Painting Fakes

I bought myself a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald this week and was fascinated by two stories. The first was about a nameless Chinese citizen given the moniker "NK".  He entered Australia on a student visa not long after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, but in 1992 was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in jail.  In 2006 the parole authorities judged him suitable for release.  However, as a convicted murderer he is no longer eligible for an Australian visa because he fails the "character test".  He should have been deported immediately.  However, he is at risk of being retried for the same offence in China and being executed, and the Australian government is prevented by law from returning him to that kind of danger.  Unable to resolve the dilemma, the Immigration Department has been holding him in the Villawood immigration detention centre for the last five years.  The second is the ongoing saga of cyclist Alberto Contado...

Even though their courtship makes an absorbing story, I fear the marriage of Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy will be a rocky one.  A marriage across class barriers might seem romantic, but there will be a lot of learning to do on both sides.  Fitzwilliam will not find it as easy to shed his arrogance as he thinks, and Elizabeth will not suffer it meekly.  He will sulk after an argument and they will not speak for days.  In those times especially, but at other times too, she will be lonely.  She is used to a small house filled with five other noisy, combative women and a father whose wit cuts the air.  Here she inhabits a cavernous mansion with a taciturn husband, his timid young sister and so many servants that she struggles to remember their names.  Yet if she invites her mother or sisters to visit her husband becomes even more difficult, because he despises them.  Of course they will eventually make up, passionately and wit...

It's interesting how over the past decade some of our more militant atheists have taken to using the techniques of religion to promote their cause.  Not that they've become religious - that would be absurd - but they hold conventions, they promote atheism on the backs of buses, and they write works of atheist apologetics.  The advent of Islamic terrorism, and their belief that this is a sign of the deeply dangerous nature of religion (though Stalin's atrocities were somehow not similar evidence of the dangers of atheism), has made them militant. Like Christian apologetics, these works are not really written for those outside the tent.  They are written for those within to give them ammunition with which to defend their belief, or lack thereof.  The best known work of this sort may be Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, in which the western world's crankiest atheist fires his shotgun furiously at religion.  However, because he knows very little about...

When the Murray Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) released its discussion paper about revised water allocations in the Basin late last year, copies were publicly burnt in communities throughout the area.  This was because the plan recommended substantial reductions in allocations for irrigation - 4,000 gigalitres a year all up, a reduction of up to one third of allocations in some areas.  The Commonwealth Government quickly withdrew the plan and changed the terms of reference to put more weight on economic concerns.  The chair of the MDBA resigned in disgust and was replaced by former NSW Labor Minister Craig Knowles. Now we read that the Wentworth Group , a group of environmental scientists attempting to shape water policy round the country, has withdrawn from discussions about the new plan.  They say proposed reductions being discussed are less than 3,000 gigalitres and this would be an expensive and useless exercise.  They want an independent review...

So, to continue from Part 1 ... One of the things that many of the writers on the life of Jesus agree on - including Albert Schweitzer , Albert Nolan and NT Wright - is that Jesus was a prophet of the "end times", that the core of his message was that a crisis was coming and they needed to get ready.  This is shown in the way Jesus begins his public ministry in all four Gospels.  Matthew and Mark begin with a summary statement: "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand."  The first public acts of Jesus in John's gospel are the changing of water into wine, symbolising renewal, and the cleansing of the temple, which presents a clear challenge to the Jewish authorities to reform or be destroyed.  Likewise, the scene in Luke 4:16-30 shows Jesus announcing that the prophecy of the coming kingdom was in the process of fulfillment, and talking about what sort of kingdom it would be. It didn't take any special message from God to know that a crisis was loo...

Next Sunday I get to do one of my rare preaching gigs.  The first for a long time and for perhaps the first time ever at St Andrews I get to choose the topic.  So I thought that all this reading of Lives of Jesus has to be good for something and I'm planning a talk on the story in Luke 4:14-30.   Jesus preaches for the first (and possibly only) time in the synagogue at Nazareth.  So I thought I'd try out my thoughts here and see if they make sense.  This is Part 1 - Part 2 is here . First, here's the passage. Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country.  He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.  When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read,and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the pla...

I used to think  a hung parliament wouldn't be such a bad idea.  After all it worked here in Queensland, where the Labor Party had to appease a rural independent for a whole term.  It didn't do them any harm.  Plenty of other countries have governments that include loose coalitions of parties cobbled together post-election and they still seem to function. However, in the case of the Gillard Government I'm starting to have second thoughts.   Since Gillard finally made her peace with the Greens and Independents in September, things seem to have gone badly in a lot of different ways. I don't necessarily mean on governance.  There have been some successes here.  The government has managed to actually get agreement on a health reform package and new workplace safety laws, while some good progress has been made on a carbon tax.  Other areas are more disappointing, especially on asylum seekers where Gillard has become so like Howard she may...

Do you, like me, despair at the quality of Australian jounalism?  I'm not talking about the sort of tabloid journalism you see on shows like 60 Minutes or newspapers like The Courier Mail.  There, at least, we have balance.  "Tenants From Hell" is balanced by "Landlords From Hell".  "Small Businesses Rip Off Customers" is balanced by"Big Businesses Rip Off Contractors".  "Government Bungling" is balanced by "Welfare Cheats".  It's awful but there's not much we can do about it.  As a wise man once said, "you can't stop the birds from flying but you don't have to let them nest in your hair".  No, what raises my blood pressure is when tabloid habits start to leak over into supposedly serious sources like the ABC, the Sydney Morning Herald or The Australian.  I know they have tight deadlines, but if we don't stop this leakage then before long our brains will be turned to porridge.  To help p...

This book has been sitting on my shelf for years, brought home from some second hand book stall or other and then left to gather dust with the other classics of Australian literature which I feel I ought to read and occasionally do. Stead is not for the fainthearted.  Living in various American and European cities in between bookending her life in Australia, she wrote amidst the horrors of the Great Depression and World War 2   Her books are depressing, dense and difficult.  You have to be determined. Have I sold it to you yet?  Well, perhaps I should try a little harder.  Mediocre writing can be easy to read, great writing always requires an effort.  The reward for that effort is a rich reading experience and a different way of seeing the world.  That's what you get from A Little Tea, A Little Chat.   Not a way of viewing the world you would like to adopt, but one that, at least for me, gives me an extra point of reference...

Of the books I read while I was away on holidays, the one that got my brain moving the most was Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson.  The chapters of this book were originally a series of lectures given as part of the wonderfully named  Dwight Harrington Terry Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy .  Her subject is what she calls "parascientific writing" - that is writings, generally by scientists, which attempt to apply scientific insights to subjects such as religion or human culture which are strictly beyond the bounds of those sciences.  Obviously uppermost on her mind are those we think of as "scientifics atheists" - the Dawkins, Dennets and EO Wilsons of this world - but she also delves further back to the writers of the late 19th and early 20th century such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, not to mention a whole chapter on Sigmund Freud.  One of the key aspects of this kind of thinking, she says, is that its authors ...

So Osama bin Laden finally got found and killed , in a major Pakistani urban area just a kilometre from a military academy.  Bloody images of the room in which he was shot are broadcast around the world.  Americans dance in the streets.  Western leaders struggle to hide their glee behind serious faces.  The world is a safer place, they say, now that bin Laden is no longer in it. I'm not a fan of bin Laden.  He was the figurehead of an organisation that promotes and plans terrorist attacks.  He preached an extreme version of political Islam that oppresses everyone.  Yet I find it hard to share the glee. I'm not convinced that his death does make the world a safer place.  He's been in hiding for ten years, his activity very limited.  Al Qaeda is a network of more or less independent cells and they will continue with or without him.  They will be angry.  They have a new martyr. I'm also a little dubious about the ...

My friend Trevor recently posted a Facebook link to an article in the New York Times entitled "The Case for Hell"  by Robert Douthat.  So of course I've been thinking some more about Universalism and all that. Douthat is obviously a believer in hell.  He laments what he sees as a decline in this belief, which he attributes to a growth in pluralism ("are Christians obliged to believe that Gandhi is in hell for being a Hindu?") and an increasing outrage at suffering which comes as a result of our prosperity and relative safety.  However, he sees a problem with a faith that eliminates hell. ...to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score. In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic a...