Painting Fakes

I've just finished reading Richard Holloway's Between the Monster and the Saint . Holloway is pretty much the only religious person mentioned positively by Richard Dawkins in "The God Delusion", mainly because of his self-description as a "recovering Christian". However, while Dawkins has little feeling for religion, and refutes his own caricature of it, Holloway has lived a life immersed in it. As a lifelong Anglican priest, former Bishop of Edinburgh and author of over 20 books on religious subjects he has spent decades wrestling with the Christian faith, so while he no longer seems to believe it in an orthodox way he understands it intimately, is sympathetic to it and has been deeply influenced by it. In this book Holloway is searching for an answer to those perennial questions - why are humans so cruel? Why do they suffer, and make each other and other creatures suffer? Is there an ultimate purpose to life? "The human herd," he says, "wh...

A little bit of extra holiday reading - Behind the Exclusive Brethren by Michael Bachelard. Bachelard is an investigative reporter with the Melbourne Age who first came in contact with the Exclusive Brethren when they were exposed in some rather dodgy behind the scenes support for the Howard Government's re-election in 2004. Subsequent investigations took him as deep into the life of this exclusive sect as it's possible for an outsider to get. This book is the result, and a sorry tale it is too. There are currently about 40,000 Exclusive Brethren in the world, including about 15,000 in Australia. Their collective life is largely shaped by an extreme interpretation of the passage in 2 Corinthians 6 which begins "Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common....'Therefore come out from among them and be seperate' says the Lord." This is a controversial passage and has been applied to many things by different...

Happy Christmas Everyone! Since it's Christmas and I've been reading a book on religious philosophy, here's a Christmas thought. We're told that Jesus was born to Mary even though she was a virgin. That is to say, she had never had sex, and so no sperm had ever entered her uteris to fertilise the egg. Yet the teaching of the church (both Protestant and Catholic) is that Jesus was fully human - hence that he grew from an embryo into a human baby like the rest of us. Now we know that in normal circumstances an unfertilised egg is barren - it doesn't divide and grow, it just decomposes. We also know that even if it did begin to grow of its own accord, unfertilised, the outcome would be a girl, since it is the man who provides the Y chromosome. So, in the absence of male sperm, how did her egg get fertilised, and the required male DNA enter the ovum? This problem leads sceptics, particularly those of a scientific persuasion, to dismiss this story as a "mere myt...

Each semester in High School English we would study one main novel, and in Grade 11 we "did" John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. I loved it (as I loved most of what we did in English) despite the curriculum. I was moved by the way the Joad family maintained their dignity in the face of the crushing poverty of the Great Depression and the absurdity and cruelty of their society. As a result I read quite a few other Steinbeck books in my youth, and they were just the thing for a sensitive young man. Coming back to some of these stories as a supposedly mature person provides some interesting food for thought. Take, for example, The Pearl. This little novella, a kind of meditation on Jesus' parable of the pearl of great value, features Kino, his wife Juana, and their infant son Coyotito, a poor Indigenous Mexican fishing family. One day Kino goes pearling and discovers an amazingly beautiful, enormous pearl, a find that should enable him to live out his dreams. Modes...

Since last Sunday’s sermon I’ve been thinking about the letter to the Laodiceans. My wife grew up among the Brethren and we spent six years when we were first married going to a Brethren assembly. Most of them read the seven letters of Revelation as seven eras of the church, with Laodicea as our present era, the final one before Christ’s return. I don’t go for this entire prophetic system – it’s way too forced – but it’s an interesting insight into our current age. We are lukewarm, neither one thing nor another. I think the current debate about climate change is a great example of how this happens. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change represents the majority opinion amongst climate scientists, that global warming is happening and is caused by human-generated pollution. Governments try to act on this understanding, but there are plenty of dissenting voices, saying there is no global warming, or it's caused by something else, or it's way worse than the scientist...

In the 2002 movie adaptation of HG Wells’ The Time Machine (which bears only passing resemblance to the book), its chief character is driven to complete the invention of his time machine by the murder of his fiancé. Traveling back in time, he repeatedly attempts to prevent the murder, only for her to die in some other way. In despair, he travels far into the future and meets someone of highly advanced intellect who explains that since the murder triggered the invention of the time machine, it can only exist in a time stream where the woman dies. Ever since Wells’ novella, time travel has been a staple of science fiction. Usually, as with Wells, the ability to travel through time represents a technological triumph, although ultimately a mixed blessing as various versions of the paradox perplex or endanger the participants. The Time Traveler’s Wife , both the novel by Audrey Niffenegger and the recent film adaptation starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, makes it a disability. ...

Apropos of pretty much nothing, I'm sitting here listening to Tom Waits CD "Alice". It has this great song called Poor Edward , the lyrics of which go like this. Did you hear the news about Edward? On the back of his head He had another Face Was it a woman's face Or a young girl They said to remove it would kill him So poor Edward was doomed The Face could laugh and cry It was his Devil twin And at night she spoke to him Of things heard only in Hell They were impossible to separate Chained together for life Finally the bell tolled his doom He took a suite of rooms And hung himself and her From the balcony irons Some still believe he was freed from her But I knew her too well I say she drove him to suicide And took Poor Edward to Hell. Very spooky! And fascinating. The two sided personality, good and evil co-existing in the one person. More fascinating - Mr Waits (or the song's narrator) sets you up to think that the sonmg is about Edward, but then at the end he...