Painting Fakes

I've just finished reading Richard Holloway's Between the Monster and the Saint . Holloway is pretty much the only religious person mentioned positively by Richard Dawkins in "The God Delusion", mainly because of his self-description as a "recovering Christian". However, while Dawkins has little feeling for religion, and refutes his own caricature of it, Holloway has lived a life immersed in it. As a lifelong Anglican priest, former Bishop of Edinburgh and author of over 20 books on religious subjects he has spent decades wrestling with the Christian faith, so while he no longer seems to believe it in an orthodox way he understands it intimately, is sympathetic to it and has been deeply influenced by it. In this book Holloway is searching for an answer to those perennial questions - why are humans so cruel? Why do they suffer, and make each other and other creatures suffer? Is there an ultimate purpose to life? "The human herd," he says, "wh...

A little bit of extra holiday reading - Behind the Exclusive Brethren by Michael Bachelard. Bachelard is an investigative reporter with the Melbourne Age who first came in contact with the Exclusive Brethren when they were exposed in some rather dodgy behind the scenes support for the Howard Government's re-election in 2004. Subsequent investigations took him as deep into the life of this exclusive sect as it's possible for an outsider to get. This book is the result, and a sorry tale it is too. There are currently about 40,000 Exclusive Brethren in the world, including about 15,000 in Australia. Their collective life is largely shaped by an extreme interpretation of the passage in 2 Corinthians 6 which begins "Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common....'Therefore come out from among them and be seperate' says the Lord." This is a controversial passage and has been applied to many things by different...