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Aeroplanes

Just before Christmas we had great footage of chaos in European airports as snowstorms left travellers stranded in mid-Christmas journey.  Yesterday we had a lucky escape from the Australian version as storms saw planes turned back from Brisbane airport all morning.  Fortunately we flew in the evening and were only an hour late, but there was chaos in Sydney airport as passengers queued for hours and airline staff desperately pleaded for Sydney residents to go home and try again the next day. The British government is talking about whether it might have to upgrade its airports to make them snow-proof.  I don't think you can do the same for tropical storms.  There's no protection from wind, thunder and lightening except to stay indoors and wait it out.  If it blows hard enough even that doesn't help. In any case, I wonder how temporary this will all be.  It's not too many years ago that we would spend 24 hours on a bus to Sydney because the plane was so expensive.  N

A Family Christmas

It's nearly Christmas.  Most of us are getting ready to hang out with our extended family, while those of us who are a long way from family are most likely lining up surrogates to stave off the loneliness.  This has come to be what Christmas is about for most Australians.  So with that in mind, here's a little Christmas gem from Kenneth Bailey's marvellous book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes . In our traditional view of the Christmas story, based on Luke 2:1-7, Joseph and Mary set off for Bethelehem.  When they arrive, however, the inn is full and they are forced to sleep out in the stable, where Jesus is born.  The story has become a symbol of Jesus' poverty and his status as a social outcast.  In Bailey's view it is also very European, and is a very unlikely scenario in the context of Middle Eastern culture.  Firstly, Joseph was a descendent of David, going to the City of David.  Hence he almost certainly had relatives in town and these would have been hono

Orwell on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

For my last birthday my daughter gave me a selection  of booklets from the Penguin "Great Ideas" series.  They're extended extracts (100 or so pages each) from great works of literature or philosophy.  In my little pile are extracts from Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Fyodor Dostoevsky and this selection of essays by George Orwell.  Both Penguin and my daughter know me well - a full volume of Kant would wait on my shelf for years, but I can promise you the 100 page version will be read pretty soon.  They're also good for plane flights.  I read about half the Orwell on a flight to Sydney last week.   Orwell would have been a great blogger - he doesn't waste words, he draws you into the world he describes, he is prepared to live his art not just read about it, and he is interested in a wide range of things.   Here's something I thought was especially clever.  One of the essays is called The Art of Donald McGill.   McGill was a designer of comic postcards and the

Leaking in the Facebook Age

Everyone who's on Facebook knows (I hope) that anything you post can become public property.  You may think that your privacy setting will protect you, but if you'd be embarassed to see that photo in your local newspaper, then don't post it. What's clear from the unfolding Wikileaks saga is that the same applies to diplomatic correspondence.  You may think your cables are confidential and sent through a secure network, but electronic data is so easily transportable that you have to expect that sooner or later it will get out. This is part of the reason why the focus on Julian Assange is misplaced.  You will have noticed that even though Assange is in prison, the leaks are still being published.  The internet is a dispersed medium, definitively a network, and if you cut off one person from it you damage that person, but the network just finds another pathway.  In response to the push in the US and elsewhere to prosecute Assange, many jounalists have pointed out tha

Leaking Crocodile Tears

On the ABC News this evening we heard the Republican leader in the US Senate declaring that Julian Assange is a "hi-tech terrorist" and should be treated as an "enemy combatant".  Of course since we've been fighting a "war on terror" it's become a lot easier to say such things.  But just who is Assange and his Wiki-leaks army terrorising? Well, although new bombshells are exploding every day they seem to be entirely of the metaphorical sort, and I don't recall anyone ever being killed by a metaphor.  Of couse, it's possible that amongst the material there is confidential information which might compromise the safety of, say, an intelligence operative or informer, and this would be of some concern.  Australian Observer , a former senior Defence and Foreign Affairs official, strongly doubts it - the security of such contacts is much tighter than that. It seems that the main people being terrorised are diplomats and politicians, quaking i

Searching for Certainty

I guess this is a kind of addendum to all those posts on biblical inerrancy .  It's also the 100th post on Painting Fakes which is more than any of the Australians managed in the first innings in Adelaide (cricket joke, for the Americans among you).  The more I do it, the more I love it. Among the incredibly wide variety of types of people in the world, there are two that I'd like to mention in this post.  The first are "black and white people".  They like things to be clear.  It's right or it's wrong, it's true or it's false.  The second are "shades of grey" people.  They rarely see the world in absolute terms.  Something may be true in a certain sense and false in another sense.  It depends what you mean by "true". This distinction is a matter of psychology, not belief.  For instance, both Ken Ham and Richard Dawkins are black and white people.  The content of their beliefs differs, but they have a similar approach to belief

Inerrancy Part 6 - What I Think

During this series on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy , some people have suggested to me (with greater or lesser degrees of subtlety) that I should maybe explain what I think, not just what I don't.  Of course, I've been doing that all along to some degree, but as a closer for the series I'd like to spell it out as clearly as I can. Of course all along I've been using the Chigago Statements as a foil against which to work out what I think.  It's still developing.  Nor do I claim anything close to inerrancy for myself - I expect lots of people to disagree in various ways and I expect a lot of them will turn out to be right.  I'm no Bible scholar, and none of what I say here is original.  Still, here goes... 1. The Bible is the primary source for Christian belief Everything important that we believe as Christians is ultimately sourced back to Bible.  It's where we learn about God and about Christ, it's where we learn how to pray and how to

Inerrancy Part 5 - Poetry

A couple of times in this series on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy I've mentioned poetry in the Bible and I'd like to deal with this question a little more fully. Article VI of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics says WE AFFIRM   that the Bible expresses God's truth in propositional statements, and we declare that biblical truth is both objective and absolute. The problem with this affirmation is that it is simply and clearly wrong for large parts of the Bible.  Even the framers of the Statement on Inerrancy recognised this, saying in Article XVIII WE AFFIRM  that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices.... They knew this to be the case, but they obviously didn't know what to do with it, or they couldn't have put their article about "propositional truth" in the follow-up statement. So what's propositional truth?  Mr Google defi

Dream Attic

After my brief mention of Richard Thompson's latest album, Dream Attic, in a recent article I received an e-mail from the man himself *.   He said You little s***, how dare you blow me off like that?  You've got a hide, using me as a stepping stone to a review of an album by that young upstart Martha Tilston.  I was sharing stages with her dad when she was still in nappies.  I may even have changed her nappies myself - I can't be sure, there was a lot going on at the time.  Anyway, did you even @#$% listen to my album, you *&^%$? I have to admit he has a point.  RT is one of my musical heroes .  And I had only listened to the cd a couple of times when I used it as a starting point for my review of Martha Tilston's beautiful album.  Kind of a march of the generations thing, you know.  So, with reverent apologies to the great man, here's a more mature reflection on his latest.  Thompson is known for three things - his brilliant and unique guitar playing whi

Works of Belief?

A little while ago I wrote about the way we tend to substitute intellectual works for moral ones , insisting that assent to various doctrinal positions is essential to be considered a "Christian".  I just finished reading Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time by Marcus Borg and was delighted to find a very similar thought, although expressed much better than mine.  He talks about Jesus as a teacher of wisdom, and how his wisdom was opposed to the conventional wisdom of his day.  He then reflects on his own experience. I grew up as a Lutheran, in a tradition that emphasised salvation by grace and not by "works of the law"....As Lutherans, we all knew that we weren't saved by "works". Rather, we were saved by "grace through faith". Yet this strong emphasis on grace got transformed into a new system of conventional wisdom, not only in my mind but, I think, in the minds of many Lutherans, and many Christians generally.  The emphasis was pla

Inerrancy Part 4 - Why didn't David build the temple?

My relative and fellow blogger Luke has also been blogging on inerrancy, coming from quite a different standpoint to me.  Most recently he pointed to Jesus' parable of the mustard seed , in which some of the botanical details are not quite correct.  This is a clear case where literal truth is beside the point - indeed, Jesus' "errors" of fact appear to be quite deliberate and are used to heighten his message. I've been thinking about another Bible story this past week, in relation to the Chicago Statement's insistence on the  absence of contradication in the Bible.  This is one of my favourite Old Testament stories - the story of David's desire to build the temple.  The first part of this story is found in pretty much identical form in 2 Samuel 7, and in 1 Chronicles 17.  Quoting from the Chronicles version, here is what happens. After David was settled in his palace, he said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a house of cedar, while the

Budget Cuts

We're having a lot of sound and fury about bank regulations at the moment, but I've been noticing another debate that's been going just a fiercely, although with slightly fewer headlines.  It's the debate about cutting spending. Apparently, in the "little red book" of briefings provided by Treasury and Finance to the incoming Labor government, they recommended substantial cuts to government spending.  This was needed, they said, to prevent the economy from growing too fast and putting upward pressure on inflation and interest rates. What occurred to me (and I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this) is that Keynesian economics has left us with an inbuilt tension in the way we think about Government spending.  After the Great Depression governments in the developed world adopted Keynes' idea that government spending should be used to smooth out fluctuations in the market economy.  When there was a downturn, governments should increase t