Painting Fakes

While I'm writing about controversial issues, I may as well jump in with both feet (in my mouth, probably) and talk about sexual abuse in the church. The Catholics are in the spotlight at the moment so us protestants can take a breather, but we shouldn't be too compacent. Remember it was only a couple of years ago that the Anglican Church here in Queensland was under scrutiny and our former Archbishop had to resign his plum job as Governor-General after defending an abusive priest on national television with the idea that the underage girl initiated the relationship. However, the story at the time that made me most angry was the one about the school counsellor at a prestigious Anglican school, who over a number of decades had used his position to abuse vulnerable young boys. Finally one of them went to the police, they started to investigate, and the man committed suicide. That was bad enough, but what really made me feel sick was that after his suicide, and knowing full we

A recent Facebook discussion with some rellies has made me think some more about abortion, so at the risk of alienating half my friends and readers whatever I say, here's what I thought. Thanks to Andrew, Shiloh, Steve and Mike for the inspiration, but I won't blame you for the content. I don't know the answers, I'm just thinking about the questions. There are two basic ethical issues in the abortion debate. The first is this - is an embryo (foetus, whatever) human? Or to put it another way, at what point does an embryo become human? I really don't know the answer to this, but a lot of the answers I hear don't make sense to me. You can go to the far end of the debate, as per official Catholic doctrine, and say that any attempt to prevent pregnancy is immoral, although "for your hardness of heart" you can practice the rhythm method if you must. For them clearly, and for most other "right to life" groups, an embryo is at the very least human

Apologies have become a popular way of addressing historical wrongs in Australia and in other places. It's just over two years since the Australian Prime Minister issued his formal apology to the stolen generation , those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were forcibly removed from their families and communities. Since then there's been an apology to people brought up in State institutions. The British government recently apologised to people forced to emigrate to Australia as children and live in awful, exploitative "orphanages" even though most weren't orphans. These apologies don't necessarily change people's situation, but they make them feel vindicated, acknowledging publicly the wrong they knew had been done to them. Apparently apologies aren't so popular in Turkey. A festering sore in that part of the world has been publicised this week, bizarrely, by a resolution of the US Congress Committee on Foreign Affairs , calling on the US

Today's Australian featured an article titled "Belief in Climate Change Dives". At first I was supicious, given that this is a Murdoch paper which devotes more column inches to the views of climate change skeptics than to the crimes of drunken footballers. However, their source for the article is that most impeccable of left-wing papers, the UK Guardian , whose report actually identifies the source of the data! This is essentially a poll of 1000 people between the ages of 16 and 64, and reveals that compared to a similar poll conducted a year ago, the proportion of people who believe that climate change is "definitely" a reality has fallen from 44% to 31%, while the proportion believing the problem is exaggerated increased from 15% to 30%. It also references a recent BBC poll with similar results. There are two candidates mentioned as the reason for this change although neither is conclusive Climate science has had some bad PR lately, with leaking of snarky e-

I've been playing guitar long enough to know I'll never be much good at at. I always enjoy listening to a really good guitarist, and some of my all time favourite artists are people who can play guitar parts I can hardly dream of playing. Lately I've been enjoying Jeff Lang's new CD, "Chimeradour", as I always enjoy pretty much everything he does. First and foremost Lang is a guitarists' guitarist. He has a devoted following which I suspect includes way more than the average proportion of wannabe guitar players like me. He's essentially a blues player, but if that label conjures up stereotype pictures of guys playing 12-bar and singing about their dead dog, think again. Lang skips easily between lap steel, acoustic, electric and resophonic guitars, with intricate parts played in all variety of weird tunings. But I'm not here to write about the technicalities of guitar playing - as if I could! Instead, I want tell you about the stories he tells. Un

At church recently we've been reading the Book of Ruth, and it's got me thinking about a few things. For those who don't know the story, here's a summary. An Israelite man called Elimelech goes off with his wife Naomi and two sons to live in Moab to escape a famine. While there, the two sons marry Moabite women, then all three men die. Because men owned all the property in their society widows had few means of support,  Naomi decides to return to Israel, where her kinship networks are, and suggests to her daughters-in-law that they should likewise return to their families. One of them agrees, but the other, Ruth, vows to stick with her mother-in-law and go to Israel with her. "Your people shall be my people, your god shall be my god," she says. She claims the protection of the law and kinship networks of Israel. This is a brave and perhaps foolish decision. The Moabites and Israelites were often at war, and various Israelite laws discriminated against fo

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