Painting Fakes

( Content warning: this post discusses child sexual abuse and sexual assault.) I have to say I don't generally pay a lot of attention to the Australian of the Year award.  Often the person who receives it is someone I've never heard of, and as often as not I am none the wiser at the end of their term.  Theoretically they get to use their status to promote the work and issues which got them there in the first place.  The 2023 recipient is Taryn Brumfitt , the leader of the Body Image Movement which tries to counter the negative messages women and girls get through their lives about their bodies and build a more positive culture around our physical selves.  It sounds like a good thing, but I had to look that up just now for this article.  I was more familiar with her predecessor Dylan Alcott but I heard a lot less of him in 2022 when he was using his platform to promote disability inclusion than than I did in previous years when he was winning tennis tournaments....

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'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 ...