Painting Fakes

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...

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; tha...

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 has ancient roots, and as well as featuring in Pullman's book is the central feature of an 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 volumes 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 Th...

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 a...

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 physiologic...

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 regio...

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 pri...

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 undergra...

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 ...

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, and 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 ...

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...

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 ...

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, S...

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 c...

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 introduce...

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 genera...

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 forensic 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...