Painting Fakes

Two rather sickening stories caught my attention in yesterday's edition of The Australian . The first concerns serial violent offender Robert John Fardon.  Fardon has a history of violent sexual assaults dating back to 1966, some against children and one against a woman with an intellectual disability.  Since 1978 he has set up a bit of a pattern - being sentenced for a crime, serving a long sentence, then committing a similar crime soon after his release.  His case was one of the triggers for Queensland to introduce indefinite detention as an option for repeat violent offenders, and this law has now been applied to him. The second is the case of Dr Graeme Reeves, who was convicted of a serious assault after he surgically removed a woman's clitoris without her consent and without any medical need to do so.  Dr Reeves also has form, having been previous convicted of indecent assault against patients and being the subject of over 100 complaints to health authorities.  He wa

I first encountered Richard Dawkins through The God Delusion, his tedious and ill-informed rant against religion.  Like Christians around the world, I shook my head ruefully and said, "no, I don't believe in that god either".  So I thought I'd try again with his most recent book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. I have to say it's much more pleasant to encounter Dawkins on his own territory.  While his religious knowledge is patchy at best, he has a deep knowledge of evolutionary biology and a passion for the subject that really shines through.  Unlike Sam Harris , he even holds out an olive branch to moderate religious believers, opening the book with a discussion of his joint lobbying with various Anglican bishops on the subject of the teaching of creationism in school science classes. The motivation for this book is Dawkins' horror that over 40% of Americans, and over 20% of Britons, believe in young earth creationism .  Dawkins

Writing about what it means to be human made me think of Philip K Dick's lovely science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.   The title alone has got to be worth the price of the book. It poses a tricky, if hypothetical, problem which is not that different from the problem of post-humanism. The story centres on two humans.  Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter whose job is to destroy escaped androids.  The intellectually disabled JR Isidore is a delivery boy for a company that repairs electronic animals.  They live on an Earth that is a virtual wasteland, where almost nothing survives except humans and even these in rapidly decreasing numbers through mass emigration to the outer planets.  In this lifeless world, every human dreams of owning a real animal, but these are such rare and expensive items that most have to settle for incredibly lifelike electronic substitutes.  These dreams provide a deep emotional core to the novel.  Deckard, already the owner of a elect

Post-humanism is one of the favourite themes of speculative fiction, and the world is not short of futurists like Cory Doctorow who believe it could one day be fact.  The basic idea is that through technology humans will one day transform ourselves into something different to what we are now.  Greg Bear (among many others) imagines that humans will be able to upload their consciousness into a huge database in which they will potentially live forever, divorced from any physical existence but preserving their individual consciousness in the company of other disembodied "elders".  Doctorow imagines that our memories and thoughts might be recorded at a remote back-up location, to be refreshed and revived in the event of a catastrophic local breakdown.  Iain M Banks describes a society where medical technology enables people to become whatever they want.  They can change gender, physical appearance, even species with the essence of their personalities preserved through a

Don Rogers over at Reflections recently posted this quote. "Those who claim they “believe the whole Bible” and “take it literally” are being dishonest. Their pastor may have preached recently on the story of the fall of Jericho, but it was applied to God “making the strongholds of sin in your life come crumbling down”, not to a battle plan to take a city. To be fair, not all Biblical authors view God in the same way. And so there is no single “Biblical view of God”. But certainly God as depicted in some parts of the Bible is not the concept of the deity served by Christians today. The question a Christian needs to ask is whether they have the courage to admit that their view of God is not the same as that of many depicitions in the Bible. Do you have the courage to take the Bible’s actual words completely seriously, even when the result is that you are forced to acknowledge that you do not accept their literal truthfulness?" ~from Dr. James McGrath’s "Exploring

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