Painting Fakes

I'm sure all my readers will at least think they are familiar with the art of scapegoating. It happens in companies.  When something goes wrong, and the company accidentally kills someone or loses lots of money, there are usually multiple system failures that lead up to the problem.  However, as often as not someone will get the blame, and the sack.  This will usually not be the CEO or the Board of Directors, even if it was actually their fault.  It will usually be someone more junior - a person with enough authority to be plausibly blamed for the problem, but not enough power within the company to protect themselves.  They take the blame for everyone else and are ceremoniously banished as a way of removing the stain from the company as a whole. Countries and the regimes that govern them tend to do the same.  Regimes that are corrupt, or oppressive, or govern in the interests of a small minority, find themselves the target of their people's anger. ...

I'm sorely tempted to not write about asylum seekers.  I really don't want to.  It's too awful.  But my conscience compels me.  It seems like every time I write an article about this, the story is worse than the last one. The last time I wrote, our government was complaining that while the Human Rights Commission was criticising them for holding children in detention  and the United Nations was highlighting their failure to respect the human rights of asylum seekers in general, no-one was was giving them credit for the amazing human rights achievement of preventing people from drowning at sea.  Mind you, they have never presented a scrap of evidence that they have done this.  They have prevented boatloads of people from arriving in Australia by intercepting them on the way here and sending them back, but there is no evidence that I have seen about where they end up. Now we are seeing just how hollow this claim is.  It is becoming clear th...

I've been thinking about human sacrifice lately.  A lot.  It's not a pleasant subject, but there seems to be a lot of it going around so it's hard to not talk about it, especially with the the Anzac centenary celebrations still ringing in my ears.  On the day after Anzac Day we even had the subject mentioned from our church pulpit.  It was a long time since I had felt so let down by my church. It was the Australian poet Les Murray who first made me aware of the place of human sacrifice in Australian religious attitudes.  His essay, 'Some Religious Stuff I Know About Australia', was published in 1982 in a book called The Shape of Belief:   Christianity in Australia Today  although I probably first read it some years later.  Here's what he had to say. Since the spiritual dimension universally exists in human beings, it has to be dealt with by them in some way or other; a sacramentally-minded Christian would say that it has to be fed.  It ...