Painting Fakes

Happy Christmas Everyone! Since it's Christmas and I've been reading a book on religious philosophy, here's a Christmas thought. We're told that Jesus was born to Mary even though she was a virgin. That is to say, she had never had sex, and so no sperm had ever entered her uteris to fertilise the egg. Yet the teaching of the church (both Protestant and Catholic) is that Jesus was fully human - hence that he grew from an embryo into a human baby like the rest of us. Now we know that in normal circumstances an unfertilised egg is barren - it doesn't divide and grow, it just decomposes. We also know that even if it did begin to grow of its own accord, unfertilised, the outcome would be a girl, since it is the man who provides the Y chromosome. So, in the absence of male sperm, how did her egg get fertilised, and the required male DNA enter the ovum? This problem leads sceptics, particularly those of a scientific persuasion, to dismiss this story as a "mere myt...

Each semester in High School English we would study one main novel, and in Grade 11 we "did" John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. I loved it (as I loved most of what we did in English) despite the curriculum. I was moved by the way the Joad family maintained their dignity in the face of the crushing poverty of the Great Depression and the absurdity and cruelty of their society. As a result I read quite a few other Steinbeck books in my youth, and they were just the thing for a sensitive young man. Coming back to some of these stories as a supposedly mature person provides some interesting food for thought. Take, for example, The Pearl. This little novella, a kind of meditation on Jesus' parable of the pearl of great value, features Kino, his wife Juana, and their infant son Coyotito, a poor Indigenous Mexican fishing family. One day Kino goes pearling and discovers an amazingly beautiful, enormous pearl, a find that should enable him to live out his dreams. Modes...