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The perils of bad apologetics

I've been following (and participating in) a very interesting discussion at Simone's blog about whether people can accept the statement that the earth was created in six days. Personally I find a six day creation hard to accept scientifically and unnecessary theologically. But it made me think about how we can paint ourselves into a corner defending a position that never needed defending in the first place. The US in particular has a huge ongoing controvery about the six day creation, and this has led to the elaboration of "creation science" and its love-child, the Intelligent Design movement. I'm hardly competent to assess the science, but it's always seemed to me that the primary argument of creation scientists is a theological one. Years ago I heard Ken Ham speak, and his basic message was that if you don't believe in the literal truth of Genesis then the whole authority of Scripture collapses and you may as well give up on Christianity. Oddly e

Killing People Part 2

Here's a distressing further thought on my post on abortion . I mentioned there that to sort this out ethically you would first determine whether an embryo is human, and if it is, in what circumstances it is OK to kill a human being. You will be aware that in the US (and no doubt here as well) doctors who run abortion clinics regularly receive death threats from people saying they are pro-life, and that on rare occasions they are even victims of murder or attempted murder. My first reaction is that the people who make such threats are probably quite disturbed and the threats or acts of violence are a sign of their mental illness. This may well be the case. However, the really disturbing thing is that their behaviour can be easily fitted in to my framework. As pro-lifers, they assess that the embryo and the doctor are equally human. Why not respect the doctor's life, then? Well, the most obvious answer is that the person making the threats is a believer in capital punishme

Abusive priests

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

Killing Babies and Other People

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

Saying Sorry in Turkey and Armenia

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

Climate Change Skeptics Gain Ground

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-

Chimeradour

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

The Book of Ruth

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

Between the Monster and the Saint

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

Exclusive Brethren

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

Christmas DNA

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

Steinbeck's Despair and Hope

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