Painting Fakes

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 o...

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.  ...

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 experie...

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 ar...

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 Sydney, 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 ...

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 Cath...

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...

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 ...

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 B...