Painting Fakes

I've read a few of Neil Gaiman's fantasy novels now as well as watching the film Mirrormask , for which he wrote the script.  I've enjoyed all of them in that "I just want to keep reading this" way that good genre novels should have.  However, I've started realise that he has a template.  All the stories he tells are variations on the one story which goes roughly like this.  A well-intentioned but hapless young man is trapped in a rather unsatisfactory life.  He works in a dead-end job, is in a relationship with a woman who is wrong for him, and is stumbling down the slope to a sub-optimal life.  Then some apparently chance encounter or freak event tips him into a completely bizarre parrallel world, in which he must achieve (or help someone achieve) some great and incredibly dangerous task in order to get back to his old life.  In other words, these are quest stories. My most recent (but Gaiman's first) is Neverwhere , in which Richard Mayhew, mild-m

Sam Harris, an American neuroscientist and CEO of Project Reason , wrote a book called The End of Faith .  He argued that religion is not only completely unreasonable, it is so dangerous in a world where there are weapons of mass destruction that it is no longer safe for us to keep it around.  I haven't read this book, but apparently many Christians did, and some were so incensed they wrote him abusive letters. (Note to my fellow Christians: writing abusive letters is definitely What Jesus Would Not Do!) Harris replied not with personal abuse by return mail, but with a booklet called Letter to a Christian Nation, in which he responds to his correspondents with more grace than they deserve, restating his arguments simply and briefly. He is primarily addressing fundamentalists, and I found I agreed with him on a lot of points.  He is right to be horrified at some aspects of the Old Testament punitive law, like the stoning of adulterers and disobedient children, although he is

So to continue where I left off yesterday .... While Mark and Matthew place this story late in Jesus ministry, John places it at the start.  It forms part of John's counterpart to Matthew and Mark's "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand", and Luke's story of Jesus preaching in Nazareth . John has two commencement stories.  The first, the story of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana, is not quite a public act, because although the wedding itself is a public event most of those present don't seem to know what has happened.  The story is also a deeply symbolic one.  The wine is symbolic of the life and vitality of the Kingdom of God.  Hence, when the original wine supplied for the wedding runs out, we should take this as indicating the bankruptcy of the old order, the order of priests and sacrifices which Jesus was confronting.  Jesus' response is to ask them to fill with water, and then draw from, the jars which the household woul

After my sermon on Jesus preaching at Nazareth some of us talked further on the question of how you should treat your enemies, if you're not supposed to kill them.  During this discussion we got onto the story of Jesus clearing the temple and I thought it would be worth a closer look. The story appears in three of the gospels.  In Mark 11:15-19 and Matthew 21:12-17 it comes in the final week of Jesus' life, right after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  In John 2:12-25 it plays a somewhat similar role to the story of Jesus in Nazareth in Luke, a public introduction to the purpose of his ministry.  I have read some commentators who think this means Jesus did it twice, but this seems to be an absurd concession to the idea of inerrancy .  John has placed the story in a different place but it serves the same purpose - to introduce Jesus' terminal conflict with the Jewish authorities. Here is the story as it appears in Mark. On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temp

"Now it happened that Kanga had felt rather motherly that morning, and Wanting to Count Things — like Roo's vests, and how many pieces of soap there were left, and the two clean spots in Tigger's feeder." As you do.  Even though I rarely feel motherly on account of my Y chromosome, I felt like labelling things.  I tried labels on this blog when I first started and soon gave up as I had a new label for each post.  Now that there's over 150 posts here it's getting hard to find your way around, so I thought it was time to be a bit more organised.  Every post has a label, and every post has only one because that's the tidy way to do things.  I know the real world is much messier than that but that's not my problem, I didn't make it that way.  I tried not to have too many labels.  Hope you enjoy using them.

In today's edition of The Australian, Denis Shanahan says: The key to success for the Malaysian solution for Labor is to be seen as hard-hearted and uncompromising, putting asylum-seekers on planes, manacled and at gunpoint if necessary, to convince people-smu gglers and their customers the corrupt "business model" will not work. Refugee advocates are starting to look back at the detention centre on Nauru as "the good old days" and advocate for its re-opening. What more can I say?  I previously opined that the differences between Gillard and Howard on asylum seeker policy were so slight Gillard may as well shave her head and put on glasses.  I was wrong.  Howard should buy a red wig and get himself contacts. 

I bought myself a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald this week and was fascinated by two stories. The first was about a nameless Chinese citizen given the moniker "NK".  He entered Australia on a student visa not long after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, but in 1992 was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in jail.  In 2006 the parole authorities judged him suitable for release.  However, as a convicted murderer he is no longer eligible for an Australian visa because he fails the "character test".  He should have been deported immediately.  However, he is at risk of being retried for the same offence in China and being executed, and the Australian government is prevented by law from returning him to that kind of danger.  Unable to resolve the dilemma, the Immigration Department has been holding him in the Villawood immigration detention centre for the last five years.  The second is the ongoing saga of cyclist Alberto Contador's positive dr

Even though their courtship makes an absorbing story, I fear the marriage of Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy will be a rocky one.  A marriage across class barriers might seem romantic, but there will be a lot of learning to do on both sides.  Fitzwilliam will not find it as easy to shed his arrogance as he thinks, and Elizabeth will not suffer it meekly.  He will sulk after an argument and they will not speak for days.  In those times especially, but at other times too, she will be lonely.  She is used to a small house filled with five other noisy, combative women and a father whose wit cuts the air.  Here she inhabits a cavernous mansion with a taciturn husband, his timid young sister and so many servants that she struggles to remember their names.  Yet if she invites her mother or sisters to visit her husband becomes even more difficult, because he despises them.  Of course they will eventually make up, passionately and with a great show of repentence, after each argument, and perh

It's interesting how over the past decade some of our more militant atheists have taken to using the techniques of religion to promote their cause.  Not that they've become religious - that would be absurd - but they hold conventions, they promote atheism on the backs of buses, and they write works of atheist apologetics.  The advent of Islamic terrorism, and their belief that this is a sign of the deeply dangerous nature of religion (though Stalin's atrocities were somehow not similar evidence of the dangers of atheism), has made them militant. Like Christian apologetics, these works are not really written for those outside the tent.  They are written for those within to give them ammunition with which to defend their belief, or lack thereof.  The best known work of this sort may be Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, in which the western world's crankiest atheist fires his shotgun furiously at religion.  However, because he knows very little about religion, Daw

When the Murray Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) released its discussion paper about revised water allocations in the Basin late last year, copies were publicly burnt in communities throughout the area.  This was because the plan recommended substantial reductions in allocations for irrigation - 4,000 gigalitres a year all up, a reduction of up to one third of allocations in some areas.  The Commonwealth Government quickly withdrew the plan and changed the terms of reference to put more weight on economic concerns.  The chair of the MDBA resigned in disgust and was replaced by former NSW Labor Minister Craig Knowles. Now we read that the Wentworth Group , a group of environmental scientists attempting to shape water policy round the country, has withdrawn from discussions about the new plan.  They say proposed reductions being discussed are less than 3,000 gigalitres and this would be an expensive and useless exercise.  They want an independent review of the science behind the plan.

So, to continue from Part 1 ... One of the things that many of the writers on the life of Jesus agree on - including Albert Schweitzer , Albert Nolan and NT Wright - is that Jesus was a prophet of the "end times", that the core of his message was that a crisis was coming and they needed to get ready.  This is shown in the way Jesus begins his public ministry in all four Gospels.  Matthew and Mark begin with a summary statement: "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand."  The first public acts of Jesus in John's gospel are the changing of water into wine, symbolising renewal, and the cleansing of the temple, which presents a clear challenge to the Jewish authorities to reform or be destroyed.  Likewise, the scene in Luke 4:16-30 shows Jesus announcing that the prophecy of the coming kingdom was in the process of fulfillment, and talking about what sort of kingdom it would be. It didn't take any special message from God to know that a crisis was loo

Next Sunday I get to do one of my rare preaching gigs.  The first for a long time and for perhaps the first time ever at St Andrews I get to choose the topic.  So I thought that all this reading of Lives of Jesus has to be good for something and I'm planning a talk on the story in Luke 4:14-30.   Jesus preaches for the first (and possibly only) time in the synagogue at Nazareth.  So I thought I'd try out my thoughts here and see if they make sense.  This is Part 1 - Part 2 is here . First, here's the passage. Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country.  He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.  When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read,and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: