Jesus is often quoted as saying, "Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone rich to enter the kingdom of heaven."

I can't imagine any scenario in which Jesus, in the middle of a sermon, would turn to his flock and say, "This man, Ruper Murdoch, is exactly what I had in mind when I began my ministry. If any of you are looking for a real model to copy, then Rupert is your man.".

In the past, when expanding on his religious beliefs, Rupert Murdoch, currently worth over 18 billion, has said, "I'm certainly a practising Christian. I go to church quite a bit, but not every Sunday, and I tend to go to the Catholic church – because my wife is Catholic. I have not formally converted. And I get increasingly disenchanted with the C of E or Episcopalians as they call themselves here. But no, I'm not intensely religious as I'm sometimes described."

I do not understand how it is possible to be a practising Christian and not be religious. As I understand it, the Christian religion explains how God, the supreme being, brought reality into existence and strict guidelines for humankind to live their daily lives as individuals and as members of a family, community, and society. Principally, these guidelines exist o help individuals live in harmony with God, to be the best version of themselves, to help others do the same, and to leave the world a better place once they depart the mortal realm for Heaven.

Rupert Murdoch has dedicated himself to accumulating wealth and undue influence upon the political parties of major Western democracies such as Australia, the UK and the USA. Murdoch has relentlessly deployed his vast media empire to promote an endless culture war against those who do not support his political agenda and narrow, increasingly reactionary perspective of how a healthy society looks and functions.

As seen through the lens of his various propaganda outlets, Murchod's current preoccupations are easy to discern: I cannot recall any gospel in the Old or New Testament that encourages Christians to deny the biological determinacy of their fellow citizens, corrupt officers of the law, promote slavery as a tool of education, reduce women to chattel, and seek to eliminate the voting right of fellow citizens their rights because they grow up in a different part of the country or don't vote for the same political party- how is any of this an accepted part of a practising Christian's day?

It is a given - isn't it :) - that Christianity was intended to be a revolutionary spiritual and cultural movement that would liberate the poor - spiritually and materially, from the immoral practices of unjust governments, fake kings, and cruel Ceasars. All this while providing a roadmap for how human beings could live in spiritual synchronicity with their creator while offering others, principally their family and community, the same opportunity and its inevitable rewards.

Christians were (and are supposed to continue to have) a significant advantage over other religiously inclined folk. Distant, arbitrary, often violently bipolar sky gods who never get down and dirty in the mud and tribal politics be damned and cast into the mythology bin of history. For Christians, their role model, Jesus, the perfect blend of man and God and moral principles, has walked amongst them.

Undisciplined, sensual, virgin-deflowering obsessed Greek titans may have made their presence known by constantly fathering demi-gods and liberally gifting their favoured children with magical properties. The God of the Bible beat out all his rivals and peers by dramatically raising the stakes. God, in the form of Jesus, bothered to cast aside his omnipotent powers, and go down to earth, get his feet dirty and eat with his chosen people at the same dinner table, put logs onto the stubborn cabin fire, sought comfort from the rain beneath the same useless tree, and even had the nerve to offer up his own life for his followers and friends, to misguided strangers who loathed his mortal form, because he loved his people enough to suffer as they did, and with them, all so they could understand him better and get closer to him. No true believer ever had a more selfless or more deserving God.

But the story of Christ isn't about God. It's about his followers. You! (yes, it's always about you.) By His words and deeds, in private and when out and about in the world, from dawn to sunset, Jesus provided His followers with a clear blueprint for how good Christians were to conduct themselves by always acting as His best example of divinely inspired righteous goodness upon the earth.

After Jesus' short but purposeful time on earth, living one's life as a practising Christian was meant to be easy: Jesus could not have made the route to salvation any easier to understand. Follow my example, make the same choices I did, and the world will be a better place, and you'll undoubtedly get to Heaven.

It turns out that believing Jesus to be the direct Son Of God is easy; the hard part for Murdoch, and too many other self-declared Christians, is living up to the Nazarene's bold, uncompromising example.

This woeful, historically tragic failure is easy to understand. Everyone gets this. It's hard living up to perfection. We have 2.000 years of history to prove Christians have found it impossible to match the Nazerene's high standards. Far easier to behave as if self-identifying as a Christian is an invitation to rule over Jesus' kingdom in his absence and hold sway over every other mortal animal on the planet, so explaining husbandry, serfdom, slavery, mass industrial-level slavery,

Murdoch and his weak ilk need to come up with another term to describe themselves and leave Jesus out of the equation. In my book, a belief in Jesus that does not command a Christian to practice Jesus's values by offering love as the solution to all of man's follies - equates to no belief at all.

Then again, I'm not a Christian, so what do I know?