What the Sydney newspapers say today, Friday April 21, 2000

AAP General News (Australia)
04-21-2000
What the Sydney newspapers say today, Friday April 21, 2000

SYDNEY, April 21 AAP - Easter and its significance to Christians is the subject of
most newspaper editorials today.

The Daily Telegraph says Good Friday is the most holy of holidays in the Christian calendar.

It is the day on which the enduring mystery and magnificence of Christ's death and
resurrection are central in the hearts and minds of the faithful, the newspaper says.

Despite being in an age where the concept of sacrifice of oneself for the benefit of
others is not the fashion there are a few whose self-sacrifice is natural, it says.

"We will not soon forget the bravery of police officer Don McKinnon, nor of Happy Fiefia
both of whom plunged into the burning wreckage of nine cars involved in the April 11 road
tragedy at Dee Why.

"By their courage and by their refusal to think of their own safety they are joined
forever to the central tenet of the Christian faith," the Telegraph says.

The Sydney Morning Herald says traditional Christian belief has it that Jesus rose
in bodily form.

"It is this event which validates everything else we are told about the life of Jesus,
the paper says.

However it says many theologians, biblical scholars and even some senior Christian
clergy believe the resurrection is a metaphor for something other than what the authors
of the gospels intended to mean by it.

Some say Jesus shed his physical body merely to assume a purely spiritual one, while
others have dispensed even with the notion of vaporised immortality. They claim it was
the spirit of Jesus which emboldened his disciples.

"Both these suggestions go some way towards embracing the possibilities allowed by
modern science," says the Herald.

"More importantly perhaps, they accommodate the scepticism charcteristic of contemporary
Western society."

The Adelaide Advertiser says the calendar provides a particular resonance for Easter
2000 as, indeed, for the virtually simultaneous Passover commemorations by members of
the Jewish community.

It says this day Christianity marks a hideously painful execution after a farcical
trial which, for believers, leads to the glory of the Resurrection.

Various calendar changes and scholarly research make it clear that Jesus of Nazareth
was probably not born precisely 2000 years ago, it says.

"That does not detract from the significance of his teachings and the fact that the
faith they have inspired has lasted into a third millennium," it says.

On another subject, The Age says in Australia's colonial past there was violent conflict
between Aborigines and settlers, but not the type of violence experienced in South Africa
under apartheid.

And the experience of indigenous dispossession in Australia is neither as raw and recent
as Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, nor does it have such a long history as the persecution
of the Jews in Christian Europe, the newspaper says.

"So why has it been so hard for Prime Minister John Howard to utter the same words
as the Pope, (Indonesian) president (Abdurrahman) Wahid and majority or respondents to
South Africa's truth and reconciliation comission: `I am sorry'?" The Age says.

The Herald Sun says motorists are tired of being ripped of in holiday periods by a
greedy oil industry.

No one was suprised when on Easter eve petrol prices soared in unison, the newspaper says.

It says the federal government must use its powers to force exposure of the cause of
these seemingly orchestrated petrol price rip-offs, for which no one will voluntarily
take responsiblity.

"The government must protect motorists from highway robbery," the paper says.

AAP jx/gfr/hu

KEYWORD: EDITORIALS

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