A tyrannical air is supplanted by an image of grumpy uncle.

Religion is a vexed topic these days. Not only do we no longer in Australia have a vaguely agreed-upon common deity, to whose actual existence we might privately subscribe with varying degrees of conviction; now there are a bunch of gods, and you have to be careful about invoking them carelessly.

It's with this in mind that I cast the widest possible ecclesiastical net when I offer devout joyous thanks, and a sizeable tithe, to whichever heavenly being it was who made Rupert Murdoch go on Twitter.

Of all the published works for which Mr Murdoch is directly or indirectly responsible, his Twitter stream is the most weirdly, awkwardly, cringe-inducingly enjoyable, with the possible exception of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem.

It's got everything: drama, pathos, suspense, and the sorts of high-spirited shenanigans that inevitably ensue when an 81-year-old man tangles with predictive text.

(One tweet in January, reporting ''universal anger with Optus'', caused deep confusion in the Australian telecommunications industry until the mogul revealed he had actually typed POTUS - the President Of The United States - only to have his iPad decide otherwise on his behalf.)

Where Rupert Murdoch was once a remote and vaguely terrifying global powerbroker, @rupertmurdoch - or ''Twupert'', as the twitterati have nicknamed his loveably cantankerous online persona - gives us access to his own breakfast table.

It's rather a brilliant cosmic irony, but @rupertmurdoch is about as close as we ordinary mortals will ever get to hacking the squillionaire's voicemail.

Sometimes his tweets are grammatically Delphic, like Thursday's ''Without trust, democracy, and order will go.''

Here, the message is structured like one of those punctuation puzzles where the addition or subtraction of a comma radically changes a sentence's meaning, like: ''Let's eat, Grandma!''

Was Twupert sounding a stern alarum to champions of transparency in the political process? Because it sounded a bit like he was ordering yum cha to go.

At other times, the mogul exhibits the kind of ''close, but no cigar!'' approach to popular expressions that is more common in those for whom English is a second language. ''Let's have it on!'' he challenged his oppressors last week; an exhortation to ideological conflict, issued with a deliciously creepy Marvin Gaye touch.

The current round of allegations against News - that the former News Corp company NDS had encouraged the hacking of competitors - roused Mr Murdoch to a particularly productive day at the keyboard on Thursday, during which he groused that his enemies were ''piling on with lies and libels''.

''So bad, easy to hit back, which preparing,'' he promised.

(Tweeting as Yoda is one of the mogul's most disconcerting occasional tics. It's weird, but it makes sense once you apply some thought; Mr Murdoch owns Yoda, for one thing. And even if he didn't, it's understandable that he might in any event feel some sort of natural affinity for a cultish, wrinkly, omnipotent figure who lives to be 900).

Mr Murdoch's public appearances used to be rare and remarkable; brief but frenziedly scrutinised materialisations at the News Corp AGM, disembodied phone hook-ups with selected business reporters, or the truly inexplicable glossy Hello! spread in 2010 featuring the youngest two of Mr Murdoch's six progeny being moistened in the river Jordan by way of baptism, attended by their white-raimented father, Queen Rania, Nicole Kidman, Tony Blair and Ivanka Trump.

(One can only sympathise here with the Murdoch girls. It's hard to imagine a more bewildering introduction to formalised religion.)

Between these glimpses, a Murdoch mystique established itself, characterising the man as a remote and vengeful tyrant of diamond-hard ideology and business acumen.

This mystique has served him pretty well, partly by keeping political leaders in Australia, the United Kingdom and the USA - who view life in general as difficult enough already without the added complication of a Murdoch fatwa - in varying degrees of pants-wetting obeisance.

Never mind that the truth was far more nuanced; just how strategically brilliant, after all, is a man who buys MySpace for $580 million and then sells it six years later to Justin Timberlake for a song - and not even a Justin Timberlake song at that?

Even this dreadful misadventure, by the way, isn't regarded as off-limits by the frank-to-a-fault Twupert: ''We screwed up in every way possible,'' he cheerfully admitted when asked about MySpace in late January.

The phone-hacking scandal in the UK cracked open the door of Murdoch's remote impregnability, offering a glimpse of the ageing man within. The querulous, table-thumping chap who gave evidence to that British parliamentary committee, monitored hawkishly by his beautiful and quick-fisted wife, bore little or no resemblance to the fearsome tycoon we all know from the stories.

And Twitter does the rest. Twupert is impulsive, charming, irascible, fabulously entertaining, and constantly in need of spellcheck.

But scary? Not very. Not any more.

Give Thanks For Twupert - Twittering Off Into Cultdom