Painting Fakes

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 Greatest 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 .  Dawki...

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....

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 house...

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 ente...

"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.

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-smu gglers 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. 

I bought myself a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald this week and was fascinated by two stories. The first was about a nameless Chinese citizen given the moniker "NK".  He entered Australia on a student visa not long after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, but in 1992 was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in jail.  In 2006 the parole authorities judged him suitable for release.  However, as a convicted murderer he is no longer eligible for an Australian visa because he fails the "character test".  He should have been deported immediately.  However, he is at risk of being retried for the same offence in China and being executed, and the Australian government is prevented by law from returning him to that kind of danger.  Unable to resolve the dilemma, the Immigration Department has been holding him in the Villawood immigration detention centre for the last five years.  The second is the ongoing saga of cyclist Alberto Contado...

Even though their courtship makes an absorbing story, I fear the marriage of Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy will be a rocky one.  A marriage across class barriers might seem romantic, but there will be a lot of learning to do on both sides.  Fitzwilliam will not find it as easy to shed his arrogance as he thinks, and Elizabeth will not suffer it meekly.  He will sulk after an argument and they will not speak for days.  In those times especially, but at other times too, she will be lonely.  She is used to a small house filled with five other noisy, combative women and a father whose wit cuts the air.  Here she inhabits a cavernous mansion with a taciturn husband, his timid young sister and so many servants that she struggles to remember their names.  Yet if she invites her mother or sisters to visit her husband becomes even more difficult, because he despises them.  Of course they will eventually make up, passionately and wit...