Painting Fakes

A flood makes you see your suburb in a new way.  I always thought of Fairfield as a flat place, and particularly of my street as a flat street.  The hill started on the other side of the railway line, where the streets climb quickly up to the top of the ridge.  Down on the floodplain the land appears to run evenly from the bottom of the ridge to the river. Now I know differently.  Our street dips, then rises again.  Because we are half way up the rise, we got half flooded.  Our neighbours at the top were high and dry.  Those down in the dip were submerged.  Those two metres make all the difference. When the floods first receded the mud painted a physical contour line on the street - below was brown, above was black.  Then as people started to clean up the mud line got blurred because cars and boots carried mud all over, and hoses swept much of it into the stormwater drains.  A new line emerged, of broken furnitu...

We interrupt normal programing to bring you this update from damp and muddy Brisbane. Brisbane's paradigmatic flood occurred in January 1974, when I was 12.  A rain depression in the Brisbane River catchment combined with a king tide to inundate large areas of Brisbane.  I remember going with my scout group to Rocklea in the days after it subsided and helping people clear out houses which had been completely submerged.  The mud and the stench was terrible. Our house in Fairfield stood in about 2.5 metres of water in 1974, filling the downstairs part of the house and covering the floorboards upstairs.  Our neighbours in low set houses were completely submerged.  We didn't live there then, of course.  When we bought the house in 1994 we checked out flood levels and were told that the building of Wivenhoe Dam lowered them by about 2 metres. Fast forward to 2010-11.  The La Nina weather pattern dumped huge amounts of rain on Queensland and town after...

Do you ever get that feeling in the pit of your stomach, like you've just gone down the slope of the roller coaster except that you know you're sitting still?  I've been getting it a lot lately.  I get it whenever I'm reminded that the lifestyle I enjoy, and the feeling of security I have, is based on a global system that is profoundly unsustainable. I got it again last week.  At the same time I was reading Albert Schweitzer's description of Jesus as a harbinger of the end of civilisation as he knew it, I was also reading Richard Ellis' s The Empty Ocean.   Each chapter of this book is a variation on the one theme.  Not too long ago, the ocean teemed with huge populations of cod, tuna, albatross, seal, whale, dolphin, herring, etc etc.  Then within a few decades humans exploited the species to the point of extinction.  Some species are rebuilding after strong conservation efforts, others are not.  Undeterred, we plough on with our exploitation ...

Albert Schweitzer is the interpreter of all the " lives of Jesus " which came before him, and godfather of all that came after.  His book The Quest of the Historical Jesus , written in German in 1906 and first translated into English in 1910, not only gave its name to a whole genre of theological writing, but  set the terms in which the subject would be approached.  Any "life of Jesus" you pick up today has its counterpart in the works reviewed by Schweitzer, or in his own views.  Reviewing such a work is like humming a Beethoven symphony. Schweitzer was 30 years old when the Quest was published, already working as the Principal of the theological college of St Thomas in Strasbourg.  This is a scholarly book, but warm and lucid as hot coffee. In approaching the task Schweitzer makes use of the idea of the distinction between "the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith".  The core historical problem is that virtually all the records of Jesus...

I thought it would be interesting to write a series of reviews on some of the "lives of Jesus" that I've read over the last few years.  One of the reasons I thought it would be interesting is because there are so many.  This photo is only the ones on my shelf.  There's more in the local library plus a couple on my computer.  Another reason is that they all say something different - often radically different.  Why that's interesting is that they're all looking at the same evidence.  There are essentially three sources for a "life of Jesus".  There are the written gospels, including the four in the Bible plus a number of non-canonical versions of the story.  There are the references to Jesus and to early Christians in contemporary Roman and Jewish sources.  And finally, there is contextual information - documentary and archaeological information about life in Palestine in the first century which can throw light on the written materials....

Happy New Year, everyone. I've been thinking for a while now about something that happened in school when I was about nine or ten.  One of my classmates was having some problems with his writing, and our teacher decided that he wasn't trying hard enough and a bit of public humiliation might sharpen him up.  So he stood him up and read out one of his essays to the class in a tone of biting sarcasm.  The rest of us squirmed in embarassment, torn between feeling sorry for him and being glad it wasn't us.  He may have cried, I can't remember that detail.  Nor can I remember the actual content of the essay but I clearly remember the problem.  It went something like this. "I walked down the street and there I was a red car.  I saw very excited to see it." You will imediately understand what was going on.  My classmate had dyslexia.  He mixed up his was and saw because he couldn't tell the difference.  It wouldn't matter h...

Just before Christmas we had great footage of chaos in European airports as snowstorms left travellers stranded in mid-Christmas journey.  Yesterday we had a lucky escape from the Australian version as storms saw planes turned back from Brisbane airport all morning.  Fortunately we flew in the evening and were only an hour late, but there was chaos in Sydney airport as passengers queued for hours and airline staff desperately pleaded for Sydney residents to go home and try again the next day. The British government is talking about whether it might have to upgrade its airports to make them snow-proof.  I don't think you can do the same for tropical storms.  There's no protection from wind, thunder and lightening except to stay indoors and wait it out.  If it blows hard enough even that doesn't help. In any case, I wonder how temporary this will all be.  It's not too many years ago that we would spend 24 hours on a bus to Sydney ...

It's nearly Christmas.  Most of us are getting ready to hang out with our extended family, while those of us who are a long way from family are most likely lining up surrogates to stave off the loneliness.  This has come to be what Christmas is about for most Australians.  So with that in mind, here's a little Christmas gem from Kenneth Bailey's marvellous book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes . In our traditional view of the Christmas story, based on Luke 2:1-7, Joseph and Mary set off for Bethelehem.  When they arrive, however, the inn is full and they are forced to sleep out in the stable, where Jesus is born.  The story has become a symbol of Jesus' poverty and his status as a social outcast.  In Bailey's view it is also very European, and is a very unlikely scenario in the context of Middle Eastern culture.  Firstly, Joseph was a descendent of David, going to the City of David.  Hence he almost certainly had relatives in town and these w...

For my last birthday my daughter gave me a selection  of booklets from the Penguin "Great Ideas" series.  They're extended extracts (100 or so pages each) from great works of literature or philosophy.  In my little pile are extracts from Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Fyodor Dostoevsky and this selection of essays by George Orwell.  Both Penguin and my daughter know me well - a full volume of Kant would wait on my shelf for years, but I can promise you the 100 page version will be read pretty soon.  They're also good for plane flights.  I read about half the Orwell on a flight to Sydney last week.   Orwell would have been a great blogger - he doesn't waste words, he draws you into the world he describes, he is prepared to live his art not just read about it, and he is interested in a wide range of things.   Here's something I thought was especially clever.  One of the essays is called The Art of Donald McGill. ...

Everyone who's on Facebook knows (I hope) that anything you post can become public property.  You may think that your privacy setting will protect you, but if you'd be embarassed to see that photo in your local newspaper, then don't post it. What's clear from the unfolding Wikileaks saga is that the same applies to diplomatic correspondence.  You may think your cables are confidential and sent through a secure network, but electronic data is so easily transportable that you have to expect that sooner or later it will get out. This is part of the reason why the focus on Julian Assange is misplaced.  You will have noticed that even though Assange is in prison, the leaks are still being published.  The internet is a dispersed medium, definitively a network, and if you cut off one person from it you damage that person, but the network just finds another pathway.  In response to the push in the US and elsewhere to prosecute Assange, many jounalists have pointed...

On the ABC News this evening we heard the Republican leader in the US Senate declaring that Julian Assange is a "hi-tech terrorist" and should be treated as an "enemy combatant".  Of course since we've been fighting a "war on terror" it's become a lot easier to say such things.  But just who is Assange and his Wiki-leaks army terrorising? Well, although new bombshells are exploding every day they seem to be entirely of the metaphorical sort, and I don't recall anyone ever being killed by a metaphor.  Of couse, it's possible that amongst the material there is confidential information which might compromise the safety of, say, an intelligence operative or informer, and this would be of some concern.  Australian Observer , a former senior Defence and Foreign Affairs official, strongly doubts it - the security of such contacts is much tighter than that. It seems that the main people being terrorised are diplomats and politicians, quaking i...

I guess this is a kind of addendum to all those posts on biblical inerrancy .  It's also the 100th post on Painting Fakes which is more than any of the Australians managed in the first innings in Adelaide (cricket joke, for the Americans among you).  The more I do it, the more I love it. Among the incredibly wide variety of types of people in the world, there are two that I'd like to mention in this post.  The first are "black and white people".  They like things to be clear.  It's right or it's wrong, it's true or it's false.  The second are "shades of grey" people.  They rarely see the world in absolute terms.  Something may be true in a certain sense and false in another sense.  It depends what you mean by "true". This distinction is a matter of psychology, not belief.  For instance, both Ken Ham and Richard Dawkins are black and white people.  The content of their beliefs differs, but they have a similar approach to belief...