Painting Fakes

Stopping the Boats

2012-01-25T10:36:00.001+10:00

So, the talks between Government and Opposition on reviving offshore processing have collapsed. Even though both government and opposition want basically the same thing, each wants their own version of it an neither will compromise. This is undoubtedly good news for asylum seekers, at least in the short term, because Australia's current laws as interpreted by the High Court are more compassionate than either of our main parties would like them to be.

Meanwhile, Tony Abbot has plumbed new depths of absurdity in this increasingly absurd debate, suggesting that a Coalition Government would return boats to Indonesia. As usual, Abbot is a little short on practicality here.

First of all, there is the issue of detecting the boats. The ocean is wide, the boats are small. Often the first Australian authorities know of their existence is when they chug into the dock on Christmas Island.

Secondly, there is the issue of the process of their return. Most of the boats are not seaworthy, so it is irresponsible to send them back unaccompanied. The alternative of towing them back, or ferrying the passengers back on coastguard ships, is unlikely to be popular with our friends in Indonesia - not to mention that while the towing is taking place, other boats can't be intercepted.

Speaking of Indonesia, what do they think of all this? Well from the evidence in the Australian media, they are sensibly staying out of the silliness that passes for Australian politics. However, I suspect that they are likely to say that Australia should solve its own refugee problems, and refuse any such boats permission to enter Indonesian waters. All of which is also very unhelpful.

Hence we have seen Abbot, Australia's most prominent cyclist, back-pedalling furiously, inserting the words "where possible" into the equation and going back to the same old same old of Temporary Protection Visas and reopening the Nauru detention centre.

Which brings me to the real point. Before anything else, good policy is about clearly defining your objectives, and then finding credible ways of achieving them. If you can't find a way of achieving your objective, or the achievement of the objective causes too much collateral damage, you need to change your objective.

Both of our major parties have allowed themselves to be persuaded that the major objective is to stop unauthorised arrivals into Australia. Their main way of achieving this is to provide a deterrent - imprison the smugglers, hold refugees in detention for long periods. When this doesn't work, their response is to up the deterrent - Labor wants to send them to Malaysia, the Coalition wants to send them to Nauru or back to Indonesia and if they can't do that re-introduce Temporary Protection Visas. Flogging is presumably not far off, and some of the proposed solutions already look unconscionably close to drowning.

I have two problems with this. Firstly, I think the objective is wrong. These are people fleeing persecution, war or other forms of suffering, and the prime objective should be to provide them with refuge and safety. This is not to say this needs to happen in Australia. One of the reasons people make these boat jouneys is that neither Indonesia nor Malaysia are signatories to the United Nations refugee convention so asylum seekers are unable to gain any legal status in those countries. Changes in those and other countries would save people a dangerous boat trip. However, until those changes take place, we need to be prepared to deal humanely with those who do arrive here.

Secondly, the collateral damage is too great. The financial cost of our deterrent measures is exhorbitant, and increases as we try to up the deterrent. Latest Immigration Department estimates suggest that re-opening the Nauru detention centre will cost $1.7b. This figure may be inflated for political purposes, but even the previous estimate of just under $1b is exhorbitant.

However, this is a lesser concern to the human cost. Extended detention (especially in overcrowded centres), long periods of uncertainty and deportation are huge sources of trauma for refugees, already traumatised by their experiences in their home countries. These are people whose only "crime" is to seek refuge.

I've already said what I think we should do and if you missed it you can read it here. It's time for us to wake up and rediscover our compassion and generosity.

Flood and Fall

2012-01-20T18:14:00.005+10:00

Finkelstein and Silberman suggest that the book of Genesis began life as a series of orally transmitted stories which were turned into literary form relatively late in the piece. It is possible that the first eleven chapters, in particular, consist of orginally unconnected material, with the genealogies serving as a literary device to tie them together.

If this is true, then it is possible to see that there is not one but four stories of the Fall in Genesis. There is the one we usually associate with it, found in Genesis 2 and 3. Then there are the stories of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4), the Great Flood (Genesis 6-8) and the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11). All four stories feature the same core elements - humans fail to live up to God's standard, God intervenes to punish them or prevent them from doing more harm, and there is a form of redemption at the end. I'll talk about Cain and Abel and Babel later, but first the Flood.

Two things surprise me about this story. The first is that it doesn't give biblical literalists a lot more trouble. Of course I've heard the rather unconvincing explanations about oceanic fossils on mountaintops and geological features caused by wave action (all easily refuted in the light of what has been discovered about geology and paleontology in the 200 years since such claims were last taken seriously by scientists) but the biggest killer for me is how the creatures managed to survive afterwards. Even assuming the herbivores could find enough to eat in the devastated landscape, they would all be eaten by the carnivores in the first few weeks after which the carnivores would starve and the earth would be left to the cockroaches and cane toads.

But enough pot-shots at easy targets. A more interesting surprise is that this story is an incredibly popular children's tale. Of course boats and cute animals do provide a lot of opportunities for illustrators, but this is the darkest of the Fall stories. Here's how it begins in Chapter 6.

⁵ The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. ⁶ The LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. ⁷ So the LORD said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” ⁸ But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.

It's easy for the cute animals to blind us to the scale of destruction. Whereas in the Adam and Eve story there are only two humans, and they are the only ones punished, here there are lots, and everyone gets it. Not only the humans (including presumably infants) but all the animals and birds, despite their innocence of human crime, are given the death sentence. The rest of the tale tells how it was done. The LORD inundates the earth with water, huge volumes of water, for 40 days. It takes 150 days to recede. All terrestrial life is wiped out, save for a small remnant - Noah and his family, and a breeding pair of each species of animal (plus a larger stock of domestic animals), sheltering in a huge boat the LORD has ordered Noah to build.

This is where it doesn't pay to be a literalist or to believe in inerrancy. A god who actually does this kind of destruction would be a monster. Explain that to your Sunday School class. This is one of those difficult stories, and Christians who don't struggle with it are just not paying attention.

I don't know the answer, but let me suggest a couple of things.

Firstly, stories of great floods are widespread around the globe, because flooding is pretty much universal. I can tell you from personal experience that it is extremely unpleasant and destructive, and something of this universal experience is translated and exaggerated in this story. It reminds us of how precarious our lives really are.

Secondly, the story is a classic warning tale. Noah sets a standard for human behaviour. It is not a moral standard - no morality is discussed in this story - it is a standard of fidelity. He obeys God in the building of the ark, but more importantly the first thing he does when he steps on dry land is build an altar, and make a sacrifice. This is how we should all act, it says.

Thirdly, the story contrasts an imagined past with a much better, safer present.

²¹ The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.
²² “As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.”

Just as the LORD made clothes for Adam and Eve after the fall, so here he promises future protection to Noah's descendents. The readers of the story need not fear a repeat of such desctruction, because God favours them and promises to care for them. This promise is open-ended. The rainbow is seen to this day as a symbol of hope, or new beginnings, of good times following bad. As we face the possibility of another ecological catastrophe, perhaps this story can give us hope.

God's Undertaker

2012-01-16T20:46:00.001+10:00

Oxford mathematics professor and Christian apologist John C Lennox has recently acheived a high profile in Australia due to an appearance on the ABC's Q&A. He has also debated noted atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer. All of which means that sooner or later I was bound to check him out.

God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? is Lennox's summary of his arguments against the "scientific atheism" of the likes of Dawkins and Shermer. Its central question is whether the evidence of science has really killed off the idea of God. His main antagonist in this debate seems to be Dawkins, and a number of chapters in this book are direct refutations of claims made by Dawkins - that the process of natural selection is sufficient to explain the origin of life, that an interventionist god violates the laws of nature, that David Hume's arguments are a conclusive philosophical refutation of the possibility of miracles.

In the process, Lennox brings to bear the findings and observations of a range of distinguished scientists - Nobel Prize winners, Fellows of the Royal Society, professors at prestigious universities, and so forth. Some of these are Christian, others are agnostic and some are even atheists, but they appear to share the view that science does not of itself disprove religion. On what grounds?

Well, interestingly, the central theme of this book is a revival of the "argument from design", roundly mocked by atheists in the form popularly proposed by William Paley in the 18th Century - the analogy of discovering a watch and inferring the existence of a watchmaker. Paley, and Lennox, both suggest that life as we know it is irreducably complex, that it could not come about by chance and the only possible explanation is that it has an intelligent designer.

Lennox gives this argument a 21st Century makeover using the findings of modern physics, cosmology, genetics, and even paleontology. Not surpisingly, as a mathematician he applies a liberal dose of probability calculation. His calculations quickly exhausted by limted maths, but his conclusions are clear.

Firstly, he highlights the sensitivity of the boundary conditions for life set by our universe's physical constraints. The slightest difference in such parameters as the nuclear background radiation required for the creation of carbon, the ratio of the nuclear strong force to the electromagnetic force or the rate of entropy would make life impossible. There is no theoretcial reason, he says, why things have to be the incredibnly improbable way they are, yet somehow they got to be just right for our arrival.

His most sustained attention, however, is focused on the probability of the chance emergence of the building blocks of life - amino acids, proteins, DNA and RNA. "Pure" evolutionists argue for the emergence of these molecules gradually, over a period of billions of years. Yet the information encoded even in amino acids is incredibly complex. How could this complexity come about by chance. His calculations of the probability of these chance develops produce mind-bogglingly large numbers, and he concludes that in practice they amount to impossiblity within the time-frames available.

What's most facinating is that of course Dawkins et al also know this. Their response is that obviously there is something more than pure chance going on - nature is able to select for certain things, so that once they appear they self-perpetuate and accumulate. Lennox turns this argument on its head, arguing that this can only be the case if the pattern for life is already existent, so that the process of evolution somehow "seeks" that pattern. In Lennox's hands, Dawkins' attempts to demonstrate the possibility of chance producing life turn out to be examples of intelligent design. Dawkins's computer simulations only work if they are already encoded with their end goal.

I can hardly do justice to the full scope of his arguments. His maths is beyond me, as is his physics, cosmology and genetics. His array of eminent sources is certainly impressive as is his own scientific pedigree, and he is certainly not to be dismissed lightly, but in the end I can only take his world for it.

It seems to me that he is far from proving his case and perhaps that is not his intent. He has strayed into realms of such massive uncertainty that in the end we just have to say we don't know. We know a lot about how things work now. We have mapped the human genome and the extent of the galaxy. We have detailed knowledge of biochemistry and a huge, although partial, fossil database. However, the task of projecting backwards from this evidence to its origin is so incredibly speculative that it will inevitably be tainted by our worldview. Lennox sees God, Dawkins sees chance. Which God, or which chance? These are questions of philosophy and theology, not of science. In the end, Lennox convinces that the debate is still alive, and Dawkins' strident claims of victory are hugely premature. Rumours of God's death are greatly exaggerated.

The Kindness of Strangers

2012-01-09T18:59:00.001+10:00

Speaking of the Fall, my relaxing holiday reading this Saturnalia, has been AJ Mackinnon's lovely travel story The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow. Mackinnon tells the story of his journey through the waterways of Europe, from Wales to the Black Sea, in a 10 ft sailing dinghy. It's glorious fun, with the odd hair-raising incident to keep the adrenaline going. Like to try crossing the English Channel in a dinghy? Without any larger craft accompanying? Like to be accosted by pirates in remote Bulgaria? Like to be stuck in Serbia as NATO is about to begin bombing?

Apart from the comedy and high farce, one of his most persistent themes is the kindness of strangers. Just when he is about to despair, his boat is ready to fall to pieces, he is starving and out of cash in a Visa-less country, or some other disaster strikes, some complete stranger steps up with carpentry tools and expertise, good home cooked food, a towrope, a place of shelter, a kind word or gesture. Across the length and breadth of Europe, pirates and Milosevic notwithstanding, kindness far outweighs cruelty or indifference.

Meanwhile, in a different kind of fall, my cousin and fellow blogger Roo had a mountain biking accident on New Year's Eve. No permanent damage but a painful injury meant his son had to call the ambulance and they had to retrieve him from bushland. Exploiting the privileges of confirmation bias to the full he says: "People were so wonderful, generous and helpful. Sorry, my Christian brethren, but I don't think humans are 'fallen' at all."

So twice proves it, and it led my thoughts to Creation Spirituality and a book I read years ago by one of the founders of the CS movement, Matthew Fox, called On Becoming a Musical Mystical Bear. Despite its unblievably kitschy title and equally kitschy 1970s cover, this is actually a brilliant book which has had a huge influence on me over the past 20 years.

Fox's basic idea is that creation represents the "original blessing". He opposes to the life-denying tendencies of traditional theology, influenced by the neo-Platonists and passed to us via Augustine and the likes of Thomas a Kempis, a life-affirming, joyous spirituality based on appreciating and enjoying God's gift of creation, and working fervently to preserve its goodness in all its forms.

For we have numerous instances in Western spiritualities of life-denying rather than a life-affirming spirituality.... Repression, not expression; guilt, not pleasure; heaven, not this life; sentimentality, not justice; mortification, not developing of talents: these are the earmarks of what Western spirituality has for the most part done with the thought of Plato and the neo-Platonists (who always preferred a different world to this one); of Augustine (who...dichotomised the body and soul, man and woman, creation and grace and founded Chrisitan faith on belief in the Fall rather than in creation).... (These spiritualities) can lead to life-denial and deep human pessimism. Yet they have invariably been the more popular and influential spirituality in Christianity.

By contrast, Fox has spent his life trying to build an alternative kind of spirituality. He works towards a "creation-centred, that is, a life-affirming spirituality", knowing "how to enjoy life without feeling guilty", while at the same time "preparing to 'stick out his chin' for justice's sake - that is to share life whatever the personal cost. This tension is the substratum on which an adult, creation-centred spirituality is based. It is the spirituality that Jesus practiced...."

Fox doesn't deny the Fall, in that he recognises that things in the world are not as they should be. There are still pirates, NATO still drops bombs, people like Milosevic still get to ruin countries. He emphasises the prophetic tradition which calls for justice and opposes oppression. Yet he doesn't believe the presence of evil in the world negates the basic goodness of God's creation, the value of this life or the image of God which each of us carries. We can be kind to stangers - indeed, we often are - because that is how God made us, and that is how God is.

Discovering We Are Naked

2012-01-06T15:38:00.000+10:00

Prompted by reading an essay by Wendell Berry, I've been thinking about the second and third chapters of Genesis and what they have to say about our current environmental predicament.

Many scholars think these two chapters represent the earliest Hebrew version of the creation account, with the opening chapter added at a later date. They record the creation of humanity, and the fall of the first humans from their state of innocence.

We are accustomed to think of ourselves as somewhat separate from nature, as shown in the diagram below.

We understand that we are, to some extent, natural beings. We know we need to eat and drink, that we get sick. However, we see ourselves as fundamentally different from the rest of creation. Hence, we see "nature" as something to be conserved, managed or exploited by us. This is why we are able to talk so easily about balancing environmental and economic factors, for instance, as if the economy was something seperate from the environment, or nature was just one factor of production.

This is not the picture I see in the second chapter of Genesis.

...the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

We are made of dirt. God did not make the earth, and then make us. He formed us from the materials that were already there. We are wholly creatures of the earth, coming from the dust and returning to it.

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

We live in the garden, and our primary task is its care. The garden was not planted for us, it was planted by God for reasons which are not explained. Instead, we were created - from the same materials used to create it - to care for it on God's behalf. The diagram should really look like the one below.

We are a part of God's creation, with our own job to do and our own particular characteristics amongst all the other diverse creatures God has made. So how did we come to see ourselves as separate from it? Chapter 3 gives us the answer.

The serpent, it says, tempted Eve with the prospect of becoming "like God, knowing good and evil". There is no word in the English language adequate to translate the Hebrew word yada, rendered here as "knowing". When we think of "knowing", we think of intellectual knowledge, of information. Yet the word is used in a wide variety of contexts. It serves, for instance, as a euphemism for sexual intercourse, as a description for intimate friendship or acquaintance, as an abilty to discern or decide, to declare or instruct.

Good and evil, the serpent suggested, would become Adam and Eve's constant companions, the subject of their deepest thoughts. They would not only recognise good and evil when they saw it, they would declare some things good and others evil. They would no longer simply occupy their place in the natural world, they would stand above it as its judges, arbiters and controllers.

The results were immediate. They knew themselves to be naked, and they hid. They were no longer comfortable in their own skins, in their natural state. They needed something more - leaves, animal skins. They began to exploit nature, to cover their nakedness and make up for their discomfort with who they were. They began to justify themselves (another aspect of yada) and to make excuses.

The LORD understands that there is no going back. Indeed, he himself placed the cherubim with the flaming sword to bar that way. The human dream of a return to Arcadia, that state of blissful nature, is just that. We have knowledge and we cannot un-know. The question is, how will we use it? Will we remember our own nakedness, our own vulnerability? Will we remember that we are made out of dirt, the same substance that made the forests, the animals , the birds? Will we learn once again to tend the garden? Or will we persist in defining good and evil in a way that ensures our return to the dirt from whence we came?

The Bible Unearthed

2012-01-02T18:53:00.000+10:00

Happy New Year everyone. I trust 2012 is a better year than 2011 or, if 2011 was the best year of your life so far, that at least the comedown is unspectacular.

In between eating, sleeping and watching cricket I've been reading The Bible Unearthed, an earlier book by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, authors of David and Solomon. This book operates on a broader canvas, providing an overview of the latest (at least up to their time of writing in 2001) archaeological evidence about the times in which the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, are set.

Finkelstein and Silbermann are serious and distinguished historians and archaeologists, not eccentric amateurs like Tony Bushby or Stephan Huller. They carefully cite and sift their sources, build their arguments from evidence and are careful to avoid overclaiming. Nonetheless it is important to remember that archaeological evidence is intrinsically partial. In a country which has been continuously occupied for millennia, there is little that is undisturbed, and many key sites can't be excavated because they are still being used. For instance, there is little archaeological data available about the Jerusalem temple because the site is currently the second holiest mosque in Islam and digging it up would be considered sacrilege. Another major discovery, or another decade or two of patient research, could turn the whole thing on its head.

Still, there's a surprising amount of evidence. The absence of any trace of the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) doesn't tell us much, because a small band of nomadic pastoralists would be unlikely to leave much evidence. However, the absence of any independent verification of the Exodus is more telling. The cumulative failure to uncover any evidence of a mass emigration from Egypt, a large group of people wandering in the Negev, or a sudden devastating conquest in Canaan, types and scales of events which would leave an imprint on the landscape and on the cities of the time, provides a much stronger suggestion that the exodus and invasion are not actual historical events.

Other bits of evidence are more positive. For instance, a comparison of the locations of events in Genesis with archaeological data reveals that the historical setting of the partiarchal tales is not the world of the Bronze Age where the Biblical chronology would place them, but of seventh century Canaan. Whatever the origin of these stories, the authors of Genesis have placed them in their own world, in the places their readers would know and recognise.

It's also fascinating to get a picture of the social conditions in the time of the Israelite kingdom. According to their best evidence, the settled population of Israel and Judah in the time of David and Solomon would have been around 50,000 people. The peak population of the kingdom of Israel in the time of Jereboam II would have been around 350,000, while that of Judah in the time of Hezekiah would have reached no more than 100,000. Of these, most were illiterate peasants, with a small population of "elites" - soldiers, priests and royal officials. These two kingdoms at their peak were closely integrated, economically and politically, with the empires of the Near East, particularly the Assyrians and later the Babylonians.

These are just samples of the wealth of evidence the authors bring to bear. The picture that emerges from their combination of archaeology and biblical scholarship is strongly at odds with the literal view of the Bible. The core of the Old Testament history as we know it - what biblical scholars call the "Deuteronomistic history" including the early versions of the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings as well as edited versions of the rest of the Pentateuch - was created in seventh century Judah, especially the time of King Josiah. This is not to say that the stories themselves were created then - they are almost certainly drawn from pre-existing oral and in some cases written accounts. But the stories were adapted and retold to fit the purpose of Josiah's court, to tell a story which united the Hebrews as a nation, justified Josiah's territorial ambitions (and those of his grandfather Hezekiah) and their religious reforms which centred the worship of Yahweh in Jerusalem and outlawed alternative religious practices.

What is presented in these stories is not so much a history as a theory of history. According to this theory, Yahweh chose the Hebrews to be his own special people and gave them the land of Canaan. However, in return the people and leaders needed to remain faithful to Yahweh. In the times they were faithful - during the time of David, for instance, and in the reigns of Jehosophat, Hezekiah and Josiah - Yahweh blessed them and protected them. When they were unfaithful he punished them by allowing them to be invaded by the surrounding nations, particularly the great empires. The conclusion was that Israel should remain faithful to Yahweh, obeying His law, keeping separate from the surrounding peoples and forsaking all other gods.

Unfortunately, on Finkelstein and Silberman's reading the evidence is at odds with this theory. The glories of David and Solomon are at best exaggerations, contradicted by the archaeological evidence of a poor, sparsely populated region with no evidence of widespread literacy or centralised rule. The most prosperous periods in the Northern kingdom were those of the Omride kings, particularly the notorious Ahab. The eras of greatest prosperity in Judah were those of the "bad" Davidic kings Ahaz and Manasseh, whose cooperation with the Assyrians led to increased wealth and booming populations. By contrast, the kings most highly praised by the Deuternomistic authors - Hezekiah and Josiah - followed a course which led to disaster. Hezekiah managed to avoid the destruction of Jerusalem but the rest of Judah was devastated as the Assyrians put down his revolt. Similarly Josiah's ambitions led to the invasion and ultimate destruction of the kingdom.

The Deuternomists said Israel should isolate itself from the surrounding nations, pursue ambitious territorial goals, and rely on Yahweh for military assistance. The lesson of the archaeological evidence, on the other hand, is that if you want your kingdom to prosper you should integrate with the surrounding peoples, appease the great powers and trade to your heart's content. This is not, of course, without its dangers for a small kingdom. You can back the wrong imperial power, as the later northern kings did. If the empires change their policy, you are powerless to resist. You can lose who you are.

This is where the genius of these stories lies. Of all the peoples conquered and dispersed by the Assyrians and Babylonians, how many retain their identity to this day? The ideas of the Deuternomists were disastrous as political strategies, but as strategies for cultural survival they were brilliant, motivating the return from exile, the creation of an enduring Jewish identity, and the spawning of a set of religious ideas that sit at the base of the two largest world religions today. It doesn't have to be history to do that.

Value in the Dressing Room

2011-12-28T10:17:00.000+10:00

It being the lazy post-Christmas season I'll just have to write you a post about Cricket. American readers might like to wait for something else to pop up, or else try this helpful explanation of the game, or perhaps this more detailed one.

Many commentators have been calling for the heads of veteran batsmen Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey, but both have been picked for the Boxing Day Test. Australia's new Chairman of Selectors John Inverarity explains that both players provide "great value in the dressing room".

This is is obviously a good thing as both have been spending a lot of time there lately. They are clearly needed in the team, because while these two experienced players are devoting themselves to the dressing room, some other players are letting the side down.

Of course the bowlers can't be blamed. They routinely spend long hours with their mates, followed by a brief stint batting and a swift return to the bosom of the team. This means you can be fairly relaxed about which bowlers you select, since they all provide pretty much the same dressing room value. This policy particularly applies to spinners - you can practically pick any spinner you like. However, there are exceptions. Nathan Hauritz, for instance, provided great dressing room value early in his Test career. However, the longer he stayed in the team the more inclination he showed to stay away from his mates, and eventually the selectors' patience ran out.

No, it's the batsmen you need to worry most about. Some of the recent additions to the Test team have shown a worrying lack of dressing room form. David Warner is a case in point. Selectors had high hopes for him, with his reputation for quickfire batting stints followed by long dressing room contributions. So far in Test cricket his performances in this regard have been adequate, but there have been some alarming lapses. The warning signs were there in the second innings of the Brisbane Test, with his failure to return to the dressing room until right at the end of the game, but the second innings in Hobart must really have the selectors worrying. Warner went out to bat at the very start of the innings and failed to return for more than five hours, only reluctantly dragging himself back to the room when the last of his batting partners refused to stay with him any longer. No doubt his captain will have something to say about this.

Which leaves me wondering about the recent dropping of Phil Hughes. Early in his carreer, Hughes appeared almost incapable of spending time in the dressing room. In his first two tests, on tour in South Africa, he was absent for over 12 hours. Little wonder he was dropped early in the following tour of England. Nonetheless, his form in the current Australian summer has been a huge improvement, with less than two hours absence in the recent series against New Zealand. His axing for the India Test is baffling to say the least, especially when his replacement, Ed Cowan, seemed determined to do everything in his power to avoid the dressing room in the first innings against India on Boxing Day.

Of course the strains of captaincy are taking their toll on Michael Clarke, with long absences in South Africa and again in Brisbane an obvious sign that he is taking some time to settle into the role. This is why Ponting and especially Hussey are so important to the team. Ponting's contributions have been slipping a little of late but he has been a consistent contributor over the past two years, and his performance in his home Test in Hobart was outstanding, with all but an hour spent in the company of his team. However, with Ponting's recent form a little patchy and Clarke struggling, Hussey has to bear more of the load than he really should. His performance in the New Zealand series was world class, with only 66 minutes in absentia across the two Tests. The man they call Mr Cricket is a durable, determined performer but surely he can't be expected to bear this kind of load every game. Some of the young players will need to start stepping up soon.

Happy Saturnalia

2011-12-23T13:13:00.000+10:00

It being Christmas, I've been thinking about Saturnalia, of course, and this led me to remember a fascinating passage in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Writing in 601 AD, Pope Gregory sends Abbot Mellitus to help out Augustine, the first Roman missionary to the Anglo-Saxons in Britain. Among various instructions, he says this:

When, therefore, Almighty God shall bring you to the most reverend Bishop Augustine, our brother, tell him what I have, upon mature deliberation on the affair of the English, determined upon, viz., that the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they have been accustomed.

And because they have been used to slaughter many oxen in the sacrifices to devils, some solemnity must be exchanged for them on this account, as that on the day of the dedication, or the nativities of the holy martyrs, whose relics are there deposited, they may build themselves huts of the boughs of trees, about those churches which have been turned to that use from temples, and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting, and no more offer beasts to the Devil, but kill cattle to the praise of God in their eating, and return thanks to the Giver of all things for their sustenance; to the end that, whilst some gratifications are outwardly permitted them, they may the more easily consent to the inward consolations of the grace of God. For there is no doubt that it is impossible to efface everything at once from their obdurate minds; because he who endeavours to ascend to the highest place, rises by degrees or steps, and not by leaps.

Augustine and his helpers were not sent on a destructive mission. They were not sent to wipe the slate clean of anything that had any relation to paganism and start all over. The were not afraid of paganism, because they were confident that Christ would prevail over it. They also understood that nothing was so universally human as the love of a good party. Their parties and places of celebration were to be lovingly and gently Christianised, the good aspects kept and the evil or dangerous ones phased out.

This gentle, inclusive spirit surely also inhabited the Christian adoption of aspects of the Roman festival of Saturnalia into the Christmas celebration. Saturnalia, the festival of the Roman harvest god Saturn, ran from December 17 to the winter solstice on December 23. It was a celebration, a time of feasting and gift giving, a holiday in which there were both public and private feasts. It was also a festival of misrule, in which masters served their slaves, children ruled their parents, and the festival was presided over by a Lord of Misrule whose absurd and chaotic commmands must be obeyed.

The mid-winter date of Christmas is not a great match for the Gospel stories of Jesus' birth with their shepherds sleeping in the fields and Joseph and Mary travelling cross-country to Bethlehem. Yet what could be more Christian than an upside down festival like Saturnalia? How better to celebrate the birth of a king who entered his city on a donkey and died for his people, who took little children on his knee, healed lepers, touched bleeding women, befriended Samaritans and gave it to the chief priests and leaders of Israel with both barrels?

Wouldn't it be great if we had our own Saturnalia. We could go and sleep in tents and demountable huts while homeless people and refugees occupied our homes. We could wait on the tables of the starving. Our politicians could answer their own phones and open their own letters while their admin staff made decisions of state. It would be thrilling and dangerous. Some of the decisions of our misrulers might turn out to be better than those of our regular rulers. Perhaps we might even make it permanent.

Happy Saturnalia everyone!

More Lives of Jesus 5: The Twin Deception

2011-12-21T09:11:00.000+10:00

When I reviewed Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ earlier this year, I made the mistake of assuming he had invented the idea of Jesus' twin brother. I was wrong. The idea comes from this exceedingly odd book, The Twin Deception, by Tony Bushby, published by the small independent Queensland publisher Joshua Books in 2006.

Bushby is a prolific writer of Christian pseudo-history with at least six similar voumes to his name. There is a lot of familiar stuff here, including hidden messages, concealed identities and Catholic cover-ups, but Bushby takes the art-form to a whole new level.

I don't mean his writing. His grammar is questionable, his prose convoluted and his telling of his story is so incoherent as to be almost incomprehensible. Nonetheless, the extent of his reworking of the tale is beyond anything attempted by the likes of Barbara Theiring, Stephan Huller or even the redoubtable Michael Biagent.

In summary his story is this. Jesus had a twin brother, Judas Thomas. These two boys were the children of the Jewish serving woman Mary and the Roman Emperor Tiberius. Judas, the elder of the brothers, became the leader of the Essenes, a militant Jewish sect, before travelling to Rome to attempt to take his father's throne by force. There he was arrested, sentenced to crucifixion but escaped by switching places with Simon of Cyrene. As a result he lost his freedom, was sold into slavery by his brother Jesus and ended his life in India.

Meanwhile Jesus was initiated into the mysteries of Osiris in Egypt, inherited his brother's position as head of the Essenes but fell out with them because he attempted to reveal their secrets to the common people. This led to a journey to Britain where he spread his secret to the British Jews before finally being stoned to death in London.

This will of course leave you wondering how the story came to be told as it is in our bibles and of course Bushby has the answer. Christianity as we know it was invented at the Council of Nicea, called by the Emperor Constantine, a descendant of Jesus. This was not, as we have been led to believe, a gathering of Christian bishops (there being no such thing at the time) but a gathering of the teachers of a wide range of religions current in the Empire at that time. Constantine was worried at the divisiveness of multiple religions and wanted to decide on a single faith to unite his empire. In the end the Council, at Constantine's urging, decided to create a new religion, based around the persons of Constantine's ancestor Jesus and his brother Judas, which combined elements of the cults of Caesar, Krishna, Mithra, Horus and Zeus. Bishop Eusebius was given the job of creating scriptures to support this religion and the New Testament was the result.

Of course the "true knowledge" of the existence of the twins and the fictitious nature of the Gospels was not completely suppressed. It was known to the Catholic heirarchy, preserved by the initiates of various secret societies, leaked out in the works of the Renaissance masters and had to be suppressed again with a complete rewriting of the New Testament in the late 15th century.

It's useful at this point to keep in mind Michael Shermer's criterion for assessing conspiracy theories - the likelihood of a conspiracy theory being true is inversely proportional to the number of people who would have to be involved. The cover-up described by Bushby involves literally millions of people over almost seventeen centuries. Surely someone would have had an attack of consience and released the true story by now?

What evidence does Bushby have for these astonishing claims? It's difficult to tell. Most of his sources predate the 20th century. He cites a number of obscure and out-of-print 18th and 19th century historians, and has a love for 19th century editions of the Encyclopedia Brittanica and Catholic Encyclopedia, from which he quotes extensively. This means, of course, that most of his sources can't be verified.

Where they can, the result is not encouraging. Virtually every time he quotes the New Testament he either misquotes it or distorts its meaning. A classic example is his brief section on "the biblical evidence of Jesus' twin". He cites the parallel passages in Mark 6 and Matthew 13 which refer to Jesus' brothers, who include "Judas called Thomas", and relates these to the references to the apostle Thomas "the twin" in John's gospel. The problem is that the Mark and Matthew passages don't mention "Judas called Thomas", merely "Judas" or "Jude", and there is no suggestion that he is Jesus' twin. Hence the connection with Thomas in John is completely spurious.

Other sources that I could easily check showed the same pattern. He cites the story of the conflict over Easter in Britain in the 6th century as evidence that the original British church did not celebrate Easter. Yet the original of this story in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (which Bushby appears to have only read at second hand) makes it clear that both sides of the dispute celebrated Easter and the source of the conflict was the method of calculating the correct date.

Bushby goes so far as to cite Geoffrey of Monmouth's fantastical History of the Kings of Britain as if it were a real work of history. Even then he misquotes it, confusing a passage about the imaginary king Cymbeline, "a powerful warrior whom Augustus Caesar had reared in his household and equipped with weapons" and the following paragraph, "In those days was born our Lord Jesus...", as evidence that Augustus armed Jesus and sent him to Britain. If this small sample is any indication, none of his citations can be trusted.

He even struggles to get his own story straight. The Gospel accounts of the crucifixion are described both as inaccurate retellings of Judas Thomas' supposed crucifixion in Rome, and veiled accounts of Jesus' initiation into the Egyptian mysteries. Jesus is both the son of Tiberius, and armed and dispatched by Augustus. The Gospels were invented by Eusebius in the 4th century, then again by the church authorities in the 15th. Bushby is able to both have and eat multiple servings of cake.

So why did I bother with this tedious, badly written nonsense? And why am I boring you with it? I have to admit I wondered that myself as I skimmed the latter part of the book searching in vain for something that made sense.

The answer is that these retellings have cultural resonance for 21st century Western readers. While Bushby is a little too out there even for Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code used the various common pseudo-historical tricks to turn a second-rate detective novel into a publishing phenomenon. The religion sections of secular bookstores contain as many works of pseudo-history as they do collections of the Dalai Lama's sayings. Even Bushby's extreme left-field ideas found an echo in Pullman's decidedly more mainstream treatment of the subject. Why is this stuff so popular?

Partly, of course, it's fashionable to take pot-shots at the church as Western society grows into its own increasing secularism. However, these stories also provide the same fascination as a well constructed science fiction or fantasy world. The boring, hum-drum, incompetent society in which we live conceals another, far more exciting reality in which super-competent, malevolent rulers conspire to deceive ordinary people for their own gain. The suggestion of historicity in these claims, however flimsy, just adds to the excitement and the thrill of horror.

It's all nonsense, but perhaps there's an upside. With a bit of luck, Tony Bushby may get to have twice as much fun at Christmas as the rest of us!

Answer on Asylum Seekers

2011-12-16T10:03:00.000+10:00

Back in September I wrote to Julia Gillard, Immigration Minister Chris Evans and my local member to express the view that both offshore processing and immigration detention should be abandoned and asylum seekers allowed to live in the community. Not long after, the High Court ruled that offshore processing is illegal and the Gillard government accidentially arrived at a policy somewhat similar to my suggestions.

Finally, I have a reply to my letter to Chris Bowen from Kate Falvey, Director of Protection Policy in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Some of the things she says are as follows.

You will be pleased to know that on 18 October 2010, the Government announced that it would move the majority of children, and a significant number of vulnerable families, into the community by the end of June 2011, by expanding the community detention program. This commitment was met.

As at 21 November 2011, the Minister had approved 2382 clients (1266 adults and 1116 children) for accommodating in the community detention program since October 2010. Of these, 1292 clients (774 adults and 518 children) are residing in the community under these arrangements. Around 1000 clients have left the program after being granted protection visas.

On 25 November 2011, the Hon Chris Bowen MP, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, announced a new approach to the management of asylum seekers. Following an initial mandatory detention period for health, security and identity checks, eligible boat arrivals who do not pose risks to the community will be progressively considered for community placement on bridging visas while their asylum claims are assessed.

Asylum seekers on bridging visas will have the right to work and support themselves, and will also have access to necessary health services. Some will also be eligible for support services through the existing Department of Immigration and Citizenship funded programs such as the Asylum Seeker Assistance Scheme and the Community Assistance Support Program, which will be determined on a case by case basis.

Astute readers will note the weasel words in this letter - the "majority" of children, a "significant number" of "vulnerable" families (presumably some families are invulnerable), "eligible" boat arrivals will be "progressively considered" for community placement, and "some" will be eligible for support services. This is a cautious bureaucratic document which leaves a lot of wriggle room.

Nonetheless it's a move in the right direction. Community detention represents a sort of half-way house, much like parole in the prison system. The Immigration Fact Sheet on the program says:

Community detention enables people to reside in the community without needing to be escorted. These arrangements do not give a person any lawful status in Australia (for example, no visa is granted at this stage), nor does it give them the rights and entitlements of a person living in the community on a visa (for example, the right to study or work). The person remains administratively in immigration detention while living in the community....Conditions include a mandatory requirement to report regularly to the department and/or their service provider, and reside at the address specified by the minister.

This is problematic because they still remain in limbo, with no way to support themselves and limited opportunity to engage in meaningful activity. However, at least they have basic freedom of movement and a home environment rather than a traumatic institutional one.

The bridging visa option is a further improvement. People are allowed to start establishing their lives, to work and become independent. However, it does provide less security for people - they have to jump through the hoops to be approved for discretionary assistance programs run by the Red Cross (see the fact sheets here and here) and you can be sure many will slip between the cracks.

The letter doesn't mention the High Court decision but it is clear the court has set the cat among the pigeons. Policy is moving fast, cautious public servants are having to think on their feet, and there is an opportunity for those who are looking for humane solutions to get ahead of those who see only danger. I'd still like to see more generosity, but at last after years of the zero sum game of detention we seem to be moving in a more generous direction. May we keep moving forward!

The Art of Persuasion

2011-12-08T18:39:00.001+10:00

Still ploughing through my rapidly diminishing pile of periodicals. Right now I'm reading Zadok Perspectives No 112, Spring 2011, and it includes a lovely lucid article by John Dickson, director of the Centre for Public Christianity and one of Australia's foremost Christian apologists, reprinted from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Dickson is talking about the very same thing as Michael Shermer, confirmation bias or as Dickson calls it, the "Backfire Effect". We readily believe evidence which supports our pre-existing views, while contrary evidence not only fails to convince us, it often "backfires" and strengthens our erroneous opinions.

His point is the same as Shermer's - that our beliefs are so rarely dictated by the evidence, and instead we read the evidence with beliefs in hand. This effect applies equally to Christians and atheists, the those on the left and the right, to those who refuse to see the evidence that there is a real physiological basis for sexual orientation and those who refuse to accept the empirical evidence that Christian belief really does make you a better person.

What hope is there for us, if we are so intractably unreasonable? Dickson turns to Aristotle's On Rhetoric for an explanation. Aristotle identified three controlling factors for persuasion. The first, logos, is about evidence and reason. According to Aristotle we all like to believe that we believe on the basis of logos, but this is rarely the whole story. Two other factors are also in play. Pathos is our emotional reaction to an idea or proposition. We are more likely to believe an idea or assertion we find pleasant or fitting, less likely to believe one we find repugnant. The final factor is ethos, the social or ethical dimension to belief. We accept the ideas of people we like and trust, disbelieve those we dislike or distrust, irrespective of the strength of their evidence.

What counts in debate is a combination of intellectual, aesthetic and social factors. I find it interesting that Christian believers will very often admit that their convictions emerged in this threefold way; that their faith rests on the holistic basis of logos, pathos and ethos. For Christianity, indeed, satisfies all three dimensions of our existence. But what is especially interesting to me as I reflect on Aristotle and the research on the ''backfire effect'' is the way sceptics rarely admit that their scepticism rests on the same combination of reasons.

Typically, my atheist mates have protested that, for them, it is entirely a matter of evidence. "If there were more proof," they say, "I would readily believe." I don't believe them for a moment.
Yes, evidence is important, but it is not the only factor. I have spoken to too many atheists over the years who start out with a "proof" line of argument only to eventually admit that their reasons for rejecting religion have equally to do with some painful event in the past that called into question God's existence or some ugly encounter with a religious hypocrite that caused them to distrust religious claims. Personal and social factors prove as important as intellectual factors in the formation of belief and unbelief, whether on religious, ethical, political or social matters.

Whether on climate change, politics, religion or ethics, we do not change our minds on the basis of facts alone. Indeed, they may even bolster contrary views. What environmental campaigners, refugee advocates, gay rights lobbyists, atheist evangelists and churches need if they are to be persuasive are not just more facts but a narrative that stirs our hearts and a social movement that wins our trust.

Development Projects Shot Down

2011-12-05T17:09:00.001+10:00

Amongst the huge backlog of periodicals I am currently skimming my way through is an issue of Target, the quarterly magazine of aid agency TEAR Australia, which celebrates 40 years of TEAR's operation. We've been supporting TEAR for almost 30 of those 40 years, signing up as soon as we had an income in 1983. I love the way TEAR has always focused on working with people and local agencies, and held to its dual role of supporting and empowering people in the third world where the problems are experienced, and working for change in the first world where most of them are caused.

Deborah Storie's editorial provides food for thought.

We have a lot to celebrate! Yet over recent decades, if conversations linger and range broadly enough, a darker shadow story is also told. Despite all their achievements, people testify that their lives are harder and more precarious, or that they are worried about the future. Why? Common themes across countries and regions emerge. People speak of losing access to natural resources: land, forests and water. They say the weather is changing, rainfall is less reliable, harvests are disappointing and severe weather events are more frequent.... People speak of fear and of violence, of conscription and coercion, of looting, rape and death, of soldiers, police and militia, of guns. Conflict and militarisation are increasing.

I wondered: are they? Or is this just people's impression, current problems looming larger than past ones? I remember quite vividly a project from my early days as a TEAR supporter. They had a system where you could follow a particular project closely, getting regular updates on progress and analysis of results. We followed a project called Vision Terudo in Uganda. It was a classic and very effective community development project, run by a church-based regional organisation in Uganda employing local people, doing a variety of community development projects focused on things like health, food security, reforestation, and capacity building. Results were good, people's lives were clearly improved.

However, it didn't provide the warm assurance of progress we had been hoping and praying for, because after we had followed for a while the whole thing was wiped out in one night of violence with the onset of civil war. Participants were killed, crops destroyed, livestock stolen, staff had to flee for their lives. It certainly gave us an education in the precariousness of life in Uganda, but it was hard not to give up in despair.

Is it any worse now? Has militarisation and violence really increased? I asked Google, and it led me to the website of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and the revealing graph below showing military spending, in 2009 US dollar values, from 1988 to 2010.

So the short answer is "yes", but the long answer is both more interesting and more depressing. From the end of the 1980s, with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War, global military spending declined substantially, from over $1.4 trillion US in 1988 to just over $962b in 1998. Remember the "Peace Dividend"? Yet since then, the trend has been all upwards as the potent combination of militant Islam and concern over control of the world's diminishing oil reserves has raised the global temperature. By 2008 spending was back at its 1988 level and it has kept growing.

Of course the USA is the main culprit here by a huge margin, accounting for almost half of global arms spending and more than half the increase since 1998. However, the rest of us are also in on the act. Only Central and Western Europe have shown no significant increase since 1998. Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania (in which Australia is the dominant power) and the Middle East have all shown increases of between one third and half in real terms since 1998.

No wonder we are fearful for the future. Our looming ecological crisis means the need to work together is more urgent than ever. We need global trust and cooperation to manage the transition to low carbon economies and renewable energy, and to halt the destruction of ecosystems and natural resources. Yet we are busy tooling up for more war, eyeing each other across increasingly tense borders. Can we pull back from this rearmament, or will we solve our ecological arguments through war and conquest?

How Not to Sell the Carbon Tax

2011-12-02T17:55:00.001+10:00

The Australian Senate passed the final version of the "Clean Energy Future" bill (in other words, the Carbon Tax) on 8 November, amidst much fanfare and no small amount of criticism. This means that assuming Tony Abbott is just posturing when he says a Coalition government would repeal it, from June next year it will cost money to release carbon into the atmosphere. $23 per tonne, at least at the beginning.

This is not a popular measure. Over the past few years support for a carbon price and carbon trading has eroded. Big polluters have sowed seeds of doubt, funding visits and lecture tours by climate change deniers like Lord Monckton and mounting scare campaigns about the damage to our economy.

Meanwhile, I've been going through the pile of periodicals and occasional publications that has been growing in my in-tray for the past eight months. One of the little gems I found was a Commonwealth Government publication called What a carbon price means for you: the pathway to a clean energy future. It was put out a few months ago, when the legislation was first introduced to Parliament, and it is the major promotional document for the package.

It would have to be the oddest piece of marketing I have ever seen. The summary page lists four key points.

9 in 10 households will receive some combination of tax cuts and increased payments to help with the cost of living impact of the carbon price.

Over 1 milion extra Australians will no longer need to lodge a tax return.

Almost 6 million households will be assisted to meet their average price impact.

Over 4 million households will get assistance that is at least 20 percent more than their average price impact.

What's missing from this summary? Oh yes, that's right, that whole climate change thing. Damn, we forgot all about that!

The rest is not much better. Three of the twenty pages are devoted to talking about reducing carbon pollution. On none of these pages is there any explanation of how a carbon tax will help with this. Instead there are generalities about how important it is to reduce carbon pollution, and assurances about the effectiveness of the tax. "Trust us," they seem to imply, "we know what we're doing."

After this brief non-explanation about what the policy is actually about, the next ten pages are devoted to spelling out how Australian households will be compensated for the price increases caused by the tax. There are precise details of the amount of cost increases we can expect to see, and the amount of tax cuts, pension increases and other such baubles ordinary Australians will receive to help pay for them. Everyone is covered - workers, students, low income earners, pensioners, people with disabilities. No stone is left unturned to reassure us that we will not be worse off.

Why am I not convinced? Why, with such a wealth of detail, is the Australian public as a whole not convinced?

Well, we have before us a classic example of poor communication. The good thing about a carbon tax is that it provides a financial incentive for businesses, particularly power generators and large scale users of energy, to cut their emissions and move to low- or no-emission technologies. They pay for every tonne of carbon they emit. Renewables suddenly have a huge head start if only they can make their technology efficient enough to compete. Emissions reduction technologies have a tangible financial benefit. Offsetting measures suddenly make a lot more economic sense. The carbon tax speaks to polluters in the language of capitalism, saying "reduce your emissions, and you will make more money". It is an ambitious attempt to move capitalism towards sustainability.

Yet this core message, this basic rationale for the policy, does not appear anywhere in the marketing. All that appears is the downside. This will cost you money, it says. Don't worry, it won't be as much as you think, and we'll make it up to you. But of course if you have to spend 10 pages explaining how people will be compensated, the message which underlies those ten pages is that this is a destructive policy. Why do it, if people need this much compensation?

It suggests the government has no faith in its own policy. It has no confidence in the vision and imperative to tackle pollution and climate change, or in the effectiveness of its chosen strategy. The carbon tax may be a necessary evil, but nonetheless it is evil. So we need to reduce the evil as much as we can. The deniers, be they in the business community or the Opposition, have got into the government's head, and made them afraid of their own policy. If they are afraid, why should we not be?

Dunning and Kruger

2011-11-25T18:21:00.001+10:00

Many of you will already have heard of the "Dunning and Kruger Effect", a piece of psychological research which has made its way into the popular consciousness. In summary it suggests that those who are more incompetent at a particular task are also more likely to overrate their competence, since their ignorance prevents them from realising just how bad they are.

Anyway, I finally got around to reading the article, "Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self Assessments", by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999, Vol 77, No 6. Much of it is not scintillating reading, being after all an academic research paper filled with statistical jargon. However, it is more comprehensible than many similar articles and shot through with flashes of psychologist humour.

The paper reports a series of four linked studies. All were carried out on undergraduate psychology students, coerced or bribed into being experimental subjects as they are the world over. Psychology is the study of first year psychology students. In each experiment, the students were asked to perform a test - one on assessing the quality of jokes, one on grammar, and two using tests of logical reasoning. In each case they were asked to rate their own performance in relation to their peers, and where it was possible to estimate their own score. The result - the students who scored the lowest were the ones who most overestimated their ability. Those who did best, on the other hand, tended to underestimate their scores.

In a follow-up, students who did either very well or very poorly were asked to come back a couple of weeks later and assess a sample of the work of their peers, being handed a set of papers of varying standard. After marking these papers as best they could, students were asked again how they thought they had gone compared to everyone else. The least competent showed no change - they still thought they had gone really well because, of course, they didn't know enough to make a proper assessment of the papers they had been asked to examine. The most competent, on the other hand, revised their assessment of their skills upwards - because they realised they had done a lot better than most of the tests they had marked.

The third activity involved training people, then asking them to reassess. Prior to rating some of their peers' performance on a logic test, some of the poorest performing students were given a short education module on logical processes. Unsurprisingly, after this brief presentation, they were much more realistic about their own performance, because they now understood a little more about the subject.

When you think about it, none of this should be a surprise. Some people don't know enough to be aware of their own ignorance, and pronounce confidently on subjects about which they know absolutely nothing. Often such people end up running whole countries. A little exposure to the discipline in question, whether it be logic or grammar or the relative funniness of jokes, makes us aware of the yawning gaps in our knowledge and we suddenly become more circumspect. Someone, however, has to be game to point out our ignorance. This is usually easier for people to do before you become Prime Minister - say, perhaps, when you're a first year psychology student who hasn't yet grasped the basics of grammar and logical thinking. What to they teach them in those schools?

The conclusion to Kruger and Dunning's article is a classic, worth reading to the end for.

Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.

Yes folks. Kruger and Dunning fear that they may have painted a fake. Join the club, boys.

Faith and Doubt

2011-11-24T17:58:00.001+10:00

To make sure I don't just get trapped in a single viewpoint, I've been reading John Ortberg's Faith and Doubt. Ortberg is an American Presbyterian pastor and also coincidentally a former clinical psychologist. His overall outlook seems to be basically orthodox, conservative Protestantism but he is not really in the "fundamentalist" camp in that he is not a believer in the literal seven day creation, nor in premillenialism.

He has written this book to deal with the question of doubt. Why do Christians doubt, what should they do about it, and how does doubt relate to faith? He deals with the issue in a chatty, anecdotal style, keeping it light and easy and leaping from story to story, topic to topic, with the agility of a grasshopper. Although he doesn't say so, I suspect that the material in this book started out as a set of sermons, and it still sounds like something meant to be spoken, peppered with jokes that are often quite funny but also distracting and at times beside the point. You can hear the congregation laughing, relieving the tension on what could otherwise be a rather stressful subject.

To my mind, he takes a while to get to the point, beginning with an outline of what he believes is important in the Christian faith and why it attracts him. It's not until over half way through the book that he starts to get to grips with doubt. He does so by summarising what he sees as the three main reasons for doubt. The first is intellectual - why is there not more evidence for God? Why does he not show himself clearly, if it is so important that we believe in him? The second is moral - why are God's followers not better people? Many former believers, or potential believers, are driven away by the poor behaviour of God's people and the church institution. Then the third is the classic question of theodicy - why does a loving God allow so much suffering? Although he discusses all three, it seems to be the last which affects him most personally and to which he returns a number of times.

So what should we do when we doubt? First of all, he makes it very clear that he doesn't think doubt is a bad thing. In fact he sees it as essential and inevitable. Doubt helps us to learn and grow (since it drives us to seek the truth) it makes us humble, and it drives us to trust. He urges his readers to cultivate the gift of doubt. However, he wants to keep this doubt within limits. He urges us to avoid the traps of skepticism, which he sees as persistent failure to decide (Michael Shermer would certainly disagree with this definition!) and a negative force typified by the apostle Thomas; of cynicism, a constantly negative attitude driven by fear of loss; and of rebellion, a deliberately oppositional attitude to everything. I found this part of the book perplexing, and his dismissals of these viewpoints a little too glib.

However, the weakest point of this book was its apologetic framework. He identifies a number reasons to believe, but in the end they amount to variations on the same theme - our sense that the universe has meaning, that there is a standard of right and wrong, that individuals have significance, are sure pointers that there is a god. His reasons for belief are heavily intuitive and emotional. He believes because he feels things make sense. Shermer would have a field day.

The ease with which he slips into these arguments makes me wonder just how seriously he has doubted himself. His doubts seem to just scratch the surface, mere ripples on the still silent pool of his belief. Because if his arguments are at all convincing (and I don't find them very strong myself) they only lead you to a general theism. It is a long step from there to Christianity in any form, and an even longer one to Christian orthodoxy. The rest he asks us to take on trust, like a trapeze artist letting go of the swing and relying on the catcher to arrest our fall at the right time. For him the catcher is God, and Jesus points unambiguously to this God and gives us courage to believe. He would get a big surprise if he looked up and found Brahma on the end of the trapeze, or perhaps the trickster Anansi pretending to drop him before snatching him by the hair at the last minute and laughing uproariously.

In a sense he's right about this. Our belief is a choice, it is a free act in a universe which is not so determined that we have no options. We choose to believe every day, relying on our trust in those around us or our intuition, on matters as mundane as whether it is safe to eat our dinner or as momentous as the guiding principles of our life. Yet it is not a binary choice. At each point, and on each issue, we need to choose over and over again. And we have at least three choices, not two. We can say "Yes, I believe, despite my doubts". We can say "no, I don't believe that". Or we can say "I'm just not sure, we'll have to wait and see".

The Once and Future Bible

2011-11-21T17:25:00.001+10:00

Courtesy of my friend Kay I've been reading a book by Gregory Jenks called The Once and Future Bible: An Introduction to the Bible for Religious Progressives. Jenks is Academic Dean of St Francis Theological College, the Anglican seminary here in Brisbane. He is also strongly connected with the "progressive" Christian movement in the USA as a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar and a friend of the radical former Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong, to whom he refers as a kind of mentor.

Despite his association with Spong, Jenks is very much his own person. Spong's comparable book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, is combative and quixotic, leaping unpredictably between mainstream scholarship like the source theory of the Gospels, to fringe ideas like the notion of the Apostle Paul as a repressed gay man. By contrast, Jenks is calm and sober, providing a concise lay person's summary of what he sees as the current state of Biblical scholarship. Yet he identifies very closely with what Spong calls "believers in exile" - those people (in the church or outside it) who retain a Christian faith but no longer feel at home in the church and within the framework of traditional belief. These people are his intended audience.

A lot of what he says is not particularly contentious. His book follows the basic outlines of the Old and New Testaments, summarising what bible scholars see as their likely dating and process of composition, and its relationship to history. Certainly, he is "progressive". This means that when he has an alternative between a traditional interpretation and a more radical one, he generally chooses the more radical. Where there is a choice between an earlier and later date of composition, he usually chooses the later. However, he does so within a framework of scholarship, acknowledging alternative views and avoiding fringe or speculative theories. Lots of people will disagree with his conclusions but you would have to be a little oversensitive to find them offensive or provocative.

The most interesting parts of the book are the third chapter and the final one. In the third, after setting the scene by explaing why many people find the Bible problematic, he outlines a threefold framework for studying it. The first is to understand the world behind the text - that is, the hisotirical circumstances of its composition, the likely identity of its authors and their purpose, its place in the historical context that it describes and in which is was created. This is largely the work of the various disciplines of biblical criticism and history - source criticism and arachaeology, for example.

The second is to understand the world of the text - that is, what it is actually saying. What is it saying about the nature of humans, God, history and so on? This is the work of Biblical exegesis, and raises plenty of problems for him and other progressive Christians as well as more traditional believers. How do you account, for instance, for the prevalence of what he calls "sacred violence" - the urgings to war and genocide found in so many places in the Old Testament, the idea of eternal condemnation of sinners found in parts of the New? How do you account for the subjugation of women, and the toleration of slavery? These are real problems which have driven many people from Bible, as you can see from a quick read of Sam Harris or Michel Onfray.

The final aspect of his approach is to understand the world before the Bible - that is, the world of the reader, the questions to which the reader is seeking answers. What will a feminist, an environmentalist, or a person from a particular theological background, make of any particular text? Because Jenks sees the Bible as a sacred text but not an infallible one, he is quite comfortable with the idea that someone might create a variant reading of a text, or offer a critique of it from a modern perspective, so that the Bible becomes part of a dialogue about how we should live now, rather than providing the final word.

Which brings us to his final chapter and what appears to me to be the crux of this whole book. If we take his view of Scripture (and on the whole, it seems close enough to the mark) and see it is a faithful but fallible human witness to God, how should we use it, and what kind of faith will result? His answer is tantalisingly brief, covering no more than a few pages. I wish he had gone into more detail. What he says is that we will read the bible with our eyes wide open. We will be fully aware of its history and the way it was composed, rather than reading with the illusion of divine infallibility or complete harmony. We will also bring to it our knowledge from other fields - our learnings from other spiritual traditions, from science and history, from our engagement with the issues of the day. We will not so much be looking to the Bible to answer all our questionsas making it part of them.

He sees the Bible as giving us four things - an openness to the sacred, a world-affirming attitude to life, a vision of inclusive community and a passion for justice and reconciliation. There is no compulsion in his view of this, nothing to say you must read it. Nonetheless, he and his fellow Christian progressives, and others of us too, come from a Christian background. This background provides us with a rich history and tradition, the wisdom of ages from which we can draw to help us deal with the pressing issues of our day. This won't be enough for some of my readers, I know. For others it will be too much. He walks the fine line between the fundamentalisms of Christianity and atheism, and tries to live in the tension between them.

James and Paul

2011-11-15T17:28:00.001+10:00

Here's a little something that Crossan and Reed's Excavating Jesus has got me thinking about. They open their book with a discussion of an artefact called the "James Ossuary" - a bone box inscribed with the words "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus". Their analysis of this relic, sold in the antiquities market with no indication of its origin, is fascinating. Apparently even if the inscription is genuine there is only a one in 20 chance it actually contains the bones of James, the brother of Jesus Christ as worshipped by Christians. All three names were incredibly common in first century Palestine.

Be that as it may, it leads them into a reflection on the role of James in the early church, and the origin of Christianity as a Jewish reform movement. Here is my version of it, inspired by theirs but a little different.

James the brother of Jesus (as opposed to James the son of Zebedee, brother of John) is only mentioned once by name in the gospels, a passing reference in Matthew 13:55. The context is Jesus' visit to his home town of Nazareth, where the locals apparently express the contempt of familiarity. “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas?" An earlier story in Matthew 12 appears to suggest Jesus is just as dismissive of his family.

⁴⁶ While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. ⁴⁷ Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.” ⁴⁸ He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” ⁴⁹ Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. ⁵⁰ For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

Be that as it may, James appears to have played a prominent role in the early church, of which we only catch a glimpse in the New Testament through the story recorded in Acts 15 and its alternative telling by Paul in Galatians 2. The context for this story is the early success of Paul's mission to the Gentiles. Prior to this mission the church had been almost exclusively Jewish. How should these Gentile converts be integrated into the Christian community?

Some (identified as Pharisees in Acts) believed they should become fully Jewish. They should be circumcised and required to submit fully to the law of Moses. They saw Christianity as a movement within Judaism. Paul, of course, saw things differently, and was commissioned by his church at Antioch - the first mixed church - to take the question to the apostles in Jerusalem.

What happened there is something of a surprise. Throughout the early chapters of Acts, Peter is portrayed as the leader and spokesperson of the apostles in Jerusalem. He plays a prominent role here too, alluding to his earlier call from God to preach the gospel to the Roman Centurion Corneleius and using this to argue that God accepted Gentiles without any expectation they would follow the law. However it is James, making his first and only appearance in Acts, who appears firmly in charge and who finally rules on the question. Luke is silent on this change. Why is James, and not Peter, chairing this meeting? And from where does he get the authority to deliver the final ruling?

¹⁹ “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. ²⁰ Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood.

This is clearly a compromise. They are not asked to take on the whole Jewish law, but an abbreviated version which includes food laws and sexual morality.

Paul's account in Galatians 2 contains no hint of this compromise.

⁶ As for those who were held in high esteem—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism—they added nothing to my message....They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised. ¹⁰ All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along.

He then goes on to record a sequel in which Peter comes to Antioch.

¹² ... before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. ¹³ The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy....

Paul's answer is unequivocal as he publicly rebukes Peter.

²¹ I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!

What's going on here? Three aspects of the law are under discussion - circumcision, food laws and sexual morality. There seem to be at least four basic positions on this set of issues in the early church. There is the position of the "pharisees" who believe Gentile Christians should submit to the whole Jewish law, including circumcision. At the other extreme, although not mentioned in either of these accounts, there appear to be those who believe that none of these laws apply.

Both James and Paul occupy middle positions. In their writings, both argue against the idea that morality can be dispensed with altogether - James in his sole letter preserved in the New Testament, Paul for example in Romans 6. Both also agree that laws about sexual morality should apply to Gentile Christians. What they disagree about is food laws, and even here their disagreement does not appear, in one sense, to be that great. Paul does not believe in food laws himself, but in Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 10 he asks his followers to be considerate of one another in these matters.

Yet behind these details there seems to be something more fundamental which arouses Paul's passions. Despite the nuance of his position in other places, his stance in Galatians is very black and white. The "men who came from James" seem to be equated with the "circumcision group", so that Paul seems to understand James's position as advocating circumcision, contrary to Luke's account. A further implication is that circumcised believers - full Jews, whether by birth or conversion - needed to maintain their purity by seperating themselves from Gentile believers, particularly at meal times which were such important communal events in the early church. The result is a divided community - a Jewish church, and a Gentile one. This seems to be what has raised Paul's ire. His vision is for a united church, as shown in Ephesians 2.

¹⁴ For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, ¹⁵ by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, ¹⁶ and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.

Crossan and Reed speculate that we are seeing a divide between two churches - an essentially Jewish church based in Jerusalem and led by James; and a mixed church led by Paul and others, made up of Jewish and Gentile converts from outside Judea. Peter seems to have moved between these two churches, although not without some difficulties as shown in Galatians.

Although the relationship between the two was obviously a little uneasy they seem to have been able to co-exist, and later in Acts we see Paul making efforts to keep the lines of communication open, visiting Jerusalem and going through certain Jewish rites despite the danger to himself.

However, the Jewish war of 66-73 CE, as well as putting an end to Jewish temple worship, killed off the Jerusalem Jewish church and limited James' influence on subsequent Christianity. From here on, Paul's model of church prevailed. Converted Jews became indistinguishable from converted Gentiles and in time Jews came to be seen not as partners of the church but as its enemies.

The Decisive Moment

2011-11-13T14:46:00.001+10:00

So Roo said to me that after reading Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain I should read Jonah Lehrer's The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind. I always aim to please and I did enjoy Shermer.

Lehrer is one of those annoying people who seem good at lots of things. He has a degree in neuroscience, studied literature and theology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and writes for a number of different publications. Where Shermer is a scientist who writes, Lehrer appears to be a writer who does science. He is less technical than Shermer, more journalistic and accessible.

The Decisive Moment (apparently marketed in some countries as How We Decide) covers a lot of the same territory as The Believing Brain, including reporting many of the same experiments. However, Lehrer asks a different question to Shermer and so of course he gets a different answer. Shermer is interested in belief, and his conclusion is that we should reject the emotional, unconscious part of our mind and form our beliefs using our capacity for rationality, aided by the stringent methodologies of western science.

Instead of the "big" questions posed by Shermer, Lehrer is interested in a practical issue - what is the best way for us to make decisons? He talks about the model of rationality first outlined by Plato, in which our reason is the charioteer, driving and guiding the horses (often wild and difficult to direct) of our emotions and impulses. This ideal has influenced Western thought from Plato onwards (including, obviously, Shermer), but according to Lehrer it is a mistake.

To illustrate the point he tells the story of a man who has his orbito-frontal cortex - one of the key brain areas processing our emotions - destroyed by a brain tumour. Although his intelligence is unaffected, he is almost completely unable to make even the most simple decisons, like what to have for dinner or where to park his car. He intensely compares and analyses his options, but never reaches a conclusion.

From here Lehrer spins a vivid tale of how our brains make decisions. To summarise what is a complex and absorbing tale (or set of tales), it goes something like this. Our rational brains are good at computing. They do numbers and measurements, and compare objective elements of our various choices. They keep a check on our emotions, and allow us to avoid obvious, silly mistakes. However, these same rational brains are easily deceived. They are only able to deal with about seven variables at once, and get easily overloaded. They are also not good at aesthetic decisions. Thus, people asked to rate a set of posters - some with classic artworks, some with funny cats - will almost always choose the classic art. Yet if they are asked to explain the reasons for their choice before choosing, many more of them will choose the funny cats, even though they regret it later. Their reason gets in the way of their better judgement.

So what to do? Well, for Lerher the brain is something like a committee meeting. Our rational mind will add up figures and caution us about factuality. The pleasure centres of the brain will flood us with dopamine when we consider a choice that appeals to us - even though there may be no obvious rational explanation. The pain avoidance centres will likewise flood us with apprehension when we consider things that appear unpleasant. We need to listen to all of these things to make good decisions. Counter-intuitively, the more complex a decision, the more we need to trust our emotions and the less we can rely on our rationality. We can reason our way to choosing the right vegetable peeler, but if we are buying a house or a car we need to trust our emotions.

So if Lehrer and Shermer were in a room together and discussing how to decide what belief system to follow, what would they say to each other? I can't find that this scenario has ever been played out, at least not in public, but perhaps it would go like this. Shermer would say that our emotions and our inconscious impulses are not to be trusted because they are biased. Therefore they need to be overridden by evidence. Lehrer might reply that the matters under consideration are so complex that our rational minds can't cope with the number of varables, and that listening to our emotions will help us to make better decisions about these things.

Shermer would respond, perhaps, that our emotions are tutored by our environment and our upbringing, so that if we have consistently been taught something that is factually incorrect, hearing it will produce pleasure. Lehrer would agree that the debate in our brains needs to involve all parties and that sometimes our fear at abandoning treasured ideas needs to be overridden by rationality. But at other times, when the answer that appears so rational nevertheless makes us feel sick in the stomach, then perhaps our emotions are pointing us to something beyond the comprehension of our reason, and we would be foolish to ignore it.

Aristotle apparently described humanity as a "rational animal". Jonathan Swift begged to differ, describing us as "an animal capable of reason". Lehrer seems to suggests it's not so simple. We are indeed capable of reason, but reason may not be all its cracked up to be.

The Believing Brain

2011-11-06T18:02:00.000+10:00

William James is supposed to have said, "Thinking is what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." Courtesy of a tip from Roo and the friendly folk at the Brisbane City Council library service, I've finally got my hands on Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain, which explains this aphorism in a lot more detail.

I previously encountered Shermer through his Why People Believe Weird Things, a fun journey through a set of beliefs on the edge of the intellectual world like Holocaust denial, alien abduction, Ayn Rand's Objectivism and the psi quotient. Shermer revealed himself as an intensely curious, sympathetic but highly skeptical observer, constantly on the hunt for evidence.

The Believing Brain covers some of the same territory but it's a much more technical book dealing with the question from the point of view of Shermer's own specialist field, neuro-psychology. What it is about our brains, Shermer wants us to know, that makes us so prone to belief, of whatever kind?

There's a lot of detail about the operation of neurons and brain chemicals, the functions of different parts of the brain, and the way our brains respond to certain stimuli. What it comes down to, though, is three things - patternicity, agenticity and bias.

Patternicity: Our brains have evolved to seek and recognise patterns in their surrounding environment. A primitive hominid, wandering in the jungles of Africa, hears the rustling of leaves. It could be a lion about to turn him or her into dinner. It could also just be the wind in the leaves. The hominid has to make an instant decision. The one who assumes it is a lion and runs away is likely to survive, irrespective of whether there actually is a lion. The one that doesn't is likely to be eaten. The one that runs away is our ancestor. Hence, an inability to see patterns where they actually exist is fatal, but a tendency to percieve non-existent patterns has no evolutionary cost, so it is likely to persist.

Agenticity: Part of the reason our ancestors were so successful in doing this is that they were able to perceive the intentions of other creatures - both people and animals. "That lion plans to eat me". A peculiar characteristic of our species is that we attribute agency to all sorts of things, including things like rocks, trees, the sky and so on which actually have no intentions.

Bias: These tendencies are far from superficial - they lie at the basis of our brain function, encoded in the way our brains work, in the electrical impulses and interplay of brain chemicals that accompany thought. The result, says Shermer, is that our beliefs are seldom formed through a rational examination of the evidence. Belief comes first, evidence follows, and we automatically look for evidence which supports our pre-existing beliefs, noticing the supporting facts and screening out the contradictory ones.

From this basis, he moves on to discuss various beliefs, especially focusing on alien visitations, belief in God, political ideology and conspiracy theories. I found his discussion of visitations (whether by aliens, ghosts, spirits or angels) fascinating. Our brain, he says, creates an image of our body, repeated in each brain hemisphere. Perhaps, he says, if these mirror images get out of sync, as they are prone to under pressure - for instance, for solo climbers in the Himalayas, or in the early morning hours of a stressful period in someone's life - the brain will have two rival body images. Because it knows there should only be one, it seeks a pattern to explain the other and lights on something from memory or culture - an alien, an angel, the ghost of a parent. He describes how such hallucinations can be reproduced in the laboratory by electrically stimulating certain parts of the brain. The patterns we find match what we expect to find, but don't correspond to any objective reality.

What is the answer to this sea of irrationality? Of course you guessed it, it's Science. The scientific method provides a methodology of controlled experimentation to collect objective evidence, statistical techniques to analyse this evidence, and a system of peer review in which rival scientists will gleefully pull your conclusions to bits if they don't match the evidence. He doesn't claim perfection for this system, or that scientists are immune from the processes that drive belief, but what he does assert is that it's the best way to arrive at reliable knowledge and to test these beliefs.

One of the things I enjoy about Shermer is the fact that he doesn't overclaim on his evidence. There is a lot that we know about the functioning of our brains, but also a lot we don't, and words like "might" and "perhaps" appear a lot in this book. Shermer is happy to speculate but it is generally clear when he is. He is also clear what his analysis does not prove.

Explaining why someone believes in democracy does not explain away democracy; explaining why someone holds liberal or conservative values within a democracy does not explain away those values.

Indeed. One thing Shermer skates over, although I am sure he is aware of it, is the distinction between correlation and causality. It is possible to track what is happening electrically and chemically in our brains as we perform certain types of thought or respond to certain stimuli. Does this mean the chemical and electronic activity causes the thoughts, or do the thoughts cause the activity? If you produce hallucinations by electrically stimulating parts of the brain, these hallucinations are not caused by the brain's electrical activity, but by the experimenter's stimulation of it. In the absence of such artificial stimulation, what else causes these things? Are the causes always the same? Shermer is forced back on "might" and "perhaps".

This is where his own biases are clearly on show, and he makes no attempt to hide them. He is a materialist, believing that everything has a "natural" cause. Humans are purely physical - when our body dies, there is nothing else of us to continue on. There is no god. This is not the result of his examination of the evidence - he himself is clear that there is no evidence - it is his own philosophical position. He believes that the burden of proof lies with those who claim otherwise, since something which cannot be proven to exist probably doesn't. Yet this assumption means that he sees the evidence in a particular way. All his "perhapses" are naturalistic explanations. He never says "perhaps some of them really did see angels".

Shermer devotes the first three chapters of his book to outlining three different world views. The first is that of a self-taught former bricklayer who once heard a disembodied voice speaking to him, and has built his life around what it said. The third is devoted to explaining his own world view - converted to fundamentalist Christianity in his teens before drifting towards atheism as the scientific evidence against his version of belief piled up. Yet he balances his journey from fundamentalism to skepticism with the journey in the opposite direction of distinguished geneticist Dr Francis Collins, who converted to evangelical Christianity in his 20s and has retained this belief alongside considerable scientific eminence. Shermer is not just being polite when he says that his reasoning does not disprove God's existence - there are enough believers with high level scientific training to show this is an established fact.

Abortion debate in 28 words

2011-11-02T17:36:00.001+10:00

Some of my rellies, along with various other people, are currently involved in an attempt to break the world record for the longest Facebook thread. The subject is, of course, abortion. The thread is currently up to 380 comments plus various likes and dislikes. They would have broken the record by now except that the host deleted the original thread in a valiant attempt to enforce some minimum standards of courtesy.

I've carefully refrained from participating. I've previously tried to bring some ethical nuance to this debate, but I've found it doesn't help much because no-one is listening.

So my latest idea is that we should dramatise the abortion debate as a kind of Flash Mob event, like this one in a food court, with people popping up from opposite ends of the room to advocate their positions. In my head it sounds a little like the third section of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Pro-lifer 1: Don't kill babies!

Pro-choicer 1: They're just collections of cells!

Repeat several times and then...

Pro-Choicer 2: It's a woman's right to choose!

Pro-lifer 2: How can you choose to kill babies?

Continue to repeat both couplets before introducing couplet 3.

Pro-lifer 3: All life is sacred!

Pro-choicer 3: What is life?

Further voices could be added to amplify each couplet as the volume rises to cacophonic level.

For those who feel the levity of a Flash Mob is a little inappropriate for such a serious subject, an alternative would be to declaim the different points of view over the backing track to The Doors' Horse Latitudes.

Divided Ethics

2011-11-01T08:28:00.000+10:00

For some reason I woke up this morning thinking about a facebook discussion I was part of a while ago over Divided, an American documentary film which argues that "modern youth ministry is contrary to Scripture". The argument got a little heated (not from me, I was polite). This morning I woke up thinking about the broader context for it.

The message of Divided is that youth ministry, as in having a youth group as part of your church, is wrong because it divides families. Proper ministry is ministry to the whole family, together. Various Bible verses are quoted out of context to support this view and selective stories about youth groups are used to show they corrupt young people and lead to poor outcomes.

So from my description you can already see what I think. My parents had grown up going to church and had no interest in going back. At the age of 14 my school friend invited me to a church youth group and I was introduced to both Christianity and to a group of loving, accepting young people who made me feel at home. 36 years later this is still one of the key formative influences in my life. So of course I think youth groups are a great idea.

But this is all beside the point, as we all talked (and yelled) past each other on this topic. Let me tell you what I think this is really all about.

For most of my adult life I have been under the influence of Joseph Fletcher's controversial book, Situation Ethics. Fletcher's view is that there is only one moral absolute, to love, as Paul says in Romans 13:9 - "The commandments...are summed up in this one rule: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.'" Our ethical task is to do what is loving in each situation, even if sometimes this contradicts something that seems commanded in the Bible or is mandated in our laws.

This is not an easy ethic to live by. Our judgements are incredibly fallible, both because we are apt to be selfish and unkind, and because our knowledge is so incomplete. So Fletcher has been heavily criticised for giving people an "out" in moral choices and promoting anarchistic individualism. There is some point to the criticisms and it seems to me we can gain a lot of guidance on what it means to love from the Bible and from Christian tradition. We would be foolish to simply rely on our own judgement. Yet ultimately I am with Fletcher. Love is the law, all else is secondary.

Not so the producers of Divided. They see at least two things as absolute which I see as relative.

First of all, they see the Bible as providing a blueprint for the whole of life. They believe that they can find in the Bible a whole pattern for the organisation of the church and individual lives. This means that there can only be one right way to do things. The task of the Christian is to study the Bible in order to find that right way, and then do it. Of course since the words "youth group" do not appear in the Bible (either to be praised or criticised) this can be taken to mean such things are not part of God's plan, but they also then bring in various verses about the role of fathers and families to support this view.

They would claim that this is their only absolute, but I beg to differ. Their second is the centrality of the family in Christian life, by which they mean the nuclear family - Dad, Mum and the kids. Anything that strengthens the family is good, anything that might weaken it or bring non-family influences into children's lives is bad. The Bible is read through this lens. Youth groups are bad because they are non-family.

Where does this take you morally? It takes you towards acting like all people, and all families, are the same - or that they should be, and if they are not they need to be fixed. It makes you absolutise our particular modern Western version of the family as a small, mobile, discreet unit. It makes you devalue the wider community. It makes you liable to forget single people and grandparents, and leaves you vulnerable to turning a blind eye to child abuse and domestic violence. A family is only as good as it is, and plenty of people need protection from their families.

I'm not a proponent of one right way. I think we should do what helps, and avoid what hurts. There is no easy guidebook which will tell us what this is. We need to think carefully and learn compassion - and then relearn it every time we forget. Love is hard. Other ways may seem easier, and more certain, but this security is an illusion.

Paul Keating on Music

2011-10-23T11:10:00.000+10:00

Yesterday's Weekend Australian contains a detailed interview with former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating and a short extract from his new book. In it, he laments the narrowness of our current political culture, the inability of our politicians (especially his successors in the Labor Party) to tell an overarching story about Australia, where we are heading and our place in the world.

Part of the problem, he says, is that they are too focused on logic and pragmatics at the expense of vision and aesthetics.

Friedrich Schiller, the German philosopher, said: "If man is ever to solve the problems of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom."

Romantic and idealistic as that view may seem to some, the thought is revelatory of the fact that the greater part of human aspiration has been informed by individual intuition and privately generated passions, more than it has through logic or scientific revelation. The moral basis of our public life, our social organisation, has come from within us - by aspiration and by light, not by some process of logical deduction.

He then moves on to use music as an illustration of what he means.

Music provides the clue: unlike other forms of art, music is not representational. Unlike the outcome of the sciences, it was never discoverable or awaiting discovery. A Mahler symphony did not exist before Mahler created it.

E.T.A. Hoffman, a contemporary of Beethoven's, famously said: "Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind all feelings circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the inexpressible."

This is not to turn our back on reason. Or to argue that modernism, with all its secular progress through education, industrialisation, communications, transport and the centralised state, has not spectacularly endowed the world as no other movement before it. But a void exists between the drum-roll of mechanisation with its cumulative power of science and the haphazard, explosive power of creativity and passion. Science is forever trying to undress nature while the artistic impulse is to be wrapped in it.

While these approaches are different - perhaps often diametrically opposite - they inform related strands of thinking in ways that promote energy and vision.

This is what I have found when these forces are contemplated in tandem. When passion and reason vie with each other, the emerging inspiration is invariably deeper and of an altogether higher form. One is able to knit between them, bringing into existence an overarching unity - a coherence - which fidelity to the individual strands cannot provide.

Apart from making me wish he was still Prime Minister (given the current alternatives on offer) Keating has said very eloquently something I often try to get out in my own hesitant way. He applies the lesson to politics - we need to use our intuition, our aesthetic sense, to complement our rational decisions, not replace them.

I've been thinking the same in the church. So often our songs are just another way of expressing our dogma. Our songwriters and musicians write and play out of an intellectual straitjacket of "correct doctrine" which means only certain forms of words are acceptable. This is part of what worried me about the Twist conference that I reacted so strongly to.

Music at its best, whether in church or in wider society, should open up another realm to us, something that can't be easily encapsulated in theological or sociological formulae. If it could be pinned down in words, music would no longer be necessary. It alerts us to the fact that our formulae are only ever approximations of the truth. Sure, "the truth is out there" but if we think we understand it we are selling it short. Perhaps it's a bit like what the other Paul says in Romans 8:26-27.

We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.

More Lives of Jesus 4: Crossan and Reed

2011-10-22T12:35:00.001+10:00

So, after John Carroll's existential midrash on the life of Jesus, we return to a more typical type of contemporary midrash, the historical reconstruction. Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L Reed represents a detailed foresnic examination of historical evidence in the tradition of the Jesus Seminar, of which Crossan was co-chair for a decade. Crossan is perhaps the more famous of this pair of authors, known for his New Testament scholarship and his reconstructions of Jesus' life and the first century church. Reed, while lower profile, appears to be just as distinguished in academic terms and specialises in Palestinian archaeology. Within the dual focus of their sub-title, the division of labour seems clear - Reed deals with stones, Crossan with texts.

It is the combination of the two which provides the power and fascination of this book. The archaeology of first century Palestine can't tell us much in particular about Jesus, but it can give us a vivid picture of his place and times. The key is to dig to the right level and distinguish the buildings and other material remains of the first century. By analogy, the authors use the same process for the texts. These have at least four layers - the original words and deeds of Jesus; the oral accounts and memories which circulated amongst his first followers; the first written records of these, in the gospel of Mark, the presumed "Q" gospel which provided extra material for Matthew and Luke, the writings of Paul, and later but independent non-canonical writings such as the gospels of Peter and Thomas and the Didache; and as a fouth layer the additions and editorial glosses of the later Biblical writers themselves.

The authors use these layers to perform a kind of triangulation. If something appears (perhaps in different form but with the same content) in more than one of the third layer sources (say, in both Mark's gospel and Thomas's) then it probably comes from a source that precedes them. If it only appears in one, it is more likely to be a later addition. The authors acknowledge that this is a controversial procedure and take a reasonably humble approach to it, but the items they identify are those most widely agreed to originate with Jesus himself or his immediate followers. This is then placed in the historical context revealed by archaeology and the early historians, particularly Josephus and to a lesser extent Philo.

What emerges is this. The core of Jesus' message, the Kingdom of God, was an act of non-violent but far from passive resistance against the Kingdom of Rome. Against the heirarchy of the Roman empire, symbolised by its palaces and fortresses in which the subjects came to the Emperor (or his representatives) and bowed before him, Jesus opposed a centreless regime in which he travelled to the people, lived with them and served them where they were. Against the merchantile empire of Rome which concentrated wealth in the cities and in the hands of the few, Jesus opposed a communal life in which possessions were shared and justice and equality reigned. Against the Roman claim to ownership of the land Jesus opposed God's covenantal ownership in which the people of Israel were stewards. Jesus chose neither the path of violent resistance of the Zealots, nor the withdrawal of the Essenes, but lived out his message with his followers right under the eyes of the Roman and Jewish authorities.

This mode of resistence meant that he, like his predecessor John the Baptist, was openly challenging the Roman system and its Jewish collaborators, and was destined ultimately for punishment - especially when he went to Jerusalem and directly challenged them through the cleansing of the Temple. This is also why only he was executed at the time - if he had led a violent resistence, his followers would also have been slaughtered, but for a non-violent protest it was enough to execute the leader and hope the followers would then disperse. Of course they didn't, and many were executed in later years in a further attempt to stamp out the movement.

Which of course brings us to the resurrection, and what to me is Crossan and Reed's most interesting chapter in this fascinating and vivid book. They accept for the sake of argument that the resurrection occurred and ask instead the historical question - what did it mean? In its first century Jewish context, they are clear that there were a number of things it didn't mean. It didn't mean resuscitation, for instance, a nearly dead person returning to life. Nor did it mean an "apparition" - a ghost or spirit talking with his followers from the land of the dead - or exalatation, the spirit of the person being caught up to be with God. All these things were well understood in the ancient world and are different to what was said about Jesus.

The resurrection, in their view, is intimately linked with his earthly program - his role as an eschatological or apocalyptic prophet. The just, holy kingdom promised by the prophets involved the resurrection of the martyrs, those who had died in earlier times as a result of their faithfulness to God. Jesus' resurrection was the herald, the beginning, of this more general resurrection of God's servants, which would surely follow. It was in expectation of this completed resurrection that the disciples, under the leadership of Peter and of Jesus' brother James, gathered in Jerusalem to wait. It was also in expectation of this that Paul and his companions travelled throughout the empire, announcing the coming of this Kingdom to Jew and pagan alike.

In the process, they present us with a first century take on that most common piece of modern apologetics, the fearlessness of the disciples and rapid growth of the Church as evidence for the resurrection. In our post-Enlightenment world view, they say, "impossibility battles with uniqueness" - the miracles and resurrection appear improbable, but Christians argue that they are one-off, unique events attested to by their followers' passion. In the first century this argument would have been totally irrelevant. The miracles and resurrection would be seen as neither impossible, nor as unique. No-one would have had any trouble believing them and most ancient religions involved similar claims. Instead, the arguments of the early Christians centred around the question of superiority. For believers, the clincher was not the truth of the events, but the superiority of the message they conveyed - the reality of the liberation and justice that flowed from the Kingdom of God, enacted in their own believing communities. Those who remained inconvinced remained so primarily because they could not see the value of this message, not because they disputed its truth.

Hence the midrash. As for them, the authors are implying, so for us. By building the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the site of Jesus' grave, with the magnificent architecture of a Roman palace, Constantine transformed Christianity from a radical challenge to the Kingdom of Rome into a mirror of it. No longer did the Christian church go out among the people and create a kingdom of justice and shared wealth. Now people came to the palatial church, built with the wealth of Constantine's merchantile empire, and paid homage there to the twin powers of Church and State. It made the church safe, not to mention rich and powerful, but what became of Jesus' message?

Onshore Processing

2011-10-15T13:59:00.001+10:00

So, a few weeks ago I wrote a letter to Julia Gillard, with copies to Chris Bowen and my local member Graham Perrett, outlining the reasons they should not only abandon overseas processing of boat arrivals but the whole mandatory detention system. I'm still waiting for the reply, aside from a brief acknowledgement from a member of Perrett's staff thanking me for saying what I think. But blow me down if they haven't gone and done something quite like what I suggested. All arrivals will be processed in Australia, with those deemed likely to be granted refugee status given bridging visas and allowed to live in the community after basic health and security checks. At last, a move in a more humane direction!

It would be nice to think they listened to me and the thousands of other people advocating a more humane solution. Sadly, it seems that it's just a stuff up. The media is even talking about it as the "failure of migration policy". Both Liberal and Labor parties went into the parliamentary debate intent on reviving offshore processing. Their inability to agree on the form this should take, however, meant that no legislation got passed. As a result the High Court ruling against offshore processing stands, and the government has no alternative.

It made me think of that lovely poem by WH Auden, which I think may have been written about Winston Churchill.

Providentially
right for once in his life-time
(his reasons were wrong),
the old sod was permitted
to save civilisation.

It's not exactly Churchillian and it won't save civilisation but it's great when a government accidentally does something right. May there be many more such stuff-ups!

More Lives of Jesus 3: John Carroll's "Existential Jesus"

2011-10-14T20:05:00.000+10:00

To keep the Australian theme going here is another Australian Life of Jesus, The Existential Jesus by John Carroll. However, this is where the resemblance to John Dickson ends. Carroll is a professor of sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne and is not an active church member or a biblical scholar. Instead, he approaches the story of Jesus through a secular reading group he convenes at the University, which has twice read the Gospel of Mark in its entirety. He has found the story profoundly affecting and life changing, and this book is the result.

Nor is Carroll greatly interested in the Quest for the Historical Jesus, and is scornful of both the idea of Jesus as eschatologocal prophet, and of the Jesus Seminar with their colour-coded sayings. Not that he doesn't make use of historical research - he leans particularly heavily on Catholic scholar Raymond E Brown - but his intention is quite different from theirs. This is what he says.

The Christian churches have comprehensively failed in their one central task - to retell their foundation story in a way that might speak to the times. They have failed in what the ancient Jews called midrash - the art of reworking stories so as to bring them up to date. The church Jesus is a wooden residue of tired doctrine...little of which has cogent mainstream resonance today.

This is his aim - to produce a midrash which can make Jesus relevant to the 21st century. What does he find?

...a mysteriously enigmatic, existential Jesus whose story has not been retold elsewhere...This Jesus learns through his own bitter experience to reject temples and churches. What he finds himself left with is nothing, apart from his own story. So he invites those who have ears to hear to join him, to stand in his shoes, and to learn from his tragic journey. By the end, the total accummulation of what he has done and what he has said is stripped back to one single teaching: all you need is his story. You don't even need him, only what his story teaches - a dark saying about being.

With a beginning like this it would be tempting to dismiss Carroll as recreating Jesus in his own image. This would be a mistake. While there is certainly some truth in the charge, there is also a lot to like about his reconstruction. He is erudite, perceptive, and daring.

The core of the book is his own retranslation of key parts of Mark's and John's text as well as one or two passages from Luke but none from Matthew. His translation is perhaps not entirely to be trusted - he says he has based it on his knowledge of classical Greek (a different dialect to New Testament Greek) supplemented by insights from other scholars. Nonetheless, he has a gift for highlighting complexities and ambiguities in the text, and these abound in Mark. A key one is the word pneuma which depending on the context is variously translated wind, breath and spirit or Spirit. By retaining the original Greek term he draws out multiple meanings which disappear from most English translations. Hence the wind which batters Jesus' boat on the Sea of Galilee can be read as both wind and Spirit, and this complexity is repeated across accounts.

However, the best thing about this book is Carroll's keen literary eye. Unclouded by historical or doctrinal questions, he hones in on the correspondences between different events, the repetition of key words and ideas, the motifs which Mark and John use to identify Jesus' main teachings, and point readers to their own interpretation of these.

Carroll sees Mark as the foundational gospel story and John as a midrash on Mark. He organises his book in the same way. In the first part he provides a sequential commentary on Mark. His version of the story is enigmatic, and Godless. Jesus is a tragic, isolated figure, misunderstood by his disciples, especially Peter, but occasionally understood by random strangers who he encounters and heals - like the man posessed by 2000 demons in the country of the Gadarenes, or Mary of Bethany who anoints him with oil before his crucifixion. His message is I am and he wants his followers to see themselves in the same way - to learn to be. What Carroll means by this is not entirely clear. He does not see Jesus as claiming to be God so much as replacing him, but he sees him as driven and inspired by pneuma and wielding a power which any of his followers could also wield, if only they could learn.

Mark's story is ultimately a tragedy, although an ambiguous one. Jesus dies alone, understood by none of his disciples except perhaps the shadowy figure of Mark lurking in the background, and Mary finding the empty tomb on Easter Sunday. Frustrated and angered by the obtuseness of his disciples (he regrets calling them almost the moment he has done so) many of his sayings take on a caustic, even cruel edge. His final death is accompanied by a scream of agony and the empty tomb is at best ambiguous, a hint or possibility rather than a certainty.

In the second part of his book, Carroll turns his attention to John, presenting a more hopeful version of Jesus' story. Where Mark's Jesus is driven by his fate, doubting and learning as he goes along, John's is serene and fully in control of his destiny. In Carroll's own midrash on John we see Jesus through the eyes of five archetypal followers - Peter, who is incapable of rising to Jesus' heights and instead is given the lowly task of creating the Church; Mary (Carroll follows the later Christian practice of conflating Mary of Bethany, Mary Magdelene and the anonymous woman who washes Jesus' feet in Luke), a woman who finds her true being through a jouney from sensuality; Judas, consumed by hate, who opposes Jesus' I am with an angry I am not; Pilate, who reaches the borders of I am in the course of Jesus' trial; and finally John himself, the young man who Jesus loves and who needs to nothing more than be himself.

These chapters for me are the high point of the book. His skill, for instance, in picking out the progression in the five key sayings of Pilate during the trial is a revelation, as is his reading of Judas' motivations and his bitter hatred. Even his portrait of Peter's continual failure has an air of truth about it, sealed by his plausible reading of the final scene in John's gospel where Jesus asks "Simon, son of John, do you love me" and Peter replies in the affirmative and is asked to feed Jesus' sheep. Carroll highlights two things about this tale that have escaped every preacher and commentator I have heard or read on the subject. Firstly, he uses the name "Simon", not "Peter" - his pre-conversion name, not his name as a disciple. It is as if he is rescinding his earlier call. Secondly, Jesus asks "do you agape me?" - the Greek word for selfless, giving love used by Paul in 1 Cor 13. Peter replies, "you know that I phileo you" - the word for fraternal love. The final time Jesus gives in and also uses phileo. Peter is not affirming his love for Jesus as we are usually taught. Rather, he is unable to rise to the heights of selfless love Jesus is asking of him, and will always be stuck at the level of mere mateship.

I don't agree with everything Carroll says. His portrayal to Jesus' isolation is overdrawn, missing the many clues in Mark that Jesus is surrounded not only by his disciples but a wide group of friends and followers. His heavy existentialism leaves me cold - what does this Jesus ultimately have to offer us? To be ourselves? Is that it? Yet because he is an outsider, and because he loves and reveres these texts and has immersed himself in them, his interpretation is rich in possibilities. He shines light in dark places, he raises new questions and proposes new answers. His voice will be in my head as a reread the stories, and it will lead me to see them afresh.

David and Solomon

2011-10-13T09:13:00.001+10:00

As a teenager I was fascinated by the story of KingDavid. It was a part of the Bible I readover and over again. Looking back on it, I think it’s because David is the most complete and the most humancharacter in the Bible, even including Jesus. Despite his flaws and his repeated failureshe keeps trying to do right and enjoys tremendous success. Plus, there’s lots ofaction, plenty of blood and guts and a fair amount of sex.

At one point I even wrote an ancient history assignmentabout King David’s role in Israelite history. However, I lost marks because of my naïve acceptance ofthe Biblical accounts as accurate history, my failure to evaluate them as sources.

To be fair to my teenage self, back in the 1970s mosthistorians had a fairly generous view of the historicity of Samueland 1 Kings. Not that I knew anythingabout it at age 16, but most critics regarded elements of these stories asreaching back to two narratives written close to the time of David himself – one they called “David's Rise to Power” which charted David’s rise from banditchief to king of a united Israel, and another called the “Court History” or“Succession History” which was mainly written to explain or justify why Solomonended up as his successor.

This doesn’t mean scholars accepted the accounts as objectively accuratein all respects. They were seen as beingwritten as defences of David, royal propaganda to counter charges that Davidwas nothing but a bandit and mercenary who killed his master Saul and stole his throne, and that Solomon was a usurper who may not even have been David’slegitimate son and certainly not his heir. However, setting their creation close to the time meant these criticsaccepted the broad historical picture of David as a powerful king of a united

Israel

,and Solomon as the wise and wealthy builder of the temple and palace.

I would like to think that this was true. However, I’ve just been reading David and Solomon by Israel Finkelsteinand Neil Asher Silberman. Both authors,and Finkelstein in particular, are distinguished archaeologists, and this booksummarises the vast amounts of archaeological evidence about the periodof David and Solomon uncovered in digs over the past few decades, and combinesthis with a re-reading of the Biblical text in the light of this evidence.

The result is a much more sceptical view of these twokings. In the tenth century BCE, whenthey are presumed to have lived, Judah was a largely subsistenceagrarian community with as few as 5000 inhabitants. Its towns, including Jerusalem itself, were small villages. The population as a whole, and probably mostof its leaders, was illiterate and writing was hardly used for even thesimplest communications. The realms of Israel and Judah were clearly separate, with Israel far more wealthy and populous. David, who they assume was a real person,could have been no more than the bandit chief and local leader portrayed in theearly parts of the account in 1 and 2 Samuel. The elaborate temple attributed to Solomon was built at least 100 yearslater.

So where did these elaborate, detailed and vivid accountscome from? You’ll have to read the bookto get the full picture, but they suggest a number of stages in the creation ofthe story. The first is the creation ofa folk tradition, preserved in orally transmitted stories and songs, of Davidthe bandit chief made good and his mighty men, as well as the rival traditionfrom further north containing the deeds of the Benjamite King Saul.

The second, dating from the destruction of the Northernkingdom by the Assyrians and the prosperous reign of Hezekiah in the 8^thcentury, involved combining these two traditions in a more sequential accountused to justify the legitimacy of David’s dynasty in the face of Assyrianaggression and a wave of refugees from the north. The third, dating from the time of Josiah inthe 6^th century, placed stronger emphasis on the territorial extentof the united kingdom and the religious purity of David’s reign as a way ofjustifying Josiah’s religious and territorial ambitions. The fourth and fifth, compiled by priestsafter the exile, focused even more on the importance of the temple andreligious purity as the key to the kingdom’s greatness. At each point, the new editors used David andSolomon as foils for their own concerns and needs, and so the story kept ongrowing and changing.

Nor did it stop there, they say, with Jews and Christianscontinuing to develop the story through their expectations of the Messiah andthe development of their own ideas of kingship.

It doesn’t make it any less fascinating as a story, or thecharacter of David any less inspiring. What it calls into question, though, is the concept of static religioustruth. Each if the successive tellers ofthe story, in their view, felt free to re-interpret and retell the tale to fitthe needs of their time. Rather than anabstract and absolute truth, the stories evolved with their writers andreaders, being brought to bear on new and urgent problems.

Jewish religious teachers have a term for this – midrash. A midrash is a creativereading of the text. A portion ofscripture will be read, then its message embellished in the light of the issuesfaced by the listeners at the time. Theaim is not to analyse the text as we would, digging into its “true”meaning. The aim is to use it to helpthe listeners and to bring God into their situation. Both Jesus and Paul regularly use thistechnique, perplexing well-educated evangelical preachers who see theirstatements as divinely inspired but also know they violate all the principlesof sound exegesis.

We can see this process reaching back in time. The kings of Judah used the stories of theirancestors, David and Solomon, to shore up their own positions in the face ofAssyrian imperialism, as a way of uniting their kingdom after a wave ofnorthern refugees, and as a way of explaining their religious reforms. The priests of post-exilic Jerusalem used these same stories as part ofa the grand narrative of national continuity and faith in God that helped theirtemple worship to survive and helped cement Jewish identity. The first Christians radically reinterpretedthe idea of a Davidic messiah to provide continuity with the Jewish faith,while also opening it up for non-Jewish believers. Later Christian theologians continued theprocess, interpreting the lives and putative writings of these kings assymbolic representations of Christ, or as examples of godly kingship.

I would suggest that we do the same thing. Modernist Christians have reread thesestories in the light of our own need for scientific factuality. We have needed, within our modernist culture,to see them as having actually happened the way they were written. We have needed to see the Bible as the kindof scientific history written by Finkelstein and Silberman. We are so blind to the cultural nature ofthis reading that we believe our faith stands a falls by it. If the authors are right, then it mustfall. Then again, maybe it is ourculture that is temporary.

TWISTing Our Plastic Halos

2011-10-06T13:04:00.001+10:00

It's always good to step outside your normal environment and be exposed to something new. That's how you learn. So I let myself be persuaded to go the last night's TWIST (The Word in Song Together) conference. This is part of a series of events organised by Emu Music, an Australian organisation best known for recording and publishing new worship music but which also runs frequent training events for church music leaders. That's me, so off I went.

The event went for about two hours, split pretty evenly between singing and listening to the featured speaker, Bob Kauflin, a songwriter and worship leader from Sovereign Grace Ministries in the USA. As you'd expect from a room full of 500 musicians the singing was good, led by a polished (and loud!) pop-rock ensemble. The songs, and the talk, certainly made me think, but I probably wasn't thinking what the organisers wanted me to think. I rarely do.

The talk was pretty simple, although I may have lost the point because there were no visuals, and I'm a visual learner. Best practice communication, people! Kauflin was basically saying that worship is our response to God - reverence, obedience, service, trust, love, and so on. In a worship service, then, we should be worshipping God with our minds, souls (the seat of emotion) and bodies. I got the minds and souls bit - we should clearly understand what and who we are worshipping, and it should be more than cold logic, it should engage us. The bodies bit was a little confusing and a lot overlong, and he seemed to think we should be waving our hands more. He waved his a lot, anyway.

What interested me more was the songs, and the context they provided for the message. I lost count, but we probably sang about eight songs in all, some of them twice. The tunes were straightforward and easy to sing although I thought they were sometimes pitched a little too high. I'm 50, and men's voices drop as they get older.

However, I was struck by their words and their content. There were some gems, especially In Christ Alone, the Townend and Getty song which is already widely sung in protestant churches.

In Christ alone my hope is found,
He is my light, my strength, my song;
this Cornerstone, this solid Ground,
firm through the fiercest drought and storm.
What heights of love, what depths of peace,
when fears are stilled, when strivings cease!
My Comforter, my All in All,
here in the love of Christ I stand.

It's not exactly brilliant poetry - the metaphors are a bit strained - but it paints an evocative scene, and the folk-tinged tune gives it a certain grandeur which I find stirring.

Sadly, most of the lyrics were a long way short of this standard. Like this, from the Emu-published song This Life I Live by Michael Morrow.

This life I live is not my own
For my Redeemer paid the price
He took it to be his alone
To be his treasure and his prize
The things of earth I leave behind
To live in worship of my King
His is the right to rule my life
Mine is the joy to live for him

Or this one from the speaker himself.

You are worthy to be praised
with my every thought and deed
O great God of highest heav'n
Glorify your name through me.

No doubt the sentiments are worthy but the poetry is lacking. It's flat. It could just be a sermon. There was worse, but fortunately I have forgotten the titles and so can't look them up. These are not terrible songs but neither are they particularly good. Played by a rocking band like last nights, they could engage your emotions, but they could be so much better.

What made me think the hardest, though, was the extremely limited spiritual and emotional range that was on show. This may not be typical of Emu, but if not, an interesting choice for a night meant to encourage the development of "contemporary, Biblical, Christ focused music in the church". The songs were indeed Christ focused, but in a particular way. They focused almost exclusively on one moment in Christ's life - his death - and one "moment" (at least figuratively) in ours - the moment of conversion. Michael Morrow again.

I died to sin upon the cross.
I'm bound to Jesus in his death.
The old is gone, and now I must
Rely on him for every breath.

Substitutionary atonement is front and centre, and everything else - Christ's life, his teaching, his acts of compassion, his social and political message - fade into the background. It brought to mind very vividly Richard Leonard's observation that Christ didn't come to die, he came to live. Jesus in these songs is always bleeding. It even made me think of Robert Funk (bizarrely, given where I was) and his focus on the "missing bit" of the creeds - the bit between Jesus' birth and his death.

Along with this, the speaker and the singers appeared to want us to feel a particular emotion - a passionate zeal for Christ based on his death for us. This passion was vertically directed - we are focused on God, and we are longing for heaven. In the process, our relations with each other fade into the background, as does our life in this world. Kauflin acknowledged, as a kind of concession, that we may not always feel this passion, and that our remorse at not feeling it and even our emptiness of it may also be acceptable worship. But what of our other emotions - our sorrow, our grief, our joy at mundane matters, our passion for justice, our sense of community, our fear of looming death, our excitement at our work? Surely all of these things are part of our worship as we come together and try to make sense of our lives in the light of God's love. The tendency of Kauflin's approach, reinforced by the songs, is to repress all this and try our hardest to generate the emotions the songs ask of us. We risk ending up where Mark Heard did.

These plastic halos, they seem so out of place
Behind the mask lurks a scarred and fragile face
We lie so spiritually, familiar smiles displayed
This fleeting masquerade.
We hide our pain, we try to laugh
Fools to think our tears would provoke holy wrath.

I wonder if this is why the songs often seemed so flat. Maybe the writers were trying to fit their words to what they believed they should be feeling, but their masks got in the way. Perhaps that's doing them an injustice, and they felt deeply what they wrote but just struggled to communicate it. Yet surely all of who we are, and all of who Jesus was and is, is an acceptable part of our Sunday gatherings and should find its way into our songs and prayers. We need not enter our atonement bubble. Our sorrows and struggles, the troubles of the world, our joy in the universe and the tiniest atom, our children and friends, are all important to God. Jesus entered our world because it's his world too. We don't need plastic halos, we need to remind ourselves that God loves us as we are, all that we are and all of the time.

Where the Hell is God?

2011-10-04T21:03:00.000+10:00

Christians have a recurring problem over suffering. Apart from the fact that they actually suffer, which is a problem everyone has, the Christian-specific problem is this: Christians traditionally believe in three things.

God is all-powerful, both knowing and being in control of everything that happens in the universe.
God is perfectly loving, desiring nothing but good for his/her children and creation.
Humans have free will and are able to decide the direction of their own lives, including being able to reject God and to make mistakes.

The problem is that these things are logically incompatible, and nothing brings this incompatibility into focus more than suffering. If God is both loving and all-powerful, why does he allow suffering in the world? There are two common answers. One is that the suffering is a result of our misuse of our freewill. This, however, calls into question either God's power (could God not have designed things so that our freewill need not lead to suffering?) or his love (has God now withdrawn his love from us?).

I must admit that for a long time this question didn't bother me in the slightest. I think there are two reasons for this. One is that I was brought up with a rather stoic idea of suffering. My mother always said that when something goes wrong there's no point complaining, just get on with it. And that's what she did, right to the end of her life. Yet I think the more important reason is that I just haven't suffered all that much. Sure, I've experienced grief, I've been afraid, I've been anxious, but I'm much better off than the vast majority of people in the world. I'm have a good income, a comfortable home, I'm mentally and physically healthy, I have a happy marriage and two lovely grown up children, I do work that I love.

How should I talk about this? It seems rather pagan to say that I've simply been fortunate - blessed by the goddess Fortuna, lady of chance and fate. Yet if I say "God has blessed me" or "God has been good to me", what does this say to all those who are worse off than me - those who are poor, ill, grieving, and so on? That God has been bad to them? That he has cursed them?

All of which is a rather long introduction to a short and lovely book, Where the Hell is God?, by Jesuit priest Richard Leonard. His starting point is the story of his sister. At 25, she was a faithful young Christian woman who had devoted her life to helping the poor, first in Calcutta with Mother Theresa and later at a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory. Then she had a car accident - which wasn't even her fault - and became a quadriplegic, in need of full time care for the rest of her life. This experience led him and his family - and especially of course his sister Tracey, who has also written her own book - to delve deeply and personally into the problem of suffering.

He starts with the standard lines that Christians think the sufferer might find comforting, but which the Leonards found offensive - like "God wants to teach you something through your suffering", or "God has a purpose in all this". As if God couldn't work out his purpose by some less clumsy and drastic means. Then there were the Job's comforters who said, in more or less subtle ways, that Tracey must be being punished for her sins. Which, besides being very insulting, begs the question - why would God punish a dedicated, generous young woman for some unspecified sin, while leaving oppressors and mass murderers untouched?

The tendency of all of this "comfort", in Leonard's mind, was to make God seem cruel, arbitrary and perhaps even a little unhinged. He is particularly scornful of the line often used to comfort grieving parents who have lost young children - "God must have needed another angel". So he killed our child? How psychopathic is that?

All of this leads him to a set of broader questions about how God acts in the world and the picture that emerges is fascinating and thought-provoking. Leonard's God is not the God of popular piety who will meet all our tiny requests. He does not order our suffering - the suffering simply happens as a result of the laws of nature, or our own mistakes or misjudgements. We may learn from our suffering, but God does not send it to us for this purpose. Instead Christ, who came into this world to be like us, suffers with us, and comforts us in our suffering. He wants us, in turn, to learn to suffer with and comfort others.

His comments on two other pieces of popular piety also struck me. One is his reluctance to pray for rain. He is not unsympathetic to farmers suffering from drought - far from it. However, he says that when we pray for rain, or say special masses for it, we misundertand God. Instead, we are praying to someone like the Greek God Zeus, an unpredictable character who controlled the weather and had to be placated through ritual and sacrifice. God is not like that. He does not interfere at random with the planet's climate system. Instead of thinking that if we pray hard enough God will send us rain, Leonard thinks we should take our lament to God, and our pain and suffering, and lay it before him. In the process, perhaps we should reflect on our own behaviour, the damage we have done to the planet, the havoc we are causing to the cimate system, and repent and change our ways.

The second (and I promise to stop here) is his reflection on the hymn How Great Thou Art and particularly the third verse.

And when I think that God, his son not sparing,
Sent him to die I scarce can take it in.
That on the cross my burden gladly bearing
He bled and died to take away my sin.

If God sent Jesus to die, he says, why did he warn Joseph about Herod's murderous intentions? Why not get the whole dying thing over at the beginning? Why go through the charade of the next 30 years, if all that was required was a death? No, he says, God didn't send Jesus to die, he sent him to live, to show us what God is. It was people who sent him to die, arresting him and crucifying him because they did not like the light he shone on their injustice and oppression. Thus it always is. We blame God for our suffering, but so often we do it to each other.

So for Leonard, free will is intact. We should not expect God to direct our every move or fiddle in the minutiae of our lives. Instead we should get on with living as he has taught us. God's love is also intact. He cares so much for us that he came to share in our lives. Where in this is God's power? Leonard leaves the question unanswered, and leaves us much to think about, many questions to explore further. It's a short book, and left me wanting more.

Why People Believe Weird Things

2011-09-27T20:59:00.000+10:00

My atheist friend and occasional fellow blogger Roo told me I should read Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain as part of my series on atheism. While I wait for the lovely people in the Brisbane City Council library service to buy it and lend it to me (yes I am a cheapskate, and besides, I pay my rates!) I've been whetting my appetite with one of his earlier books, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition and other confusions of our time.

It's a little unfair in some ways to include Shermer in a series on atheism given that he makes it clear in this book that he is an agnostic. Nonetheless, it's worth looking at the light he sheds on various belief systems and why they come into being.

Shermer is something of a minor celebrity in the US, a regular guest on TV chat shows where he appears as the token skeptic in episodes about the various "weird things" he discusses in this book. He has degrees in psychology and the history of science, but in fact he is a professional skeptic, editing his own magazine called Skeptic as well as writing for Scientific American, hosting a radio show and writing numerous books.

These various encounters form the basis of this book, with chapters dealing with ESP, alien abduction, recovered memory, near death experiences, racial prejudice and the notion that a future supercomputer will bring about the resurrection. There are also two longer sections, one dealing with young earth creationism and the other with Holocaust denial, bookended by some more general chapters about the art of skepticism and why people believe weird things.

Of course, one man's weird is another man's normal, but by sticking largely to fringe beliefs Shermer is able to avoid offending too many people. He also comes across as a gracious critic, ready to praise the believers when praise is due, and genuinely interested in and willing to explore the beliefs he debunks. Dennett, Harris and Dawkins could learn a thing or two from him.

The result is a lot more than an interesting romp through the outer reaches of the American psyche. In the process he provides a guide to the scientific method as she is practiced. His constant search is for verification, for evidence, for falsifiability. People say they have been abducted by aliens. Is there any evidence of these aliens apart from these people's testimonies? People say there was no Holocaust. How do they account for the converging threads of historical evidence that tell a consistent story of deliberate genocide? People say they can read each others thoughts. Does their ability to do so lie outside the statistical probability of a correct guess? Everywhere we see behind his stories of individual beliefs the footprints of scientific method - the gathering of evidence, examination of possible explanations, testing of these explanations, repetition of experiments, peer review and accountability. All of these, he says, are missing in the world of pseudoscience and pseudohistory.

Apparently, his response when asked "why should we believe you?" is invariably, "you shouldn't!" Of course he's picked easy targets and this inevitably makes him look smart. Still because he's so open and engaging, I'm going to take him at his word. So let me get to what I see as some questions posed by his version of rationality.

First of all, Shermer is very interested, as a psychologist, in the mental processes of belief. He describes, for instance, the idea of "confirmation bias" - we automatically look for facts which confirm our already held views, and unconsciously filter out those that don't. He also talks about the role played by images and ideas from our early training and wider culture. Joe Firmage's aliens bear a remarkable resemblance to the angels that appear in the beliefs of the Mormon faith in which he was raised. The appearance of other aliens matches that in early science fiction films. And so it goes on.

What strikes me about this is the same thing that stuck me about Dennett's discussion of memes. Both writers seem to act as if these processes don't apply to themselves. Those poor deluded people are subject to confirmation bias and unconsious childhood images. We, on the other hand, are scientific and rational.

Following on from this is Shermer's persistent naturalist assumption. This follows from what he calls "Hume's Maxim", taken from the words of the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume: "...no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish". This means that Shermer will explore all "natural" explanations for a phenomenon before he considers the "supernatural" ones. Does this not strike you as a procedure wide open for "confirmation bias"? Perhaps, perhaps not, but somehow he always seems to find the naturalistic explanation he seeks.

In this respect Shermer is, in general, highly conservative. In any scientific question, he is likely to be on the side of the majority. This, of course, means that he is likely to usually be right. I couldn't help agreeing with him on the beliefs he discussed here - most of them seem highly unlikely to me. The test of his method will come when he takes on something more controversial, something for which the evidence, or lack thereof, is not so clear-cut. Then we will see....

PS - I did eventually get to read The Believing Brain and you can read my review here.

Michael Kirby's Love Story

2011-09-25T15:58:00.000+10:00

Yesterdays Weekend Australian Magazine includes this moving extract from the soon-to-be-published memoirs of former High Court Judge Michael Kirby. It tells the story of his lifelong partnership with Johan van Vloten - how they met, the early days of their relationship, his ongoing delight at finding love when he thought he was destined for a life of loneliness.

If Johan had been a woman there would be nothing remarkable in this tale, and it certainly wouldn't be the pre-publication extract. If I remember rightly, none of the extracts from John Howard's book talked about his lifelong love for Janette. Yet there is an undercurrent of pain in Kirby's telling. In the 1970s (the pair met in 1969) it was illegal to be gay, and Kirby was a high profile lawyer and later a judge and the public face of law reform. Their relationship stayed more or less secret until the late 1990s when social attitudes finally allowed them to come into the open. Of course colleagues knew or at least suspected but as Kirby says, "don't ask, don't tell".

Here's what Kirby says of the relationship.

He is a truly remarkable companion. Fortunate is a human being, straight or gay, who has such lifelong love. Evil are those who would deny such love to a fellow human being. God does not smile on such people.

No doubt, such a statement would make many Christians froth at the mouth. Of course with moves in many countries to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry, this is a hot topic amongst Christians. While some insist that the Bible clearly condemns gay relationships, others from surprisingly conservative backgrounds suggest that it does no such thing. Personally I would say that as a general rule if some people think the Bible clearly condemns something and others think it doesn't, then that probably means it doesn't. After all, what else does "clearly" mean?

Leaving aside some items in the Mosaic law (given that Christians happily ignore most of that) there is only one Bible reference for us to argue about, which should in itself give us a hint about the priorities of the Biblical writers. It's this one, from the first chapter of Romans.

²¹ For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. ²² Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools ²³ and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

²⁴ Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. ²⁵ They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

²⁶ Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. ²⁷ In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

²⁸ Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. ²⁹ They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; ³¹ they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. ³² Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

The immediately relevant section here is, of course, verses 26 and 27. Paul certainly seems to be saying that same-sex relationships are a result of our estrangement from God. Many - in fact most - Christians take this to be sufficient grounds for excluding people in same sex relationships from active ministry, and for encouraging gay people to live a life a celibacy if they can't change their orientation.

Others believe it is not. There are a few reasons for this. One is that many Christians, like me, don't believe the Bible is inerrant. Therefore we are not obliged as Christians to follow everything it says to the letter and are able to make judgements ourselves under the grace of God which may differ from those of Paul or other biblical writers.

However, leaving this aside and accepting for the moment the authority of this passage, there is another way of reading it. To do this, you would need to keep reading, because the very next thing Paul says at the beginning of the second chapter is this.

¹ You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. ² Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. ³ So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?

It is easy for straight people to be judgemental about gay people. Yet Paul has given us a long list. Do we exclude greedy people from active ministry? Do we exclude people who are subject to envy? Do we exclude people who experience lust? Do we exclude those who are arrogant, or who gossip? Do we exclude those who disobey their parents? Do we exclude people who are foolish? Churches would be very quiet places!

We so often forget what Christian morality is all about. Sure, we are trying to become better people, to overcome our faults, to live as God wants us to live. But the operative word here is "trying". If we think we are succeeding, Paul suggests, we should think again. The church is the community of those who are seeking God's grace, not the community of those who are living a reformed life.

One of the reasons I think we treat same-sex relationships as different from things like envy and greed is that they seem black and white. Envy sneaks up on us and just when we think we have beaten it, there it is worming its way back into our heart. On the other hand, it's possible to say that you are either in a relationship or not. Hence, the more or less standard position is that gays should be celibate. From time to time, they will experience desire for someone of the same sex, just as a straight person will feel desire for someone who is not their wife or husband - but they must not act on it.

For those who say this, listen with empathy to one of Kirby's later statements and see if, as a straight person, you feel any differently.

I suppose that a life of celibacy would have its own rewards. Returning to a dark home of silence and takeaway meals would probably be quite adequate in many circumstances. A solitary meal would certainly allow the events of the day, the month, the year or life generally to be explored quietly and alone, in the crevices of the mind. Perhaps a cat or a dog could look up before returning to sleep, indifferent to the clattering of the home-comer, deep at night.

But for most human beings, that is not enough. It was not enough for me. It is not enough for most gays and lesbians.... Beyond the dance parties and the Mardi Gras, homosexual people are human souls searching for love and companionship. Searching for the true friend. Hoping against hope for someone who will welcome their return home and offer words and actions that immediately translate love into reality.

Not a Career Politician

2011-09-22T17:49:00.000+10:00

Talk about turning a negative into a positive. Ray Smith, the Labor candidate to become Brisbane's Lord Mayor next year, just had a flyer delivered to my letter box.

First of all he tells us this.

Everywhere I go people are telling me they're fed up with costly toll tunnels that nobody uses. Council isn't solving our traffic problems. Despite all the wasted money, traffic is worse than ever.

Fair enough, but later on he tells us why we should vote for him.

My background is in business - I'm not a career politician. I haven't sat around in Council for over 20 years like my opponent, instead 20 years ago I started a small business working for myself. Today that business employs over 150 highly skilled locals.

In other words, unlike Graham Quirk, the long-standing Councillor who recently inherited the Lord Mayor's job when Campbell Newman stepped down to make his tilt at becoming president of Queensland, Ray Smith has no relevant experience. While Councillor Quirk has been toiling away for the past two decades at running the Council with its 7,000 employees and billion dollar plus budget, Mr Smith has been running a small business. This is why we should vote for him?

Speaking of those tunnels and the man who gave them to us, what was Mr Newman doing before he became Lord Mayor? You guessed it, he was running a small business, and campaigning for the mayoralty on the basis that he wasn't a career politician. How times change!

Perhaps Mr Smith wasn't aware of that because he was too busy running his business at the time. Or perhaps he thinks we'll have forgotten. Not likely, Mr Smith!

"What shall it profit a man?"

2011-09-20T20:14:00.000+10:00

I was generally a bit lukewarm about John Dickson's A Spectator's Guide to Jesus. However, he did say something at got my attention.

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" is one of those biblical phrases that has made its way into our wider culture. This means that it is often taken out of its context, even by Christians. Whenever I have heard a sermon or a discussion on this verse, it is taken to mean something like, "what's the point of riches and power if you are going to end up in hell? it's better to believe in Jesus even if that means giving up these things." There is of course a certain amount of truth in this but there is much more to the story than that.

Here is the full passage it comes from, Mark 8:27-38 taken from the New International Version rather than the King James that you will most often hear quoted or misquoted.

²⁷ Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”
²⁸ They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”
²⁹ “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.”
³⁰ Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.
³¹ He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. ³² He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
³³ But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
³⁴ Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ³⁵ For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. ³⁶ What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? ³⁷ Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? ³⁸ If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

The Messiah or "anointed one", as understood by Peter and other first century Jews, was the promised descendent of King David, the new king who would rid the people of Israel of their foreign oppressors on the way to establishing his rule over all the nations. The Messianic dream was a dream of world domination. This is what Peter and the other disciples, and many in the crowd, either believed he was, or hoped he would become.

Jesus was very wary of this title, and you can see that here as he instructs his disciples not to talk about it. This is not, as Stephan Huller likes to think, because he didn't claim to be the Messiah. There were times when he clearly did. Rather, it is because he believed those around him seriously misunderstood what a messiah would do.

This is what lay behind both his sharp rebuke of Peter - "Get behind me, Satan!" - and his teaching to the crowd. His followers had to be prepared to suffer, even to die a shameful death. There would be no world domination under the Messiah Jesus, only death and shame.

This is the context in which he asked his rhetorical question: What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? When he says "gain the whole world" he is not speaking metaphorically, he is speaking literally. His central message to Israel was one of repentance. They needed to set aside their hypocrisy, their exclusion of women, the poor and the "unclean", their hatred of Gentiles, their focus on appearance rather than substance. What would be the point of a military campaign to dominate the world if those who dominated in God's name were no better than those who did so in Caesar's.

For me, this underlines the irony of subsequent events in church and world history. In the first three centuries after Christ the church grew in the face of persecution and suffering. The followers of Jesus did indeed literally have to take up their crosses. Then Constantine changed the game by co-opting the church into his empire. He waged war under the sign of the cross. His successors made Christianity the official religion of their regime. For the next fifteen centuries church and state went hand in hand throughout Europe. Wars were waged in the name of the Prince of Peace, dissenters were tortured in the chambers of the Inquisition, popes made and broke kings for entirely political purposes.

Christians gained the world. But what happened to our souls?

More Lives of Jesus 2: John Dickson

2011-09-18T18:57:00.002+10:00

After the hilarious foolishness of Stephan Huller it's kind of calming to read a book about Jesus as sensible as John Dickson's A Spectator's Guide to Jesus: and introduction to the man from Nazareth.

John Dickson is a theologian and ancient historian, co-director of the Centre for Public Christianity in Melbourne, and has a shadow life as a gospel singer. He is representative of the sort of moderate evangelicalism that permeates the Anglican church and many other mainstream protestant denominations here in Australia. It would be hard to imagine a more orthodox commentator on the life of Jesus.

The first thing that stands out about Dickson, more than any other writer I have read on the Life of Jesus, is his transparency about his sources. Indeed there is a 100-page companion volume to A Spectator's Guide entitled The Christ Files which provides a handy summary of the various ancient sources - both Christian and non-Christian - for the life of Jesus. He is also up front about his approach to these sources, making use of what he terms "mainstream" scholarship (and his "main stream" is quite broad) while largely ignoring both highly skeptical scholarship like that of Robert Funk, and outright apologetics.

A Spectator's Guide takes these sources and uses them to provide an introduction to Jesus in his times. Twelve brief chapters deal in turn with Jesus as teacher, healer, embodiment of the nation of Israel, Christ or Messiah, judge, friend, replacement for the Jerusalem temple, saviour, new Adam, Caesar, God and servant. If you knew nothing about Christianity you would not only come away from this book with a much clearer understanding, you would come away thinking that maybe the faith is not so nutty after all. Dickson is very careful not to overclaim on his evidence, but is clear about his own stance as an orthodox believer and presents a highly orthodox interpretation of the data.

It would be unfair to ask too much of an introductory book like this. In 160 pages you have to drastically simplify a very complex set of information and analysis, and Dickson does this with great aplomb. Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out a few things.

The first is that although he is very conscientous in citing his sources, he makes no attempt to evaluate them. For example, he quotes Tacitus's brief description of Christians, written in the late first or early second century, as an example of early non-Christian corroboration of some key details in the Gospels. However, he does not address the question of how we should interpret this reference. Where did Tacitus get his information from? Why does he report it in this way? In fact, it seems that Tacitus is not really that interested in Christians and even less in Jesus, who he calls Christ, indicating that his information comes ultimately from Christians. Rather, he is telling a story about the emperor Nero, the point of which that his cruelty was so horrific that it even made people feel sympathy towards the despised followers of Christ.

This is even more evident when he comes to discuss the Christian accounts of Jesus. While he quite rightly suggests that these are by far the richest sources of historical information about Jesus, he does not attempt to assess their value as historical documents. For instance, while he alludes to the multiplicity of accounts, he makes no attempt to address the different perspectives and emphases of the writers of the four Gospels and of Paul, whose writings he uses freely as the earliest Christian writings we have. Hence, although he knows better, the New Testament accounts are presented as if they were one account. The assumption that they can and should be harmonised is not far from the surface.

Which brings me to my second point. Much as he appears to claim otherwise, it is hard to read this as anything other than a work of apologetics. He is careful not to claim too much. For instance, he is clear that the documents only demonstrate that the early Christians believed Jesus performed miracles - whether we believe the same is a matter of philosophical choice or perhaps (although he doesn't use the word) of faith. Nonetheless, in his moderate way he makes a clear and compelling case for an orthodox Christian interpretation of the data. Dissenting voices, if they are heard at all, are extremely muted.

He is also very solidly evangelical. He is pre-occupied with the traditional evangelical issues of sin and personal redemption, expressed in an individual rather than social way. Hence, while he wants his readers to be disturbed by Jesus, he misses some very disturbing things. For instance, although he devotes a chapter to the way in which the rhetoric of the Gospels deliberately adopts the terminology used by the Roman Empire about the Caesars, his reflection on this is thoroughly individualistic, asserting Jesus' claims over "my finances, my career, my politics, my sex life, my leisure, my ambitions and my family". Yet if the claim to be a greater Lord than Ceasar is not primarily public and political what is it? It seems Dickson does not notice this challenge to his own individualism. Nor, in his reflection on Jesus as the "friend of sinners", does he really get to grips with the startling way Jesus redefines the concept of "sinner".

There is a lot to like about this book, and if you are looking for a simple introduction to Jesus you could hardly do better. But for me his Jesus is a little too tame, a little too 21st century, a little too mainstream. Dickson's caution becomes Jesus' caution. Once you have read this book and grasped the basics, move on. Read NT Wright or Albert Nolan, or even Marcus Borg, and see just how upsetting Jesus really can be.

More Lives of Jesus 1: The "Real" Messiah

2011-09-14T11:08:00.000+10:00

While writing my earlier reviews of the Lives of Jesus, I realised that my reading was getting a little dated - almost nothing after 1995. So it's time to do something about that - starting with Stephan Huller's The Real Messiah: The Throne of St Mark and the True Origins of Christianity.

Apart from the title, two things about this book let us know immediately that we are reading a work of pseudo-history. The first is the biographical note, which informs us that after graduating with a degree in philosophy, Huller pursued a career in the circus. The second is the point on Page 2 where he cites The Da Vinci Code as evidence of a groundswell of awareness that something is wrong with the traditional view of Christianity.

The rest of the book does not disappoint. All the tricks of the pseudohistorical trade are here - characters with multiple names, coded messages, fortuitous discoveries of previously hidden evidence, and of course the inevitable Catholic cover-up. Along with this fun is a vague and slip-shod use of sources, gigantic logical leaps thinly disguised by the repeated use of the word "undoubtedly", and a card-house of speculation, inference and circular logic.

What emerges, as far as I can tell from his turgid prose and tortuously roundabout telling of the story, is that Jesus had virtually nothing to do with the beginning of Christianity. Jesus was a humble prophet who repeatedly affirmed that he was not the Messiah. This Messiah is identified instead as Marcus Agrippa, last of the Herodian kings, in Huller's telling born around 29 AD and living and ruling as a client king in Roman Palestine until around 100 AD.

Agrippa makes multiple appearances in the gospel story, under various names. He is the Apostle John, Mark the evangelist and Barabbas who was released prior to Jesus' crucifixion. He makes a coded appearance as the risen Christ, with the "true" meaning of the resurrection stories revealed as Agrippa's ascension to the messianic throne. Even Jesus' death is reinterpreted not as the "Lamb of God" dying for all of us, but as the ram, sacrificed in place of "Isaac" (aka Agrippa) to allow the messianic project to continue. Incidentally, to make this all possible Jesus' death is also redated (without any explanation) to 37 CE, at which point the eight-year-old Agrippa is just about plausible as an active participant in the story.

As far as I can tell, the rest of the tale tells how Agrippa, as well as being a Roman client king, made himself the head of a Jewish mystery cult, encoded in an artefact known as the Throne of St Mark (generally dated around 500 CE, but that doesn't seem to bother Huller) and in the original (now lost, of course) versions of Mark's gospel. Huller's rather strange view is that there was originally only one gospel (written of course by Marcus Agrippa aka Mark the Evangelist) which was split into four and substantially altered by the Roman theologian Irenaeus in around 170 CE for reasons which are incredibly confusing.

Anyway, enough of this nonsense! I won't bore you with Huller's tortuous descriptions of the Throne of St Mark, his mangling of New Testament and early church history, his speculations about Isis and Horus, and all the other odd ideas he manages to cram into this one book. I'm tempted to wonder why he needed Jesus in his story at all. If he had left him to be crucified at the usual date around 30 CE he could have told a fascinating story about Agrippa anyway. Could it be that such a book would never sell?

Which leads me to another thought, prompted by my recent reading of Karen Armstrong's The Case for God. If for some weird reason we were to accept Huller's version of events, then Irenaeus's invention of the gospel of Jesus Christ is a work of incredible genius. His Jesus gives us an ethic of compassion and inclusion, a vision of justice and non-violence, backed up by his willingness to die and fortified by the hope of his resurrection.

By contrast, what does the Messiah Agrippa offer us? A client king of the Roman Emperors, active in the destruction of Jerusalem, plotting and scheming to preserve his position through the reigns of ten different Ceasars. A self-serving religious syncretism designed to cement his place in the hearts of cosmopolitan Jews and Samaritans while avoiding the ire of his Roman overlords. A saviour who does not save, a God-king who does not rule, a set of ciphers hiding a message that, when revealed, tells you nothing. This story may have obsessed Huller for 20 years, but I'd rather pass.

Letter to Julia Gillard

2011-09-10T16:14:00.000+10:00

The following is a slightly edited version of a letter I sent to my local member and copied to Ms Gillard and Immigration Minister Chris Bowen.

The recent High Court decision preventing the government from sending recent boat arrivals to Malaysia is a good opportunity for your government to rethink your approach to asylum seekers.

It’s time to accept that the policy of mandatory detention is an expensive failure. In the two decades in which it has been in place, it has done nothing to stop boat arrivals. At the same time it has a massive cost in a number of different ways.

It is costly financially – I understand it costs around $1b per year to manage Australia’s current asylum seeker system, with the majority of this funding the detention centres. That would pay for a lot of resettlement services!

It is costly in human terms, in the trauma inflicted on the detainees themselves, particularly as centres become more crowded and longer term detainees become more stressed. This trauma comes on top of the original danger that drove them from their homeland.

It is costly to the resettlement process. Given that the majority of detainees are eventually resettled in Australia, it is imperative that they develop a love of their new homeland and feel welcome and wanted here. Yet if their first experience of our country is a traumatic period of detention, they will always carry a certain ambivalence towards our community and this will make it harder for them to feel at home and commit to their new country.

It is costly to all of us in moral terms. Since 1992 we have seen a gradual escalation in the stringency of our response, as we try to toughen the deterrence factor to the point where it will actually work. Each step in this escalation makes us crueller, less compassionate, less able to see asylum seekers as people. Ultimately it will only work if our response to asylum seekers is worse than the despotic regimes they are fleeing. Is that what we want to become?

It is politically costly to your government. It turns what should be a good news story into bad news. Thousands of refugees have been settled in our community, and almost all of them are valued community members who make a positive contribution to our society. Yet instead of these stories being front and centre, coverage of the issue is dominated by the zero sum game of detention and deterrence. You will never win that battle and you need to stop trying to fight on that ground.

Asylum seekers should be allowed to live in the community while their claims are assessed. They should be provided with financial support and allowed to work or study. Your $1b budget would cover the costs of this temporary community settlement, even allowing for an increase in arrivals and the cost of tracking down occasional absconders. You might even be able to up the resources for processing claims and cut down the absurdly long waiting times. Those who are eventually granted refugee status would be already well on the way to resettlement. Those who are not would be deported just the same, but be spared the cruelty in the meantime.

Certainly this might result in more boats coming and you would be criticised, but you are being criticised anyway. You have nothing to lose. At least instead of stories about bulging detention facilities, riots, fires and mental health problems the stories would be about ordinary people living in ordinary homes, trying to rebuild their lives.

I know your government has invested a lot of political capital in the deterrence approach, but it is clearly not working. You have the chance to make a real difference. Don’t blow it.

The Case for God

2011-09-08T20:34:00.000+10:00

I have heard that while authors provide the content for their books, publishers choose the titles. Karen Armstrong's The Case for God might be an example of this. The title sounds like she is defending God against atheism. In fact, the book has a good deal to say about religion, not much about atheism (although the advent of atheism is clearly part of its context) and is fairly ambivalent about the word "God".

Karen Armstrong has written widely on religious subjects and has a strong bent for comparative religion. After a stint in a Catholic religious order as a young adult, she initially abandoned faith altogether before coming back to a more open and inclusive spirituality, embracing lessons and practices from a variety of sources in a manner reminiscent of Joseph Campbell.

The Case for God covers similar territory to Alister McGrath's The Twilight of Atheism, but it both travels back further and delves more deeply into the religious background to the question. Armstrong is also less orthodox than McGrath and more willing to critique Christian belief and practice.

The book is in two parts. In the first, she provides a brief overview of the history of religion up to the end of the Middle Ages, focusing mainly on Christianity and to a lesser extent Judaism and Islam. She mainly uses this to outline some key ideas gleaned from pre-modern religion.

She highlights the distinction made in various religious streams of thought between logos (the capacity for reason and logical thought) and mythos (the contemplation of mysteries and spiritual stories which are beyond rationality). Logos is the province of science and reason, while mythos is the province of religion. The two are not seen as in conflict, but complement one another and serve different purposes.
She also highlights the way our idea of "belief" differs from the pre-modern idea. Where for us it means an intellectual assent to a set of concepts, for pre-moderns it meant commitment. Before the modern age, she says, all religions stressed that religious doctrine could not be divorced from its practice, ritual and moral, and in the absence of this practice would seem lifeless and trivial.
Finally, she highlights the idea of limits to our knowledge. Through the eyes of medieval saints like St Denys, Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart she illustrates how they taught that we can know nothing about God for certain, and that all our statements about God must be matched by the denial of the sufficiency of those statements.

All this is background for the second part of her book which outlines the effects of the modern mindset on religious belief. It's hard to summarise, but what she charts in essence is the demise of mythos and the triumph of logos. It starts out with Descartes believing he has identified (by divine revelation!) an incontrovertable logical proof of God's existence. Alongside this type of thinking is Isaac Newton's belief that God was a necessary part of his groundbreaking theory of the cosmos, since inert matter required a First Cause or Prime Mover to set it in motion. Finally we see William Paley's argument for design dominating Christian apologetics in the English-speaking world.

In Armstrong's view, these developments impoverished religion in a number of ways. They made believers think they understood God, and hence became a form of idolatry. To see God as a Supreme Being is to see him (or "it" as she prefers to say) as essentially like ourselves, as just another something. Our sense of reverence and awe are replaced by a kind of smug certainty. The practice of religion is replaced by a cold set of logical propositions. This is religion without the power to transform.

It was also religion setting itself up for a fall. The science changed. Darwin identified how life could develop without a designer or a grand plan. Einstein showed how the cosmos could spin without a hand to spin it. The comfortable arguments of the early moderns fell down around their ears, and their heirs had no mythos to fall back on.

At the end of the book Armstrong charts three movements which have grown from this set of developments. The first two she critiques. Fundamentalism, she says, attempts to preserve this "scientific" modernist view of religion despite all evidence to the contrary. It insists on a version of literal, objective truth for everything in its chosen holy book which is a long way from historic Christianity or Islam. Scientific atheism a la Dawkins, Dennett and Harris springs from the same mindset, opposing religious fundamentalism with scientific fundamentalism just as exclusive and intolerant. These opposing fundamentalisms fight it out in a spiralling competition of extremes.

However, she also traces a groundswell of unknowing in a variety of places - in the post-modern philosophy of Heidegger and Derrida, in the theology of Bultmann, Tillich and Vattimo, and in the openness and wonder of physicists like Paul Davies.

This, then, is the burden of her message. We need to abandon our desire for certainty and our idolatrous, rationalistic vision of God in order to recover a working spirituality. We need to understand once again that religion is about immersion in ritual and contemplation, about symbols which help us make sense of our human condition, and about the practice of compassion. This need not come from a single, authorised source. It is as likely to come from Buddhists or atheists as from Christians. Wherever it comes from, we should embrace it, learn from it and live it.

Jane Eyre

2011-09-07T10:03:00.000+10:00

Lois and I went to see the new movie version of Jane Eyre for my birthday. I don't need to provide a spoiler alert, do I?

What a good movie adaptation will do for a classic story - and this is a good one - is to strip away a lot of the incidental details and show the skeleton of the story in sharp relief. What we see is a story that, while never losing its focus on Jane as its heart, is structured around two interlocking love triangles.

If there is a more spiritually charged set of love triangles in English literature then I can't recall it. What is at stake here is not mere romance, or fortune, but people's souls.

Jane lives through hard times before finally arriving at Thornfield House as a governess and falling in love with her master, Edward Rochester. Although strange, and set against the background of creaky gothic horror, the romance seems set to end happily until the inevitable romance-tale hiatus. Edward is already married to poor mad Bertha, the spectre who is kept secure in a secret room at Thornfield.

From here Jane has a choice. Edward urges her to become his mistress, and she longs to say yes. After all, the conventional world of morality has done her little good. What claim has it over the passionate uniting of their spirits? Yet her conscience will not allow it. She refuses, and runs.

This decision almost kills her but it ultimately brings her a kind of peace, as she is rescued by St John Rivers and his sisters and given freedom, a loving family and rewarding work. Yet when St John asks her to marry him it is not out of love, it is a request to give up passion, to sacrifice all for the sake of duty and service. Once again she refuses this offer - she is indeed willing to serve and be dutiful, but not if in the process she must give up passion. Ultimately, her patience and refusal to settle for less are rewarded as she is mysteriously called back to Edward's side, to find him blinded but also widowed. Their marriage can take place on her terms, with a clear conscience. Passion and righteousness can share the same heart.

In the background to this story is Edward's own love triangle. On the one hand he has Bertha, who represents for him darkness, chaos, the evil we hide in our deepest selves. He cannot love her, she does not love him, yet he also can't disown her. She is his responsibility, and they are bound together for good or ill.

Jane comes as an angel of light, or as the fairy queen. He longs for her innocence and simplicity without understanding that they are won through suffering. In the attempt to possess them he almost destroys her - how could she be an angel of light and yet become his mistress? Doing the right thing is at least as costly for him as it is for Jane, perhaps more so. Bertha comes close to destroying him three times - once when she nearly burns him to death, once when he almost tricks Jane into marrying him, and finally when she burns Thornfield to the ground. The dangers of uncontrolled passion are to the fore, and while Jane must pay the price for her righteousness before she can enjoy her passion, he must do the reverse, paying for his passion before he can experience the peace of righteousness.

The final scene in the film says it all. I can't remember the exact words now, but as Jane holds his hand and he realises it's her, Edward says, "I fear that I am dreaming." Jane replies, "Wake up, then!" It's as if Charlotte Bronte, and director Cary Fukunaga, are saying to us, "Don't settle for half a life. Don't give up passion to do what is right, don't violate your conscience for the sake of passion. You can have both - if you are prepared to pay the cost."

Emergency Behaviour

2011-08-31T10:59:00.002+10:00

Recently my local paper featured a story about the Lifeline shop in our local shopping centre, finally re-opening after the January flood. They were glad to be open again, but struggling for volunteers, and hoped that the community spirit that got us through the flood would bring them more volunteers.

I've got some bad news for them. The spirit of the floods will not continue. People behave differently in an emergency. There's normal life, and then there's what you do in a time of crisis.

To some extent, this is sad. The willingness of Brisbane people to help complete strangers back in January was one of the best things that's happened here in years, even as the flood itself was one of the worst. The fact that we are now back to our normal routine - neither particularly good nor particularly evil - is a bit of a let-down.

On the other hand, emergency behaviour is unpredictable. We recently read stories from London of ordinary middle class young people looting shops, stealing things they didn't need just because they could. They wouldn't normally do that, but people behave differently in an emergency.

In our normal life we have very clear boundaries defining what's socially acceptable. In Australia it's clearly not acceptable to take someone else's property, even though some do. We like it that way. We're shocked when someone breaks the taboo, as people have been doing recently in our suburb. A few weeks ago someone took the broken hot water system from under my house. It was rubbish awaiting disposal, but its theft made me profoundly uneasy. When an emergency like the London riots, or indeed our own flood, unleashes a tide of looting we feel that anarchy cannot be far away. We give our police emergency powers. Normal laws and freedoms are suspended.

Yet it is also not socially acceptable for Australians to interact too closely with strangers. It is certainly not acceptable to wander into their homes and offer to help them clean up their houses and yards. A polite conversation is acceptable but if it goes beyond two exchanges one of the parties will begin to look around for an escape. A random offer of assistance is cause for deep suspicion, and is almost certain to be refused.

Our reaction to the flood suggests that we may not be entirely comfortable with this in ourselves. We long for something closer, more open, more trusting. Yet this will not come in a rush, as a result of a single emergency. Our fear of anarchy will not allow it. Emergency behaviour is too unpredictable. It is just as likely to bring out our dark side as our noble side.

No, it will only come as a result of a sustained, deliberate change, a deep social and personal transformation. This demon can only be cast out through prayer and fasting.

One Up for the Baby Boomers

2011-08-26T19:04:00.005+10:00

Fellow blogger Brad posted this interesting rave about cross generational computer skills, in which he refers to the technologically illiterate baby boomers and the current generation who have such easy to use technology that it requires no knowledge. The the most tech capable people are therefore sandwiched between these two generations.

Anyway, this story popped into my head and I popped it into his comments box, but I liked it so thought I'd post it here too.

My depression/war generation Dad was one of the early users of computers in Brisbane. He was an electrical engineer who designed giant transformers (the sort that convert electrical current, not the ones that turn into fighting robots). In the late 1960s he used to go into the Computer Centre in the city and get them to put cards through their huge machines to work out complex equations for him. I didn't inherit any of his technological skills so I became a social worker and only started using computers when it became really easy.

Years later, after he retired, he bought a set of speakers for his home PC. He couldn't get them to work so he asked my son to come and help him. Ben is now an engineer himself, but was then a geeky teenager who had literally been introduced to computers on his grandfather's knee. A couple of hours later I went to pick him up, and the old pro and young nerd had still not been able to work it out. I immediately noticed the problem. They hadn't switched the speakers on at the wall.

One up for the technologically illiterate baby boomer parent!

Picture from here.

2 Timothy 3:16

2011-08-22T20:59:00.003+10:00

2 Timothy 3:16-17 is one of those snippets of scripture you get taught to memorise when you're a young evangelical. I haven't read it for a while but it formed part of our readings on Sunday morning and it struck me that I had learnt it without thinking clearly about what it means. Now's my chance to make up for that lack. Here's the passage.

¹⁴ But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, ¹⁵ and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. ¹⁶ All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, ¹⁷ so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

We were taught that this verse was a key indication that we should believe the Bible in its entirety. It was often combined with a passing reference in 2 Peter 3:16 (what is it with that chapter and verse number?) to Paul's writings "which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures", to indicate that Paul's writing's come under the same heading and should also be treated as inspired.

Of course unlike Paul (more on that later) I was taught to read bible passages in context, but I somehow had no memory of the context of this one. Paul is encouraging his younger protege in his task of guiding the church in Ephesus. He is encouraged to rely on two connected sources of knowledge to fortify his faith - the example of Paul and the others who have taught him during his life, and on "the Holy Scriptures", which he has known from infancy.

So let's take the last two verses bit by bit.

"All Scripture"
What is Paul talking about here? Well, if we accept the traditional view that Paul is the author of this letter then from the context it seems most likely that he is talking about the Old Testament and perhaps also the Old Testament Apocrypha which many New Testament writers use freely in their teachings. He is clearly not talking about any of the New Testament writings because he is talking about what Timothy learned in his infancy, before any of the Christian writings existed. The only way this passage can be made to refer to any of the New Testament writings is to accept the view of some scholars that it was not, in fact, written by Paul but is of unknown authoriship and dates from the late first or early second centuries. Even then, it could not date from any time when there was anything like a fixed New Testament canon.

All this begs the question as to the authority of this statement itself. Why should we believe Paul when he says this? Paul clearly expects himself to be believed because of his example and his relationship with Timothy. In other words, Timothy is being asked to continue a tradition which has been handed down to him.

"Is God-breathed"
The version I memorised said "all scripture is inspired by God". This construction is clearly grammatical nonsense, since to "inspire" is literally to "breathe in", and it makes no sense for God to breathe in his own scripture. Rather, the sense is that God breathed it out and the writers breathed it in. The word "spirit" is derived from the word "breath" so the Holy Spirit is best understood as the "breath of God". What is being suggested here is that the people who wrote the Scriptures were under the influence of God's Spirit.

This is a far more nebulous assertion than we were taught to believe. It clearly says that the scriptures have their origin in God, but what exactly is the nature of the infuence of the Spirit on the authors? Theologians have argued at length about the alternatives of "verbal inspiration" (every word comes from God) and "plenary inspiration" (the whole comes from God), and the relative roles of an infallible God and the fallible, culture-bound humans through whom God spoke. Paul offers us no help with this question.

"..and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness..."
Paul is most struck by the usefulness of Scripture. He wants it to be used for a particular purpose - "so that the man of God may be equipped for every good work". Scripture is where we learn to do what is right.

What strikes me is that Paul himself uses scripture in quite a different way to how we are taught to use it. Take for instance his set of scripture quotes in Romans 3:10-18. Here he uses a number of quotes from scripture, each of them taken out of context, to illustrate the point he has already made (without prior scripture reference) that all humans have sinned against God. Such examples abound in the New Testament writings and serve to remind us how culture-bound our own traditions of interpretation are. Paul feels free, and by implication is encouraging Timothy to feel free, to use the scripture to illustrate or reinforce his teaching, which he has learned from Paul and from his own mother and grandmother.

To summarise.

It's not at all clear that we should treat this statement itself with any particular reverence or authority.
It clearly does not refer to any of the New Testament writings, only to pre-Christian Jewish scriptures.
It does not imply that these scriptures are inerrant, only that the writers, in some unspecified way, are under the infuence of God.
It emphasises the use to which the scriptures are to be put, not any kind of truth claims.

This verse will only give you certainty if you are already certain.

Solving the Solution

2011-08-20T19:15:00.003+10:00

What do the English riots and social problems in remote Australian Aboriginal communities have in common? Well, there are probably a few things but one of them is that they have brought both critics and defenders of the welfare state to the fore.

For the defenders, the riots are a protest against the welfare cuts of the new Tory Government. They are an overflow of the stress of poverty exacerbated by the fear of lost entitlements. For the critics, on the other hand, these generous welfare measures are part of the problem. They encourage people to think that the world owes them a living, and enculturate them into a "something for nothing" mentality which disempowers them and disengages them from society.

This same debate has been going on for years in Australia, particularly focused around the problems of Aboriginal communities. Noel Pearson, a prominent Aboriginal leader from Cape York, has long been a critic of the welfare state, seeing it as destroying the initiative and economic independence of Aboriginal communities. Other Aboriginal advocates, like Pat Dodson, see the problem as about economic injustice, and the solution in a greater level of wealth redistribution via compensation for stolen lands.

This is a complex debate, and one so easily hijacked by politicians for their own ends. A little historical perspective might help keep the discussion more open.

The creation of the modern welfare state was shaped by two pivotal 20th Century events - the Great Depression, and the Second World War. The Depression saw mass unemployment with almost no welfare safety net. Unemployed men and women tramped the country looking for work, and those who could find it were often little better off as wages dropped below subsistence levels. The experience was deeply shocking.

The War was shocking in a different way as many of the same men went off to fight, and often die, for what they saw as their countries' interests. Meanwhile those at home worked and sacrificed for the promise of a better society to emerge after the war. This sacrifice was seen by many as a clear social compact - we will fight and sacrifice now, and after it is over we will work together to create a better society.

Delivery of the welfare state was a clear part of this compact, and the decades after the war largely saw this fulfilled. Unemployment benefits were put in place for those who couldn't find work, and also for those who couldn't work for reasons of disability or parenting responsibilities. Public housing took the place of inner city slums. Public hospitals ensured universal access to basic health care. Public schools ensured the same for education.

Those of us who grew up after the war largely take the resulting security for granted. The fact that starvation is almost unknown in our society, that most people can read and write, and that even the poorest can have high quality cancer treatment, is no longer amazing to us. Hence, it is easy for us to find ourselves nodding when right wing commentators blame this system for many of our social problems.

So how has the solution come to be seen as part of the problem? Well, I'm tempted to just blame the right and their big business backers who would prefer to pay less tax and who can afford to pay their own medical bills thanks. However, this sounds so much like a slogan that there must be more to it.

I think a big part of the problem is that our welfare system is very much an industrial insititution, and it is trying to cope in a post-industrial society. Public housing estates are a great example. After the war, large estates were built in places like Inala on the edge of Brisbane, Broadmeadows on the edge of Melbourne, or Elizabeth on the edge of Adelaide. These estates were located near large industrial areas, and their working class residents worked in these industries. Their children were educated in the local public schools and those who didn't use this education to escape to the middle class went and worked in the same factories as their parents. Social security provided a backstop for when jobs were in short supply. The same story can be told in remote Australia, but substitute Aboriginal communities for public housing estates, and pastoral work for factory work.

This all worked fine up until the 1970s, but then things started to change. The factories that didn't close automated. Cattle stations substituted helicopters for men on horseback. Suddenly communities which had vibrant economic lives turned into communities where there was nothing to do. In the process of this change unemployment rose back towards where it had been in the Depression, and people started moving again. However, this time the movement was different. Those who had been best able to take advantage of the educational opportunities created by the welfare state moved out of these communities to where they could find work. Those least able to use this education, for whatever reason, stayed on or moved in to places where they were now trapped in a cycle of poverty. Thanks to the welfare state they didn't starve, but there was no exit plan.

The welfare state is not the problem. The problem is the structure of our economy, and the way it rewards some while excluding others. But neither is it the solution it used to be. It still provides subsistence, and idleness is more bearable if you're not constantly hungry. But its industrial assumptions, its mass programs and its system of rewards and punishments are not geared to the post-industrial world.

The most popular solution, touted by conservative poticians the world over, is the idea of "mutual obligation". This misses the point. The welfare state has always involved mutual obligation. It has always been a social compact. People receive unemployment benefits as long as they look for work. People receive public housing as long as they pay the rent and care for the house. Those who fail to meet their obligations will have their benefits cancelled or be evicted from their housing. 21st century advocates of mutual obligation are not changing anything, they are just beefing up the sanctions.

The solution to this problem would require a series of posts which, despite being a social policy professional, I'm hardly qualified to write. However, a brief teaser. The problem with "mututal obligation" policies is that at present we don't have a framework for making them truly mutual. We know what we want of recipients - work or study hard, make an effort, contribute to society. However, we don't really know what we want the State, or the society, to deliver.

We think these people should have access to work. But providing work is left to the market. What happens when the market doesn't deliver? What happens when we painstakingly train someone for an occupation which becomes obsolete? We want people to move from poor communities where there's no work to areas of high employment. But what housing is available to them there? What communities will they become part of and from where will their social support and companionship come? If they are Aboriginal, how will they fare in a foreign culture, away from their country, and who will help them and welcome them?

Simply cutting welfare, and increasing sanctions for non-compliance, won't do the job. These are industrial-scale responses unsuited to a post-industrial world. We may even (shock! horror!) need to spend more on welfare to get the outcome we need. But we need to understand it as an investment, and invest wisely.

The Doors - Dark Corridors

2011-08-14T16:30:00.005+10:00

I've been listening to The Doors for the first time. Really listening, I mean. I've known of their music for years, had a tape or two in my collection, had them playing as I drove or read. In fact it's hard to avoid them if you sometimes listen to the radio, or have neighbours who do. They're one of those ubiquitous bits of our popular culture. Yet this is the first time I've really set myself to listen properly. Let me tell you, it's not for the fainthearted.

The Doors were formed in 1966 and burst onto public consciousness in 1967 with their self-titled first album. Four years, seven albums and untold quantities of alcohol and narcotics later, it ended with Jim Morrison dead in a Paris hotel room. The other three band members - keyboard player Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robbie Krieger and drummmer John Densmore - tried to continue but most of the creative spark departed with Morrison, singer, chief lyricist and creator of stage mayhem.

The band's name comes from a book called The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, in which he describes his experiences under the influence of the narcotic mescaline. Huxley himself took the title from line of William Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." For Huxley, mescaline opened the door onto a wider spiritual experience, a heightened perception of reality which enables him to reflect on and deepen his understanding. The Doors, however, open out onto a dark corridor, a labyrinth from which it seems impossible to escape.

In the era of the Summer of Love and Woodstock (peace, love and rock'n'roll), The Doors were countercultural even within the counterculture. While their contemporaries were bringing an end to war and promoting the virtues of free love and equality, they were exploring the dark side of being human. Their live shows were unpredictable and dangerous, depending on Morrison's state of mind and blood alcohol level. Sometimes they were electrifying, at other times shambolic. Then there were the times when Morrison, bored with performing, would taunt the audience, or the police, into starting a riot. Or the time in Miami when he allegedly exposed himself on stage, leading to a court case which was still unresolved at the time of his death.

The closest they came to a peace song was Peace Frog.

Blood in the streets in the town of New Haven
Blood stains the roofs and the palm trees of Venice
Blood in my love in the terrible summer
Bloody red sun of Phantastic L.A.

Blood screams her brain as they chop off her fingers
Blood will be born in the birth of a nation
Blood is the rose of mysterious union.

The love songs are not much more encouraging. There's the raw, loveless sex of Roadhouse Blues, or for something more sinister, the creepy stalker aleination of The Spy.

I'm a spy in the house of love
I know the dream, that you're dreamin' of
I know the word that you long to hear
I know your deepest, secret fear
I know everything
Everything you do
Everywhere you go
Everyone you know

Then, of course, there's Light My Fire. Their most mainstream song and the closest thing they did to a "normal" love song courtesy of Robbie Krieger's lyric, it was nonetheless the centre of one of the more notorious incidents in their career. They were asked to sing it on the Ed Sullivan Show, a guaranteed audience of millions, but they were also asked to change the lyric.

You know that it would be untrue
you know that I would be a liar
if I were to say to you
that we couldn't get much higher.

Apparently you couldn't say "higher" on national TV because it might be seen as a drug reference. The Doors are not short on drug references, although this doesn't seem to be one of them. They agreed to the change beforehand, but during the live performance Morrison sang the original lyric anyway, leading to a public snub from Sullivan and widespread outrage which did nothing to harm their edgy outlaw reputation.

If only the CBS censors had looked at the next verse.

The time to hesitate is through
No time to wallow in the mire.
Try now, we can only lose
and our love become a funeral pyre.

That's something it would have made sense to censor: a dangerous, even deadly love, a passion so risky it could kill you, the dark side of the Summer of Love.

In our more relaxed era, Light My Fire has become a staple of rock radio, its hypnotic keyboard part, growling vocal and skillfull solos standing the test of time. However, you are not likely to hear The End on mainstream radio any time soon, with its terrifying Freudian spoken section.

The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door...and he looked inside
"Father". "Yes, son". "I want to kill you."
"Mother...I want to..."

So why am I telling you all this? Why would you let yourself be drawn into this dark, dangerous corridor, opening on rooms containing things you would rather not see? Well, if you're like me you might listen purely for the music, the jazz-tinged instrumental virtuousity a cut above most 60's rock music, and Morrison's gruff baritone a change from the usual rock singer falsetto.

However, there's another reason. The public face we present to the world, the face of courtesy, respectability, kindness, peace, love, is only part of who we are. Hiding behind is this other face, the face of despair and violence, the face of fear and hatred, the face of war and mayhem. It's dangerous to look into this face. Morrison died before he reached 30, trying to drown his demons in whisky and heroin. There but for the grace of God go we.

Practice Makes Perfect

2011-08-13T17:01:00.001+10:00

For a long time I've wondered why some people seem so certain of what they believe, while I find myself so often vacillating and asking questions. While I was out riding my bike this morning it occurred to me that it's because they practice.

It's very much like playing guitar (something else I'm not very good at). A brilliant guitarist like Bruce Cockburn or Jeff Lang makes it look and sound easy, but they can only do that because they have spent hours behind closed doors playing scales and arpeggios over and over again until they can do it without thinking. They have usually started young, when their hands and brains are still supple. They also look after their hands like precious treasures. I've never forgotten the bushwalk I went on with a serious classical guitarist - he wore thick gloves the whole day because he couldn't afford to cut his hands. Of course they need some talent and the right shaped fingers, but without all that hard work and care they would be nothing.

Belief is the same. People can stand up in public and argue for their convictions, but they only do it well through years of training. Some people have more talent for it than others, but without practice the talent will be wasted. Like a musician, you have to immerse yourself in your chosen belief. You have to read the right books, listen to the right speakers, surround yourself with people who think as you do. You have to shield yourself from contrary influences and shocks which could damage your certainty. You have to train yourself strictly - often with the help of others - to shut out doubt. In the end it will come naturally to you, and you'll wonder why other people don't see things as clearly as you do.

Of course such skills are transferable. A master guitarist can quickly learn piano or mandolin. Someone who has mastered certainty in, say, religion, can transfer that skill to other fields, like science or politics or even atheism. But the core skills have to be there, and you have to keep practicing.

I tried to cultivate the skill of certainty, but I think I started too late. By the time I immersed myself in the culture of a conservative church I was in my 20s. I had a whole childhood and adolescence of training in critical thought, in asking awkward questions, in not accepting authoritative answers. Hard as I tried, the questions kept coming. I kept asking them at awkward moments, and I kept not being satisfied with the answers.

Some people possibly feel that I didn't work hard enough at it, and that if I'd kept going I might have eventually mastered it. Maybe they're right. I like to think that I had a different calling. From my earliest days I was trained to think a bit differently to everyone else. Not so differently that people would think I was batty, but differently enough that I would never be on quite the same course as those around me. I was trained to ask questions and go on asking, to poke into the soft spots of an argument and see if it squealed. I took classes in it, I practiced it day in and day out.

I would always have been second rate at total commitment. As it is, I'm highly skilled at uncertainty. Practice makes perfect. If you share your certainty with me, I'll share my uncertainty with you, and perhaps between us we could make a great duet.

Protestantism and Atheism

2011-08-07T15:04:00.000+10:00

One of the things that struck me in Alister McGrath's The Twilight of Atheism was the link he makes between the Reformation and the rise of atheism. He says

A distinctive feature of the Reformation, particularly associated with the leading reformers Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin, is the "desacralisation" of nature....The declaration that the natural world was not in any way sacred opened the way to its scientific investigation. There could be no religious obstacles to the analysis of the world. The world increasingly became seen as a machine or an instrument - of divine origins, of course, but increasingly distant from God. The material world might have been created by God; it could not, however, convey the divine presence....

....in popular Catholicism sacred and secular times, events and places were so closely associated that they were often indistinguishable....The individual had a strong sense of place within the cosmos that radiated the glory of God and displayed a divine structure. The sacred was present within the world's events, rhythms and patterns. One expected to encounter and experience the divine in everyday life.

The Protestant reformers were strongly critical of any such suggestions. Not entirely without reason, they suspected that medieval Catholicism occasionally degenerated into a folk religion of nature. An immediate encounter with God through nature was excluded, almost as a matter of principle. God had chosen to reveal himself through the Bible, and the authorised mode of knowing God was therefore through reading that Bible, and hearing sermons based upon its contents....Whereas medieval Catholicism saw the focus of worship as the altar of the church, the pulpit now became the focal point of Protestant worship....

The rise of Protestantism thus gave rise to an absent God who was known only indirectly - and then through the mind rather than the imagination.

This is why McGrath stresses the importance of Pentecostalism in the growth of the church and the diminution of the influence of atheism. Pentecostalism represents a revival of total involvement, of direct experiential contact with God. It takes the theism/atheism debate out of the realm of dry intellectual argument and into lived experience. However, for us Protestants who are not Pentecostal, what is our answer to this problem?

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I mostly sit in church and feel uninspired. We sing some songs together. We listen to the Bible, then we listen while someone talks to us about it. Sometimes this is inspiring and thought provoking, sometimes it's not. Then we listen to someone pray. Then we listen to someone read the notices. Then we have a cuppa and chat and go home. Often the cuppa is the best bit.

It's not that people aren't trying, or that they don't work hard at what they do. But 90% of the activity is based around listening. We have a small amount of visual stumulation. Sometimes the preacher uses visuals, and of course we read the words of the songs. We have no tactile involvement, nothing "hands on". We have no olfactory stimulation. We have a tiny taste of communion bread and wine once a month. Of all the myriad human arts we only use music, and that only in a limited way. We have a group of children who occasionally dance. No drama, no poetry, no painting, no sculpture, no construction, no culinary art. God is supposed to consume and direct my whole being, but most of my being is left to its own devices.

This is not why Dawkins et al are atheists. In fact, despite reading their works I'm still not sure why they are. But it's why so many people don't bother with church. Surely we can do better.

The Twilight of Atheism

2011-08-03T20:08:00.006+10:00

And now for something completely different - a book about atheism by someone who is not an atheist. Alister McGrath is currently a Professor of Theology at Kings College, London and at the time of writing this book was Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford. Prior to that he had a scientific carreer with a doctorate in molecular biophysics. He is clearly no fool and just as clearly no atheist.

I have to admit that The Twilight of Atheism was not the book I was expecting to read. I picked it up expecting to read an educated refutation of atheism. Instead, I got something equally fascinating - a historical analysis of the rise of atheism and of what McGrath sees as its subsequent decline.

In his reading, modern atheism gained strength and influence in the latter half of the 18th century, in the events leading up to and surrounding the French Revolution. In this context, atheism was seen as a force for liberation, with the church clearly aligned with the oppressive regimes of France and other European countries. Revolutionaries believed that to break the power of the monarchy and aristocracy they would also have to break the power of the church, and atheism provided a powerful, liberating alternative.

A number of other factors added to its success and growth. The rise of rationalism and the modernist worldview were tailor-made for atheism, emphasising the mastery of humans over the natural world and our ability to understand it through the processes of reason. The scientific discoveries that resulted from this world-view also called into question, if not Chrisitianity itself, then many of the aspects of what had come to be seen as the "christian" world-view, such as the centrality of the earth in universe, the "argument from design" and the literal seven-day creation and flood.   In addition, European poets and artists of the 19th century found Christianity imaginatively impoverished and turned to atheism and paganism for their inspiration, weakening the imaginative hold of Christianity. More of this in a subsequent post.

McGrath highlights the work of several key thinkers along the way - Feuerbach's notion of religion as a creation of the human imagination, Marx's analysis of it as "the opium of the people" which would whither away once liberation was acheived, Freud's identification of it as pathological. What these thinkers have in common is a triumphalist view of atheism.  Religion was holding back progress - philosophical, socio-economic, psychological - and atheism would pave the way for spectacular change and improvement.

However, later generations saw things in less rosy terms. Neitzsche, the supposed originator of the idea that "God is dead", did not necessarily see this as a triumph. Nor did Albert Camus. For them, the world without God was a bleak, absurd place and in God's absence people would reach for all sorts of less desirable alternatives.

For McGrath, the causes of the decline of atheism mirror the causes for its rise. The communist regimes of Eastern Europe, far from demonstrating the liberating power of atheism, showed it up as an oppressor at least as bad as the religions it replaced. As soon as people were free of compulsory atheism, they returned to religion in force. The credentials of atheism as liberator were irreperably damaged.

This damage was aided and abetted by the rise of post-modernism. Atheism is the natural "religion" of modernism, an expression of certainty in a monolithic view of truth informed by science and reason. For post-modernists, this certainly is itself oppressive, leading to a suppression and diversity and a silencing of dissent and difference. The old certainties of the 19th century have become increasingly untenable in the 20th and 21st.

Religion, too, adapted to meet the challenge of atheism.  The rise of the pentecostal movement is a key development turning religion from a dry philosophical activity to a lived experence which fuels the imagination of its followers.

What I found most remarkable about reading this book, after reading the likes of Dennett, Harris and Dawkins, is how different its picture of atheism is from theirs. For all these writers, the primary driver of atheism is science. They both believe science has disproved religion, and seek scientific explanations for its continuing hold on humanity. Yet despite his own scientific background, McGrath pays little attention to "scientific" atheism, barring a couple of passing references to Dawkins. Even Darwin, according to McGrath's reading, did not become an atheist in response to his scientific discoveries, but in response to his grief over the death of his daughter and his inability to think of her in hell.

The atheism of McGrath's account has much more in common with that of Michel Onfray. Indeed, it shows Onfray up as a bit of a throwback, mouthing enlightenment thinking long after the enlightenment has passed. For McGrath atheism is much more a political and philosophical viewpoint than a scientific one, rooted in its time and place, responding to the issues of a time which has now passed and ill-suited to the challenges of the 21st century.

I wonder, though, if he is a little premature in pronouncing its "twilight" phase. His book was first published in 2004, well after the World Trade Centre bombing, but he doesn't seem to have noticed or predicted the fillip this event and its aftermath would give to the atheist cause. Dawkins' documentary The Root of all Evil and subsequent book The God Delusion, as well as the popular works of Harris and Dennett, were all written after The Twilight of Atheism. They are infused with a genuine urgency to combat what these writers see as the religious root of this atrocity, and their writers have shown an increasingly energetic willingness to publicise and proselytise. Nor are these writers the cranks and oddballs who people McGrath's descriptions of contemporary atheism. Perhaps atheism has more life left in it than McGrath thought.

Hendra Virus Makes Some People Batty

2011-08-01T18:30:00.004+10:00

Queensland's media and politicians are currently in a tizz about what is being referred to as an outbreak of Hendra Virus. For those outside Queensland who may not have been following this story, Hendra virus primarily occurs in populations of flying foxes, giant fruit-eating bats of the genus pteropus. However, from time to time it also spills over to infect horses and, via them, humans. Its name comes from the suburb of Brisbane where our main racetracks are located, and where it was first detected in 1994, taking the life of horse trainer Vic Rail and a number of horses. This is where it gets emotional.

To some extent, the emotions are understandable. Australians love their horses, and Hendra virus has been fatal to every one of the 50-odd horses known to have contracted it since 1994. It's also very dangerous to humans, having led to the death of four out of the seven humans known to have contracted it. This winter there have been more horses infected than ever before - properties in eight locations in Queensland are affected and ten horses and one dog have died so far, although no humans have yet tested positive.

Still, the scale of the problem seems to suggest a moderate response is most appropriate. The distribution of the outbreaks suggests that this is not a spreading epidemic (except perhaps amongst the bats) so much as a series of incidents. After all, ten horses is not that many. Queensland Health and Biosecurity Queensland have control and testing procedures in place, and the State Government has allocated $6m to further research on the disease.

Still, this is not enough for some people, and a number of local communities are demanding that their flying fox colonies be "moved on". Queensland's pretend Opposition Leader Campbell Newman, who could well be Premier by this time next year, has promised to do just that. I don't think Mr Newman has really thought this one through, so let me help him.

Flying foxes are highly sociable creatures and spend their day in huge colonies, with thousands of bats roosting side by side in trees. At night they fan out in twos and threes, searching for fruit and flowers, and flying up to 50 km each night. As drought and deforestation have taken their toll, more groups have set up camp in or near urban areas, where flowering plants are readily available. Aside from the very occasional Hendra virus issue they are not really dangerous to humans, but they stink and make a lot of noise, so you wouldn't necessarily want to live too close.

It's these that Mr Newman is promising to move on. However, there are a number of problems with this. First of all, colonies are not that easy to move. Basically, you need to prevent them from roosting in their chosen locations. This means you need to go out to their nesting sites in the early hours of the morning, making loud noises and perhaps setting off smoke bombs, to scare them away. Bats are not strong in the intellectual department so you need to repeat this procedure quite a few times before they get the message.

All this is theoretically possible, but why would you? The flying foxes thus scared away will, of course, roost somewhere else, most likely nearby. From their new location, they will once again fly their 50km each night, spreading their viruses over much the same territory as they did before. However, because they are more stressed, they will be more vulnerable to catching the disease and will excrete more. In other words, you won't get rid of them but you will increase the chances of infection.

From here you can only sink further into absurdity. To really remove the problem in a particular community, you will need to remove the creatures beyond their 50km limit. If it is not your intention to kill them, you will need to select your new location carefully - somewhere with lots of flowering plants and no horses. Off the top of my head I would think such locations were fairly rare. Then of course, assuming you can find such a location, you would have to somehow get the flying foxes to it. Option A - herding them - would seem a little impractical given that they don't fly in flocks and that any attempt to drive them in a particular direction will just scatter them. Not to mention that they sleep during the day, so you would have to herd them at night. Option B - catching them and transporting them in cages - is also slightly comical. Did I mention that they roost in trees, and can fly? In addition, they have sharp teeth and as well as Hendra virus they carry another deadly disease known as bat lyssavirus which humans can catch by being bitten or scratched. I guarantee that if you try to catch a flying fox, it will bite and scratch you.

So it would seem that the only option left to Mr Newman will then be to "cull" the bats, a handy euphemism for killing them. Hopefully even Campbell Newman will consider this a little drastic, especially given that flying foxes are the chief agents for propogating various plant and tree species, spreading them in their faeces as they fly over their 50 km territories. The destruction of not only our most prominent native bat, but our open forest ecosystems, would seem to be a huge price to pay to spare the lives of a dozen horses.

Still, it's something to keep up our sleeves for when the eventual US or European debt default sparks the next global financial crisis. Governments looking for something to spend fiscal stimulus money on will find that we already have enough school halls. What better way to spend the money in regional Australia than to employ armies of people to chase flying foxes from place to place?

(Flying Fox photos from Brad and Lynn's Field Photos.)

Bruce Cockburn's Small Source of Comfort

2011-07-28T20:36:00.001+10:00

I loving Bruce Cockburn's new CD, Small Source of Comfort. I don't think I've ever heard a Cockburn album that I didn't like.

For those unfortunate enough not to have heard of Cockburn, he is a Canadian singer-songwriter who first became famous in the 1970s with a brand of folk-tinged music and beautiful poetic lyrics dealing with spiritual and political themes. Over the years he has branched out musically, taking on elements of electric rock-n-roll, jazz, soul and world music. He is a passionate world citizen, travelling not in a superstar musician cocoon but with his eyes and heart open, and lots of his songs are inspired by visits to the world's trouble spots.

It's five years since his last effort, Life Short, Call Now. He comments in the sleeve notes to Small Source of Comfort, presumably with tongue firmly in cheek, that after that largely acoustic effort he had planned to do something "electric and noisy, with gongs and jackhammers and fiercely distorted guitars." The best laid plans. This is possibly his most laid-back album since the 1970s, with spare arrangements, quiet reflective tunes and lots of space for his guitar.

That's fine by me, although a little depressing. Cockburn is a good guitarist in a way that makes bad guitarists like me wonder why we bother. His unusual chord structures, intricate guitar parts and mastery of rhythm make for instant recognition, as does his weary, ironic voice. And what can I say about the lyrics? Just beautiful. This time he is less combative than ususal, more reflective, like this.

I feel these serpents of desire
ripple my skin like ropes of fire
all I ever wanted all along
was to be the "you" in somebody's song.

Or this one

Silver rain sings dancing rhyme
sunlight on blue water
rocky shores grown soft with moss
catches all our laughter
and it sends us back without its edge
to strengthen us anew
that we may walk within these walls
and share our gifts with you.

After 30 albums you would think there wouldn't be any surprising new directions, and there aren't really. Nonetheless one song made my ears prick up in a new way for its sheer absurd daring. It's called Call Me Rose, and it's inspired by George Bush's attempts to rehabilitate Richard Nixon's memory. Cockburn undoubtedly has higher moral standards than Bush, and wonders what it would take to truly rehabilitate Nixon. Perhaps a second life as a poor woman, learing what it's really like to struggle?

My name was Richard Nixon only now I'm a girl
you wouldn't know it but I used to be the king of the world
compared to last time I look like I've hit the skids
living in the project with my two little kids
it's not what I would of chose
now you have to call me Rose

I was boss of bosses the last time around
I lived by cunning and ambition unbound
the suckers said they'd stand behind me right or wrong
as if they thought that hubrus was the mark of the stong
I was an arrogant man
but now I've got it in hand
it's not what I would have chose
now you have to call me Rose

My name was Richard Nixon only now I am a girl
you wouldn't know it but I used to be the king of the world
I'm back here learning what it is to be poor
to have no power but the strength to endure
I'll perform my penance well
maybe the memoir will sell
it's not what I would of chose
now you have to call me Rose

Making the News

2011-07-23T15:14:00.001+10:00

News Limited has been in the news itself, and some, over the past couple of weeks as a result of The News of the World's large-scale hacking of mobile phones. As if there was previously any doubt that the ethics of News's tabloid empire were hopelessly flawed. A set of newspapers that earns its revenue by hounding and exploiting celebrities is only just marginally less sad than a society that buys these newspapers in huge numbers.

However, there is more to News's ethical problems than just invasions of privacy, and they extend beyond the realms of tabloid journalism. The front page headline of today's Weekend Australian is a good (or should I say awful?) example.

Business turns up the heat on ALP

And in smaller type above the bold heading: "Thought bubble" policies criticised.

The body of the article reports comments by Ziggy Switkowski (former Telstra CEO and soon to be Suncorp chairperson), Lindsay Maxsted (Transurban and Westpac chairperson) and John Macfarlane (Deutche Bank executive chairperson). All of them criticise the current Commonwealth Government for lack of leadership and lack of long-term policies, with Switkowski citing the NBN and the Carbon Tax as examples of "thought bubble" policies that are not fully worked through.

Their comments are hardly surprising although I'm a little mystified as to how the NBN and Carbon Tax are either short term or poorly thought through. We all know which Australian political leader is most inclined to emit thought bubbles. Still, these men are entitled to their opinions and that's not what worries me here.

If you read the article with even a small amount of attention (i.e. if you look beyond the predictably government-bashing headline) you will see that the report is based on the proceedings of The Australian and Deutche Bank Business Leaders Forum. Yes, you read that right, the Australian has based its lead story on an event it organised itself. It set the platform and the agenda, decided who to invite, then reported the results on the front page in bold type. The Australian is no longer reporting the news, it is now manufacturing it.

A number of Labor Government ministers have said they believe News has an explicit policy of working to bring down the Gillard government. News executives strenuously deny this. Policy or not it seems to be what they are doing. They have shifted from being observers and commentators on Australian politics to being active, partisan participants.

News controls two thirds of Australia's daily newspapers and has cornered the market in some states. Lachlan Murdoch is also chairperson of Channel 10. That's a lot of control over information to be held by a partisan player. News has a lot of resources to throw at this - it's a global media conglomerate the scale of which rivals that of the Australian government itself. And of course, even though its origins are Australian, its interests are primarily in the USA and Europe. There is no necessary alignment between the interests of News Limited and those of anybody in Australia, never mind ordinary Australians.

So in a sense, phone hacking is just a distraction. We do need an inquiry into Australian media ownership, but not because there might be hacking here. We need to ask ourselves, do we want the information we get controlled by a company that is so profundly ethically compromised?

The F***-Up Theory of History

2011-07-22T19:13:00.001+10:00

I'm in the middle of reading Iain M Banks' latest Culture novel, Surface Detail. As usual its a wonderful piece of space opera, with action that sprawls across planetary systems, species and real and virtual worlds. There are wheels within wheels, nothing is necessarily as it seems, and the technology is incredible.

Much of the action takes place in what is called the Tsungarial Disk, a ring of supposedly abandoned ancient machines surrounding a gas giant planet. Two of the main characters approach the disk, intent on skullduggery.

Veppers smiled thinly at the alien.... "Why did they build all these? Why so many? What was the point?"

"Insurance, possibly," Bettlescroy said. "Defence. You build the means to build the fleets rather than build the fleets themselves, the means of production being inherently less threatening to one's neighbours than the means of destruction. It still makes people think twice about tangling with you." The little alien paused. "Though it has to be said that those inclined to the fuck-up theory of history maintain that the Disk has no such planned purpose and is essentially the result of something between a minor Monopathic Hegemonising Event and an instance of colossal military over-ordering." It shrugged. "Who is to say?"

I definitely subscribe to the fuck-up theory of history. Given that the Culture is basically Western society writ large (very large) it's not hard to see ourselves in this description. What was the Treaty of Versailles but a huge stuff-up that paved the way for the second World War? What was the dropping of the warheads on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but a stuff-up brought on by US fear of the Russians? What is Al Qaeda but a colossal mistake by the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence service?

It's often said that those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. It's also been said that the one thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history. Perhaps we should change that. The one thing we learn from history is this - stop fucking things up!

The Good Samaritan

2011-07-18T20:41:00.005+10:00

In previous posts I've talked about Jesus' inaugural sermon in Nazareth, where he reinterprets the Kingdom of God to include Israel's enemies; and the story of the cleansing of the Temple, in which Jesus symbolically clears the Court of the Gentiles for their expected influx. In Luke 10:25-37 we find a story that reinforces these themes in a different way.

²⁵ On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

²⁶ “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

²⁷ He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

²⁸ “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

²⁹ But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

³⁰ In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. ³¹ A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. ³² So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³ But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. ³⁴ He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. ³⁵ The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

³⁶ “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

³⁷ The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

This is one of the best-known of Jesus' parables, and the term "Good Samaritan" has entered our wider culture as a term for someone who helps people in need.

Jesus uses a rhetorical method that we see at greater length in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) in which he starts from a point of agreement with his hearers based on the Law, and then follows up by turning this law on its head. The lawyer asks what he must do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus invites him to anwer his own question. He does so by quoting two verses, the first from Deuteronomy 6:5, and the second from Leviticus 19:18, and Jesus fully endorses his answer : "You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live".

This is the standard Rabbinic answer to the lawyer's question. These two verses were seen as a summary of the whole Mosaic law.  As Jesus says in the parallel version of this story in Matthew 22, "All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." By endorsing this view, Jesus seems to place himself securely within the Rabbinic tradition. However, the rabbis were well aware of the difficulty of actually following these commands and they wanted to define them a little more carefully. This is the purpose of the lawyer's follow-up question, "who is my neighbour?"

You will notice that Jesus doesn't answer this question. The relevant Rabbinic answer goes something like this: your neighbour is your fellow Jew. A further question follows: what if I'm not sure the person is a Jew? The answer is that if you don't know then you can be legitimately excused. Jesus doesn't answer this question because the problem is with the line of questioning as much as with the answer.  Instead he poses a question of his own in the form of the famous parable.

At its simplest level, the meaning of the parable is clear, and modern readers understand it well. You should help those in need, whoever they might be. However, there is a further level provided by the three characters Jesus places in the story. The first two, the priest and the Levite, are not only Jews, but people whose role and duty is to interpret and enforce the Law of Moses, and to enact it in the Temple. They should be exemplars of the Law.

The problem for them is twofold. Firstly, they are walking along a dangerous road and they see clear evidence of a violent robbery - they are obviously at risk and want to hurry along. Secondly, the robbery victim has been left "half dead" - he is lying unconsious beside the road. If he turns out to be dead they will become ritually unclean by touching him, and will not be able to carry out their sacred functions in the Temple until they have served a period of cleansing. So they do what the Rabbinic interpretation of the law says they can - they assume he is not a Jew, and pass by.

The third character in the story is a Samaritan. The Samaritans were people of mixed descent who lived in the area just to the north of Judea and followed (still follow to this day) a modified form of the Jewish religion, worshipping at their shrine on Mt Gerazim. There was a long history of enmity between Samaritans and Jews, which had often escalated into violence. This Samaritan, unencumbered by the law of the Rabbis, sees a man in need and stops to help him. What could be more natural and straightforward? He binds his wounds, puts him on his donkey, and arranges for his care in the nearest inn.

By the time Jesus asks his question - "Which of the three do you think was a neighbour...?" - it is clear that there is only one possible answer - "The one who had mercy on him."

Having the Law, at least as interpreted by the lawyers of Jesus' day (who we often mimic), does not make you more godly. In fact, it is likely to make you less so.  The Samaritan is not merely ignorant of the Law but its active enemy. Yet acting on his good impulse he is more godly than the priest or Levite acting from their deep knowledge of the Torah. This is why the priests and Levites, and the temple in which they serve, will be destroyed. This is why their place of leadership in the Kingdom of God will be taken by Gentiles, Samaritans and Jewish outcasts. This is why they had Jesus executed.

The Atheist Manifesto

2011-07-14T17:47:00.004+10:00

I used to think that Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett all had a bit of a grudge against religion. Then I read Michel Onfray's The Atheist Manifesto and changed my mind. Dawkins and Harris are mere pussycats compared to Onfray.

Michel Onfray is a French philosopher, and I have to admit he's a random pick on my journeys in atheism. His book has been staring at me from my library shelf since it reopened in May, so finally I brought it home and read it. I'm not sure how our better known Anglo-American atheists view him. He shares with them a negative, jaundiced view of religion, especially the major monotheistic religions which are the focus of this book. On the other hand, whereas the core of their critique is scientific, grounded in the works of Charles Darwin, his is almost wholly philosophical, grounded particularly in the works of Neitzsche and Freud.

Onfray claims to have made a close study of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. If so, he has studied them in a peculiar way because what he presents is even more of a caricature than Dawkins' or Harris's. He has failed to see any good elements of religion, while he has magnified the bad, invented extra bad things where the real ones were not bad enough, and presented a huge, very ugly paper tiger to attack with the sword of his caustic wit.

Like Dennett, he makes no attempt to refute or disprove religion. He assumes that anyone with an ounce of intelligence can see its falsehood. Why, then, are there so many believers?

Human credulity is beyond imagining. Man's refusal to see the obvious, his longing for a better deal even if it is based on pure fiction, his determination to remain blind have no limits. Far better to swallow fables, fictions, myths or fairy tales than to see reality in all its naked cruelty, forcing him to accept the obvious tragedy of existence. Homo Sapiens wards off death by abolishing it.

Having thus disposed of religion in a few words, he can get on with what really interests him - his critique of the behaviour of organised religion. While he takes aim at all three major monotheisms, his main target is Roman Catholic Christianity. Over two hundred pages he circles around two main critiques, restating them again in again in slightly different clothing.

Firstly, he sees religion as the enemy of the intellect. Since religion is obviously nonsense, its leaders can only maintain it by supressing intellectual inquiry. He gleefully cites example after example of the church's persecution of scientists, its anathemising of new scientific insights, its habit of proscribing or, better still, burning books which are contrary to its teachings, its destruction of great works of art in the name of religious dogma.

Secondly, he sees religion as the enemy of democracy and freedom. He sees monotheisms as intrinsically theocratic, as always siding with tyrants and dictators. He cites examples across the sweep of history, from the Torah's injunction to destroy the surrounding nations, through the smooth transition of the Roman Empire from persecutor of Christians to persecuter of pagans and heretics, to the Vatican's condoning of Nazi atrocities and the totalitarianism of extreme Islam.

His bile is entertaining for a while, his pithy, bitter gallic prose and agressive certainty sweeping the reader along, seducing us into his world view. However, by the end of this book, short though it is, it becomes wearying. After hearing the critique of religion I wanted to know what he would offer in its place.

He is pretty clear what he doesn't offer. The enlightenment philosopers, and particularly Kant, earn his scorn for their deism, their failure to jettison the idea of God and instead to simply remove him to a greater distance. He is also highly critical of the tendency of atheists to mimic religion by setting up their own quasi-religious structures to promote free thought. Dawkins take note. And despite living in the world's most secular country he he has little time for modern secularism, which he sees as mere nihilism rather than what he regards as "true" atheism.

So what is this true atheism? He makes a promising beginning, outlining his project for developing what he calls "atheology", mobilising disciplines as diverse as phychology, metaphysics, archaeology, history, aesthetics and of course philosophy to the task of building a truly atheist worldview. And in quotes like the one above he makes a promising beginning at describing what this might look like. However, he gets no further than this. At the end of his seemingly interminable harangue he is still where he started.

Today's and tomorrow's battles require new weapons, better forged, more efficient, weapons suited to present needs. We need yet another effort to de-Christianise the ethic, politics, and the rest. But also to de-Christianise secularism....

I wished he would get on with the forging, but was left with the suspicion that he lacks both the fire and the iron for the task.

So why would a Christian read such a book? Well, I suppose for two reasons. The first is that we are asked - in fact commanded - to love our enemies. How can we love them if we refuse to listen to them, if we refuse to take them seriously, if we block our ears to their voices?

The second reason follows from the first. Much of what he says is true, despite not being the whole truth or even nothing but the truth. Christianity and Christendom, as well as Islam and Judaism, have crimes to answer for. We have amends to make. We have truths to face. We need understand why people hate us. It is too easy for us to try to sweep these things under the carpet, but God calls on us to repent, and Onfray, for all his bitterness, can help us to do so.

John Spalvins on the Carbon Tax

2011-07-11T20:59:00.002+10:00

At last the Gillard Government has released the details of the carbon tax and we can get on with it. Of course its complicated. The country's 500 largest polluters will pay $23 per tonne of carbon emitted and this cost will flow through to the wider economy in all sorts of puzzling ways, for which some people will be compensated in ways sometimes just as puzzling.

Leaving aside the technical details of the tax and the compensation package, about which some industries are still bleating while others are relatively relaxed, it is interesting to read the comments of former Adelaide Steamship Group Managing Director John Spalvins. Spalvins was giving an interview to mark the 20th anniversary of Adsteam's sinking under $7b of debt. After some gratuitous pot-shots at the Gillard Government, here's what he has to say about the carbon tax.

He said several former senior US executives were bemused about Australia's introduction of the tax. "When I am in the US -- I spend three months at least each year -- if you raise the issue of carbon tax and carbon emissions, it is a non-event. They can't believe what we are trying to do -- by taking the pain and the suffering first," he says.

"Even if you say it is an issue, why should we 22 million people lead the world of six to seven billion people, and what difference does it make if we do?"

I'm sure Julia Gillard won't be seeking economic advice from a man who lost his company $7b. Nonetheless he sums up in a pithy way the three great fallacies peddled by those who stand to lose money in the transition to a low-carbon economy.

1. "Even if you say it's an issue..."
Enough with the climate change skepticism! The science is clear that it's happening, and why. There are varying views on how fast, and how drastic, the change will be. The doubt is solely in the minds of those like Spalvins who have a vested interest in inaction.

2. 22 million out of 7 billion
Carbon tax opponents make a great deal out of our smallness and hence insignificance on the world stage. Our 22 million people make us the 50th most populous nation in the world, with about one three hundredths of the world's population. However, our 400,000 tonnes of annual carbon dioxide emissions make us 16th in the world, and we are 12th in emissions per capita. We are world leaders in emissions, why not be world leaders in cutting them?

3. "Why should we lead the world?"
Being a proud Australian I would be delighted to think we were leading the world in this or any other worthwhile endeavour. Sadly we are not. The European Union (responsible for 14% of world emissions) has had an emissions trading scheme in place since 2005. New Zealand (the world's 72nd largest emitter) enacted its scheme in 2008. And while the USA, the world's second largest emitter, has no national scheme it has a number of regional ones which between them cover areas with far more population and emissions than Australia. We're lagging behind, people!

I'm with the Greens on this one. I'd like to see more, and a faster transition. However, the political difficulties are real and what we are about to have is at least a start.

The Ocean of Song

2011-07-09T16:10:00.006+10:00

All over the world, songwriters are beavering away every day producing new songs. I guess most of them never see the light of day, or get heard by a small circle of people before drifting off into the sea of forgetfulness. Occasionally, one will break the shackles of time and place and become immortal, like Amazing Grace or Knockin' on Heaven's Door.

I've been thinking about the ones in between - the ones that reach the public sphere, experience a moment of adulation, then sink beneath the waves. What happens to these songs, and to their authors?

I somehow managed to miss Pavlov's Dog on their first time around in the mid-1970's, although I remember seeing their records in the shops - who could forget that classic cover? It's surprising, because it's just the sort of music I would have loved at 15, with its metal-lite sounds, over-emotive lyrics and David Surkamp's ridiculously powerful falsetto. I recently caught up with their first two albums courtesy of various people offloading them cheap. I've been loving them just as I would have at 15, suspending my critical faculties and enjoying the rock'n'roll energy and melodrama.

Like most rock bands they had their moment of fame and then faded away. I guess they still get a bit of money from occasional CD sales but on the prices I paid for mine, this wouldn't be enough for a living. To the apparent amazement of band members someone put up a Pavlov's Dog website and it's interesting to see where the members are now - some struggling along in the music business, some working in ordinary day jobs. In the 1970s their fame spread throughout the world, now it has shrunk to a few nostaligic fans. Nonetheless, like everything else you can find many of their songs on Youtube and you'll find from there that Surkamp, who wrote most of them, is still paddling furiously in his 60's, touting his worn falsetto around the world and reprising Julia to fans who are still interested if maybe not quite adoring.

No so Andrew Durant. He was rhythm guitarist and principal songwriter of Stars, a band in the good old Australian pub rock style best epitomised by Cold Chisel. They had a brief moment of fame in the late 1970s and were already on the way down when Durant was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1979 at the age of 25. That could well have been the end of the story, but Durant obviously enjoyed more respect amongst his peers than in the wider community because in 1980 some of the cream of Australian rock music came together for a memorial concert at which they sang the bulk of his songs, including some written in the last months of his life and aired here for the first time.

Celebrity concerts can be tedious affairs as stars with oversized egos jostle for airtime. However, in this one they seem to have submerged their egos in Durant's music, and the result is a beautiful concert, re-released on DVD in 2008. Not all the songs are brilliant but there are some true gems here. The cheery Look After Yourself is actually better in the original Stars version. That's Durant with the moustache. On the other hand, Solitaire is given a soulful makeover by Ian Moss, while Last of the Riverboats is surely evidence that if you can just stop him screaming long enough Jimmy Barnes is the best of all Aussie singers.

Of all these songs Riverboats seems to be the only one that has attained a life of its own, being added to the repertoire of various country artists. On the other hand, the most beautiful of all of them, Ocean Deep, written during Durant's last battle, may possibly only live on in this single electrifying performance led by Broderick Smith.

I'm feeling like a captain with no hull beneath my deck
Waves are pounding my proud ship to a wreck
The songs of the sirens are still ringing in my ears
I'm a weather-worn sailor feeling his years.

Turned my back on fate, but I didn't have much say
You can't ignore the weather when it's blowing you away
Threw out a lifeline and prayed that it would hold
And waited for the storm to go.

Ocean deep, time and tide won't let a sailor sleep.
Ocean never ends, like the tide I'll always roll out again.

On the distant horizon there's a golden beach
A haven for sailors, always out of my reach
As long as there's an ocean and a strong steady wind
I'll sail the seas forever, no land can lock me in.

Theodicy

2011-07-04T09:41:00.001+10:00

Have you spent long hours agonising over the problem of suffering (which theologians call "theodicy" for some reason I'm sure I knew once)? Well, finally Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has provided the explanation we've all been waiting for. Check it out, you won't be sorry.

Punishment, Deterrence, Protection

2011-07-03T15:32:00.002+10:00

Two rather sickening stories caught my attention in yesterday's edition of The Australian.

The first concerns serial violent offender Robert John Fardon. Fardon has a history of violent sexual assaults dating back to 1966, some against children and one against a woman with an intellectual disability. Since 1978 he has set up a bit of a pattern - being sentenced for a crime, serving a long sentence, then committing a similar crime soon after his release. His case was one of the triggers for Queensland to introduce indefinite detention as an option for repeat violent offenders, and this law has now been applied to him.

The second is the case of Dr Graeme Reeves, who was convicted of a serious assault after he surgically removed a woman's clitoris without her consent and without any medical need to do so. Dr Reeves also has form, having been previous convicted of indecent assault against patients and being the subject of over 100 complaints to health authorities. He was sentenced to a total of three and a half years in jail, of which he must serve at least two.

These cases are remarkably similar. Both involve serious sexual assaults against defenceless people. Both crimes are horrific and have lifelong impacts on their victims. Both men are repeat offenders. Yet while victims of crime organisations are rejoicing in the verdict on Fardon's case, they are appalled at the lightness of Reeves' sentence.

Lorraine Long from the Medical Error Action Group, which helped to expose Reeves, said yesterday her "jaw dropped" at the "highly inadequate" sentence.

"There seems to be a double standard when a crime on the street becomes a misdemeanour in the surgery," she said.

"People thinking of coming forward to report their own experiences of medical malpractice must be thinking, 'What's the point?' I would have expected the sentence to be double what it was."

The victim, Carolyn DeWaegeneire, felt the same.

"Until now I thought the law was to protect the public and the people; I have now learnt otherwise," she said outside Sydney's Downing Centre Court.

"I was hoping a woman would be treated equal to a man. If a penis and scrotum had been cut off, what sentence would you give to him?"

I have to admit they have a point. It seems an extremely light sentence for a serious act of violence, especially considering that Fardon's convictions have each earned him more than ten years in prison.

You hear this a lot when it comes to sentencing. It seems rare that a victim thinks a sentence is adequate. I struggle with this issue myself, and I think a lot of the problem comes from the fact that for serious crimes we only have one response, imprisonment, to serve three different purposes, each of which is at play in these two cases.

Punishment
The first purpose is punishment, or revenge if you like. Carolyn de Waegeneire wants to be avenged and you can understand why she would. This is a principle as old as civilisation itself and we have it in the Bible - "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". However, before my literalist friends leap on this as a model for our legal system, remember what Jesus said.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also."

I'm not sure that Jesus meant this to be applied in a judicial setting and it would be difficult to ask this of Ms de Waegeneire, especially if she is not a follower of Christ.

The difficulty is, how do you decide what sort of punishment is proportional to the crime? If you went with the original Biblical principle, then Dr Reeves would be condemned to have his genitals surgically removed. This would be just, but most of us would also find it gruesome. You wonder if this punishment would satisfy his victim, or if it would make her feel even worse.

Our justice system puts two things in the way of this happening. First, it puts a neutral authority between the victim and the perpetrator. Where the victim would no doubt feel like wielding the knife herself, the judge takes a dispassionate view, and tries to decide objectively on an appropriate sentence. Perhaps he or she sometimes gets it wrong, but at least he has all the facts before him, while we just have a short newspaper report.

Secondly, various punishments are seen as inhumane and unacceptable. Mutilating the victim is one of these. Dr Reeves will not be surgically altered. Nor will Robert Fardon be subjected to violent sexual assault. Indeed he will be in protective custody to prevent this very outcome. As a proxy for this proportionate revenge, a judge, guided by the law, will try to calculate an equivalence between the offence and an amount of time behind bars. It's like comparing apples with roast beef.

Deterrence
If you thought that was complicated, the waters of deterrence are so muddy as to be almost impenetrable. The idea is that sentencing will serve as a deterrent both to the perpetrator and to others who might be thinking of committing similar crimes. The trouble is, the deterrent factor is such an unknown. I am deterred from committing such crimes purely by the prospect of being shamed in front of my family and friends. For others (like Fardon himself, for instance) even a lengthy prison term doesn't seem to work. Reeves is an unknown quantity. While he has committed multiple offences this is his first stint behind bars.

What effect does all this have on other potential offenders? Deterrence assumes that people weigh up the consequences before committing an act. This may sometimes be the case but I suspect that overall people commit crimes in the expectation that they will be able to conceal them.

Lorraine Long's comments provide another perspective on this - what sort of sentence would provide an adequate incentive for a victim to make a complaint and go through the traumatic process of getting a conviction? Clearly she thinks that Reeves' sentence is too short and will shield other offenders from prosecution.

Protection
The final part of sentencing is the view that the wider community should be protected from such offenders. This is most clearly the case with Fardon's sentencing which is wholly motivated by this protective factor. As the Queensland Attorney General Paul Lucas says:

"This appeal was never about punishing Fardon -- that was the role of the sentencing court when he originally appeared before it. This is about protecting the public."

You wonder what role this has played in Fardon's earlier sentences, and even more what role it has played in Reeves' term. Ms De Waegeneire alludes to this in her comments but it is not clear how she thinks the law would protect her. It would seem that public safety could be ensured by preventing Reeves from practicing medicine, since all his assaults took place under cover of medical procedures. At least it has to be tried. In the meantime protection has another side. Prison brutalises people. They often come out worse criminals than they went in. The community is often better protected in the long run by keeping offenders out of jail altogether. And of course there are people in jail too. Who is protecting them?

It's all so complicated and a judge has to weigh up a lot of factors in each case. He or she has to have the wisdom of Solomon to make the right decision and the hide of a rhino to put up with criticism afterwards. I'm happy to leave them to it.

The Greatest Show on Earth

2011-06-30T22:09:00.005+10:00

I first encountered Richard Dawkins through The God Delusion, his tedious and ill-informed rant against religion. Like Christians around the world, I shook my head ruefully and said, "no, I don't believe in that god either". So I thought I'd try again with his most recent book, The Greates Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

I have to say it's much more pleasant to encounter Dawkins on his own territory. While his religious knowledge is patchy at best, he has a deep knowledge of evolutionary biology and a passion for the subject that really shines through. Unlike Sam Harris, he even holds out an olive branch to moderate religious believers, opening the book with a discussion of his joint lobbying with various Anglican bishops on the subject of the teaching of creationism in school science classes.

The motivation for this book is Dawkins' horror that over 40% of Americans, and over 20% of Britons, believe in young earth creationism. Dawkins responds by attempting to set out, accessibly and in plain English, the various strands of evidence that point towards the truth of the evolutionary view. He draws heavily on Darwin's Origin of Species, the closest thing to a sacred text in Dawkins' world, but updates Darwin's perspective with research data accumulated over the intervening 150 years.

The evidence is grouped into nine main strands:

evidence from humans' experience with selective breeding and the changes in animals and plants which result from such selection
evidence from experiments with bacteria and fish in the laboratory, and in the real world, which show major changes taking place over periods of years or decades
the evidence of various radioactive dating methods
the evidence of the fossil record, including a lengthy response to the idea of "missing links"
evidence from embryology
evidence drawn from the similarities and differences of species on different continents and islands
evidence of the genetic relationships between various species
evidence within species of change and adaptation, including numerous examples of "poor design" which seem to stem from gradual adaptation
evidence of the "evolutionary arms race" in which predators and prey mutually improve their ability to catch and escape.

Personally I didn't really need convincing, but I have enjoyed the ride anyway. I'm an occasional reader of popular science books and I already knew a lot of this stuff, but there was still plenty that was new to me. I found his discussions of comparative anatomy fascinating, as were his accounts of the evolutionary history of various types of animals including ourselves. A lot of his asides and footnotes are fun, and his conversational tone kept the book light enough to keep me reading.

Not that this is a perfect book, by any means. The book could could probably have lost 100 pages without anyone missing them. If I was the editor I would have taken the red pen to the large number of digressions and multiple illustrations of the same point. I would also have got rid of some unhelpful analogies, a few discussions of terminology he doesn't use, and most of the bits where he kicks sand in creationists' faces. It seems cruel to kick someone when they're down, but then I guess that's how natural selection works.

Which brings me to the thing about this book that I found most jarring, coming from the world's best-known militant atheist - Dawkins' persistent, even relentless, use of the language of intention. Like this, the first one I found flipping through the book, from Page 366.

...when our fish ancestors took to breathing air, they didn't modify their gills to make a lung....Instead, they modified a pouch of the gut.

Clever fish! Or this one, from page 390.

Natural selection...chooses between rival individuals within a population. Even if the entire population is diving to extinction, driven down by individual competition, natural selection will still favour the most competitive individuals....

The book is full of this kind of stuff, Natural selection choosing, favouring, acting, achieving, tinkering. Individual species making transitions, adapting, modifying.

Dawkins knows that this is a mere figure of speech. Only two pages later he says this.

Natural selection is all futile. It is all about the surival of self-replicating instructions for self-replication.

So why does he use it so constantly? Why does he speak throughout the book as if nature, evolution and natural selection are acting purposefully? Why does he so consistently attribute agency to these impersonal, chance-driven, statistical processes?

I think part of it is that Dawkins is just not a particularly skilled writer. To be sure, he is a great communicator and controversialist, but compared to the likes of Stephen Jay Gould or Stephen Hawking his English is pedestrian and unimaginative. He is in too much of a hurry to get his point across to spend time teasing out the niceties of language.

However, my guess is that there's more to it than this. Living under the beneficient influence of Charles Darwin, Dawkins is surprisingly Victorian. Like Darwin, he is an upstanding gentleman, a person of high ethics and passion for the truth. He is a natural seeker after meaning and structure. His choice of language helps to shield him from the implications of the futility of natural selection.

Even the term "natural selection" itself is a misleading analogy. No selection is involved. Some things survive, others do not. Those that survive continue to reproduce, spawning other things which also survive or don't. These things change between generations, and the changes which survive subsequently lead to other changes. That's it. That's all there is. Outside of human minds there is no such thing as purpose and meaning.

Dawkins can't face the despair of that view of life. Nor can I. He papers it over with the language of intention. I remain a Christian.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

2011-06-28T21:44:00.000+10:00

Writing about what it means to be human made me think of Philip K Dick's lovely science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The title alone has got to be worth the price of the book. It poses a tricky, if hypothetical, problem which is not that different from the problem of post-humanism.

The story centres on two humans. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter whose job is to destroy escaped androids. The intellectually disabled JR Isidore is a delivery boy for a company that repairs electronic animals. They live on an Earth that is a virtual wasteland, where almost nothing survives except humans and even these in rapidly decreasing numbers through mass emigration to the outer planets.

In this lifeless world, every human dreams of owning a real animal, but these are such rare and expensive items that most have to settle for incredibly lifelike electronic substitutes. These dreams provide a deep emotional core to the novel. Deckard, already the owner of a electric sheep, takes his flying car out into the wilderness for a little time alone and finds what appears to be a real, living toad. He carefully catches it and takes it home to his wife, only to be shattered as she ruefully flips it over and opens its battery cavity. JR has better luck, finding a real live spider in the abandoned unit block where he lives and taking it back to his own unit.

In this world there are also human-shaped androids, so lifelike as to be almost indistinguishable from real humans. They look exactly like humans, they sound like them, they smell like them, they are as intelligent as them and they even behave like them. Used widely as servants on the outer planets, these androids are outlawed on Earth. Nonetheless they frequently escape and try to blend in with the Earth population, and it is Deckard's job to find them and destroy them.

This is not easy, as androids have no trouble blending into the human population. Short of pulling them apart, the only detectable difference is that androids have no empathy. They know what it is, and can mimic it, but they do not feel it. When Rick identifies a suspected android he has to administer an "empathy test" in which he hooks it up to a monitor and meaures its response to various emotional stimuli. A human will have an instant physiological reaction to shocking ideas and images. In an android this reaction will be ever so slightly delayed, as they first process the idea, and then consciously create the appropriate response.

This difference is crucial, as we see when a group of escaped androids move into JR's apartment block. JR takes them for humans and befriends them. At first things go fine, but then they find his precious spider and slowly torture it to death in front of him, oblivious to his immense distress. JR himself is rescued when Rick tracks down the androids, but his relief is tinged with sadness for the loss of his "friends".

This is, of course, a version of the Frankenstein story, and it poses a similar moral question for us, should we succeed in creating artificial intelligences that really live. In Dick's view, our creations may be monsters, highly dangerous in much the same way as Frankenstein's monster. Yet the book's title insistently asks us to empathise with them. Perhaps they do dream of electric sheep. They certainly dream of freedom, or else why would they escape so regularly? Like Frankenstein's creation, they dream of being truly human. Could they be, or will they be always wholly other?

Post-humanism/Resurrection

2011-06-25T15:14:00.004+10:00

Post-humanism is one of the favourite themes of speculative fiction, and the world is not short of futurists like Cory Doctorow who believe it could one day be fact. The basic idea is that through technology humans will one day transform ourselves into something different to what we are now.

Greg Bear (among many others) imagines that humans will be able to upload their consciousness into a huge database in which they will potentially live forever, divorced from any physical existence but preserving their individual consciousness in the company of other disembodied "elders".

Doctorow imagines that our memories and thoughts might be recorded at a remote back-up location, to be refreshed and revived in the event of a catastrophic local breakdown.

Iain M Banks describes a society where medical technology enables people to become whatever they want. They can change gender, physical appearance, even species with the essence of their personalities preserved through a potentially infinite number of such changes. People can potentially live forever, although most choose not to. Those who do most often live on only as disembodied memory pods, waiting to be revived at some unspecified future when something comes along that might be interesting enough to rekindle their interest in life.

There's something seductive about these futures. They promise us eternity, relief from our physical suffering, relief from the dangers of accident and illness, relief from the ravages of dementia. Yet the term "post-humanism" is a good one, because you have to wonder to what extent the beings created in this kind of world would be human. So much of who we are is conditioned by our physicality. We see, hear, smell and feel through physical membranes and nerve endings. Without these, how would we perceive the world? How would our relationships with one another, our empathy and solidarity, survive? Would we suffer from sensory deprivation and go mad? Would we become the detached, pure spiritual beings envisaged by Buddhist or Christian mysticism?

I was reminded of this by an article in The Australian by Greg Sheridan, a lifelong Catholic. He says

...there's one aspect of orthodox Christian belief I have found strange and mysterious in ways that almost make me uncomfortable, and that is the doctrine of the bodily resurrection...that not only did Christ rise from the dead in bodily form, that is to say his physical body, in a transformed state, rose from the dead...(but) that all human beings will rise from the dead in their transformed bodies.

There are two difficulties I have with this doctrine. One is that growth and decay seem of the very essence of humanity.... The other is that it is just impossible to imagine the body renewed and lasting forever. And a third, how is there purpose in changelessness?

He goes on to say that this is not a faith killer for him. It's just one of the infinite number of things he doesn't understand.

It seems Sheridan and the post-humanists are struggling with the same issue. The post-humanists, in their various ways, are struggling with our intuition that we are eternal beings, that there is more to our existence than the physically finite eighty years (give or take) of human life. Their technological triumphalism leads them to replace God with ourselves, or perhaps with an artificial intelligence which grows out of what we create.

This surrogate god confers on us the gift of eternity, but this gift is not necessarily an unalloyed good. It is something we have to wrestle with, because it changes us irreparably. It's possible that our nature will change completely. It's possible we won't be able to stand eternity in the end and will choose to bring our lives to an end. On the other hand its possible that in our new bodies, fleshly or electronic, we will find possibilities we can't so much as imagine from our present prisons of flesh and bone, and that these possibilities will be enough to fill several eternities.

The Biblical God

2011-06-21T17:49:00.004+10:00

Don Rogers over at Reflections recently posted this quote.

"Those who claim they “believe the whole Bible” and “take it literally” are being dishonest. Their pastor may have preached recently on the story of the fall of Jericho, but it was applied to God “making the strongholds of sin in your life come crumbling down”, not to a battle plan to take a city.

To be fair, not all Biblical authors view God in the same way. And so there is no single “Biblical view of God”. But certainly God as depicted in some parts of the Bible is not the concept of the deity served by Christians today.

The question a Christian needs to ask is whether they have the courage to admit that their view of God is not the same as that of many depicitions in the Bible. Do you have the courage to take the Bible’s actual words completely seriously, even when the result is that you are forced to acknowledge that you do not accept their literal truthfulness?"
~from Dr. James McGrath’s "Exploring Our Matrix"

It says some things I've been thinking, and says them much better than I could. What do you think?

Neil Gaiman

2011-06-19T14:35:00.005+10:00

I've read a few of Neil Gaiman's fantasy novels now as well as watching the film Mirrormask, for which he wrote the script. I've enjoyed all of them in that "I just want to keep reading this" way that good genre novels should have.

However, I've started realise that he has a template. All the stories he tells are variations on the one story which goes roughly like this. A well-intentioned but hapless young man is trapped in a rather unsatisfactory life. He works in a dead-end job, is in a relationship with a woman who is wrong for him, and is stumbling down the slope to a sub-optimal life. Then some apparently chance encounter or freak event tips him into a completely bizarre parrallel world, in which he must achieve (or help someone achieve) some great and incredibly dangerous task in order to get back to his old life. In other words, these are quest stories.

My most recent (but Gaiman's first) is Neverwhere, in which Richard Mayhew, mild-mannered London accountant and fiance to the formidable Jessica, finds a young homeless woman bleeding from an injured shoulder. His innate sense of compassion makes him ignore Jessica's protests, take her home and help treat her injury. As a result he is literally tipped out of his life (ordinary people are no longer able to see him and his friends and colleagues have forgotten his existence) into the world of "London Below", a bizarre realm of homeless people, forgotten places, talking rats, mythical creatures and incredibly dangerous assassins. Here he has to help his new friend, the Lady Door, and her odd and slightly suspicious group of companions to find out who had her family killed, and why.

Because it's a quest story you know it will work out OK in the end. Just like it does for Charlie Nancy in Anansi Boys, or for Shadow in American Gods. Yet despite knowing the ending you keep reading. Partly it's his skill as a writer dragging you along, revealing unexpected twists just as you think you might know what's happening. Partly it's that you want to understand the new, mysterious world Gaiman has created, which he shows bit by bit like a conjurer. Partly its because you like his characters, and really want things to turn out right.

There's also the fact that you're trying to work out exactly what "right" is. Richard wants his job back, and his flat, and his fiance. But does he, really? You feel like screaming at him, "No, don't marry Jessica and spend your life as an accountant!" And of course that's the point of a quest. You could go back to where you started, but it will not be the same for you because you have changed. Richard returns to a group of people amongst whom he is a slightly hapless accountant, but in London Beneath he is a warrior, knighted by the Earl of Earl's Court, friend to the rats and birds, companion of the Lady Door. Which calling will he follow?

I think ultimately the power of these stories (and they are tremendously popular) is in their psychology. Gaiman is showing us that beneath the surface of our lives there is so much more than we acknowledge. Not only are there people all around us who we don't notice - homeless, mad, fogotten people who could possibly turn out to be gods or mythical heroes - but there is a whole world of feeling and ambition, danger and possibility, that runs beneath the surface of our ordinary lives. We rarely acknowledge it, we live as if it were not there, but if just once we allowed it to take hold of us we would never be the same again.

Letter to a Christian Nation

2011-06-14T12:20:00.004+10:00

Sam Harris, an American neuroscientist and CEO of Project Reason, wrote a book called The End of Faith. He argued that religion is not only completely unreasonable, it is so dangerous in a world where there are weapons of mass destruction that it is no longer safe for us to keep it around. I haven't read this book, but apparently many Christians did, and some were so incensed they wrote him abusive letters.

(Note to my fellow Christians: writing abusive letters is definitely What Jesus Would Not Do!)

Harris replied not with personal abuse by return mail, but with a booklet called Letter to a Christian Nation, in which he responds to his correspondents with more grace than they deserve, restating his arguments simply and briefly.

He is primarily addressing fundamentalists, and I found I agreed with him on a lot of points. He is right to be horrified at some aspects of the Old Testament punitive law, like the stoning of adulterers and disobedient children, although he is wrong to suggest that Jesus endorsed these. He is right to point to the irrationality of belief in a literal six day creation. He is right to critique the opposition of many Christians to "harm reduction" approaches to sexual health (eg promoting the use of condoms to prevent HIV infection). He is right to suggest that religious people are not necessarily more moral than non-religious, although he is wrong to suggest that this is an argument against religion. He may even have a point about Christian opposition to stem cell research, although I think there is more to be said about that.

However, for a man who heads an organisation called "Project Reason" his critique is surprisingly unreasoned. For a start, like his friends Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, he has a rather hazy grasp of the content of religion. I'm not sure that he fully realises the extent to which, like Dawkins, he sees religion through fundamentalist glasses. This is what enables him to write like this about what he calls "religious liberalism and religious moderation".

...the issue is both simpler and more urgent than liberals and moderates generally admit. Either the Bible is just an ordinary book, written by mortals, or it isn't. Either Christ was divine, or he was not. If the Bible is an ordinary book, and Christ an ordinary man, the basic doctrine of Christianity is false....If the basic tenets of Christianity are true, then there are some very grim surprises in store for non-believers like myself....So let us be honest with ourselves: in the fullness of time, one side is really going to win this argument, and the other side is really going to lose.

It would be harder to find a better statement of fundamentalist belief in any fundamentalist publication. The problem for Harris seems to be that he actually prefers fundamentalism to what he calls "moderation" and "liberalism". Hence, he is able to toss two thousand years of biblical and theological study out of the window with barely a glance in much the same way fundamentalists do. No wonder that, like fundamentalists, he sees religious moderation as dangerous.

Funnily enough, he is not willing to apply the same standard to atheism.

Christians like yourself invariably declare that monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and Kim Il Sung spring from the womb of atheism. While it is true that such men are sometimes enemies of organised religion, they are never especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements are often delusional...

So, if I were to say that the Christians who wrote abusive letters to Harris are not acting on the basis of Christianity but of some personal pathology or distortion of the faith, I am out of order. But if Harris says that the bad deeds of atheist tyrants are based on personal pathology or delusion, that is OK. Moderate Christians are dangerous because they mask the dangers of fundamentalism, but moderate atheists are fine - in fact the salt of the earth - because they bring the light of reason to a benighted world.

Harris and his friends are classic examples of the polarising effects of war, In a war there can be no neutrals. Either you are for us, or you are against us. Voices of moderation are drowned out by the boom of cannons. In the 1950s and 1960s the problem was communism, and people who looked a little bit communist - trade unionists, fabian socialists, people who thought maybe we should be a little more generous to the poor - were suspect and placed under suveillance. The fact that most of these people were peacable, responsible citizens was neither here nor there.

Now the problem is religious terrorism, and anyone who is a bit religious is suspect. It doesn't matter if you are a moderate Christian, a pacifist, a peace-loving Indonesian muslim, you are suspect and your religion needs to be eradicated along with the distorted fanatical Salafism of Osama bin Laden. Although apparently Harris would make an exception for Jainism.

Sadly, the CEO of Project Reason is making a basic category mistake. He is suggesting that because our most recent terrorists are religious, religion must be the problem. Yet there have been many terrorists in history, using a wide range of religious, political and nationalist justifications for their unjustifiable atrocities. What they have in common is that they have managed to construct an ideology which allows, even obliges, then to impose their will on others with brutal force. This is the problem, not religion. I would happily help Harris combat this problem. While he is combating it with reason, I would combat it with arguments from religion. Perhaps between us we might get somewhere.

Jesus Clears the Temple - John's View

2011-06-12T13:44:00.001+10:00

So to continue where I left off yesterday....

While Mark and Matthew place this story late in Jesus ministry, John places it at the start.  It forms part of John's counterpart to Matthew and Mark's "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand", and Luke's story of Jesus preaching in Nazareth.

John has two commencement stories. The first, the story of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana, is not quite a public act, because although the wedding itself is a public event most of those present don't seem to know what has happened. The story is also a deeply symbolic one. The wine is symbolic of the life and vitality of the Kingdom of God. Hence, when the original wine supplied for the wedding runs out, we should take this as indicating the bankruptcy of the old order, the order of priests and sacrifices which Jesus was confronting.

Jesus' response is to ask them to fill with water, and then draw from, the jars which the household would use for washing - that is, jars for "unclean" water. The response of the bridegroom (who perhaps represents God) is that the wine which comes from these jars is better than the original. Thus the new life of God's kingdom, drawn from those excluded from the old order, is superior to the old. This is the same message we saw in the passage from Isaiah 56, where the unclean - the eunuchs and "the nations" - are given a permanent place in God's temple.

By contrast, the clearing of the temple is very clearly a public act. In outline John's version of the story is similar to that in Mark and Matthew, but it has important differences. Firstly, the references to Isaiah and Jeremiah are replaced by a much simpler statement - "Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father's house into a market!"

Secondly, in typical Johannine fashion the action is followed by a dispute with the Jewish leaders.

¹⁸ The Jews then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”
¹⁹ Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”
²⁰ They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” ²¹ But the temple he had spoken of was his body. ²² After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.

Here we see three things: the Jews' question, Jesus' response, and John's interpretation. The Jews, in essence, ask Jesus to prove he has the right to give orders in the temple precinct, perhaps by performing a miracle. Jesus' answer is cryptic - "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days." For the Jews this is a complete impossibility. For a start, the first part of his challenge is absurd - they are not going to destroy the temple at his request. The second part is equally absurd - how can anyone complete such a huge contruction project in three days? The exchange is left incomplete - was Jesus arrested? Was he expelled from the precinct? What happened to the market?

These questions don't concern John, who skips years forward to report the way the disciples came to interpret this message much later - "But the temple he had spoken of was his body." In other words, Jesus himself takes the place of the temple. The nations, the eunuchs, the unclean, will not gather in the physical temple.  As we know the temple was soon to be destroyed. Instead, they will gather around Jesus. The new Kingdom of God, which is so much better, so much more lifegiving than the old, is not tied to the Jewish nation or the site on Mout Zion. The destruction of that temple, symbolically prefigured in Jesus' action, is just one of the events that ushers in the new Kingdom.  The pivotal event is the death and resurrection of Jesus, the animation and living presence of God among us.

At whatever point in Jesus' life this story takes place, the message is the same. The old system of sacrifices and temple worship is irreparably damaged, because it is practiced in the face of hypocrisy and compromise.  Jesus' solution is not to reform it and purify it. It is to build something new, something better, something that can give the kind of life the old worship could never give.

Jesus Clears the Temple

2011-06-11T18:55:00.005+10:00

After my sermon on Jesus preaching at Nazareth some of us talked further on the question of how you should treat your enemies, if you're not supposed to kill them. During this discussion we got onto the story of Jesus clearing the temple and I thought it would be worth a closer look.

The story appears in three of the gospels. In Mark 11:15-19 and Matthew 21:12-17 it comes in the final week of Jesus' life, right after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. In John 2:12-25 it plays a somewhat similar role to the story of Jesus in Nazareth in Luke, a public introduction to the purpose of his ministry. I have read some commentators who think this means Jesus did it twice, but this seems to be an absurd concession to the idea of inerrancy. John has placed the story in a different place but it serves the same purpose - to introduce Jesus' terminal conflict with the Jewish authorities.

Here is the story as it appears in Mark.

On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. And as he taught them, he said, “Is it not written:

‘My house will be called
a house of prayer for all nations’?

But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’”

The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.

Mark records that the previous day, "Jesus entered Jerusalem and went to the temple. He looked around at everything, but since it was already late he went out to Bethany with the Twelve." Hence, this was not a sudden act of passion brought on by seeing the desecration of the temple. It was considered and well planned. So first I'd like to look at what Jesus did, and then what he meant by it.

The temple, as rebuilt under Herod the Great, consisted of the main temple building, in which worship and sacrifice took place and to which only ceremonially clean Jews were admitted, surrounded by a walled courtyard which measured something like 300m by 450m and had as many as seven entrances. This area, known as the "court of the Gentiles", was a public area almost certainly the scene of this story. It was overlooked by the Roman garrison, and included a market area where visitors could exchange their foreign currency and buy sacrificial animals. It was also a place where rabbis would come to teach their students, or to lecture in public, and beggars would sit at the gates to receive coins from the passers by.

It is impossible that Jesus, acting single-handedly, could have cleared this whole area and prevented access to it. This means that you could see his action in two ways. One is that when the gospels say that Jesus did this act, they mean that he led it, and was assisted by his disciples and perhaps other followers. This would see Jesus as the leader of a protest movement and his act as a kind of demonstration, a political protest against the practices of the priests and leaders of Israel. The other option is that he acted alone, and that his symbolic "cleansing" only served to disrupt the market and attract attention for the teaching which followed.

Whichever of these it was, it did involve a certain amount of force - the tables were overturned and the animals and perhaps people were driven out. However, it was not violent in the sense of a military act. John emphasises this point by adding the detail that Jesus "made a whip out of cords" - that is to say a whip of rope designed to sting but not harm, such as you might use to herd your sheep or goad your donkey, not a cat-o-nine-tails used for flogging criminals.

In any case, during or after the protest Jesus taught the crowd who had been attracted by it. In this teaching, summarised by Mark in a few words and compressed even further by Matthew and John, he provides a rationale for his actions grounded in two pivotal Old Testament prophecies.

The first comes from Isaiah 56:7. The quote in context is shown below.

³ Let no foreigner who is bound to the LORD say,
“The LORD will surely exclude me from his people.”
And let no eunuch complain,
“I am only a dry tree.”
⁴ For this is what the LORD says:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
⁵ to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure forever.
⁶ And foreigners who bind themselves to the LORD
to minister to him,
to love the name of the LORD,
and to be his servants,
all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it
and who hold fast to my covenant—
⁷ these I will bring to my holy mountain
and give them joy in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house will be called
a house of prayer for all nations.”

Jesus and the gospel writers often show their attachment to these later chapters of Isaiah, with their vision of the suffering servant and the welcoming of the Gentiles as equals into God's family. Jesus' allusion to this passage while standing in the Court of the Gentiles would have amplified its message. Here is the place into which all the nations should come to worship God. Here is the symbolic centre of God's kingdom. But if the Gentiles should come into it, what would they find?

Jesus' response to this is to quote from a passage which is, if anything, the exact opposite of the Isaiah passage - Jeremiah 7:11. In saying "but you have made it a 'den of robbers'", Jesus is quite likely drawing attention to the dishonest trade of the market he has just disrupted. However, this is not just any market - it is a market which changes profane money into sacred currency, and sells animals for sacrifice. It is a market which sits at the heart of the temple worship. If the market is disrupted, the worship is disrupted as well. The scope and meaning of this disruption is shown by the full context of the Jeremiah passage.

¹ This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: ² “Stand at the gate of the LORD’s house and there proclaim this message:

“‘Hear the word of the LORD, all you people of Judah who come through these gates to worship the LORD. ³ This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Reform your ways and your actions, and I will let you live in this place. ⁴ Do not trust in deceptive words and say, “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD!” ⁵ If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, ⁶ if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, ⁷ then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever. ⁸ But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless.

⁹ “‘Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known, ¹⁰ and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, “We are safe”—safe to do all these detestable things? ¹¹ Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you? But I have been watching! declares the LORD.

¹² “‘Go now to the place in Shiloh where I first made a dwelling for my Name, and see what I did to it because of the wickedness of my people Israel. ¹³ While you were doing all these things, declares the LORD, I spoke to you again and again, but you did not listen; I called you, but you did not answer. ¹⁴ Therefore, what I did to Shiloh I will now do to the house that bears my Name, the temple you trust in, the place I gave to you and your ancestors.

Jesus is effectively standing in the same place as Jeremiah and repeating his message. Instead of being a blessing to the nations as Isaiah wanted them to be, they have become cursed because of their corruption. This corruption is represented by the market, but it is much more than that - the whole system of sacrifice and worship is worthless because the actions of the temple leaders, the leaders of the nation, do not match their words. The result is that the temple will be destroyed, and their home will become desolate.

As I've discussed elsewhere, this is what happened within a few decades. Yet Jesus was also holding out hope to them. The vision of Isaiah still stood. The nations could still be blessed and could still worship at God's feet. But this post is already too long, so I'll talk more about that in my next post.

Labels

2011-06-06T20:37:00.000+10:00

"Now it happened that Kanga had felt rather motherly that morning, and Wanting to Count Things — like Roo's vests, and how many pieces of soap there were left, and the two clean spots in Tigger's feeder."

As you do. Even though I rarely feel motherly on account of my Y chromosome, I felt like labelling things. I tried labels on this blog when I first started and soon gave up as I had a new label for each post. Now that there's over 150 posts here it's getting hard to find your way around, so I thought it was time to be a bit more organised.

Every post has a label, and every post has only one because that's the tidy way to do things. I know the real world is much messier than that but that's not my problem, I didn't make it that way. I tried not to have too many labels. Hope you enjoy using them.

Evaluating the Malaysian Solution

2011-06-04T16:45:00.000+10:00

In today's edition of The Australian, Denis Shanahan says:

The key to success for the Malaysian solution for Labor is to be seen as hard-hearted and uncompromising, putting asylum-seekers on planes, manacled and at gunpoint if necessary, to convince people-smugglers and their customers the corrupt "business model" will not work.

Refugee advocates are starting to look back at the detention centre on Nauru as "the good old days" and advocate for its re-opening.

What more can I say? I previously opined that the differences between Gillard and Howard on asylum seeker policy were so slight Gillard may as well shave her head and put on glasses. I was wrong. Howard should buy a red wig and get himself contacts.