,534 3.81 732,227 4.35 Salvation Army 74,145 0.42 71,984 0.43 Seventh Day Adventist 52,655 0.30 48,341 0.29 Uniting 1,334,917 7.52 1,387,646 8.24 Other Christians 269,383 1.52 205,121 1.22 Total Christians 12,582,764 70.88 12,465,644 73.98 Buddhism 199,812 1.13 139,795 0.83 Hinduism 67,279 0.38 43,580 0.26 Islam 200,885 1.13 147,507 0.88 Judaism 79,805 0.45 74,266 0.44 Other religions 68,647 0.39 39,932 0.24 Total non-Christian 616,428 3.47 445,252 2.64 No religion 2,948,888 16.61 2,176,608 12.92 Inadequately described 54,164 0.31 49,853 0.30 Not stated 1,550,585 8.73 1,712,322 10.16 Population 17,752,829 16,850,334 Taking membership rolls as the measure, it is much harder to get accurate information, since it is up to the local gathering to collect this information. It’s made much harder because some institutions (the Anglican church in particular) do not even keep accurate information. As far as I know, there has been no real effort to collect information on this. Taking attendance as the figure, the best research we have to date is the National Christian Life Survey, conducted by the Christian Research Association. This naturally only measures Christian groups, and not even all of those (most notably, the Roman Catholic Church was not surveyed). Rev. Dr. Philip Hughes of the CRA estimates that about 10-11% of Australians attend a Christian church on any given Sunday, and about 15-18% at least once a month. This figure is higher than Christian church attendance for most of Europe, lower than Poland or Ireland, lower than the USA, and much higher than those who attend sporting events. People who are interested in more detail can consult several books which contain more detail than is presented here. “Views from the pews” [I can't find any more citation information on this book. Any help?] Philip Hughes and Rowland Ward, “Religious bodies in Australia” [Ditto] 6.3 Christianity There is a good coverage of the basic questions that you might have about Christianity in the soc.religion.christian FAQ. It is posted periodically to that newsgroup, and can also be found on the World Wide Web: The parent directory contains many FAQs and snippets about many topics of historical and contemporary concern to Christians and Christianity. It’s well worth a look: —————————— Subject: 7. Other Internet resources This list is by no means exhaustive. It is intended as a starting place for those who seek information. 7.1 Usenet groups Not every newsgroup listed here is available at every site. If your feed does not have a newsgroup that you may wish to read, see your system administrator. The micro-reviews featured here are the opinions of various regulars in aus.religion.*. Your mileage may vary. [Could anybody who reads these please write a one-liner for what goes on in them? Thanks.] alt.atheism – By far the noisiest of any of these groups. Mostly a place for American college philosophy 101 students to air their theories and try to debunk fundamentalist Christianity. alt.bible.prophecy – Unmoderated forum for discussions of Bible prophecy. alt.religion.christian.boston-church – International Church of Christ discussion group. alt.christnet – The noisiest of the specifically religious groups. Like alt.atheism, the hangout of American college students with too much time on their hands. alt.christnet.bible – With alt.bible and soc.religion.christian.bible-study a newsgroup to discuss Bible texts and doctrines. alt.christnet.christianlife – In theory at least, a group which majors on practical Christian living issues. alt.christnet.ethics alt.christnet.evangelical – Discussions on matters relating to the Evangelical (and Fundamentalist) branch of Christian theology. alt.christnet.philosophy alt.messianic – Unmoderated forum for discussions pertaining to Messianic Judaism. alt.religion.christian.baptist alt.religion.christian.episcopal alt.religion.christian.pentecostal alt.religion.christian.presbyterian alt.religion.christian.reformed – The above speak for themselves. alt.religion.clergy – An unmoderated which, according one aus.religioner, is a fairly useless group where ‘clergy’ and spammers of all kinds dump generally lightweight stuff. alt.religion.scientology alt.support.ex-cult – Postings covering cult awareness and information. bit.listserv.christia – Moderated newsgroup and from all reports pretty good. Their homepage has a very good library, too, so I’m told. soc.culture.jewish – Discussion area for Jewish people. soc.religion.christian – The international Christian newsgroup on Usenet, and it’s a moderated forum and probably one of the better general groups. soc.religion.christian.bible-study soc.religion.christian.youth-work – Moderated forum for those working with Christian youth. soc.religion.bahai soc.religion.eastern soc.religion.gnosis soc.religion.islam soc.religion.quaker soc.religion.shamanism soc.religion.unitarian-univ talk.abortion talk.euthanasia talk.origins – The place for creationists and their opponents to hit it out. talk.philosophy.humanism talk.philosophy.misc talk.religion.buddhism talk.religion.misc talk.religion.newage uk.religion.christian – High volume moderated newsgroup, predominantly England-focussed. Reportedly high-quality, presumably because of the lack of Americans. (Oops, did I say that?) 7.2 Mailing lists American Atheists sponsor quite a few mailing lists. Mail <>with the subject “info” for details. 7.3 World Wide Web There is a large collection of Christian resources at Anybody interested in atheism and all its variants should check out the site There is a large collection of resources on Roman Catholicism at John Mark Ministries is a non-denominational counselling service to clergy and their families, based in Melbourne and run by a regular contributor to aus.religion.*. Check out The upcoming National Christian Youth Convention has a page at 7.4 FTP American Atheist Online Services have an FTP site at —————————— Subject: 8. Acknowledgements Many people have contributed to this FAQ. Their assistance is much appreciated. The ones that I know about are, in alphabetical order: Rowland Croucher <>Paul Dyson <>Richard Gant <>Bert Hibberd <>Robin Murray-o’hair <>Iain Walker <>David Williams <>Daniel Yee <> – Maintained by Andrew Bromage <>Contributions, comments etc welcome.
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