Painting Fakes

In previous posts I've talked about Jesus' inaugural sermon in Nazareth , where he reinterprets the Kingdom of God to include Israel's enemies; and the story of the cleansing of the Temple , in which Jesus symbolically clears the Court of the Gentiles for their expected influx.  In Luke 10:25-37 we find a story that reinforces these themes in a different way. 25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?” 27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” 28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.” 29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to J

I used to think that Richard Dawkins , Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett all had a bit of a grudge against religion.  Then I read Michel Onfray's The Atheist Manifesto and changed my mind.  Dawkins and Harris are mere pussycats compared to Onfray. Michel Onfray is a French philosopher, and I have to admit he's a random pick on my journeys in atheism.  His book has been staring at me from my library shelf since it reopened in May, so finally I brought it home and read it.  I'm not sure how our better known Anglo-American atheists view him.  He shares with them a negative, jaundiced view of religion, especially the major monotheistic religions which are the focus of this book.  On the other hand, whereas the core of their critique is scientific, grounded in the works of Charles Darwin, his is almost wholly philosophical, grounded particularly in the works of Neitzsche and Freud. Onfray claims to have made a close study of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  If so, he has st

At last the Gillard Government has released the details of the carbon tax and we can get on with it.  Of course it's complicated.  The country's 500 largest polluters will pay $23 per tonne of carbon emitted and this cost will flow through to the wider economy in all sorts of puzzling ways, for which some people will be compensated in ways sometimes just as puzzling.  Leaving aside the technical details of the tax and the compensation package, about which some industries are still bleating while others are relatively relaxed, it is interesting to read the comments of former Adelaide Steamship Group Managing Director John Spalvins.  Spalvins was giving an interview to mark the 20th anniversary of Adsteam's sinking under $7b of debt.  After some gratuitous pot-shots at the Gillard Government, here's what he has to say about the carbon tax. He said several former senior US executives were bemused about Australia's introduction of the tax. "When I am in the U

All over the world, songwriters are beavering away every day producing new songs.  I guess most of them never see the light of day, or get heard by a small circle of people before drifting off into the sea of forgetfulness.  Occasionally, one will break the shackles of time and place and become immortal, like Amazing Grace or Knockin' on Heaven's Door. I've been thinking about the ones in between - the ones that reach the public sphere, experience a moment of adulation, then sink beneath the waves.  What happens to these songs, and to their authors? I somehow managed to miss Pavlov's Dog on their first time around in the mid-1970's, although I remember seeing their records in the shops - who could forget that classic cover?  It's surprising, because it's just the sort of music I would have loved at 15, with its metal-lite sounds, over-emotive lyrics and David Surkamp's ridiculously powerful falsetto.  I recently caught up with their first two albu

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

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