Painting Fakes

So, over the past two weeks two Nauru-based asylum seekers have set themselves on fire.  The first, a young Iranian man called Omid Masoumali, died of his burns in a Brisbane hospital.  The second, a 21-year-old Somali woman named Hodan Yasin, set herself alight yesterday and is now in a critical condition.  Reports suggest at least one other man has been prevented from doing the same. As far as I understand this is the tip of the iceberg.  Depression, anger and self-harm are widespread amongst the asylum seekers on Nauru, Manus, Christmas Island and the various detention centres on the Australian mainland. Who is responsible for this shocking self-harm, these acts of desperation, these signs of hopelessness and despair? Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Peter Dutton wants us to believe it's the fault of human rights advocates, says the Brisbane Times  (which, by the way, is the source of the photo). He expressed anger at advocates and others "who are enc

In December 1945 an Egyptian peasant by the name of Muhammad Ali al-Samman found a stone jar buried on a mountainside near the town of Nag Hammadi.  Inside were thirteen leather-bound papyrus books. Over the next couple of years these books found their way, by various circuitous routes, into the collection of the Cairo Museum of Antiquities where in the decades that followed they were examined and translated by an international team of scholars.  The thirteen volumes brought together Coptic translations of over 50 second century Gnostic Christian texts, some completely unknown, some known only through quotes and references in other writings. This is one of the most important finds in the study of the origins of Christianity, opening up an avenue of understanding that had been closed for more than 1,500 years.  Elaine Pagels joined the team of scholars working on these documents in the late 1960s and has become one of the leading experts in the field.  She has written a number of te

I was in Sydney a couple of weeks ago and went for a walk through Pyrmont on the shore of Sydney Harbour - a very swanky location indeed, but fortunately most of the actual harbourside is public parkland. I noticed something strange, though.  A lot of the trees had been painted blue.  At least, their trunks and lower branches were painted blue up to the leaf line, where the blue merged into the natural brown of the wood and green of the leaves.  The effect was quite striking and a little disturbing, like they were ghost trees, or space aliens. The sign told me that this was the work of an artist called Konstantin Dimopoulos, global citizen and current Melbourne resident, and is "an environmental art installation that draws attention to global deforestation by turning living, breathing trees bright blue, demanding we notice them before the planet's old forests are gone for good."  It adds that Dimopoulos has installed similar works around the world. Now I find the

So, it appears that after six months as Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull has finally done something clever.  He has presented the minor parties in the Senate with an impossible dilemma: vote in favour of a pernicious union-bashing piece of legislation, or be sent to a double-dissolution election on July 2 in which the most likely outcome is that most of them will be wiped out of the Senate courtesy of new voting rules designed for this very purpose.  For good measure, he will be hoping that the prospect of what is essentially a three-month election campaign will silence his increasingly vocal enemies in the right wing of his own party. So at least a partial win for Turnbull whichever way it goes, but a sad and difficult time for us voters. We are facing the biggest double disillusion election in my almost forty years on the electoral roll.   Back in 2007 when we were disillusioned with the long-running Howard Coalition government we could turn to Labor under that beacon of hop

This is my meditation for this year’s Easter Friday service.  The readings are John 18:12-17 (in which Jesus is arrested and taken to Annas and Caiaphas, and Peter follows them to the High Priest’s courtyard but denies being Jesus’ disciple) and Amos 5:18-24 (in which the prophet tells the Israelites their worship is an abomination in the absence of justice and righteousness). It seems like only yesterday that we were celebrating Christmas.  The angels sang “glory to God and peace to men”, the shepherds paid their respects, the magicians brought their gifts.  It was a time of hope and joy, anything seemed possible, God was with us and all would be well. Yet already today is Easter Friday, when all the darkness and violence of the world is revealed and we know ourselves to be powerless against it.  It is a day of mourning and weeping, a day of anger and frustration, a day of terror, a day of failure.  Soon it will be Easter Sunday and hope will be reborn, but not yet, not tod

Bearing in mind my previous post on the non-legalistic way of understanding the Law and the New Testament, I'd like to illustrate by applying it to Paul's writing about relationships in a household in Ephesians 5 and 6.  It's a long passage so I won't quote it all here.  You can look it up if you want to (read it here ), or else just take my word for it. Paul's letter to the Ephesians follows the general structure he often uses in his letters - theory (or theology) followed by practice.  In the first three chapters he talks about how his readers have been chosen and redeemed, how Christ is now exalted and we have new life in him, how God has broken down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile to make one people and how he (Paul) is a servant of this message. In Chapters 4-6 he addresses the impact this should have on the way his readers live.  This second half of the letter can be divided into roughly four sections, and in each he provides some general guid

When I wrote about the conservative Christian response to same-sex relationships  a couple of weeks ago, I talked about how many Christians approach the Bible, including the New Testament, with a legalistic mindset. By this I don't mean that they have a strict morality.  The equation of legalism with strictness is a mistake, as is the equation of non-legalistic morality with laxity.  What I mean is that people with a legalistic mindset see morality as a set of rules which must be obeyed.  Our ethical task is to interpret those rules correctly and then follow them. I have suggested plenty of times in this blog that this is not Jesus' view of morality nor that of his apostles.  Jesus taught that the whole law and the prophets could be summed up in two commandments - love God and love your neighbour.  This is often called "golden rule" morality - "do to others as you would like them to do to you". A few years ago I had a go at summarising this view in two

So, apparently we're having a national conversation about tax reform.  Governments do this every so often.  It used to be called "consultation". Such a "conversation" sounds like a really good idea.  I imagine that we would get tax experts to analyse our tax system and tell us how it is going now, what's good and bad about it and what options there are for us to improve it.  We could then get non-experts to translate this into terms ordinary people could understand, and there could be various ways for people to have input - web forums, face to face meetings, formal submission processes.  Then the government would narrow this down to its preferred options and see what reaction they get, before modifying and implementing. Of course I have a fertile imagination.  Actually it's nothing like that. Not that some people don't try.  The current government released a Tax White Paper last year called "Re:Think" and there are various plain-Engl

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about Paul Watzlawick et al's Change  and the idea of first and second order change.  The idea has kept on being useful since I remembered it, so recently I got my hands on a copy of the book to read it again.  Along with it I also bought a book by Watzlawick called Ultra-Solutions: How to fail most successfully. This little booklet is an exploration of the kind of solution which "not only does away with the problem, but also with just about everything else, somewhat in the vein of the old medical joke - operation successful, patient dead...".  It is a light-hearted romp through the pitfalls of rigid or inadequate thinking, using as its framework the witches and their mistress Hecate who tempted Macbeth, and who continue to tempt us in our day to adopt strategies just as seductive and self-defeating as that followed by Shakespeare's tragic hero. In each short chapter he deals with a mental pitfall. The search for security and