Painting Fakes

Fern Elsdon-Baker, science historian, educator and atheist, has written a book called The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy . Here's a quote from near the end of the book. "Another aspect of the proselytising effect of advocacy is the need for serious debate about whether science should be promoted as atheism to the extent that Dawkins does. By labelling whole swathes of the population as anti-Darwinian, anti-enlightenment or anti-reason, what is Dawkins actually achieving?....as we begin to face up globally to some of the most serious challenges to our generation - among them loss of biodiversity, climate change and international terrorism - should we not be seeking reconciliation, and attempting to recognise our shared agenda in the face of issues that will affect us all?....Those on either side of the faith debate need to work together to dispel misinformation about science, and to challenge detrimental superstitions and misconceptions."

I've just finished reading Helen Keller's The Story of My Life . What's really interesting about this book is that it's not very interesting. Or to put it another way, the remarkable thing about this book is its existence, not its content. For those who don't know about Helen Keller , she was born in Alabama in 1880, the daughter of reasonably well-off landowning parents. When she was two an illness (probably either scarlet fever or meningitis) left her without either sight or hearing. Thanks to the efforts of a young live-in tutor called Anne Sullivan and support from quite a few prominent people including Alexander Graham Bell, Mark Twain and the owner of Standard Oil, she ended up becoming the first deaf and blind person to earn a university degree. She was a celebrity in her youth, vilified in mid-life for her commitment to socialism, and lionised as a cultural icon in her old age. The Story of My Life was and remains her most famous and most widely read bo

I once worked for an organisation where the CEO was very focused on power*. It wasn't a very large organisation, but the role had a certain amount of profile and access to powerful people. My boss was a very large person. He was extremely clever and could also be very funny, especially when he told stories about himself. Once he told us about how he travelled on a airline and they asked him to move from the seat beside the emergency exit because he was too fat and might obstruct the other passengers. He told us, to uncontrollable laughter, how he had told them they needn't worry, in an emergency he wouldn't be in anyone's way because he'd be out so quick no-one would have time to be obstructed. Despite the self-deprecation, he never flew with that airline again. He had an office beside the front door, and positioned his desk so that he could look up at anyone coming or going from the building. He always made sure his chair was set higher than any others in the r

I have so many things stored up to write about, but having to work hard for my living lately means I haven't had time to write about them. So sometime soon there'll be a flood of posts. In the meantime, let me tell you about this weird article I read in last Saturday's Australian. I should preface this by saying I have a dilemma about newspapers. Rupert Murdoch owns most of Australia's newspapers, including the only daily published in Brisbane, the crappily tabloid Courier-Mail, and the nation's only real national paper, the Australian. This means I have a choice - buy a Murdoch paper and be assaulted by right wing propaganda, or a more moderate Fairfax paper full of stories about Sydney or Melbourne. Every Saturday Murdoch wins because I get a Brisbane TV guide. So anyway, last Saturday they reprinted an article from the New Republic (right wing US rag) about the "Cult of the President". Apparently this bloke called Gene Healy has written a book of

This is not so much a post as an ad. I'm sitting here at my computer and trying to work while listening to The Leisure Society . Laid back group of beautifully melodic Englishmen. Check them out - lovely! And they didn't even pay me.

I've always been a sucker for a good post-apocalyptic tale. Even a bad one can do it for me at a pinch. As a teenager I loved "Hothouse" by Brian Aldiss, in which a small group of humans travel through a massive tropical forest. It's a fantastic 1960s version of the greenhouse effect in which either the trees have grown, or the people have shrunk, so they're the comparative size of beetles. This week I've been reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", to make up for missing the movie. In between was the book I've loved more than anything I've read in the past couple of years, Jim Crace's "The Pesthouse". Part of the fascination of these books is imagining what the world might become in the future. In "Hothouse" it's just that, a supercharged landscape of exuberant vegetation. In "The Road" it's almost the precise opposite, a nuclear cataclysm (one presumes) leaving everything dead - blackene

I'm going to break one of my blogging rules and talk about my work. After all, it's my blog and I can do what I want, and besides it's not the first time . When I was a young housing activist in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent a bit of time on the executive of National Shelter. This organisation was, and still is, Australia's peak non-profit housing advocacy organisation, and is basically a federation of State and Territory organisations. At this time, we had a small amount of funding from the Commonwealth Government so we had a couple of underpaid staff and were able to be active on the lobbying front in a low profile kind of way. However, the organisation as a whole was struggling. Very few of our State branches had any money, and most were like the Queensland branch I represented, a few people who would get together in whatever time we could make in our regular jobs. Representatives from the State and Territory branches used to meet once a quarter, over a Fri

If we needed any more evidence that the relentless campaign by climate change deniers is working, we need look no further than the Australian Government's late April decision to delay introduction of its carbon trading scheme until at least 2013. The Prime Minister provides two reasons - his government can't get the sceme through the Senate, and global responses have been slower in coming than expected. I was a bit cheered up, but not much, when immediately after this the government had a sharp fall in its popularity. Only a bit, because what's happened is our government has gone from aspiring to global leadership to being just another follower. The loss of momentum resulting from the failure of the Copenhagen talks, and the last minute refusal of the Opposition to support a modified scheme, has resulted in the whole thing grinding to a halt. The Government is clearly in a difficult position. It has only 32 seats in in the 76-seat Senate , which means it needs to attract at

Kutz has posed the question, "what does the bible say about competitive sport?". An important question for us Aussie blokes because we love our sport. In one sense it's an easy question to answer because the bible says nothing (or virtually nothing) about it. Well, not directly. I think the closest the Bible comes to sport is the story of David and Goliath. Goliath wanders about in front of the ranks, challenging the Israelites to send someone out to fight him one on one and decide the whole battle on that one contest. This is representative sport at its most serious, but they obviously don't mean quite what they say, because after David kills Goliath they have a massive battle anyway, which the Israelites win with great slaughter. Still, this is one way to look at sport - as a symbolic battle between competing groups of people. It took on a slightly different form at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where the Nazi regime tried to use the contest to show the supremacy of

In my newspaper today I read that Belgium has beaten France to become the first European nation to ban the burka and other face-covering garments in public places. The vote was carried 136 to nil, with two abstentions. Amnesty International was quick to condemn the ban as a violation of human rights. The law has also outraged Muslims. Islamic scholar Michael Privot says Belgium "now joins Iran and Saudi Arabia in that exclusive but unenviable rare club of countries to impose a dress code in the public domain". If you think he's right, you should try going shopping in your underwear. But beyond such silliness, there are some real issues at stake here about religious freedom, prejudice and fear of the "other". In general, liberal societies (of which Belgium is one) are based on the premise that citizens are free to make their own choices on matters that concern them, provided these don't interfere unduly with someone else's freedom. You can listen to w

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

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